Happy Late Bloomsday!

This has always been my favorite picture of Irish literary legend James Joyce. Two of his works had a big impact on me and I have yet to get to the real butterfly of his career Ulysses. Dubliners celebrated Bloomsday Monday and all week, I think, with a free Irish breakfast and tours around the Joyce character's favorite haunts. From asking around I found the Irish breakfast is a tourist department concoction not a traditional breakfast as most Irish know it.

Bloomsday commemorates June 16 because that's the time of the first date James Joyce shared with his wife Nora. Ulysses at one time was not just used as an end cap to some elitist's bookshelf but was once a taboo object in America and had to purchased on the literary black market (just imagine the mules in this market) thanks to its sexually explicit parts.

At Guestroom records in Oklahoma City I found a $4 LP where an Irish actor reads a Leopold Bloom's soliloquy and an actress reads Molly Bleams yearning soliloquy from the chapter Penelope. It was purely inspired, lyrical writing that said "screw you!" to your grandma's notions of proper grammar. I'll reproduce a piece from the end of Molly's bit here:

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibralter as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Morrish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Thank you Writer's Almanac. And thank you James Joyce for not joining the priesthood. And thank you God for not striking him down for producing these works. Well, there was the eye thing...