Bloomsday 2018

From James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a passage from my favorite episode of the novel, “Ithaca,” which takes the form of a catechism. What Leopold Bloom thinks about when he goes to sleep:



Many years ago I wrote a note in the margin for “one sole unique advertisement”: “in a sense he’s a poet, an Imagist.” Well, maybe. And another for “not exceeding,” &c.: “not Ulysses!” True that.

The word of the day from the Oxford English Dictionary today is Bloomsday: “The 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses.”

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)
2016 (“I dont like books with a Molly in them”)
2017 (Bloom and Stephen, “like and unlike reactions to experience”)