June 16th, 2009
Happy Bloomsday!
Today, if you didn’t know, is Bloomsday — the annual celebration of James Joyce and his 1992 masterwork Ulysses (which takes place entirely during one day: June 16, 1904) that involves dramatic readings of the entire novel and pub crawls and so forth in Dublin and all around the world. And Philly, too. In fact, the Rosenbach Museum & Library at 2008-2010 Delancey Place, which houses Joyce’s handwritten Ulysses manuscript, is holding its Bloomsday festivities as we speak, with readings happening RIGHT NOW and exhibitions of the manuscript and other Joyce ephemera.
I did my college honors thesis on Ulysses — a lengthy paper relating to Stephen Dedalus’s discussion of Hamlet during the “Scylla & Charybdis” chapter and how that provided specific clues to interpreting Ulysses as a thinly veiled ficitonalization of Joyce’s own life. Yawn. Rather than bore you with that any longer, here’s a few tunes influenced by Joyce and/or Ulysses (in the case of Amber and Kate Bush, Molly Bloom’s famous “Yes” soliloquy) to help you celebrate Bloomsday:
“My Dedalus to your Bloom, was such a perfect wit/And to find you in my house makes things perfect”
“And then I asked him with my eyes/To ask again, yes/And then he asked me would I?/Yes, Yes/I put my arms around him, yes/And drew him down to me so he could feel my breast/And his heart was going like mad/Mmmm yes, I said yes, oh yes…”
“And then our arrows of desire rewrite the speech, mmm, yes/And then he whispered would I, mmm, yes/Be safe, mmm, yes, from mountain flowers?/And at first with the charm around him, mmm, yes,/He loosened it so if it slipped between my breasts/He’d rescue it, mmm, yes/And his spark took life in my hand and, mmm, yes/I said, mmm, yes/But not yet, mmm, yes/Mmm, yes…”
