Bloomsday Is Coming

...and the NYT is ready. The book review features John Banville's reminiscences of the novel:

One mighty tome of Joyce scholarship that I borrowed from the Wexford library, written by an American academic whose name I have long since forgotten, devoted the entirety of an extensive section on ''Ulysses'' to the parallels between the Stephen Dedalus-Leopold Bloom relationship and that of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. As a result, for many years I assumed that Holmesian rather than Homeric parallels formed the true substructure of the book--so when I came to read Stuart Gilbert's study of Ulysses, directly inspired (directly dictated, some would say) by Joyce himself, I was baffled by the lack of reference, amid all that complex mesh of designated correspondences, to the sleuth of Baker Street and his trusty Achates. Ever since, I have wondered about the exact function of academic scholarship when applied to works of art.

Online you'll also find the original 1928 review declaring that " the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it--even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it--save bewilderment and a sense of disgust." Meanwhile, in the Sunday magazine, you'll find a moderately intriguing article about modern Jews in Dublin. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Sean O'Hagan of The Observer wonders if Bloomsday has become a sellout farce:

Alongside the usual academic forums that annually draw Joyceans to Dublin from around the world, there will be various events of a somewhat more surreal and tangential nature, including a Molly Bloom lookalike contest and the 11th Annual Bloomsday Messenger Bike Rally. Depending on where you stand, the Bloomsday cele brations either help foster a new understanding of Ireland's greatest novelist, or make Ulysses, once exclusively a subject for intellectual deconstruction, an excuse for Paddywhackery of the highest order.