Happy Bloomsday, one and all.

Well, probably not all–but many of the literary weirdos who might find their way onto this site this morning or mid evening or with their faces mashed oh so narcoleptically atop their keyboards.

What was I talking about?

I am fickle about holidays. My four foot pink Xmas trees gets erected maybe every third year.

I feel similarly about Bloomsday, named after that day in literature in which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set.

I am, technically, a Joyce scholar, due to an existential rabbit hole I flung myself into from 1993 until some hazy time after. (Please don’t read the following image, which is used just to verify that I have bona fide academic accomplishments regarding my understanding of Ulysses, set on June 16, 1904, published in 1922.)

There are maybe four chapters of this doorstop novel that I have more than a dim understanding of.

I’ve hosted two live readings from Ulysses on this holiday, which the Irish singer Joe Hurley once called “St. Patrick’s Day for Nerds.”

My best Bloomsday show was a studio affair, however.

I enlisted numerous readers for this one. Jeff Shuster, the Curator of Schlock, howled that the words I demanded he read were not actually words. I could hear Joyce’s ghost snickering from the ether at that juicy moment.

In my earliest days as a podcast listener, back when the novelty of podcasts seemed to make anything possible, I listened to someone who called herself Paigerella, who read Ulysses aloud about once a week, taking if memory serves years to get the whole book read. She wasn’t a scholar, and did not frame each episode with commentary, or much commentary, but might opine, after a Joycean fart joke, that James Joyce was such a boy.

Paigerella’s conception of Ulysses as an aesthetic experience was that like a blue-tipped match, you could strike it anywhere. The book made enough sense out of context to be a fun read, and it was fun, most of the time.

This was the version of Ulysses I bought and read the summer between my undergrad work and MA work. I went made like Coleridge’s ancient mariner and bothered people at parties with the messianic weirdness, or radical human-ness, of this novel. Paigerella was probably a better ambassador for the book.

Ulysses features two men wandering all over Dublin and one woman staying at home in bed.

My first Bloomsday celebrations were in NYC, in downtown Manhattan, in readings hosted by the National Book Award winner Colum McCann. Unless you work on Wall Street, this is an odd neighborhood to wander into.

The venue was and still is Ulysses Folk House, in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street. A bar a few doors down is named Beckett’s. I deeply hope those two bars occasionally play softball together.

In 2008, I recorded the event, which features a lot of people reading passages, people including my beloved friend Christopher Booth (who knows more about Ulysses then I do), Colum McCann, of course, and Sam Shepherd, Alas, I didn’t have enough tape for the indomitable Aedín Moloney performing Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Aedín eventually adapted this reading into a one-woman play.

I have seen that this Bloomsday reading celebration celebrates its 21st anniversary. If you live in New York, this is a fine celebration on a cobblestone street from another century.

I plan to listen to a little Paigerella this year, listen to her read the first chapter and relearn about Buck Mulligan’s stately plumpness and all his churl.

I’ve never experienced Bloomsday in Dublin, but the great Bloomsda’s I’ve had are better than any other holiday. Wherever you are, I hope the links here help you celebrate, if you want to.

Try to have fun with it.

---

John King (Episode, well, almost all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has published scholarship both on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and, naturally, Mystery Science Theater 3000. He is the author of the novel Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.