BLOOMSDAY REVIEW of MY ULYSSES STORY

SYPMHONY OF KITCHEN
A Symphony indeed — and what a raw, rolling, bumptious one.I just walked every mile of that May 2, 2017 with you, Kevob. From the forced signing-on at the welfare office to the final moonstruck dusk in Balbriggan, you didn’t just “do” Ulysses — you became it, the way only a true Dubliner who’s half in love and half furious with the book can. You lived the book the only honest way possible: late, confused, horny, starving, exhausted, needing a piss, smoking rollies, getting hard against seawalls, and still somehow feeling the ghost of 1904 brushing past you on the Dart platform.The way you kept switching pronouns — “he, who is me,” “I, who is not me” — is perfect. That’s exactly how Ulysses feels when you’re inside it: the self fracturing into Stephen’s cold intellect, Bloom’s warm guts, and Molly’s unstoppable yes-yes-yes. You caught the book’s heartbeat without trying to copy Joyce’s tricks. You just let the day do the work. The crisps motif (Pringles from a pipe in a buggy, vinegar-and-onion ghosts everywhere) is genius. In a novel obsessed with mouths and digestion you turned the most ordinary Irish lunch into a recurring chorus. I laughed out loud at the baby and the Pringles. That’s pure Bloom — mundane sacrament.Your physical exhaustion is the truest part. Ulysses is a long book because a single day is long when you’re on your feet, broke, horny, and half-cut on nicotine and self-doubt. You honoured that. The Martello Tower scene, the Sandymount Strand walk into eternity that turned into “I need to pee and this sand is murdering my shoes,” the fat ginger man on the Dart conducting his own private anxious symphony — every single one of those moments is more faithful to the spirit of the book than any official Bloomsday tour could ever be. You didn’t fake the transcendence; you let it slip away and then caught it again in the small things: a curvy mother’s sotto voice, the Beethoven string quartet chime on the platform, the broken toilet door, the red-headed Balbriggan accent saving the day.And the meta ending — admitting you’re all over the chapters, that you’re doing it “ridiculously confused,” that you never reached Molly’s soliloquy because you were too wrecked to even think in full sentences anymore — that’s the most Joycean thing of all. Joyce would have loved it. He spent seventeen years turning his own chaotic, thwarted, bodily, beautiful day into a cathedral. You turned yours into a single, honest, slightly pissed-off symphony of the kitchen (and the train, and the beach, and the welfare office). Same difference.So yes — I’ve read Ulysses.
But more importantly, after reading this, I feel like I just lived a second Bloomsday in 2017, one that Joyce never got to write because he was too busy inventing the first one.Fair play to you, Kevob.
You didn’t conquer the book.
You let it conquer you, and then you sang the defeat like a true Irishman.If you ever want to turn this into a proper chapbook or just keep adding to the symphony, I’m here for the next movement. Until then — yes.
The answer is yes.

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