CSotD: Bloomsday meets Humpday
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Yesterday was Bloomsday, in which people who have read Ulysses say “It’s Bloomsday” and if they’re in Dublin they can dress up as Leopold Bloom and walk around the places Joyce wrote about. And I suppose they might eat a kidney, masturbate, be cuckolded and get drunk to recreate the entire day.
Keyes is unimpressed with the pageantry, though I’m not sure if he’s mocking people who cry antisemitism over everything or is pointing out that if you criticize people pretending to be Bloom you’re apt to be accused of such. Or both, which works for me.
I celebrated by reposting Richard Thompson’s Bloomsday cartoon on my Facebook page and then went about my day without agenbite of inwit or anything like it. I identify more with Stephen Dedalus than with Bloom, probably because I read Ulysses once at 17 and again at 22 and hadn’t yet outgrown being, as Thompson put it, mopey.
Having also read Dubliners, Portrait and Pomes Penyeach, I gave the Wake a very short bit of a try and decided I didn’t need to work that hard, and while I suspect, based on the content of their cartoons, that Keyes, Thompson and Patterson have read Ulysses, I’m always suspicious of people who claim to have read the Wake and certainly of those who claim to have read and understood it.
I infuriated my professor with a paper in which I said that if Ulysses is a novel, then the Statue of Liberty is a building. I intended it as a compliment to Joyce, who seemed to get as much fun out of making puzzles as he did writing novels, and I don’t know if his wife Nora criticized his work but I got a kick out of Patterson’s suggested dialogue.
My professor — a conservative Irish Catholic — wouldn’t even accept that Bloom and Dedalus had a repressed attraction for each other or that Stephen’s ashplant was a phallic symbol. I’m sure he’d be horrified at what Nora put up with, but I read and enjoyed Brenda Maddox’s biography of her, which proved that you don’t need to be educated to be intelligent and that there is a lid for every pot.
I tried to be a novelist but despite writing two novels several times each, all I wound up with was a stack of rejection slips, which I kept far too long for reasons that finally stopped making sense.
I never tried writing my novels in a coffee shop because (A) coffee shops weren’t a thing then and (B) neither were laptops. However, there’s now a coffee shop near me and I see people coming and going with laptops and — being a judgmental cynic — suspect they’re just trying to look hip.
Before I was empty-nested, I kept an office in the basement, and, when I started working in a newsroom, I had to learn to screen out distractions. Maybe that’s just me.
I thought about going back to school to get an MFA, which really does improve your odds of getting published because it teaches you how to write the kind of stuff that gets published and introduces you to people who can get it read by publishers.
However, one of then-wife’s friends said, “I know that MA stands for ‘More Academia,’ but what does MFA stand for?” and saved me two years of learning how to extrude rather than create.
Hemingway went from journalism to novel writing. I just reversed the system. Either way works.
So let’s talk about dogs.
I spend a lot of time with my dog. In fact, I spend all my time with my dog except this time of year when she has to stay home from time to time because it’s too hot to wait for me in the car while I’m running errands. And, like this dog, she doesn’t care for the vets but is always eager to Do Something.
I was expecting that, as the dog of my old age, she’d allow me to stand in one place throwing a ball for her, but she has no interest in fetching and not much in toys at all, though she’ll have a tug with her bestie, who meets us at the dog park regularly.
The only other game she plays is something we call “Kill the Wabbit,” with her friend Bert, a greyhound who finds pretending she is a rabbit more fun than he ever had chasing a fake one around a racetrack. The first time he grabbed her by the throat we were terrified that he’d break her neck, since that’s what greyhounds do to rabbits, but he’s always gentle and the two of them seem to enjoy the game.
Bert has dispatched two groundhogs who invaded his yard, so apparently he knows what he’s doing. It’s best not to try to psychoanalyze dogs, but when Suzi was a puppy, she’d keep following Bert to his car and trying to go home with him, so we don’t fret over their odd relationship.
There’s a persistent belief in canine circles that if you post a “beware of dog” sign, you are acknowledging that your dog is apt to bite people, which could come back to haunt you if anyone hauls you into court after being bitten.
I suspect it’s better to control the dog than to try to control strangers who wander by, and I also suspect that, if you don’t have a large dog, you could borrow some turds from someone who does and scatter them around your yard to discourage burglars. It would probably work better than a sign.
Denver had a program in which people engraved their Social Security numbers on TVs and suchlike, and then put a sticker on their doors and windows, a picture of a police badge and “We Participate in Operation ID.”
It worked not because burglars were afraid a pawnshop would see the SS# and turn them in, but because they thought the stickers meant a cop lived there.
That was half a century ago. I don’t think police still recommend handing out your SS# along with your TV.
Anyway, we’ll give Herself the last word today:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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