When Soltan finished delivering Molly Bloom’s orgasmic finale in the ambassador’s formal living room — “His heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” — Collins stepped up the microphone and said, “Yes, indeed!” He noted that “Ulysses” had never been banned in Ireland.
An account of Bloomsday at the embassy features your blogger.
As I say in the post below, I’m not sure the ambassador’s “Yes, indeed!” was unreservedly thrilled …
This Bloomsday started like all of them – on the metro.
Hours before I’d been at the beach, and the sky was clear blue and the water windy and gray. I didn’t want to leave, of course, and I thought about a quiet life always at the shore.
***********************
I walked north from Dupont Circle up Connecticut Avenue, then climbed the hilly street of fine houses and clever little urban landscapes to the Irish Embassy. It was warm, but not too warm, and UD was nervous, but not too nervous, because before she left home she glugged some Gdansk Gold-Wasser Zlota Woda.
UD seldom drinks, but when she does, she’s amazed at how well it works.
***********************
The ambassador greeted me at the door. “You’re one of our readers!” he said.
“Yes. I’m your Molly Bloom.”
I said I’d worried a bit about the soliloquy’s obscenity. “My husband said there might be clergy in the audience.”
“Oh yes! There will certainly be clergy… I must say, I was listening to some actors practicing the Molly Bloom section earlier today and I was rather… uh… ”
“Well, I’ve chosen a series of short passages and nothing too over the top.”
*********************************
Four men preceded UD, reading a bit from various earlier chapters. It was a very full room, everyone standing and holding drinks. Some guests wore period costumes. UD spotted two priests.
The readers stood in front of a large fireplace; nearby windows gave out on a view of lawns and hydrangeas.
The ambassador stood just to UD‘s left — inches away. And as UD read Molly’s endless complaints about her husband (could have been a prima donna only I married him… O but then what am I going to do about him though…), she found herself using the ambassador as a stage prop, making him her Bloom. She cocked a finger in his direction with each complaint.
This certainly amused the crowd. I think it amused the ambassador, but I’m not sure.
****************************
I like performing Molly. After many years reading her thoughts, I think I am in love with her. Bloom and Stephen are Mr and Mr Gloomy Gus; Molly perks things up considerably with her unstoppable erotic drive.
The danger in reading Molly is melodrama. Overdoing it. The temptation is to be vulgar – either sexually or sentimentally. Molly is explicit, but she’s not out there.
I think what’s most striking about her – especially at the famous conclusion of the soliloquy – is her happy relationship to her own past. Her memories of her sexual power excite her, and indeed Molly gets the last word in the novel not only because she insists on living a full emotional, aesthetic, and erotic life, but also because she loves what she has been, cherishes her exotic past, and, in recalling it, delights and renews herself. At the end of Ulysses, Molly is ready for another day.
… revs up for her Bloomsday readings. Here.
… at the Irish Embassy this Bloomsday (June 16) at 6 PM.
A lesser man might tremble at the thought of throbbing out those orgasmic yeses in front of H.E. Ambassador Michael Collins, but not UD! No sir! Lemme at him!
This year a group of Washington DC Joyceans is contriving to make it special by doing another reading (they did one on Bloomsday, natch).
The James Joyce Birthday Party, on Wednesday, February 2, 2011, takes place at 5:00 PM, upstairs at Guapo’s Restaurant at 4515 Wisconsin Avenue, NW.
UD will be reading excerpts from Proteus, Sirens, and Penelope.
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.
UD‘s ex-student, current
friend, was climbing rocks at
New River Gorge, West
Virginia, while UD, this
last weekend, was at Deep
Creek Lake, Maryland.
Courtney was at Guapo’s to
cheer UD on, you may
recall, on Bloomsday, when
UD did some molto dramatic
Ulysses readings.
… 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.
Slow blogging day around here yesterday, because UD was busy with her first day of classes.
She returned to her office after months away and found a number of fun things there.
Remember her great victory (well, first runner-up) in the 2010 Washington DC Bloomsday reading? Her award – a fine, framed Joycean map of Ireland – was on her door, with a congratulatory note from one of her colleagues.
On UD‘s desk sat a grand new computer she couldn’t use because she didn’t know its password.
Hearing her old friend Connie’s voice down the hall — Connie, department office manager, will fix this! — UD bawled out her name, and Connie came running and figured out the password.
As if this weren’t enough goodies, there was this congratulatory note on her desk (something about how UD‘s been teaching at GW for a long time) with a gift next to it: A glass apple paperweight.
UD wrote a thank you email for it, and then put it to work holding down a stack of syllabi.
In her pile of mail, she was particularly happy to see an invitation to an event of some kind at the National Press Club sponsored by Oxford University Press (the event had already happened). She was happy because it was addressed to
MARGARET SOLTAN
UNIVERSITY DIARIES
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT …
They’re addressing me by my blog now!
… UD reads an article in the Washington Post about Bloomsday at Guapo’s.
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.
… 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 …
*******************************************
**** 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.
This is a new one on me. Along with the worldwide celebration of Bloomsday on June 16 every year, there’s a Dead Dinner.
On the January night James Joyce’s story “The Dead” takes place, Joyceans in New York and Washington dress up in period clothes and reenact the big Christmas dinner and the singing at the center of the tale.
… [Stella] O’Leary recalls starting her Dead dinners the year John Huston’s film came out. It takes [guest] Ambassador Michael Collins just a few seconds to find the year of Huston’s film on his iPhone. O’Leary gasps and crosses herself, saying “‘87, 97 . . . so it’s 22 years”. Guests sing the lyrics of Thomas Moore’s Endearing Young Charms from their iPhone screens.
As [a guest] reads Gabriel Conroy’s closing speech, a website news photo on a phone of snowy Ireland is passed around the table.
… In New York, consul general Niall Burgess and his wife Marie also hold an annual Dead dinner.
… O’Leary’s guests were from the business and diplomatic community. New York is the capital of culture, though, and Burgess’s friends include the novelist Colum McCann, who won the National Book Award in November, the Tony award-winning actor Jim Norton and Gabriel Byrne.
… “Just as the English have A Christmas Carol and the Welsh have A Child’s Christmas in Wales, The Dead is our Christmas story,” [says] Burgess…
A few years ago UD wrote about the final paragraph of “The Dead.”