Twofer

Happy Bloomsday, everyone! And what a lucky day it is. A tweet from uchicagomag (the University of Chicago alumni magazine) led to this wonderful photo showing two of my most favorite things:

Eve Arnold, "Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses," Long Island, 1954

Looks like she’s absorbed in Molly’s soliloquy. “Yes” indeed!

By a commonplace coincidence, I just recently finished The Dalkey Archive, which would lead one to believe James Joyce was still alive and kicking when the photo above was taken. In this account, Joyce is tracked down by an admirer and found tending bar in an out-of-the-way Irish village, having faked his death to avoid serving in World War II. He tries to convince Mick (the main character) that Ulysses was a filthy hoax perpetrated by a coterie of literary pranksters, that he knows nothing of Finnegans Wake (he’s been working on a book but won’t describe it), and has been writing religious pamphlets in the years intervening between his supposed death in 1941 and the novel’s present (the 1960s? not sure). After several conversations, in which Joyce’s natural wariness gives way to full-bore confession, we learn that his heart’s desire is to be admitted into the Society of Jesus (aka the Jesuits) and to end his days teaching at Clongowes Wood College, so vividly and painfully depicted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. What a wicked sense of humor this Flann O’Brien (or Brian O’Nolan, or Brian Ó Nualláin, or Myles na gCopaleen …) has. Also recently read, The Third Policemen was great fun from start to finish, and At Swim-Two-Birds (which a graduate student in English at the U of C tried to foist on me years ago as the greatest of all novels) is still wondering when I will scrape away the requisite amount of time to dive into its loopy involutions.