Kidney stains

Bloom-like, we walked everywhere.

The very name Leopold Bloom tells you how kind he is, how silly, how human. How can you not love a character who makes anagrams of his name: Ellpodbomool, Molldopeloob, Bollopedoom, and Old Ollebo, M. P. I don’t know of any fictional character who is written about so honestly.

What captivates me about Ulysses is its realness. It doesn’t just have room for the characters; it has room for you. I think you could find a reference to everyone in there somewhere, some of us requiring cleverer and more intricate connections than others. Joyce is nothing if not clever and intricate.

I am probably more eager to relive books than most people. There have been mornings when so much has happened on my walk to work that I could write a Ulyssean chapter. I have also dreamed of making a map indicating the various perils I encounter on my route: the Creepy Bandaged Man, the Leafblowers, the Wayward Sprinklers, and, worst of all, the Bloodthirsty Geese. I feel akin to Bloom.

Fionnula Flanagan, a renowned interpreter of James Joyce’s female characters and a contributor to Nola Tully’s compendium Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes, remembers her childhood in Dublin.

Many of the landmarks of Joyce’s world remained, their coinage unchanged and in common usage―street names certainly, newspapers and adverts, shops and pubs, churches, restaurants and monuments, the turn of phrase, the prejudices, the mythologies, the past.

We spend life traveling through places filled with certain people for certain periods of time. Street names and monuments can summon these memories back to us.

There are certain people who make memories stronger than usual. Friends who intensify the sights and sounds with their turns of phrase and their prejudices, who develop with you a shared mythology and a world of your own, so that a stranger having lived in the same place at the same time would not recognize your memories.

One landmark remains from Bloomsday a year ago: stains on the parking garage floor where I spilled the leftover kidneys.

2006

2007

Possession

A. S. Byatt’s Possession was a marvelous read. When I read it, at the age of 30, I was surprised that no one had told me about it before. And when I later recommended it to some people I have called friends for years now, I was distressed to find that they had already read it and loved it, but never told me. If I were a literature prof, I would make it required reading for my classes, just for fun. It somehow succeeds in being a satire of literary criticism as well as an unabashed epic romance.

I think I will prove my nerdiness once and for all by admitting that I was immediately won over by the following lines in the opening paragraph:

The librarian handed [the book] to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library… Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St James’s Square.

I knew at once that this was the book for me and that this character was someone I would happily follow. However, characters reading in libraries admittedly can’t sustain a plot forever, so all this romance and mystery soon develop. Mystery is great; romance annoys me a little bit.

Every winter, he tells the tale of Merlin and Vivien, always the same tale, never the same telling. Sometimes the fairy and the magician are true lovers, whose reality is only this dreamed chamber, which she, with his complicity, makes eternal stone of air. Sometimes he is old and tired and ready to lay down his burden and she is a tormenting daemon. Sometimes it is a battle of wits, in which she is all passionate emulation, a daemonic will to overcome him, and he wise beyond belief, and impotent with it. Tonight he was not so decrepit, nor yet so clever―he was ruefully courteous, knowing that her time had come, and ready to take pleasure in his eternal swoon, or dream or contemplation.

We are always shaping our lives into stories. It is the same tale (as Sabine notices in this passage) and the end is always the same, but still we have a certain liberty in drawing the form of the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives. We can make a good life into a captivity or a demon into an idol. The romantic love story is one pattern that helps us perform these conjurings in our minds.