September 25th, 2010
I’m all of a mucksweat.

Every day’s going to be Bloomsday.

Ireland may be on its way to elect a gay president after the first opinion poll in the race showed Senator David Norris, a Dublin-based gay activist, well-ahead.

… The size of the Norris lead is surprising. The Joyce scholar and gay rights campaigner is an independent senator representing Trinity College in the Irish senate and has never been considered a candidate for national office…

A protestant, he was actually born in what was then the Belgian Congo in 1944 but came to Ireland a few years later…

[Norris] has also played a major role in popularizing Bloomsday, now celebrated on June 16th every year.

If they want to go even further and elect a Jew and a Joyce freak, there’s always UD.

September 1st, 2010
“Stream of consciousness…”

… is the last phrase uttered by Antonio Damasio in this interview. Damasio is a neuroscientist.

UD thinks a good deal about consciousness. The novels she teaches tend to be stream of consciousness works by the high modernists — James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. UD suspects she loves modernist novels precisely because they put consciousness, and degrees of consciousness, in motion, over time; they feature characters actively, eloquently, being conscious. These characters are basically saying, over and over again in their narratives, I exist, I have a life, I am surrounded by a particular world, I have a self that observes my organism, that organizes my experience… These modes of being are, as Damasio describes them, the constituents of consciousness.

Damasio calls consciousness “an add-on” to the comparatively passive, registering “mind.” It’s something “specialized, to create what we call the self.”

A passage like this one in Ulysses, in which Leopold Bloom, at a cemetery, ponders what it must be like to be conscious that you’re dying, is, what, a tour de force of consciousness…. It begins not with Bloom’s stream of consciousness, but with a few lines from the novel’s disembodied third-person narrative voice. Only with “Well cut frockcoat” do we enter Bloom’s speaking consciousness.

Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper. The boy by the gravehead held his wreath with both hands staring quietly in the black open space. Mr Bloom moved behind the portly kindly caretaker. Well cut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will go next. Well it is a long rest. Feel no more. It’s the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can’t believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven’t yet. Then darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the floor since he’s doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner’s death showing him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of Lucia. Shall I nevermore behold thee? Bam! expires. Gone at last. People talk about you a bit: forget you. Don’t forget to pray for him. Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping into a hole one after the other.

We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you’re well and not in hell.

So this is exciting, no? This is James Joyce’s consciousness in brilliant compassionate synergy with the consciousness of his creation – that’s the first reason it’s exciting. He’s making a never-alive human being live fictively. Great fiction raises the dead, or, rather, the never alive. Great art is the strongest and most beautiful reaching out of an individual consciousness to resuscitate human reality.

But in its own terms, Bloom’s consciousness, aroused by all the death around him to a most acute morbidity, is just as exciting. In this insanely condensed paragraph, these few moments out of Bloom’s consciousness-stream, we experience something more profound (if you ask UD) than, say, Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych.

Indeed, Bloom’s rapid-fire dawning-death narrative is a sort of Ivan Ilych for Dummies, ain’t it? The two-minute version…

Only it doesn’t really feel reductive, because it’s attached to a consciousness in whose reality we believe (even though, if you ask me now, I’ll concede that Leopold Bloom does not, and never did, exist), and whose comic, philosophic richness we admire, recognizing its intellectual maneuvers in the face of this sort of threat to its integrity (I mean, cemeteries, funerals – that threat) as rather similar to our own.

This is the great joy, the triumphant feeling, of Ulysses, the reason people adore it and perform their Bloomsday bacchanalia every year… Antonio Damasio calls consciousness an add-on, which falls rather short, descriptively, of the intoxicating miracle of this specialized thing brewed to make a self.

There’s no sweeter consciousness-cognac than James Joyce’s Ulysses.

June 30th, 2010
One Last Bloomsday

UD‘s friend James sends her this article from the Chicago Tribune about Steve Diedrich, who for years organized Ulysses readings in that city.

He was too sick, with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, to take part this year. He died a few days after the reading.

When June 16 arrived this year, he was in the hospital. He insisted that the Bloomsday reading at the Cliff Dwellers Club downtown go on without him. His friends sent him a videotape.

