Your Bloomship

That sounds like it was cribbed from one of those sites that has earnest-sounding but completely wrong summaries of great books, in order to entrap lazy literature students into writing complete nonsense.

The Great Writers can be classified into various non-exclusive subgroups based on their relationship to Ireland, including “Fled”, “Driven from”, “Disgusted”, “Hated”, and “Drank half”.

See George Best, who is said to have got off the plane in Toronto, seen an immense billboard with the slogan “DRINK CANADA DRY”, and tried his best.

What, no And Zombies?

For the last 30 years listener-sponsored Pacifica radio station WBAI 99.5 FM in New York has had a Radio Bloomsday celebration that used to feature a full 24 hour reading of the book – often with some pretty big name actors doing the reading. The past few years it’s been shortened (7pm to 2am) and has “Alec Baldwin, Garrison Keillor, John Lithgow, Bob Odenkirk, Wallace Shawn, Jerry Stiller, Kate Valk and Caraid O’Brien as Molly Bloom, who also directs the production.” Streaming here. Archives can be found from that page too. Always worth a listen.

Mayor of Dublin?

7: The “Drink Canada Dry” joke dates back at least to 1969

And? Ulysses dates back to 1918 and people still appreciate it…

“Mayor” has now been silently changed to “denizen.” But the WSJ still insists it’s a “difficult 1904 novel.”

Americans know about the Briscoes (although not by name) because of a story that when Yogi Berra heard that Dublin had a Jewish lord mayor, he exclaimed, “Only in America!”

So what’s going on is that the writer is confusing a joke he once heard with what little he knows about Ulysses – airy wisps of Jew, Dublin, and mayor are all floating around in the space between his ears.

And the answer to the question is that we all want to know what he was like before he went to New York and got embroiled with that Bialystock guy.

The fabulous RTÉ Radio dramatization, here at the Internet Archive. Can’t recommend it highly enough for those looking to find a way into Ulysses.

and “Nostalgic for the Fictional”, surely.

Maybe its originally a transcription error. I once watched a TV movie advertised as “a group of terrorists are stranded on a desert island”, but it turned out to be “tourists”. However, they were attacked by underwater zombie Nazis, so the original description wasn’t so far off the mark.

On “mayor” I can’t make any good suggestions, but American and Australian vowels are very different. In Australian it’s a homophone for “mare” which isn’t very helpful.

Probably has something to do with Bloomberg.

@Barry – that’s definitely it!

But, in any case, Ulysses has the Hades episode which is pretty much zombies avant la lettre.

I am pretty sure that Joyce’s other great book, Finnegans Wake, also occurs on a date certain. That is to say, the dreamer who is dreaming it is asleep on a certain date. My current guess is he falls asleep on the night of April 11, 1926. That would be the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter in a leap year when Joyce was 54 years old. Saturday because the dream’s whole sordid tale of the big man’s historical fault is being told to us in the period between his “fall” and his presumed “rising”. Leap year because the daughter Issy is a leap-year girl, she was born on Feb. 29 and is the 29th in a month’s bunch of schoolgirls. The book makes several references to HCE’s age, always in his fifties. “April” has all the main female letters, Anna Plurabelle river Issy Livia.

Huh, I have no idea why that strike through happened. Completely unintentional.

29: I listened a while, and the broadcast absolutely did not work for me at all. I don’t think Joyce intended the “voices” to be that distinct from each other, especially the authorial voice. That is blindingly true in sections like “Aeolus” and “Ithaca” but just as true everywhere else. “Ulysses” has important pictorial qualities, the text has shape and form in itself that must be seen.

Other long arguments forborne. Enjoy if you can.

In the spirit of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, based on the discussion above, I hereby offer, to anyone who wants to actually write the bloody thing, a version of Ulysses (based on the Odyssey, let’s not forget, which has a long section in the kingdom of the undead) in which Bloom wanders around Dublin, drinking, talking, attempting to forget that his wife is having an affair…….and also dodging the plague of Nazi* Zombies terrorising Ireland.

Doubtless this will lead to much humorous discussion about the difference between the zombies in Ulysses, and the zombies one sees wandering around Temple Bar, especially after closing time. Ha ha.

*Yes Nazi Zombies. They used the time machine invented by Nazi scientists under the North Pole. You know, the one the Nazis developed while working on their moon and Mars programme. I mean, d’uh.

23. Alan Hale? Now I’m one step away from being Lost

to anyone who wants to actually write the bloody thing and has permission from Joyce’s estate to do so.

There’s a reason Pride & Prejudice was picked?

@33 –Thank you, that was a typo. April 11, 1936 (not 1926).

@Chris Brooke- She may be the vampire’s prey in that passage but She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load is as good a description as any of the ambulatory style of the typical zombie.

@Hidari: I give you the soliloquy of the zombie Molly Bloom:

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me brains first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now brains 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath brains he said I was a flower of the mountain brains so we are flowers all a womans body brains that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today brains that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say brains and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old brains and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens brains and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain brains when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red brains and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again brains and then he asked me would I brains to say brains my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him brains and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume brains and his heart was going like mad and brains I said brains I will BRAAAINS.

SG, you’re quite welcome and no, the likeness is uncanny, or should I say, dead-on. I’ll be keeping the same movie-watching theme it seems.

When Joyce arrived in Austrian-controlled Trieste in 1904, the American consul thereabouts was 22-year-old Fiorello LaGuardia, the future mayor of New York, who remained at that post for another couple of years.

Like Leopold Bloom, LaGuardia was of Hungarian Jewish descent (on his mother’s side). Unlike Leopold Bloom, LaGuardia was raised as an Episcopalian in Arizona.

I am sad Joyce is not alive anymore. If he were he could inadvertently walk into a pub or other gathering place in which his words are the pretext for smugness and all round well-spirited fun. At that time he would for sure generate an amount of vomit the size of Finnegan’s Wake, amply sufficient to suffocate anybody in there. Thereby furthering progress, by the elimination of the obnoxious.

I apologize for coming late, but note that I first heard the Drink Canada Dry joke from my father when we visited Canada (the land of his ancestors) in 1961 or 1962, and he indicated at the time that it was old, which knowing the sources of his humor would place it either in the second world war or the late thirties.

All the more in common with Fiorello La Guardia. The only difference now is Arizona.