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.
I was one such student. Fresh out of college in 2008 and ready to devote my life to the study of early 20th-century literature, I moved from Mississippi to Tulsa to study at TU. I volunteered at JJQ until I became an official staff member. I eventually stepped into the role of Book Review Editor, and during my time there, I was in constant conversation with Joyce scholars and bonding with my colleagues over a shared interest in Joyce's writings. In my own experience, James Joyce is about as Tulsa as Coney Islander and midtown potholes.
I’m not the only person in town who thinks so, either. Over the years, I’ve participated in a few Bloomsday celebrations in Tulsa, drinking far too much while shouting the lyrics to “The Wild Rover” with a crowd of like-minded bookworms. I’ve even read some of my favorite passages from Ulysses after a couple of rounds. My go-to is usually a few lines from “Aeolus,” an episode that takes place in the printing office. I always liked how Bloom marvels at these machines clanking “in threefour time,” sounding powerful enough to “smash a man to atoms” while simply “doing its level best to speak.” It’s a passage I liked so much, I got it tattooed on my arm.
The most popular excerpts, however, are the spicy ones, the ones that led to the novel’s famous obscenity trial in 1922. A visit to a brothel, some beachside voyeurism, and other erotic encounters invite more risque readings if the crowd is game for it. Of course the real juicy stuff is in his letters, but that’s another topic—one for the sickos. If you like your literary conversation with a bit of beer and bawdiness, Bloomsday is a damn good time.
Unfortunately, if there’s a public Bloomsday celebration in Tulsa this year, I haven’t heard about it; therefore, I feel a need to advocate for one.
So, how do you celebrate Bloomsday?
First, I recommend you start by reading from Ulysses, even if it’s just a few paragraphs or pages. The dirty secret about Ulysses is that, despite its well-earned reputation for being complicated and dense, it’s a book that has something to offer any old reader. For one, Bloom’s Dublin walkabout is filled with moments of humor and insight. Bloom attends a funeral, he gets into a bar fight with an oafish nationalist, he listens to live music, he has a hallucinogenic episode in the red light district—all the while reacting to the world around him with genuine human curiosity.
For another, many episodes are written in different styles, so if you don’t quite rock with what one episode is going for, you can move on to something completely different. The “Circe” episode is written like a play in which both characters and inanimate objects have speaking parts; “Ithaca,” the penultimate episode, is a series of questions and answers like a catechism or philosophical dialogue.
I recommend starting with the fourth episode, “Calypso.” It is here that Bloom begins his day by eating his breakfast, visiting a butcher shop, feeding his cat, talking about reincarnation with his wife, and wiping his ass with a page from a magazine. It’s a great introduction to one of the contradictions at the heart of the novel: how the richness of interiority sits with the averageness of an unremarkable daily life, how the mind shares space with the body.
Once you’ve acquainted yourself with a bit of Joyce’s prose, take a walk.
That may be a tall order in the heat of our average Tulsa June, but I must insist. Grab some water, a hat, put on some sunscreen, and go for a stroll. It doesn’t have to be a long one—just enough of a walk to let your mind wander. Granted, Tulsa isn’t the best place in the world to engage in flaneurism given the lack of sidewalks, but taking a stroll on your lunch break downtown may be all you need to get your neurons firing.
I recommend walking not only because it’s Bloom's main mode of locomotion throughout the day, but because we know a city best by walking in it. Part of Joyce’s project with Ulysses is to capture the city of Dublin in prose. In a conversation with his friend Frank Budgen, Joyce famously said, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”
Every step Bloom takes recreates the city in the mind of the reader. It follows, then, that a proper Bloomsday celebration would attempt something similar, cataloguing our own city with our steps and opening ourselves up to its charms and faults, its future and its history commingling in our experience of the present.
In other words, the best way to experience Bloomsday is to experience your city in its most intimate everyday glory. Joyce once remarked: “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” As much as Bloomsday is about a particular day in the life of a fictional character, it’s also an opportunity to read your own city.
So, take a walk. Duck down the arterial alleys of Tulsa to find yourself surprised by the art on the walls existing alongside the trash in the dumpsters behind restaurants. Go to Fassler Hall for a sausage and listen to the cacophony of voices rising from tables across the room, each of them revealing some truth behind a life running parallel to yours. Get swept away with some live music at Mercury Lounge or LowDown and note how the experience changes you. Walk through Greenwood in reverence, letting your thoughts dwell on the town’s tragic history and uncertain future. Walk down Riverside and look across the river at the PSO industrial campus with awe at the miracle of modern infrastructure and the horror of its environmental impacts.
Hell, have an argument with some random jerk at a bar—or at least witness one. Having seen an argument at Arnie’s that led to someone’s hair extensions being thrown across the floor, I know there’s some magic out there for you if you find yourself in the right spot.
But most importantly, live in that tension between the boring and the mysterious. Find yourself in some part of Tulsa you’ve been before—a bar, a restaurant, a local shop. Make friends with boredom; acquaint yourself with, in Bloom’s words, “the thoughts you’re chewing” as you wander aimlessly, even if it’s just for a few spare minutes. And, if you’re feeling up for it, try to find a copy of Ulysses and read a page or two, just to see what it’s like.
And if that’s too tall an order, maybe just do what Samantha Crain suggests: open the door and have a goddamn beer. Sláinte, y’all.
