Bloomsday

Rodney Dangerfield's class movie "Back to School" has become one of those cable staples that I can't help but watch whenever I notice that it's on.  I always chuckle to myself, in an admittedly obnoxious, I-am-so-much-cleverer-than-you kind of way at the scene where Rodney goes to his English class for the first time.  Sally Kellerman is his professor, and she begins the class by reading Molly Bloom's soliloquoy from James Joyce's Ulysses.

But wait: the fact that I know the passage she reads come from Ulysses is not the obnoxious part.  No, the obnoxious part is knowing--and then talking about it, I suppose--that the list of books she writes on the chalkboard that the class is supposed to read is completely absurd, as it includes Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses.  I can tell you that there are perhaps 12 people in the world who will tell you that they've read Finnegan's Wake and understand it, and most of them are lying. The ration of people who've read Ulysses, and who claim to have enjoyed it and understood it, is slightly better, but it's still a book that's more famous for being famous than it is for being read and discussed.  

Which brings us to Bloomsday, which is today, June 16.  It's the day in 1904 that Leopold Bloom, the hero of Joyce's Ulysses made his was around Dublin.  It's celebrated every year by devotees of Joyce, and by a lot of people who've never read the book. 

I'm of two minds about Bloomsday.  I have a Ph.D. in literature (American, not British) and read Ulysses in graduate school.  I also had the pleasure of teaching it to a bunch of mostly disinterested undergraduates.  So I appreciate the book on a couple of levels, and I appreciate a day devoted to literature.  But I can't help but think that somehow all of this celebrating of a book that most people haven't read is a bit silly.  And I can't help but think that Joyce would see it that way, and appreciate the irony.  Like the irony of a graduate student teaching a seminar on Ulysses and using the Cliff Notes as his bible. 

And don't get me wrong, I'll be hoisting a Guinness to James this evening.