Two days later, he lost consciousness, but not before he videotaped a reply, mustering a smile and the words “Thank you.”

June 19th, 2010
A Mormon Missionary Reads Ulysses

I went to American Fork, Utah, today, where Wayne Booth, my graduate school mentor at the University of Chicago, grew up, in a fervent Mormon family.

Although a few historic buildings survive on Main Street, I can’t imagine Booth would recognize much from his past. Utah’s Wasatch Front is booming – it’s one of the fastest-growing places in the United States, right up there with Nevada – and what strikes you as you drive through Provo, Orem, American Fork, and other towns are the many large new houses on the plateau, and the astounding, gorgeous, up-close masses of mountains all around them.

The mountains – some high enough to show snow at their peaks – press in so tightly that you can study, from your car, rock faces and waterfalls and shadows.

If I abstracted from the houses, and from the upscale commercial strips, I could imagine Booth in a very small, sublimely hedged in place — hedged in geographically, and hedged in culturally.

***************************

Booth evokes the apartness of American Fork in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties in an essay he wrote in 1998, when he was 77 years old. In it, he quotes from a journal he kept in his twenties, when he was already a skeptical Mormon (though still engaged in missionary work). In a kind of dialogue with his younger self, he explains the nature of his rebellion against his church.

Until I was far into my teens, I was an utterly unquestioning Mormon. My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles were all visibly, audibly, aggressively devout–all except one uncle, a smoker, a “black sheep.” For our family, non-Mormons were beyond the pale–to be tolerated, of course, even treated kindly if they behaved themselves, viewed perhaps as potential converts, but never courted or married, and never even visited socially. They were certainly not destined, like us, to enter the celestial kingdom. We knew that in the next life those lost souls would not even be allowed to come near us, as we all continued our eternal progression, pursuing knowledge and righteousness–concepts that when defined correctly turned out to be the same thing.

What I remember as most important to me was that in heaven the non-Mormon or non-devout males down there in the lower kingdoms would have no hope for what I had a strong hope for, if I kept my nose clean: becoming the god of another world, accompanied by a pious female helpmate. Meanwhile, here and now, non-Mormons were so far beneath us that it was dangerous even to get near them. I remember feeling scared to walk too close to the one non-Mormon church in my home town, American Fork, Utah. I would always cross the road and walk on the other side, to avoid contamination, and I was thankful that we lived in another ward, far from that wicked place.

In short, until my first questioning began at about fourteen, I was a 100 percent devotee of what might be called an exclusivist, or particularist, anti-ecumenical version of Mormonism. That boy, the very young Wayne Booth, would perhaps these days be called by non-Mormons a fundamentalist (the word wasn’t in our vocabulary, I’m quite sure). Born and reared in the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, as you might say, he was for about fifteen years unaware of what had been happening to western thought from long before he was born.

Ignorance, clannishness, grandiosity, and a visceral shrinking from your inferiors – Booth describes his young self as well on its way, in its attitudes, toward the ultra-orthodox of Israel, about whose escalating withdrawal from and violence against that country I’ve been reading and posting lately.**

Later in the essay, Booth writes that he still considers himself a Mormon, though a very non-standard one; and he says:

I have been discouraged by the difficulties in the way of intellectual improvement among my people. The Mormon ideology is so firmly rooted in superstition that it seems impossible ever to separate the two: despite all my apologetics, one is simply not a Mormon unless one believes in the literal divinity of the Book of Mormon…

The young Booth begins to sense there must be much more – to himself, to other people, and to the world. His inchoate notion of the complexity and dynamism of human beings draws him to James Joyce’s Ulysses:

Meanwhile, as the idiosyncratic mission drags on, the self-divided missionary takes refuge many hours each week in literature and music, sometimes with conscious reference to religious problems but often simply lost in the joys of art.

But almost every day he wrestles with religious questions. He says that he has discovered that every person is “a walking bundle of ineffability, a bit like God himself,” by which he apparently means that the existential richness of each person finally escapes any attempt at description: forget about conceptual problems, essentially irresolvable, and revel in the riches God’s world offers you. He reads Ulysses–can you picture it, reader, that young missionary, moving from orthodox testimony meetings to James Joyce’s night-town scenes and back to the meetings? — the “most clever, most intellectual, most sophisticated book I’ve ever read!”

