Bloomsday 2004

In about 4 minutes, the 100th Anniversary of Bloomsday begins. I wish I was in Dublin. There the festivities (read: lots and lots of drinking of lots and lots of Guinness and Jameson among whatever else...) have already been going on for a week...

I know a lot of people who've actually attempted to read Ulysses hate the damn book, but it really broke my head open when I read it in college - this explicit demonstration of the absolutely staggering amount of interconnected everything that goes on in the short span of a 24-hour period (albeit for Bloom the main character an almost unbelievably active day). It's too late in the night for me to go into this too deeply, but it affected me pretty deeply. More specifically, it filled me, and still fills me, with a sense of quiet, mystified calm at the oddity of life, and frankly I've been wishing a lot lately that I could have just a bit more time each day to sit down and read and think and concentrate again on such things. While there are vast galaxies of things to not recommend about my life back when I first became obssessed with Joyce (among other writers, though he was the first big obsession) there is one thing - a hard-to-define sensibility that feels like the closest I've ever come to a deeper understanding of life - how random and arbitrary it is that we are where are when we are, and yet how this sudden flashing heartbreaking realization of its beauty can overtake us, however briefly.

Anyway, here's to Bloomsday! I've got to go to bed...