yes yes I will yes

Father’s Day yesterday fell on Bloomsday, a national holiday in Ireland and one of the only ones based solely upon a date in a work of fiction. June 16, 1904 was the setting for all the events in Ulysses, Irish writer James Joyce’s massive doorstop of a novel. I got to say “Happy Bloomsday on Fathers’ Day” to an old friend who happens to be both a father and the only other person I actually know who has read the whole book. I’m grateful to have a reason to care about that and join with other Joyce fans around the planet. As refresher, here’s the plot of the story that many scholars feel changed the nature of narrative art and is maybe the most important novel of the twentieth century. The hero, Leopold Bloom (thus “Bloom’s Day”), advertising man, buys kidneys at the butchers, serves Molly breakfast in bed, reads the mail, visits the outhouse, attends a morning funeral, runs an errand at the drugstore, inadvertently gives a man a winning tip about a racehorse, bumps into an old flame, stops off for a sandwich and a glass of wine, helps a blind man cross the road, ducks into a museum to avoid his wife’s lover, gets into an argument at Barney Kiernan’s Pub, ogles a young woman at the beach, makes a hospital visit to a woman in the throes of a difficult childbirth, spends the evening in the red-light district with Stephen Daedalus, feels paternal about him and sees him home safely, returns home to Molly as Odysseus did to Penelope. <a href="https://medium.com/notes-from-the-gratidude/yes-yes-i-will-yes-7c6b6cc64448">Read More</a>