Happy Bloomsday! (Perhaps the one holiday Hallmark has missed--??) If one can believe Wikipedia, poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were married on Bloomsday. Back in my ambitious youth, I signed up for a college class specifically because it would require reading Ulysses and then I spent the summer before the class reading The Odyssey. (Still didn't get an A in the course, though.)
You can find Molly’s lovely soliloquy here, and because everyone should be exposed to at least a little bit of Joyce today, here’s my favorite part, which I once had memorized:
O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
