WELCOME TO BLOOMSDAY, JUNE 4, 1904

I WILL NOT GIVE SPECIFIC PROMPTS FOR YOUR JOYCE BLOGS. I don't want to direct your reading that much, but you know what to do. Analyze, brainstorm, be specific, make connections, quote, free associate... GRAPPLE with the text as each of these three characters grapples with their internal contradictions.

What characters?

Leopold Bloom, half-Hungarian-Jewish, and no one will let him forget it. Deeply in love with a wife he has not touched in ten years. Scarcely orthodox in his habits. Sensual, enjoying the physical body, yet questioning and well-read.

Stephen Daedalus ("the mockery of your name - and ancient Greek!" Mulligan mocks). Aware, as Yeats was, of his destiny, but nowhere near as sure that he will get there. Struggling for freedom from the past, like the two sons he echoes: Telemachus and Icarus. Struggling between art and religion.

Molly Bloom, as sensual in her inner life as her husband. Seemingly so cruel that she wants her husband to see the evidences of her afternoon with her lover. Yet so tender that she thinks lovingly of the first time she made love with him. Craving sexual pleasure fiercely, her mind flits from thing to thing.

Joyce's book was roundly rejected by critics upon its obscure publication. Irish, established figures such as Yeats's friend George Moore implied that Joyce was a fellow of no breeding, who thought dirty words were a substitute for good literature. Ulysses, whose name mocks the author for his lack of knowledge of Greek, was rescued by admiring Americans: Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Eliot felt that Joyce had transformed the novel by grounding it in myth. Pound admired Joyce's learning, heaping scorn on anyone who did not see the unknown writer's genius. He helped Joyce publish the book, critics set to unraveling its many puzzles, and today it is the Citizen Kane of novels, regularly topping "best of" lists.

What's that above? It's the Martello Tower at Sandycove where Joyce stayed for a few nights with two friends, one of whom resembled the garrulouos Buck Mulligan, while the other was a well-fed Englishman. Art imitates life as closely as it can in this complex work, like the wine that Jesus turns back into water in Mulligan's humorous and blasphemous rhyme. But that's still to come...

Post with energy and imagination on each section of this masterwork.