Happy Bloomsday, all! Have you read your Ulysses today? I haven't yet, though I may dig my copy off the shelves and read a little this evening.

I read (via Neil Gaiman's journal) that Joyce's grandson had decided to a be an ass and demand that everyone who wants to do a public reading of Ulysses in observance of Bloomsday get his permission and make payment. This definitely seems to me to fall under the heading of Stupid Copyright Tricks. I wonder how many people will go ahead and do readings anyway, and what grandkid Joyce will do about it.

(I'm generally all for copyright, and there's no doubt in my mind that Joyce's heirs have the legal right, under copyright, to keep people from doing public readings of Ulysses. I just think it's nuts for any copyright holder of a written work to prohibit not-for-profit public readings of that work. It's great free advertising, if nothing else. And I think it's doubly nuts in the case of Ulysses, where public readings of the book on Bloomsday have been traditional for years. (A quick google seems to indicate the Bloomsday celebrations have been going on since 1954.) What possible reason can there be for kicking up a fuss now?)

For those interested in more about Bloomsday, there's a page on this year's celebrations here.

I had the good fortune to first read Ulysses under the tutelage of Lawrence Rainey, who is a certifiable James Joyce freak. Um, I mean, respected Joyce scholar. (When the New York Times runs a story on Joyce, they often call him for a quote.) He prepared us for reading Ulysses by having each of us research some aspect of literature, history, politics, or pop culture that was referenced in the novel. We all made presentations to the class on our research. With that, plus a good book of annotations, it was a lot easier to read and enjoy the book. (If you've never read Ulysses and want to try, get a good book of annotations. You'll never catch all the references otherwise.)

Prof. Rainey also managed to dig up recordings of all the songs referenced in the book. Which means I'm going to have "My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl" running through my head all day.