Happy Bloomsday!

The LA Times meditates on the popularity of James Joyce's Ulysses. "It was like nothing ever written before — a novel of 265,000 words divided into 18 'episodes' recounting in complete detail a single day in the outward and inner lives of an ordinary Dubliner, the advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, his friends and unforgettably unfaithful wife, Molly. (June 16, 1904, was chosen because it was the date of his first walk with Nora.) Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that his intention was 'to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it could be reconstructed out of my book.' " More...