Happy Monday, dear reader. Today is June 16th. A day like any other for most, but for a certain breed of literary masochist, this isn’t just another ripple in the mundane tide of the Gregorian calendar. Nope. For them, today is Bloomsday, that annual carnival of intellectual flexing, literary cosplay, and public displays of knowing exactly what “ineluctable modality of the visible” means (spoiler alert: most of them don’t).
If you’re unfamiliar, Bloomsday is the hallowed celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This 700-something-page modernist behemoth, set entirely on June 16th, 1904, captures a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a humble Dublin ad salesman with a thing for kidneys and an uncanny knack for making his deeply weird interior monologue your deeply weird interior monologue. Why June 16th? Well, legend has it that Joyce picked the date in honor of his first outing with Nora Barnacle, the woman who’d eventually become his wife and soulmate in stubborn eccentricity.
Since 1954, when a pack of particularly ambitious Joyce fans retraced the steps of Bloom and his moody sidekick Stephen Dedalus through the cobblestone streets of Dublin, Bloomsday ha spiraled into a global phenomenon. Dublin itself is ground zero, morphing into a labyrinth of tweed-clad academics, aspiring novelists, and tourists pretending to understand what “Molly’s soliloquy” really means. The day’s menu features marathon readings, theatrical performances, and pub crawls where Guinness and existential dread flow in equal measure. But Bloomsday isn’t confined to the Irish capital…it’s gone international. New York has its own event. Budapest, too. Chances are, there’s someone in your city right now butchering a Joyce passage in public.
Here’s the thing about Ulysses, though: it’s an entire ecosystem of narrative rebellion. At its most basic level, this is a novel about a guy, kind of a schlubby everyman, wandering Dublin for a day while mulling over infidelity, bodily functions, and the cosmic messiness of existence. Describing Ulysses as “just a book” is like calling the Grand Canyon a “neat hole” or fireworks “nice little explosions.” Joyce scrapped the blueprint for what novels could be, melted it in acid, and reconstructed it as a linguistic rollercoaster built for causing epileptic fits in English majors.
It’s a book where style isn’t just substance; it’s spectacle. Stream-of-consciousness prose drenched in linguistic gymnastics? Check. Entire chapters mimicking everything from 19th-century romance novels to overwrought legal rhetoric? Yep. A narrative that stops being linear the minute Joyce decides he’s bored? Oh yeah. And through all of it, you’re left marveling at its audacity, its wit, and its refusal to make itself easy for you.
Which is exactly why Ulysses has earned its badass reputation. It doesn’t care if you understand it. Hell, it seems to actively hope you won’t. It’s confrontational, unrelenting, and defiantly weird. And yet, buried under its dense wordplay and chaotic structure is a keenly human portrait of love, loneliness, sex, guilt, and spiritual yearning. It’s about what it means to be alive, absurd and messy as it is.
And maybe that’s what makes Bloomsday so resonant. Beyond the cosplay, the debates over whether Leopold Bloom or Stephen Dedalus is the superior antihero (Bloom, obviously), and the whispered apologies to unread copies of Finnegans Wake, Bloomsday is a celebration of literature that refuses to be ignored. It’s a collective act of tribute to the kind of art that challenges, confuses, and maybe even pisses you off, but changes you in the process.
Whether you’re in Dublin following Bloom’s hypothetical footsteps, or just cracking open Ulysses for the twentieth time only to quit two pages into “Oxen of the Sun,” Bloomsday isn’t about mastery. It’s about grappling with brilliance on its own terms, about raising a pint to impossibly large ideas compressed into impossibly difficult prose.
And it that’s not worth celebrating, then neither is art itself.
N.P.: “Looking for a Fight” – The Cold Stares