Molly Bloom is, I suppose, testifying; but she’s most unorthodox… And I guess the key here is “richness” – that endless, wild novel full of characters full of contradictions, wary of the traps of communal life and history and grandiosity, must have taken the protected young Booth on quite a ride.

Booth’s discovery of Henri Bergson deepens his sense of the intense, fluid energy of each self, an energy orthodox religion may deny or contain or twist.

[Bergson argues that there’s] an original vital impetus–élan vital–which is consciousness or “life” pushing upward against materiality (which naturally is descending). Through intuition and not through intellect we can discover this élan vital. There is no limit in time to the impetus; it may even transcend death. It is a becoming–as is all movement–and the aim of philosophy should be to turn inward toward this becoming in order to apprehend, “in order to follow its present results.”

His love of William Blake (Stephen Dedalus loves him too) deepens his understanding of the sources of repression:

He falls in love with Blake’s “London,” memorizes it, and quotes it entirely in the journal, commenting on the mind-forged manacles that he feels still binding him:

In every cry of every man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

Here Booth intuits his own implication in his dilemma, as well as the possibility that, in a free exercise of his own vitality, he might overcome it.

Booth concludes by describing the passionate and indeed spiritual contingency in which he would live the rest of his life:

One could say that without quite knowing it, the young man was discovering the pluralist religion that sparks my life now: the passion for furthering multiple, always partial understandings of a world, a cosmos, a God, that/who somehow deserves to be understood and commands that we both try to understand “It” and live according to Its standards–even while It remains beyond any one formula.

A novel like Ulysses doesn’t merely acknowledge the partial understandings with which we’ll always be grappling; it celebrates that limitation as the sacred key, if you’d like, to our humanity. It is what makes us loved, and loving:  this recognition – about ourselves, about others – that at any given moment in time (June 16, 1904, say) we’re struggling, often heroically, to overcome our past, to maintain our balance and compassion in the present, and to project a survivable future. “My primary interest . . . is to get closer to reality,” writes Wayne Booth in 1942. He comes to realize that nothing’s realer than fiction.

**************************************

** From a recent column in Ha’aretz:

[T]he culture wars have led to the point where Israel is currently on the verge of falling apart as a country. The events surrounding the refusal of Haredi parents in Immanuel to have their daughters study with Mizrahi girls must be seen as what they are. The Haredi community has staged the imprisonments of these parents into a grand event of martyrdom for the Torah. For them Israel’s legal system simply has no legitimacy.

Paradoxically, not only Ashkenazi Haredim think this way – the Haredi state of mind was made fully explicit by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’ spiritual leader, who condemned the High Court of Justice for intervening. He said that the offended Mizrahi parents should not have turned to arka’ot – the term traditionally used by Jews to designate the courts of the gentile countries in which Jews lived. It was seen as a betrayal of Jews by Jews to turn to these courts instead of a rabbinical court. Add to this that some Haredim used terms like the Chelmnitzky pogroms and ‘inquisition’ to describe these events. This rhetoric shows the depth of the chasm between the Haredim and the rest of the country.

De facto, approximately one million Jews – Haredim and part of the settler community – have ceased accepting the authority of the state.

June 17th, 2010
UD to Utah

I leave this afternoon to join Mr UD in Utah for a few days. We’ll stay in the mountains, and of course blogging will continue as always.

My graduate school mentor, Wayne Booth, grew up in American Fork, Utah. I’ll make a little pilgrimage there in memory of him, and I’ll write about it here.

Want to know what Booth was like? Read this letter (scroll down to Remembering Wayne Booth). Just the thing for the day after Bloomsday.

June 16th, 2010
UD’s currently cooling down…

… after her long Bloomsday night at Guapo’s Restaurant.

So long that she left before the thing was over. It’s still going on even as I blog. But — hot city, hot restaurant. Had to get some air.

