Bloomsday 2010

Therese and I arrived, books in hand, at the pub where the Bloomsday celebration was being held. Colum McCann was the emcee, and we both were a bit starstruck, although both of us have met him before, on separate occasions. He just won the National Book Award, which is very exciting. He has been emceeing this particular event for 7 years (I was at the very first one!), and he pulls out the big guns, and gets great people to participate in the readings. This was the first year without Frank McCourt attending, so the entire event started with everyone raising a glass to McCourt. The pub has two entrances, a front and a back, and the back entrance goes out into a winding cobblestone alley, with picnic tables placed. It doesn’t feel like New York. It feels like Europe. It was threatening to rain all day, and there were times when a great wind came galloping down that concrete canyon, but not a drop fell. We stayed outside the whole time. Therese and I were there early enough that we were alone at our picnic table (although that wouldn’t last long.) There was complementary gorgonzola and burgundy (naturally). I recognized a lot of people from other Bloomsday celebrations, most notably the Symphony Space one I went to a couple years back. We had about an hour before the readings started, so we just enjoyed ourselves, and compared our different copies of Ulysses. Everyone who was there had a book on the table in front of them. There were a couple of guys in straw boaters.

Then, at one point, suddenly Colum McCann was at our table, holding a notebook, and said, “Do you girls want to read?” (Meaning: participate in the readings. The way it works is each person gets up and reads a section – most of them are no longer than 5 minutes long). But McCann had obviously got the literati out in force, so we were shocked and befuddled when he asked us, and we stuttered and stammered and looked at each other, but what: we’re gonna say No to such a request? We’re gonna turn down Colum McCann? We said “Yes, sure, yes …” And he asked for our names, writing them down, and said, “Pick out a short section – just not Molly, okay?” “Okay.” And he left us in a whirlwind of panic and adrenaline, as we flipped feverishly through our books looking for something we wanted to read. “What have we gotten ourselves into …” I murmured. I immediately turned to the Ithaca section, one of my favorites in the book, thinking of the long water monologue (which is actually included in that excerpt) and which I find hilarious. I thought I could make something funny of it. Okay, fine. I’ll do that. I skimmed it like a madwoman, looking for words I might not know, things I might trip over. Oh, and I forgot, before Colum McCann left our table, he said to us, “Make sure you read good now!” You got it, Mr. McCann. No pressure or anything.

Suddenly I saw an old friend, Aedin Moloney, who always reads sections of the Molly monologue throughout the celebration, and the entire thing ends with her reading the last 4 pages of the book. She’s an actress, a musician, a great person, and I haven’t seen her in years. We have many mutual friends, and I keep missing her, like ships in the night. We did a show together years ago, we played Irish sisters, and it was a crazy and great experience. We were two peas in a pod. I saw her arrive, and then we saw each other, it was great to finally re-connect.

Meanwhile, the place was filling up. An elderly gentleman named Bob sat at our table with us, he had a hardcover copy of Ulysses, and by the end of the day, we were all fast friends. He was terrific. Really interesting, friendly, funny, and loved James Joyce. It was great luck that he sat with us.

There was a microphone and podium set up, under a couple of giant umbrellas (which were eventually removed), and Colum McCann started off with a speech, and then read the opening couple of pages of the book. People were following along in their own copies, or just listening. There was a festive atmosphere. It is strange: to hear voices booming out through the financial district: “Stately plump Buck Mulligan …” Like some sort of weird political rally.

McCann would introduce each reader, and it appeared that it was up to that person to choose whatever section they liked. There was a great mix. McCann and another guy read a bit from the Circe episode, which of course is written like a play. Once you hear this stuff read out loud, by witty people, it becomes totally apparent how hysterical this book is, something that might be missed if you get bogged down in the language. It is absurd, it is breathlessly ridiculous, it is a big showoffy book, it is filled, end to end, with jokes. What a delight. I should have written down everyone’s names, so I could properly attribute their readings, but I was too involved in the moment.

