"When is it going to be Bloomsday?"

There was once a city called Dub'in
Where James Joyce would do all his clubbin'
While his wife stayed at home, sheerly 'roused by a poem,
And not by her dear husband's lubbin'

If you recognize my title right away, ten points to you. See, Mel Brooks, when writing his Oscar-winning screenplay for The Producers, set the opening on June 16. So when Gene Wilder, playing Leo Bloom, jumps on the Lincoln Center fountain and asks when it's going to be his turn, when it's going to be Bloom's Day, he receives his answer: it already is!

The 1,040 pages of James Joyce's Ulysses all coexist on this one day, the sixteenth of June, the day ordinary Leo Bloom became a somebody. Just as you can walk through London in Mrs. Dalloway, you should be able to reconstruct the city of Dublin itself from Ulysses, as Joyce once said. Having just been there, I undertook no Leo Bloom walks, didn't visit the National Museum or National Library like he did, and didn't get into a row in the red-light district. I'm just not destined for greatness the way Bloom was.

In tribute to Mr. Joyce and Ireland, well, go look at my photo spread from yesterday. There's even an (unauthorized) photograph of the first page of the first edition of today's monumental novel.

Last year, inspired perhaps by Bloomsday, I threw open Joyce's book and started off strongly with stately, plump Buck Mulligan. I made my way into the thicket: Bloom's morning sausages, his wife Molly, the funeral carriage. Somewhere around chapter eight of eighteen, my mental facilities quavered, and my plight was now a race of endurance.

Race is exaggerating; took me a whole month, the book did. See, in eight, you have to understand what a parallax* is in order to "get it." Coming to terms with how vastly not "gotten" "it" was, I just kept swimming. Chapter fourteen offers parodic recapitulations of the English language's development over centuries; fifteen finds the character lost in script dialogue and stage directions. But that last chapter, Molly's monologue: eight sentences, sixty pages, pure unadulterated unfiltered semi-consciousness interwoven with eroticism. Perfect. Go read it right now, and tell everyone you finished Ulysses. They don't have to know your dirty little secret... but you should know Ulysses's.

*Parallax=how an object being studied is displaced because its observer changes his spot. Think imperfect focusing on a lens. Think how each eye sees the same world from a slightly different angle, enabling 3-D vision. Think of your view of Ulysses when you began from when you ended... times 1,040.