Here are notes on the experience, direct and unedited from UD‘s journal of the event…

*****************************************


16 June 2010

Bloomsday 2010. Did not drink enough (only had a sip of Nalewka) to get through this four-hour thing (I’m reading from Lestrygonians and Sirens), so must start in on that when I get to Guapo’s.

Maybe the booze will lighten this rather tense, heavy feeling I’ve got. Feel as though instead of being in my life, doing one thing, then another, flowflowflow, I’m a bit blocked. My strange silent days in an empty house outside of which immense summer storms rage (La Kid’s vacationing at the Outer Banks, Mr UD‘s at a conference in Utah , the dog is in the kennel) are pleasant, but the very placidity of it makes this – joining humanity around the Tenleytown metro – quite a wrench. Heart pounds, rear feels plugged.

… I’m very conscious of my essential absurdity. (Other people don’t seem to have this problem.) I expect other people to perceive this absurdity and laugh at it. This makes me nervous.


***************************************

Upstairs at Guapo’s. Every seat is taken! Margaritas and chips all around, and everyone’s leafing through their copy of Ulysses.

Throughout the event, the 1967 black and white film of Ulysses plays silently on a screen behind the readers. It was a good idea to do this — The fumbling sincerity of that account of the book has a sweetness that lightens the night.

And here’s Courtney, once my student, now my friend, who drove in from Baltimore for this. She’s brought another friend with her. I’m very moved that Courtney’s gone to this trouble.

The readers preceding me are all fine, but as always there’s the accent problem. We’re Americans, and if we try to be Irish we’ll be ridiculous… On the other hand, our hard American edges aren’t right for this lilting prose…

And one of the readers is doing Molly’s voice wrong — has her as a rasping harridan. Molly’s a singer, and a good one, and must have a pleasant speaking voice as well.

One of the readers, when he finishes, goes around to all the tables handing out a ten-question Bloomsday quiz. First question: When was Ulysses allowed to be published in Ireland? Damned if I know.

*******************************************

I feel very warm, although my table mates assure me that it’s air conditioned up here. Booze does that to me. Also nerves.

*************************************************

My turn! Hoopsa girlagirl! Hoopsa!

I drag my bones up to the mike – some readers sit, some stand… I decide to stand! What the hell! Go all out! In order to get through Sirens I have to sing M’appari as Simon Dedalus would have! I have to fart loudly and repeatedly! Let’s let it rip!

The crowd was quiet for me, so that was a good sign right there. And I did do accents a little – softened my hard American voice into a vaguely British/Irish something… And I went ahead and sang out that way high COME! at the end of Simon’s performance. Held it for a long time, too, and that seemed to work…

************************************************

The audience applauded a lot when I finished, and one guy even called out Bravo, which made my plugged-up heavy feeling go completely away …

*******************************************


UPDATE:

**** UD CHOSEN FIRST RUNNER-UP AFTER BIG LOCALLY FAMOUS DUDE. *****

From an email UD just got from her colleague, Christopher Griffin, who stayed at the event until the end:

Dear Margaret:

Well done on your vivid dramatic reading of “Sirens.”  After you left, there were some missing readers, so Robert Aubry Davis filled in for two of them.    When we got to “Penelope,” the reader was missing, so the MC called for Margaret Soltan. When you did not respond, Rebecca Boggs came up and did a fantastic reading.

The winner was Robert Aubry Davis, so he came up to pick some prizes.  The first runner-up was
you, but since you were not present, Coilin Owens was the next runner-up, so he picked a prize.  I figured that you deserved a token, so I went up saying that I represented you and would like to pick an item for you.  So I picked the best of what was left, which was a picture of Joyce’s face on Ireland. I will drop it off to your mailbox or office door sometime next week.


June 16th, 2010
June 16

Ulysses

Lawrence Mynott

June 16th, 2010
Habermas on Ulysses

He’s in Dublin today, accepting the Ulysses Medal.

Paul Gillespie: You are being presented with a Ulysses medal in University College Dublin and have a long-standing interest in James Joyce’s work. What attracts you to it and what do you think it has to tell us about today’s world?

