Bloomsday and the Gloves of Love

Stately, plump, a 1922 first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses sits in state at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.

And right across from it, 310 yellow rubber gloves dangle from the ceiling in a concentric spiral, bearing, in black Sharpie, the entire text of Ulysses, starting with Stately, plump on Glove 1 and, right in the center, finishing with the word Yes  on the ring finger of Glove 310.

It's called Thy Father's Spirit: The Ulysses Glove Project, by artist Jessica Deane Rosner, partly in tribute to her father, who loved Ulysses. It's a true - here comes a Joycean pun - manuscript. People love this novel and will go to amazing lengths to celebrate it.

It is possible to feel sorry for this big, hard, wonderful, beloved, side-splitting, frightening book. Many more people know of it than know it. And so, on this Bloomsday (traditional celebration of June 16, 1904, the day on which the novel happens), a question hangs in the air: Why read Ulysses in 2013?

A lot of people care about it. On Sunday, all over the world, people will gather to read Joyce's world-beater aloud.

In Philadelphia, Joyceheads will cram the 2000 block of Delancey Place and gather round the steps of the Rosenbach from noon to 7 p.m. Sunday to hear Ulysses.

Its being Father's Day, too, a thing Joyce would have loved (it's a novel, in part, of fathers and sons), several readers will co-read with their dads. Rosenbach's been hosting Bloomsday readings since 1992.

As she has so often done, actor and teacher Drucie McDaniel of the Walnut Street Theatre will conclude with her rendition of Molly Bloom's lusty soliloquy. Yes I said yes she will Yes.

"It's so moving to be there," McDaniel says, "to see some people, eyes open, following the story, laughing at the jokes; other people, with their eyes closed, just savoring the language; and still other people, whose devotion is to the text, with their copies of Ulysses open, following closely along."

"It may well be the only international observance based on a literary work," says Alice Emerson, manager of external relations at the Rosenbach.

But why? Why read Ulysses?

"There's always some new delight," says Frank Delaney, proprietor of the blog/podcast Re: Joyce (about one million downloads), who will read Sunday. "Even when you think you know it well. On every page, there are hundreds of delights in waiting."

Wesley Stace, Philadelphia-based musician and novelist, will also be on hand. "Anyone who's read it will tell you there are incredibly human, wonderful things, incredibly funny bits, incredibly tricky bits, all but incomprehensible bits," he says. 

It's hard to overstate the affection for Ulysses. To be sure, it's, as Stace puts it, "undeniably a game-changer in world lit," a brainy, experimental novel, thick with learned lore, genre-bendings, lingo-tricks, and stuff nobody knows.

"Being intimidated, that's not a bad way to start out," says Emilie Parker, director of education at the Rosenbach. She'll be reading with her father, Tom, who is driving down from Amherst, Mass. "You can get your own feeling of it, ask the question 'Why read?' for yourself. Even people who wander by chance into our event Sunday, even they'll get something out of it."

And yet, the love. Maybe it's because Ulysses is about love, and what it does to and for us. Writer Chris Hedges won't be at the Rosenbach reading, but he will be in Manhattan, to see his wife, actress Eunice Wong, read Molly at the Lynn Redgrave Theater. Hedges says we should read Ulysses because it shows us that "the most heroic and important actions of human existence do not take place on a battlefield or on great public stages. . . . It is love, and the reverence for the sacred that deep love inspires, that alone allows us to face the specter of our own mortality and cherish and hold fast to life in the face of death."

That's the Ulysses secret: Beside all its modernist somersaults, it's also on-the-street, workaday, full of the grit and grain of life as lived. Its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, walks through Dublin, eating meals ("Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls"), relieving himself, trying to get an ad printed in the newspaper, stopping at the post office, worrying about Molly, his wife, her dissatisfactions and enthusiastic infidelities. He's a father whose son, Rudy, is dead.

Stephen Dedalus, a son with a failed father, also wanders the streets. Will they find each other? and if so, how? Compassion abounds for people and their situations, their humor (it's a comic masterpiece and no mistake), their florid shortcomings.

"It's the kind of artwork, like a painting," says Parker, "where you can easily spend hours on a single chapter, a single page, just one of those wonderful, delectable sentences."

Let's hear the first two, in which, as so often in Joyce, down-to-earth things are made poetry:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air.

So . . . those gloves. Not only do they bear the words of Ulysses. But also they bear every blot and mistake Deane made with her Sharpie. They are dated, annotated with weather notes and events ("Andy Smith, my husband, is sixty today"). She started in 2010, and she finished Glove 310 on June 16 (yes, Bloomsday), 2012.

Judith Guston, curator at the Rosenbach, says private curator Judith Tannenbaum told the museum about Deane's work. "With it being both Father's Day and Bloomsday, we couldn't have asked for a better fit."

Walking among the gloves, in the presence of that great old book and Joyce's manuscripts, you sense the love so many have mentioned. It's what McDaniel looks forward to each Bloomsday reading: "It's become international: It's a street fair, very folksy, very communal, all these people coming together out of love for the same thing."