The little theater where UD just listened
to a couple of guys talk about why
Ulysses is great.

**********

The day is overcast – typically Irish… But Joyce’s novel takes place on a freakishly sunny and warm June day in Dublin.

Chestertown’s old and charming and set along a river. After the lecture, UD strolled the waterfront (full of gray geese and black vultures), and now relaxes with a chai at Play it Again Sam. There’s an open mic (five minute limit) Ulysses reading next door in about an hour. Maybe UD will take part. Something morbid, she thinks; from the Hades chapter.

UD listened to the guys talk very intelligently about why the novel’s worth is far above rubies. Wearing her James Joyce sweatshirt, scribbling in her Essential James Joyce (she met the editor, Harry Levin, at the home of Wiktor Weintraub‘s widow), UD wrestled down her impulse to comment on virtually everything they said… When she did finally say something (about the nature of artistic genius and artistic originality), one of the guys said “That person is clearly a plant.” — meaning to suggest that somebody must have custom-ordered a commenter who would sound like an English professor who teaches James Joyce.

But really it’s hard to say why Ulysses reigns supreme. One spends a lifetime with the book, trying to figure out how Joyce was able to write like that. You feel like Salieri gazing at a Mozart score. Ultimately it doesn’t seem possible that a human being could write so well. Think and feel so well. If it were only beautifully written, dayenu. If it were only beautifully written and brilliantly descriptive of social life in a city, dayenu. If it were only wise and humane and hilarious and deeply accepting of our vileness and pathos, dayenu. If it were only steamy dreamy streams of consciousness, dayenu.

Your head it simply swirls.

Bloomsday exists because the peculiar over-excitement you feel reading this book is deep and specific and shared by others.