Rejoice! Rejoyce! A hundred years after it was first assembled into a book, James Joyce’s Ulysses is still a force, if not always of nature, definitely of culture, both Irish and British, and of English, wherever that language is spoken, which is everywhere and everywhen as its main character, Leopold Bloom, might say.
Rejoicing has been in full flow, also of at least some fresh Guinness since February 2, Joyce’s birthday and also the day in 1922 on which the little publisher Shakespeare and Company released the first few copies of Ulysses. Rejoicing as in empire 2.0-minded Brits boasting about it as one of the most potent tools of modernism and modernity, English speakers gloating about it as the greatest novel of the 20th century and the Irish cashing in at reopened tourist traps along the Joycean walks of Dublin...
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