Word: bloomings
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...first reading of Ulysses can thus be a baffling experience, although no book more generously rewards patience and fortitude. Stephen Dedalus reappears, still stuck in Dublin, dreaming of escape. Then we meet Leopold Bloom, or rather we meet his thoughts as he prepares breakfast for his wife Molly. (We experience her thoughts as she drifts off to sleep at the end of the book...
Ulysses is the account of one day in Dublin--June 16, 1904, Joyce's private tribute to Nora, since that was the date on which they first went out together. The book follows the movements of not only Stephen and Bloom but also hundreds of other Dubliners as they walk the streets, meet and talk, then talk some more in restaurants and pubs. All this activity seems random, a record of urban happenstance...
Joyce later relented, and so the world learned that Ulysses was, among many other things, a modern retelling of Homer's Odyssey, with Bloom as the wandering hero, Stephen as Telemachus and Molly as a Penelope decidedly less faithful than the original. T.S. Eliot, who recognized the novel's underpinnings, wrote that Joyce's use of classical myth as a method of ordering modern experience had "the importance of a scientific discovery...
...liking. When a fan approached him and asked, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" Joyce said, "No, it did lots of other things too." But more important, Ulysses became a source book for 20th century literature. It expanded the domain of permissible subjects in fiction, following Bloom not only into his secret erotic fantasies but his outdoor privy as well...
...addition to the Houghton and the TerrieFried Bloom endowments, Amy Smith Berylson '75endowed a fund in her name during the last term.While Berylson declined to comment on the size ofthe endowment, Avery says the gift will fund anannual lecture featuring women professionals in avariety of fields...