Lost in the POMO funhouse
...the naked emperor looks ridiculous, but the ideas that undressed him do not. Steve Himmer
For a variety of reasons it's funny that the name of James Joyce should, via an accidental mention by Douglas Rushkoff, surface in the discussion of deconstruction and post-modernism begun by David Weinberger (and continuing with AKMA and Steve Himmer even as David lays siege to the Chinese sense of humor). One reason is quite vivid to me, since I'm actively working on preparations for Bloomsday in Sarasota to be held in Florida on June 16th.
Funny that just now, on the everlasting day of battle in the Middle East, the name of the Irish writer who placed a Hungarian Jew at the center of Ulysses - the vast modernistic canvas set in Dublin, rich in portrayals of anti-Semitism, rife with deformations of novelistic verisimilitude - should arise as I impatiently await AKMA's book on Post-Modernism, read Steve Himmer's thoughts as well, and share their curiosity about how each of the others explains to himself, possibly when shaving, exactly what he hopes to understand by the appellation ''post-modern.''
If nothing else, Joyce would have appreciated the irony of Himmer's onion, given how the multiple dimensions of Ulysses are a kind of anatomical digest of human nature, each chapter folding back a layer of organic insulation, till by the end of ''Ithaca,'' when Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus go their separate ways, every tool in the organon of human constructions has been pared away, leaving on the page (before Penelope opens herself to speech) - in response to the question "Where?" - the plump black punctum which, not to put too stately a point on it, leaves everything, and nothing, roundly - or periodically - consummated.
Bloomsday in Sarasota scares up a diverse crowd, some who come quite a distance, to celebrate Joyce, Bloom, Stephen, Molly, Boylan et al. It's fun in part because it's strictly a volunteer effort with no institutional control. The folks who turn up don't need no steenking institutions, or media, to tell them how, or why, to celebrate Joyce. Many have never met the others who come; something that appears to offer them more than Rushkoff's vaporous "house of mirrors" draws them.
Another funny thing: the more involved I've become with this event, the less patience I have with Joyce. I begin to wonder if he'll be read 100 years from now - a question I do not have about Stendahl or Proust. I wonder if Joyce might have managed to produce the appearance of a classic, a nifty literary trick that could lend ballast to Rushkoff's placing Joyce among the post-moderns, even as it suggests that Bloom's everlasting day of homecoming shall, at some point, come.
The author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake said he intended to keep the professors busy for 100 years. They have obliged him, creating an imperial industry. Has that industry made any difference? Joyce did like his little jokes. As did Mel Brooks. What is The Producers after all, if not a story about the unlikely box office success of an utterly impossible work of literature, perpetrated by the enterprising duo of Bialystock and Bloom?
12:43:48 PM 
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