Jürgen Habermas: You must not expect any special expertise on my part in this area. I am simply one of the countless admirers of one of the most outstanding works of literature of the twentieth century. For me, Joyce, the itinerant European author, combines things in Ulysses that are otherwise seldom encountered together. He combines the artifice of a highly self-reflective, aesthetically uncompromising modern novel whose allusions are almost indecipherable with an unmistakable, though by no means uncritical, attachment to the all-pervasive ethos of his Irish native country. The novel is a declaration of love to the streets and pubs of Dublin and to the rich tradition and spirit of the country. It could be that this mixture is gaining a new resonance in times of “glocalisation”, that is especially in places where the local is entering into strange combinations with the global.

June 16th, 2010
Why is Bloomsday so Popular?

Various writers attempt, each year, to answer the question.

… “St. Joyce has replaced St. Patrick in the new, post-Catholic Ireland,” the columnist and critic Fintan O’Toole once quipped to me.

That doesn’t explain the many who will gather in American cities to observe Bloomsday. There will be dramatic readings, broadcast on the Web, in various theaters up and down New York’s Broadway and special commemorations at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library, where the autographed manuscript copy of “Ulysses” is housed. Many will listen to the readings and lectures because they’ve never read the apotheosis of high modernism. In fact, the book may grow more inaccessible each year, since most young readers lack the grounding in the classics that Joyce took for granted in his future audience.

Declan Kiberd, the most original of contemporary commentators on Joyce, speculates that the enduring appeal of “Ulysses” rests in the author’s egalitarian impulse that transformed the ordinary into the epic; that ended in quiet fellowship between the petty bourgeoisie Bloom and the poet, Stephen Dedalus; with Molly’s deathlessly erotic monologue and the realization that she loves Leopold still…

Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

June 15th, 2010
Details on…

… New York City’s incredibly elaborate Bloomsday. It’s tomorrow.

Toronto.

June 14th, 2010
Another Bloomsday Blogpost.

[Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n Roll] starts in a Cambridge garden in 1968 with a piper playing the Syd Barrett song, Golden Hair.

Barrett, the Pink Floyd writer and singer, appears now and then in the play, a figure for the seductive, subversive glory of art…

Golden Hair. It’s Barrett’s song, but it’s James Joyce’s poem.

The charismatic rock star undone by drugs (In Stoppard’s play, we see him in his mother’s Cambridge garden. Barrett retreated there, mentally broken, in the mid-seventies, and stayed until his death not long ago, at the age of sixty.) took the James Joyce poem, Golden Hair, from Joyce’s 1904 collection Chamber Music, and in 1969 set it to stark guitar, stark voice, cymbals, and a low drone.

Here are Joyce’s words.

Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.

My book was closed;
I read no more,
Watching the fire dance
On the floor.

I have left my book,
I have left my room
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom,

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair.

Barrett changes the words in the first stanza a little:

Lean out your window
Golden-hair
I heard you singing
In the midnight air.

Barrett makes of this poem (which, in its pull toward the passion of art and away from the chill anxiety of intellect, has much in common with the Yeats poem about Fergus that echoes through Ulysses) a very private chant. His notes go nowhere; he ventures only one or two changes. His song is musing, minimalist, hesitant, circular, self-absorbed, even though the poem’s content is clearly celebratory, the speaker energized by the fire of the woman’s singing to throw away his book, leave his room, and beg her to lean from her window, so he can see her.

Barrett isn’t going to the woman. He isn’t going anywhere. He even brings his voice down, decisively, in the last line, as if to close out any possibility of release from his trance.

**************************

With Bloomsday coming up, UD ponders not only the generativity of art, the way Joyce’s work sings through the work of Syd Barrett, Samuel Barber, Kate Bush, John Cage, Jefferson Airplane, and many others (to note only his musical influence), but also the suffering of the artist, the suffering out of which art emerges. Stephen Dedalus, on June 16, 1904, is going the way of Barrett, after all, drinking himself to an early grave if he doesn’t watch out… Like Barrett, he’s acting outrageously, self-destructively, getting into fights…

And certainly part of what our hero Bloom attempts to convey to Stephen is how deadly intellect, understood as a kind of arrogant self-absorption, can be to the creation of art. Art’s passion is a human passion, and Dedalus isn’t human enough yet. Hasn’t loved. Holds himself aloof from humanity. Bloom humanizes Stephen by embodying for him the capacity for selfless love. Bloom barely knows Stephen, but intuits, as a compassionate and perceptive human being, the depth of his suffering. He follows him around late at night in Dublin, worried that Stephen will get into trouble.

