SAY hello to a group of Olympians gathered at Ballyhoo Irish Pub last night for Bloomsday, the unofficial international holiday celebrating James Joyce's Ulysses. This groundbreaking 1914 novel chronicles a single day--June 16--in life of Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and dozens of Dubliners in 1904. After a warm-up of Guinness and tasty pub fare, ten of us took turns reading our favorite section or two of the novel. While elsewhere in the world, groups of Joyce fans did marathon readings of the entire book, our group of ten decided to simply revel in the language, the joy, the meloniousness of it all. We started at the beginning (Stately plump Buck Mulligan...), read many bawdy bits from various chapters, and we did read the last gasps of Molly's monologue (...yes I said yes I will Yes.) By the end of the evening, we were all saying yes to making Ulysses our Big Read of the Summer (and possibly Fall and Winter) of 2010.
