Dallas, Dublin

yes I said yes I will Yes.

These final words of Ulysses are the title of "A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday," edited by Nola Tully. It's a fun book. I got it as part of my quest to bring Bloomsday to Dallas. As far as I know, there are not even any Bloomsday celebrations in Texas!

It's weird how quickly one can absorb the Texan rhetoric about the state's being a world in itself, lacking nothing, doing everything better than everywhere else. I mean, it's easy to mock this attitude, because of course it's not true, but part of you wants to make it true. So when you see something lacking (like Bloomsday), rather than saying, "Aha! So much for bigger and better! Silly Texans!", you try to help Texas out. You try to make it complete. Rather than refusing to believe the myth, you work to make reality match it.

Dallas, Dublin. It can happen. Anything can happen for a day.

This (yes I said yes I will Yes.) is a really fun book, like I said. It's kind of a hodgepodge, including a term paper by Tennessee Williams ("speaking of Ulysses, there is, in the first place, too much of it"), a chart in which ten critics rank various authors, composers, characters, and periodicals on a scale of 25 to -25 (Krazy Kat gets a composite 7.6, Lenin a 0, Flaubert a 16.8, Joan of Arc a 3.3, Teddy Roosevelt a -9.5), quotes from friends and critics about Joyce and his novel, descriptions of Bloomsday celebrations around the world, essays, forewords, and so on.

Robert Spoo's essay on copyright is relevant while turmoil rages over that Harvard girl and her silly book. Spoo says, "The mustache on the Mona Lisa always washes off," which seems sound to me. Not that the people she borrowed from were deathless literary masters, but in any case time will tell who's the better writer. We sort and sift. We waste time on unworthy things. That's life.

I was sort of confused by the collection of statements about Joyce. You have people who say he was a true, loyal friend and all that, and then people who say he was insufferable and conceited. I guess you could say such divergent things about a lot of people. It reminds me that there are a lot of people I don't really want to be friends with, but I'm glad they can find people who do. It balances things out.