Today is the official celebration of the fictional character Leopold Bloom's long day of Dublin exploration in James Joyce's quintessential magnum opus Ulysses. Ulysses happens to be one of those books that become a journey rather than a story, meaning that it is very difficult for people to make it to the end, myself included. I told myself recently that I was going to pick it up and try to knock out a few pages here and there and before I knew it I would have one of the great experimental visions under my belt. Well, I did that for about two weeks, and now it is sitting back at its dusty place on my bookshelf. Perhaps, Bloomsday will inspire me to pick it up once more. Perhaps not.
It is one of those books that writers talk about with such high regard, and as a book that forever changes their view of writing. My friend, Scott Rinehart has said as much himself about the novel. He is one of only two people I know who has tackled Joyce's epic. In a piece from Slate today, Jeffrey Euginides says this:
"One hundred years after Bloomsday, I can say without a doubt that Ulysses was the book, more than any other, that made me want to be a writer. It changed my life and removed the other possible lives I might have had."
"When I was younger, I always thought that Joyce would be the most influential writer of the 20th century. Now it seems to me that Proust is. More books bear his mark than Joyce's. Maybe the question for writers right now is whether to follow the Proust-Romantic route or depart from it."
Vs. 