The Heaventree Of Stars Hung With Humid Nightblue Fruit

June 16th is Bloomsday – a day set-aside and observed each year, most notably in Dublin and New York, to celebrate James Joyce and his epic novel Ulysses, the events of which all take place on a single day, June 16, 1904 in Dublin. Named after the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, the day also marks the anniversary of Joyce’s first date with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle.

And what better way to celebrate the day than with a reading of the new Ulysses Seen, a unique, interactive online graphic adaptation of Joyce’s novel by Rob Berry and Mike Barsanti.

It has been noted that true artistic ferment, of the renaissance-inducing kind, is the province of second-cities. The second-cities collect the odds and ends of culture not gobbled up by the leviathan majors, and offer an artist freedom to synthesize the material in unforeseen ways. So if you take an accomplished comic-book artist, plop him in Philadelphia, subject him to day-long readings of James Joyce’s Ulysses at a famous book museum, and inject a catalytic amount of beer, what do you get? Well, you get this, actually.

“Ulysses ‘SEEN’” is the inaugural project of Throwaway Horse LLC. Throwaway Horse is devoted to fostering understanding of public domain literary masterworks by joining the visual aid of the graphic novel with the explicatory aid of the internet. By creating “Web 2.0” versions of these works, we hope to proliferate and help to not only preserve them, but ensure their continued vitality and relevance. Throwaway Horse projects are meant to be mere companion pieces to the works themselves—by outfitting the reader with the familiar gear of the comic narrative and the progressive gear of web annotations,  we hope that a tech-savvy new generation of readers will be able to cut through jungles of unfamiliar references and appreciate the subtlety and artistry of the original books themselves which they otherwise might have neglected.

This one-of-a-kind project seemed destined for the iPad, but it quickly ran into some censorship trouble with the Totalitarian Regime of Apple and Steve Jobs in recent weeks. As Berry put it earlier this month:

“Apple has strict guidelines and a rating system to prevent ‘adult content.’ Their highest mature content rating is 17+, which doesn’t seem to be a problem since no one reads Ulysses at sixteen anyway. But their guidelines also mean no nudity whatsoever. Which is something we never planned for.”

So the novel that has a long, embattled history against censorship and eventually led to the landmark case United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, was saddled once again with the label of obscenity. This is until just yesterday, when it was reported that Apple decided to change the guidelines regarding the Ulysses Seen app and allow the art to appear on the iPad in an uncensored form.

In New York, Symphony Space continues their long Bloomsday on Broadway tradition in which actors join Joycceans, writers, critics and scholars on stage to read selections from the book that heralded the birth of modern literature. This year’s cast includes contributions from Stephen Colbert, Ira Glass, Eilin O’Dea, and Colum McCann among others.  Audio from past shows will be streaming here until Wednesday, and segments from the currently available CD can be heard here.

If you can’t make one of the big festivals, you can always check out Radio Bloomsday. This years Radio Bloomsday will be broadcast live from 7pm to 2am on Wednesday, June 16, 2010 on wbai 99.5FM in New York City and online at www.wbai.org. Performers for this year’s Radio Bloomsday include Jerry Stiller, Alec Baldwin, Paul Muldoon, Bob Odenkirk and many more.

Frank Delaney also recently launched a weekly podcast on his website called re:Joyce. Each week, Delaney promises that re:Joyce will delve into the brilliance of Ulysses and take listeners through the novel five minutes at a time:

And as Ulysses runs to some 375,000 words, and I mean to go through it sentence by sentence if I have to, in order to convey the full brilliance of this novel – and the enjoyment to be had from it – I’ll be podcasting for some time to come! It’s such an absorbing book, it’s got diamond mines of references, it’s so compassionate, so tender, so moving, so funny – and most of us never know that, because most of us have long been daunted by it. No need to be afraid any more – that is, if you make a habit of listening to these podcasts.

Blogger Paigerella also has a Ulysses podcast, in which she reads the novel, and don’t forget the good folks at LibriVox, where volunteers have recorded chapters of the public domain novel and uploaded the audio files back for all to download and enjoy as a free audio book.

Bloomsday continues to be a literary inspiration as well. You can read the short story “Bloomsday 3004″ by Seamus Sweeney about a future where the day’s origins have been lost to history and have instead become more of a folk ritual. And Pat Conroy’s novel South of Broad tells the story of Leopold Bloom King, son of a former nun and well-known Joyce scholar. In his review of the novel, Chris Bohjalian writes that:

Much is made of the idea that Leo’s mother has named him after James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and all of these friends find each other on the very day when Joyce’s Ulysses is set. But South of Broad seems to be a reworking of the Joyce masterpiece only in that Leo learns “the power of accident and magic in human affairs . . . the unanswerable powers of fate, and how one day can shift the course of ten thousand lives.”

And what appreciation of Ulysses would be complete without Eve Arnold’s famous photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading the novel on a playground in 1954.

In his “Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses: Goddess or Post-Cultural Cyborg?”, Richard Brown unpacks the image of Monroe reading the novel that defined twentieth-century literature.

What then can we restore to this image and what kind of compression and/or mediation may be achieved by attempting a reading of this photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses? We must first of all, I think, clear our reading of a clutter of unhelpful associations that may prevent us from hearing its silences at all. Arnold’s photographs are often praised in a particular set of terms. They are said to capture the famous and much-photographed icons of our culture in more thoughtful or revealingly human moments of privacy, intimacy, or rest. … In this reading the photograph shows the ‘real’ Marilyn taking a well-earned breather from the demanding work of being a pioneer professional sex symbol, relaxing with a good book. We might not, here, the apparently deliberate distance between the famous brilliance of Marilyn’s ability to catch or almost to consume the camera with her open gaze in the best-known photographs of her and the gaze that is pointedly concentrating elsewhere, on the book in this case.

Brown goes on to cite a 1993 letter from Arnold reflecting on the circumstances surrounding the famous photographs:

We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was visiting Norman Rosten the poet. As far as I remember…I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it – but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her. It was always a collaborative effort of photographer and subject where she was concerned – but almost more her input.

Click here to read Richard Brown’s essay “Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses: Goddess or Post-Cultural Cyborg?” from the book Joyce and Popular Culture.

Brown later reflected on his essay in an interview about how we might all learn a little about reading Joyce’s masterpiece from Marilyn’s example:

It was a copy of a book that Marilyn had borrowed from a friend and was in the process of reading. But she didn’t read it sequentially, beginning at the beginning and going through to the end. She read it in episodes. She dipped into places from time to time where fancy took her to different moments in the book. It occurred to me, thinking about that, that is the way we should all read Ulysses. That is certainly something I tell my students when we begin to read Ulysses in class. I don’t want them to think of it as a chore — that you’ve got to begin on page one and read through to page six hundred and thirty-six. You can pick it up and put it down, of course, as Joyce himself picked it up and put it down as he was writing the book over a period of fifteen to sixteen years. This, in a way, could provide us with a useful model to try and adopt when we come to the book to make it our own through the reading process. I suggest to them that perhaps if Marilyn, with her busy schedule, could manage to read Ulysses, then there’s no excuse for them not to read and enjoy it, too.

But perhaps there’s no better tribute to the legacy of Ulysses than from Saul Bellow in a recently unearthed letter: “Everyone is writing Ulysses all day long, within himself, and when we speak we speak sentences out of an inward context – only the tip of the iceberg appearing above the surface.”

Advertisement