Readings heard:

— a guy named Seamus read the whole “cat” section of the Calypso episode, and at the “Meow” sections, the entire audience started Meow-ing back.

— Eilin O’Dea, just off the plane from Ireland to go to Symphony Space, dropped by and did a bit of Molly’s monologue (a bit? How about 7 or 8 pages) by heart. She was amazing.

— Larry Kirwan (from Black 47) was there, beer in hand, and he read exuberantly from the Nausicaa episode], and he said beforehand, “This is for all the Catholics present.” A cheer went up and down the alley. When he finished the reading, which was quite sexy, as much of Ulysses is, a white-haired woman in the front row (obviously a friend of Larry’s) got up and whispered something to him and he then said into the microphone, “She just told me that that reading was better than her vibrator.” I am sure she loved having what she whispered to him privately BROADCAST into a microphone through the financial district. Everyone burst into laughter (including the white-haired woman), and people cheered. Let’s all cheer for vibrators and James Joyce. It’s only 3 o’clock in the afternoon, why not.

— Two guys got up – one Irish and one from Lancashire – and read from the Ithaca episode (not MY part, though), and it was like a Laurel and Hardy routine. Seriously: that episode can seem so ponderous, because of all of the lists and scientific vocabulary – but that’s the joke of it. The answers so outweigh the questions (which usually are prosaic like, “Where?” and “What next?”) that the entire thing becomes an exercise in absurdity. Hilarious.

— A guy got up who was one of Colum McCann’s writing students. McCann gave him a glowing introduction: “It’s rare that you find a writer who can assert his voice in only three words.” He’s a writer and a Marine, who said before he started, that he took Ulysses with him to Iraq and read the “catechism” episode over and over again, it comforted and steadied him in the middle of a war zone.

— One guy got up and read from Judge Woolsey’s decision, declaring Ulysses NOT obscene and admitting it into the United States in 1934. I know I’m with my own kind when the name “Judge Woolsey” arouses spontaneous applause.

— An Irish guy named Ned (ubiquitous at this function and others, I’ve seen him around) sat behind us. He also did a reading, and judging from his commentary behind me, knows most of the book by heart. He arrived a bit late, and sat down, just as one of the readers said the famous line, “The snot green sea. The scrotum tightening sea.” and Ned called out, “Ah, snotgreen, it’s a luvely color.” This is not a crowd where you stand on ceremony. There’s a lot of talk-back. It’s awesome.

— One gentleman (so sorry I do not remember his name) wearing a floppy little fishing hat got up and read a long hilarious section of Leopold Bloom’s innermost thoughts, and it had to be over 10 pages long, and he had it memorized. I think he glanced at the page once. This was not a rote performance, he wasn’t rattling off words he had just memorized – he knew it, he performed it, he embodied it. He was so funny, so great.

— Tragedy struck. A woman got up and read the section from Ithaca I had been planning to read. PANIC. I barely listened to her reading, unfortunately, because I was frantically pawing through the book looking for another reading. Never count on Plan A. So far, no one had read from the Scylla and Charybdis episode (the one where Stephen discourses on Hamlet in the library), so I chose a brief section from that, hoping no one else would steal my thunder in the meantime. FEAR. PANIC.

— Overheard: A young hot guy in a hoodie with an Irish accent, holding a Guinness, and saying into his cellphone, “I’ve been down here for hours. I’m wasted.”

— One of the things that surprised me was that no one read the list of names, which is usually a huge crowd-pleaser. Therese knew exactly what I was talking about, and we both forgot which episode it was from (and I have now forgotten it again) but we flipped through our books looking for it. It is one of those things that is immediately recognizable just from the LOOK of it, because it is a page consisting entirely of a list of names, so it’s peppered with capital letters. We were laughing at ourselves as we looked for it, since we both knew what we were looking for, and how fun it was to be with a person who knew what the “list of names” was.

