Give me something, Bloomsday's coming
Open up the doors and have a goddamn beer
Ring the baker, the butcher, the charioteer
The palm readers in Salem, the engineer
Everybody’s wondering where their little light is—Samantha Crain, “Bloomsday”
In her song “Bloomsday,” Oklahoma artist Samantha Crain waxes lyrically about the endless cycles in which we find ourselves, our little lives rounded with mundane experiences. It celebrates the beauty of the everyday, whether you're a “socialite” who “buys candles too pricey now to light” or if you're an “Okie from Okmulgee just making due with wax and pride.” Our day-to-day existence, Crain suggests, has everybody “wondering where their little light is,” all the while acknowledging the potential for anyone to shine.
The holiday that inspired Crain’s song commemorates the anniversary of the day Leopold Bloom, protagonist of James Joyce’s modernist literary epic Ulysses, wanders around Dublin in a series of episodes that echo Homer’s Odyssey. Every year on June 16, cities around the world celebrate with a mix of live readings from the novel, Irish music, and generous helpings of food and drink, all to give literature enthusiasts a taste of “dear dirty Dublin.” It’s an esoteric holiday for literature enthusiasts to toast to one of the most complex and rewarding books written in the English language.
But for me (and for Samantha Crain, apparently), Bloomsday means something far more local. It's an excuse to wander the streets, getting lost in your head and whatever town you happen to be haunting. For Tulsa specifically, think of Bloomsday as a sort of beer chaser to the mat shot that is Tulsa Tough—you gotta ground yourself eventually. And surprisingly, Tulsa has a longstanding relationship to James Joyce that goes beyond the mural of his face in the alley beside Valkyrie.
This city has become a sort of hub for scholarship about Joyce and Ulysses thanks to The University of Tulsa. In the 1960s, TU began acquiring different libraries and collections of materials devoted to Joyce and the people he knew. As a result, the McFarlin Library now houses one of the most extensive collections of James Joyce archival materials in the United States. The university also publishes the James Joyce Quarterly (JJQ), the flagship scholarly journal dedicated to criticism and book reviews about Joyce’s work. Students and scholars from around the world come to Tulsa to access the collections and learn more about one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic authors.