Today is Bloomsday, named after Leopold Bloom, the main character of James Joyce’s Ulysses and patron saint of 21st-century literary snobs everywhere. (I write this as a proud literary snob myself. My own history with Ulysses: I took it out from Northeast Regional Library on a summer loan in fifth grade, spent the entire summer reading the whole damn thing and not understanding any part, oblivious to the sexuality and the social motifs, and bloodly loving every minute of it.)
For more information on Bloomsday and Joyce, check out today’s Jewniverse. And please notice Joyce’s own depiction of Leopold Bloom to the right. Contrary to everyone’s hopes and dreams and chagrin, Bloom isn’t actually Jewish, by the strictest measure of Jewish law, anyway, as well as by his own estimation — the character was born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, and converted to Catholicism to marry that feisty Molly Bloom, but still keeps getting mistaken for a Jew.
The occasion of Bloomsday, of course, means that I need to do everything possible to let everyone in the universe know about it. There are tons of Bloomsday events going on, from marathon Ulysses readings at North Carolina’s Old Books on Front St, Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum, and elsewhere…and online, of course. There’s a special Twitter adaptation called @11lysses going on right now, and it is frighteningly brilliant, and a worthy successor to Joyce’s own inscrutability:
11ysses James Joyce
And o’#bloom the bloody freemason slopingprowling through Michan’s land, with his cod’s eye counting all the guts of fish #theprudentsoul
14 minutes ago
11ysses James Joyce
Thirst I wouldn’t sell for half a crown, bluemouldy and #begob could hear it hit the pit of my stomach w/ a click as I quaffed my cup of joy
14 minutes ago
11ysses James Joyce
Sitting atop his boulderstool rubbing his hand in his cauliflowereye: broadshouldered deepchested redhaired #thecitizen #workingforthecause
14 minutes ago
Go read the rest of it now! And go wish everyone you meet a happy Bloomsday. They won’t know what you’re talking about, but they’ll appreciate it.
