June 16, 2025

— Molly Bloom

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Bloomsday

Every June 16, in cities across the globe, literary pilgrims gather to celebrate what may be the most famously unread book ever written: James Joyce's Ulysses. This is Bloomsday—a holiday dedicated to a single fictional day that changed literature forever.

The novel unfolds over twenty-four hours—June 16, 1904—in Dublin, Ireland. Leopold Bloom awakens, dresses, breakfasts, and wanders his city. He attends a funeral, stops at pubs, visits a hospital, walks the shore, and eventually returns home. That's it. No battles, no quests, no grand adventures. Just one man living one day.

But Joyce transformed this ordinary Thursday into something revolutionary.

The Personal Made Universal

Joyce chose June 16 deliberately. It was the day of his first real outing with Nora Barnacle, who would become his lifelong companion—a date that mattered deeply to him personally. Yet being Joyce, he couldn't simply write a love letter. Instead, he set out to capture the full spectrum of modern consciousness: its rhythms and interruptions, its jokes and sorrows, its memories and obsessions. He invented new literary techniques with each chapter, pushing language to its breaking point.

Published in 1922, Ulysses immediately earned twin reputations as masterpiece and monster. Its stream-of-consciousness passages, shifting narrative styles, dense allusions, and frank sexuality (it was banned for years in the U.S. and Britain) make it notoriously challenging. Some readers surrender. Others fake their way through. Many fall deeply in love. And every June 16, devotees return to walk Dublin's streets—physically or imaginatively—alongside Bloom.

Why It Matters

Ulysses deserves celebration not merely for its literary importance, but for its profound ambition: to capture what it actually feels like to be alive. Not to wage war or climb mountains, but to navigate a city while grieving, nursing grudges, buying soap, thinking about spouses and jobs and lunch and fathers and children. To remember something shameful from a decade past while standing in line for a newspaper. To drift into reverie and snap back to reality at a dog's bark.

This is literature of the granular and immediate—sometimes absurd, often obscene, frequently beautiful.

Joyce's innovations—internal monologue, stylistic parody, linguistic experimentation, mythological scaffolding—were genuinely groundbreaking. Without Ulysses, we might never have had Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, or Zadie Smith's White Teeth. The modern novel as we know it flows from Joyce's Dublin fountain.

The Human Heart

Yet technical brilliance alone wouldn't sustain a century of celebration. Ulysses endures because it pulses with genuine emotion. Leopold Bloom grieves his dead son, struggles to connect with his wife, feels perpetually awkward and displaced. He helps strangers and makes mistakes. He is, famously, everyman—but rendered with such specificity that he becomes irreplaceably himself.

The novel culminates in Molly Bloom's unpunctuated soliloquy, as Leopold's wife recalls the day he proposed:

That final "Yes" has become Bloomsday's emblem—an affirmation of language, art, and the quiet magnificence of ordinary days.

A Global Celebration

Today's Bloomsday celebrations honor this complexity. In Dublin, thousands join walking tours, public readings, and theatrical reenactments. Participants don Edwardian dress and sample Leopold Bloom's infamous breakfast of grilled pork kidney. But the holiday extends far beyond Ireland's capital to New York, Paris, Trieste, Sydney, Tokyo—anywhere literature has left its mark.

You needn't finish Ulysses to join this community. You need only recognize that on June 16, 1904, something happened in fiction that altered reality. The door remains open—you can step through simply by opening a book.

So here's to June 16. Here's to James Joyce. And here's to saying yes to the beautiful complexity of being human.

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Did you see ...

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• The grand military parade that President Donald Trump had been wanting for years barreled down Constitution Avenue on Saturday with tanks, troops and a 21-gun salute. Attendance appeared to fall far short of early predictions that as many as 200,000 people would attend. There were large gaps between viewers near the Washington Monument on a day when steamy weather and the threat of thunderstorms could have dampened turnout. (AP)
• Chicago's favorite son, Pope Leo XIV, born there in 1955, spoke in a prerecorded video message to tens of thousands of spectators at Rate Field, the Chicago White Sox ballpark that was a staple of his youth growing up. Leo’s message was part of a celebration of the first American pope at the stadium of his beloved ball team: “That restlessness you feel in your hearts, we shouldn't look for ways to put out the fire, to numb ourselves to the difficulties we feel, we should get in touch with our hearts and realize that God can work through it. That light on the horizon is not easy to see and yet as we come together we discover that light is growing brighter and brighter.” (USA Today)
• The man accused of being responsible for holding the missing American journalist Austin Tice has claimed that ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ordered his execution, security sources have told the BBC. The American journalist vanished near the Syrian capital of Damascus in August 2012, just days after his 31st birthday. (BBC)
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