Stephen duly gets into trouble, and Bloom gets him out of it, takes him to his home, gives him hot chocolate, talks to him late into the night, escorts him out of the house (Stephen politely declines Bloom’s invitation to stay the night), and watches with him, from the yard, the quiet spectacular starry sky. This night sky watching produces one of the most famous lines from Ulysses:


The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

The line incorporates much of what one loves in Joyce’s prose: Neologisms (Nightblue is a kind of partner to skyblue; and, no, night isn’t black, or it’s not always black. Night and day aren’t always all that different; in Key West, I was amazed at how white clouds appeared in the sky late into the evening…Heaventree is heavenly. We might also hear lemontree. ). Assonance (humid nightblue fruit). Metaphor (The constellations make trees; each star is a fruit on the tree). Alliteration (heaventree, hung, humid.)

More deeply, there’s something exhilarating about the implicit humanizing, naturalizing, worlding, call it what you will, of the entire universe in this sentence. The distant, enigmatic, intimidating stars which make us feel small and transient are in this sentence gathered into our earth, made an extension of our trees and forest, our earthly garden. There’s a sort of heady insolence about this Romantic gesture, this pulling of the heavens down to earth, this re-sizing of the cosmos to fit us. This is Walt Whitman, claiming the universe, embracing all in his human arms.

More than anything, perhaps, we love the way this famous line seems ineffably balanced, as the stars seem balanced on the heaventree; somehow in the very composition of the sentence, in its smooth stately self-control, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

But of course this is the power of the artist, the power of art, that we’re registering. To be lifted up by a perfect phrase or sentence is to hear the piper in the Cambridge garden and follow him. It is to hear the woman singing through the gloom and follow her.

Barrett and Dedalus — and Bucky Wunderlick, the rock star in Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street (a character in part inspired by Barrett) — these people, these fictions, draw our attention not so much to our own experience of aesthetic rapture, as to the cost to the artist of aesthetic creation.

June 11th, 2010
Why Leopold Bloom? Why Bloomsday? …

… is the title of my latest Inside Higher Education post. It’s here.

June 10th, 2010
UD Prepares for her Bloomsday Reading.

This year, she’s reading parts of the Sirens chapter from Ulysses — the one that begins with hoofirons and ends with farts.

The reading is open to the public and jointly sponsored by the Harvard Club of Washington and American Independent Writers. Details here.

Sirens is the most musical chapter of the novel — and the novel is full of music. Little bits of two songs are featured in UD‘s reading. The songs are:

Martha (In English.)

This version of The Croppy Boy

She will try to sing them, as Simon Dedalus and then Ben Dollard sang them.

Here’s the Washington Post announcement of the event.

Bloomsday, New York City.

May 17th, 2010
A Biden Joyce

[Joe] Biden received a first-edition copy of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” signed by the author, James Joyce, and valued at $3,500. The story is a chapter from the Irish writer’s famously complex novel, “Finnegan’s Wake.”

The giver was Margaret Spanel of Hightstown, N.J., a donor to Democratic candidates. The information was included in Biden’s annual financial disclosure report, released Monday.

Spanel, 97, sent the book to Biden after hearing him say Joyce was his favorite poet, the vice president’s office said…

February 27th, 2010
James Joyce at the Olympics

From The Examiner:

Stephen [Colbert] made visits to a few international houses full of visitors from various countries supporting their teams. After pissing off a Swiss guy for implying that his main language was really just German, Colbert challenged him to a game of Fondue Pong, a variation of Beer Pong, but the loser had to drink a bowl of crazy hot cheese instead. At the Russia house, he played, and won, a game of table hockey. The best moment was when he was at the Irish house. He asked the crowd, “Who wants to celebrate Irish culture?” Then he proceeded to read James Joyce’s Ulysses to a miffed, befuddled audience. Boos and booze were prominent.

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