Bloomsday

Tomorrow is Bloomsday. It is the day that Leopold Bloom stepped out of his house on Eccles Street and into literary infamy. It is the day on which the story penned by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses. This book single-handedly changed literature - all literature, written in any language - for the rest of time. There would be no blogs without Joyce, no joke. There are few works of art that can lay that claim. I am sure all you audiophiles who read blogs can relate some piece of music that has done that. I would love to read about it in your comments. For me, the most important things are books - good books.

Also nodding to you audiophiles, it may interest you that Joyce was an accomplished musician and sang opera, almost on a professional level. The chapter in Ulysses, called Sirens, I have been told is written in the same poetic meter as a Fugue. I know very little about music, especially classical or baroque music, but I do know that the Sirens in the Homer's Odyssey, otherwise known as Ulysses, were temptresses whose beautiful voices made sailors dash their vessels onto the rocks. That is why I am delighted when I find two barmaids singing with the drinkers in the pub, plying them with more music and drink until one by one, they come to some form of personal undoing - crashing into their metaphorical rocks.

And everything in the chapter gets tied back to music. Take a look at this ...

O, look we are so! Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt's, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle. Hiss. Now. Maybe now. Before.

The fact that Bloom is thinking about his wife, Molly, taking a piss in the above passage should not be lost in the puzzle and music of the language. Joyce is scatalogical, perverted and a scream at the best of times. The book was banned, remember. Ironically it was banned in Ireland for the longest time.

Anyway, there is tons more. You can read this book forever and still not solve all the puzzles, make all the connections between all the layers and allusions, get all the jokes.

For all of you who don't give a crap about literature, music, Joyce, Bloomsday or otherwise but have kept reading to this point (why? haven't you anything better to do?) you may want to come to Dublin on Bloomsday anyway. There is a tradition of crawling all the pubs that are mentioned in Ulysses on June 16th. There are so many, including Mulligan's that has the best pint of Guinness in Ireland (this is saying something) and Keogh's, one of my personal favs, that you don't need to even be literate to have a good time.