Bloomsday in Baraboo

At the Bloomsday observance last year in Baraboo, Wisconsin, I sat and listened to two of the relay-race readers who would hand off Ulysses to one another —— on the hour, hour after hour, on that middle-June Sunday when Martha and Sammy and I were set up at the Baraboo Sunday market ... a day that was part of our season-long challenge to ourselves to see if we could keep bringing our antiquated stuff to a flea market —— a relatively genteel and easy-going and agreeable one —— week after week, May to October.

I watched these readers mostly from afar: for we occupied a space on the Baraboo Square opposite Annie Randall's Village Booksmith, where the Joycean celebratory readings have taken place on Bloomsdays since 2004.

This, the routine: a reader would sit down and declaim (or aim to declaim) Joyce's text, while sitting at a wooden chair at a table on a busy street in front of that comfortable and inviting bookstore ... reading Joyce's words to the air.

A friend or listener might occupy another chair at that small table, or might not. The readers, with a dedication to performance that I understood and hope that they all did, too, kept at their readings whether a listener sat there or not —— perhaps not even aware if ears might be hovering nearby, since the tangling and jumping and riverrunning words these readers needed to translate into lip, tongue and throat motions must have required more of their attentions than they would have exercised on a typical lazy and summery June-weekend afternoon.

Last year, Wisconsin dragged its feet through a drought while vacationers reveled in unbroken vacation-friendly weather; and in Baraboo that Sunday for the background and sometimes foreground of these readings came car-engine commentaries, oblivious passerby idle-but-loud conversations, and even, while I was sitting in a listener's chair, the thrumming-down flatulences of massed motorcycles nearing the nearby intersection, going br-r-r-r-oom instead of Bl-l-l-l-loom. Drowned sounds of Joyce, and the waves of noise that industry has made an unpleasant permanence in our lives ... and passing chit-chat ... and the running-through, too, of the internal monolog even a dedicated listener must listen to, within herself or himself ...

Really a rather nice experience of the Charles Ives sort.

Music. Environmentally enhanced.

Last year I would happily have volunteered for a reader's slot, had we lived nearer by. We live an hour and a half away from Baraboo, by state and county highways, however —— and in Baraboo I was an unknown quantity. Through the course of being there on the square, Sunday after Sunday, however, we gained some sense of that small city and its community —— artistic and antiquish, both —— and so when Annie two weeks ago stood in our booth describing the upcoming Bloomsday plans, I volunteered. The whole event will fall in our "working hours" in Baraboo: for the reading of the whole of Ulysses will begin at 2 p.m. Sunday and end at 3 p.m., the latter hour being the one when the Sunday Market ends. So Martha will oversee our booth for that last hour —— not quite alone, since Sammy will be there —— while I babble to the air.

... and all in one hour. In past years, Annie has overseen a thirty-six-hour marathon of readings. This year, she oversees thirty-six readers who will be reading simultaneously at locations around the downtown square. Annie told me she expects to cut up a copy of the book ... which made me think I may well be starting in the middle of a sentence ... appropriately enough ...

And will all thirty-six begin in the middle of sentences, at once?

Whatever the situation, I will be one of the thirty-six, with my station tentatively being on the square itself, by the cannon beneath the white pines near our usual Sunday Market space ... and come what may, be it rain or tourist apathy or hecklers enlivened into buffoonery by visits to the clown museum, I will read my allotted text and feel during it what I feel now —— honored to have the chance to take a small part.

I have read Ulysses —— albeit only once all the way through —— and had I lived in Baraboo I would have enjoyed undertaking a marathon as listener, following along, book in hand, through every hour of that reading that I could attend. What an experience that would be! Does anyone do this, at any of the Bloomsday events? In the hour or so that I listened, last year, I sat there wishing I knew what page to find, in the book there at the table, in order to follow along.

Being the reader at such an event offers a more intense experience than being the listener, however: for the reader performs and listens at the same time.

A symbolic hour of simultaneity! —- for an Irish Symbolist who still seems an enduring presence.

I will be there; and I feel sure that many others, whether they know it or not, will be there, this year or next, partaking in an ongoing festival of words that have the capacity to grow into life, even when spoken only to air.

Cheers ...

By the Fly in the Web

At Timmi Duchamp's request last summer I wrote the essay that has reappeared, published, in my mailbox.

The good folks at Aqueduct have sent me the October issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone. In its pages, Kiini Ibura Salaam rises to Timmi's request to write about being involved in various arts, with "Painting and Writing: My Yin and Yang," while I do likewise with "Line Improvisation: Notes by the Fly in the Web."

When I wrote my first short essay for Timmi last winter, I was responding to a last-minute, near-deadline request. I worked at the typewriter for the better part of a day, put the results through several revisions, and sent in my manuscript promptly. When much later I re-read that essay in published form, I reached the ending paragraphs thinking that the essay left off its narrative prematurely. It dropped its discussion too soon. I had hurried into the writing and then hurried out, though: so what else could I have expected? What was going missing, there at essay's end, however, I had no idea. The essay wanted to go somewhere farther -- somewhere it might have gone had I struggled at the task for a longer time.

With this second essay "Line Improvisation" I took the longer time, drafting the piece in pencil and allowing thoughts to arise at a more natural pace. While writing it I grew quickly aware of the fairly large scope my narrative was acquiring, however: so even while feeling more relaxed and expansive in my writing, I was pulling back, skipping over ideas and memories, and hurrying over parts of the story. While I had ample time, that ample time did end with a deadline; and in any case I feared I was making the piece too lengthy for CSZ, a slender magazine. Timmi fortunately expressed no worries about its 5,000-word length.

I sat with the Aqueduct magazine last night and read it cover to cover, absorbed in the present moment and not thinking back to those days of steady, slow writing back in July. So after the smooth flow of Salaam's essay my own essay surprised me -- with its hop-and-skip movements, and its occasional leaps between subjects ... between distant parts of a life. The lacunae between thoughts and sentences threatened to pull me, as reader, down into wordless emptinesses.

This morning I recall that when I sent the essay to Timmi I thought that my manuscript was akin to an outline of a larger narrative.

My two CSZ essays have strong memoir components -- as does the new, even longer essay I worked at in September-October.

I should say have labored at this new work, at least, when not scurrying around engaged in antiquing and Baraboo Sunday Market tasks. For CSZ? Probably not ...

Cheers ...