— Finally, Colum came over to our table and said, “You two are up next – you can go and stand off to the side.” We obeyed. Despite our nerves. We stood off to the side, and the wind at that point was huge, whipping the Irish flag off to the side. Rain seemed imminent. As I stood there, looking out at the huge listening rapt crowd, faces of all ages, I suddenly felt very happy to be myself, and to be exactly where I was at that moment in time. Ulysses, as I mentioned, is all tied up with my father, and I miss him very much, and I felt him with me right then. I felt happy that I am in my tradition, that I have embraced it, that I have taken his cues in my own insane way. I wished he had been there.

— Therese read from the Hades section, the ending of it, and it has one of my favorite bits, chilling and simple:

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time.

It sure does.

— I loved looking out at all the faces, watching, and listening, books open to the section Therese was reading. I was weirdly proud of the two of us for saying, despite our fear and sense of pressure, “Yes” to Colum McCann. It was such a treat!

— While Therese was reading, Colum came over to me and said he was afraid it was going to start raining so if I could read something short, that would be great. I showed him what I wanted to read, and then said, “How about if I just do this paragraph?” and he said, “That would be great.” He was keeping things moving, man. NOT an easy task. He had to get all of the readings done before the Happy Hour proper commenced, and he had to make sure to leave enough time for the big finale, which was Aedin’s reading of the last 4 pages of the book.

— I was pleased, because mine was the only reading the whole day from Scylla and Charybdis. Every other episode was represented, so I was happy to fill out the day. It is a chapter I love.

— My turn. Stepped up to the microphone and said, “Let’s talk about Shakespeare, shall we?” and I heard a couple of cheers from people who knew where I was going. I love geeks. I chose a section where Stephen talks about adultery in Shakespeare, and betrayal, to bolster up his theory that everyone in every play that Shakespeare wrote is Shakespeare himself. As he says later, “The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.” It was so strange and funny and singular, to speak into that mike, and hear my voice booming through the concrete canyons. I felt like Hal Phillip Walker for a moment. I read:

— Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor is not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth: an original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure, and in all the other plays which I have not read.

A beautiful and thought-provoking section, but best part is the last line (the last phrase of the last line, I should say). Stephen is going on and on with his theories, browbeating his friends into submission, and he hasn’t even read all of the plays – yet he KNOWS that his theory is true, even in the “other plays which I have not read.” I haven’t acted in a long time. I got a laugh on the last line, a big laugh, and you will forgive me if I admit that it thrilled and satisfied me, remembering the unbelievable feeling you get when you are onstage, and there’s that sudden two-way current of communication open: You communicate, the response comes back loud and clear. Nothing like that feeling on earth. I don’t take all the credit, naturally. Joyce wrote the damn thing. That’s a funny line. But I suppose a personal moment, of remembering that feeling, that feeling of being in command onstage, was a beautiful rush for me. Thanks, Jimmy.

— Perhaps my favorite moment of the day was as I walked back to my seat, a red-faced drunken Irishman held his hand out to me and shouted, “WELL DONE.”

— Therese and I, now drinking Guinness, had a private happy moment of self-congratulation for getting through it, for saying Yes, and for being a part of the entire celebration. “That was so cool – wasn’t that so cool???”

— There was so much emotion floating around that alley, for me, and for others, and I imagine that it was different for everyone. We all have associations, baggage we bring – to this book. Maybe it’s our families, maybe it’s memories of childhood, maybe it’s about living in America now and missing Ireland … who knows. It’s a big book, it can take all of those associations. Aedin started off the last section with a personal story. She plucked the book off the shelf when she was 10 years old and read it straight through. She found it easy and fun. She didn’t know what it was, or that it was important, and kind of just fell into it. “I think you should start reading Ulysses when you’re young, because a child can absorb so much, you have no idea how much.” The next time she read it she was 14 years old, and the Molly section “exploded in my head”. Why? “It was my mother. It was myself. It was all women. I recognized it all. ”

We had been there for hours, most of us. The celebration ended on a clarion call for affirmation, for love, for acceptance (of oneself and others), for forgiveness (of oneself and others), and for saying, always, for saying YES.