Your Bloomsday To-Do List

Back by popular demand (well, one member of the populace demanded it), here's a repeat of the 'Bloomsday To-Do List' I included in an eponymousday post several years ago.


Your Bloomsday to-do list (one item for each chapter):

1. Start the day with rich white milk, not hers
2. Try to awake from your historical nightmare
3. Telephone Eden on your navelcord
4. Discuss the works of Paul de Kock.
5. Stupefy them with Latin
6. Plant Paddy Dignam and watch him, Bloom
7. Kiss Molly's Royal Irish Arse
8. U.P.
9. Prove by algebra that Hamlet's father was his mother's uncle's brother's cousin's mother
10. Stalk Father John Conmee SJ from central Dublin to the hill of Howth
11. Tunefully tup Mrs. Bloom
12. Explain by science the hanged man's erection
13. Come
14. Read Saintsbury's History of English Prose Rhythm
15. Visit a Surrealist brothel and be as bad as Parnell was
16. Buck yourself up in orthodox Samaritan fashion
17. Insert long round end
18. ...and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I will also take this Bloomsday opportunity to debunk a Joycean meme currently worming its memelike way around the interwebs. People who should know better have recently been alleging that Ulysses is not all that dirty, that it is in fact rather tame by the standards of 2015. Having recently re-read the novel, I hasten to demur. (That murmuring sound you hear is the sound of me demurring.) Anyone who has read and understood the 'Circe' section could not possibly call Joyce's novel 'tame'--not unless such activities as forced transexualism, manual rape, and watching through a keyhole and masturbating while another man fucks your wife are par for your particular course. No, there's nothing tame about Ulysses. It's as outrageously extreme as any work of canonical High Porn from Petronius to Philip Roth. Don't call it tame and give the uninitiated another reason to skip it. Instead, let's insist that it's scandalous. Let's call it filthy, raunchy, surrealistic in its perversity... Dude, you gotta read it!

MERRY BLOOMSDAY!