Kat with a K

Happy Bloomsday!

June 16 is Bloomsday - the day on which all the action, if you want to call it that, of James Joyce's Ulysses took place. People celebrate this. No, really. They celebrate all over the world, but especially in Dublin, where the book took place. The Huffington Post has a bunch of pictures up of these celebrations. The James Joyce center, as you might imagine, goes all out. So does New York. (Nota bene: This Bloomsday, the first Google result, seems to be unrelated.) Oh, and a very traditional way to celebrate: banning the book, again, still! Thanks, Apple!

It was about ten years ago now that I took a Joyce seminar entitled, simply, "Reading Ulysses." And so I can say that I read every word, from "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" to "yes I said yes I will Yes." (We read secondary sources too, don't worry.) And I pretty much hated it at the time, but I'm glad I did it, and I almost have some vaguely fond memories of it now! At this very moment, 40% of me wants to reread it in a non-class setting, and 60% still thinks it's drivel that people say is brilliant because they don't understand it. So . . . happy Bloomsday? Yeah.