It’s June 16^th.  If you were not an English major, are not a lover of all things Irish, or if you don’t listen to NPR, perhaps this date means nothing to you, but to lit nerds everywhere, it’s the day we celebrate James Joyce, his greatest novel, Ulysses, and the day on which all of the events in it took place: June 16, 1904.  

But when I say “we,” I mean that more as a collective pronoun than a first person one. I am an English professor who has never read Ulysses.  Moreover, I probably never will.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate James Joyce.  Dubliners, “The Dead” in particular, is a personal favorite.  But I have a sort of reverse snobbery about a book that requires so much of its readers--that is, by Joyce’s own admission--completely inscrutable at times.  

Perhaps it's intellectual defensiveness, but I do not want to read a book that requires me to work that hard and for that long.  In order to write such a book, you’d have to be either a masturbating egotist or a mad genius.  The literary establishment agrees that it’s the latter, so I’ll have to concede that I’m just not smart enough to participate in that conversation.  Or maybe I’m just lazy. Or maybe it’s just that in the time that it would take to devote that kind of effort to reading a single book, I could read half a dozen others, and my time to read (and write) is precious enough already.  

From a distance, I can appreciate Ulysses’ ambition, its structure and scope, but  at the core of what might rightly be called my literary laziness is a suspicion that the writer of such a book is just trying to do something huge in the way that a person who wants to climb a mountain wants to accomplish something to prove they can do it.  As a reader, I feel left out. And engaging in the considerable undertaking of reading it would be like making love to an incredibly handsome guy who fancies himself a great lover, and who’s enjoying himself and making you feel pretty good from time to time...but at some point, you want to yell, “Hey!  Open your eyes!  I’m right here! Remember me?”  That is not the type of guy I want to spend a whole lot of time with.

But if I can’t or won’t read the book, I will say to those of you who have or will or who want to defend it: carry on, and have fun.  One of the joys of the virtual world is getting to eavesdrop on these little parties -- the Twitter hashtags, the essays, the commentary and the parodies that Bloomsday and events like it inspire.  Today on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency is a most-hilarious summary of “Feedback from James Joyce’s Submission of Ulysses to his Creative Writing Workshop” that will tickle the funny bone of anyone with even a passing familiarity with the book.  There are quotes circulating around the internet, podcasts, lists of suggestions for how to celebrate the occasion, venues in which to “Re:Joyce,” stories in the news and on the radio, all in celebration of a book. It all makes me want to crash the party, in spite of my lack of acquaintance with the guest of honor.  Or, as one person on Twitter suggested, I could just “Walk around [my] city. Say cryptic stuff. Say [I] read Ulysses (and since no one has actually read it, they'll believe [me]).”