The Blue Moon, a bar where I ate upon my return from Glacier.

Waterfall near McDonald Creek

At Avalanche Lake

Going to the Sun Road is under construction.

Good food to be had near Baab, Montana.

Sunrise near Many Glacier.

View from hike to Grinnell Glacier

Grinnell Glacier

Red Algae near Grinnell Glacier

Evidence of bacteria colonies near Grinnell Glacier

Some entertainment. [link]  Meanwhile, I’ve not been writing for a while as I am busy putting together an art show. I’ll see if I can’t spare some time, but I doubt it. I’ll be posting the process of putting the show together at the other site, as well as putting up the pieces featured in the show.All for now.[update] So, Rats Live On lives no more. He said, after this little exchange that he was going to quit blogging. But he actually pulled down his site completely.

The entire exchange occurred as a result of a comment I wrote at blogcritics.org on one of his posts. He was posting about the ridiculousness of the new INXS band, and the ordeal of selecting a new lead singer on the reality TV show. He didn’t like how the selections were going.

I commented that his article would have been a stronger one without the use of the word “fuck”. I was very diplomatic in the way I worded my comment so as not to appear attacking. He ripped into me on his now defunct site, personally attacking me, my writing and my art.

All that’s left is the original post over at Blogcritics. Interestingly, even though he killed his blog and is no longer participating at BC, my comment was deleted, but his post remains. Just to be sure, I checked, and my posts themselves have not been deleted.

“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” –James Joyce

Happy Bloomsday, all. Anyone who has read, or attempted to read Joyce’s Ulysses Has their story to tell. Here’s mine.

Back when I was a sophomore at Kent State University, I had the good fortune to study under Dr. Culleton, who is, though I didn’t know it at the time, a Joyce fanatic. She tricked me and the rest of our British Novelists class into falling in love with Joyce.

It began simply enough. The reading list included Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Joyce’s Ulysses. We blasted through most of the reading list and hunkered down with U, as it came to be called, for most of the semester.

Some of us were excited, others intimidated, still others stressed out that we wouldn’t “get” it. Dr. Culleton was so in love with Joyce, and she wanted so badly for others to see his brilliance that her patience guided her teaching of the book, never allowing us to become discouraged, always enthusiastic and finally overjoyed when we all “got” it. We got it so much, and loved Joyce so much that Dr. Culleton petitioned the Dean to allow her to teach a James Joyce seminar class the following semester, and we all attended.

Since that first time though, I’ve completed U five times. I even was paid by one of the other instructors at the university to teach him how to read it. Each time, the book is more interesting, more funny, less complex and more enjoyable.

Every year since at least 1954, fans of author James Joyce have celebrated Bloomsday on June 16– the date (in 1904) when Ulysses takes place.

For Joyce, the special significance of 16 June 1904 was that on that date he had his first date with 20 year old Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid he’d met on 10 June on Nassau street. She’d stood him up on the 14th (or 15th?) but he wrote her a note asking for another meeting, and by August (’heavenly summer’) they were in love.

When the book was published, however, a huge scandal ensued, many claiming that the book was “obscene” or “pornographic”. It was contraband in the United States, and had to be shipped to America in a false book jacket.

But it is not pornographic or obscene. It is beautiful. Each chapter is written in a different style, culminating with Molly’s stream-of-consciousness soliloquy at the end. Plenty of guidebooks exist on how to read Ulysses, but the best piece of advice I can give to anyone is to not get too wrapped up in the details of it the first time though. Dr. Culleton compared reading Ulysses to seeing someone walking in a snowstorm. You see them out the window, you cannot get any details about them, but the important thing is that you see them.

Read it. Enjoy it. Laugh. And for those of you too lazy to read it, here’s a handy summary told in horrid animated gifs and brief one or two sentence summaries for each chapter.

Happy Bloomsday. Tip a pint for Bloom.

(Note: I was unable to find online the best edition of Ulysses. If you plan to buy it, pick up ULYSSES, The Corrected Text, edited by Hans Walter Gabler.

A recurring theme in the lives of many of my friends is that of uncertainty. Uncertainty about what it is we want to be doing with our lives. We are a creative bunch. Most of us have jobs that, at the very least, pay the bills. None of us, none that I can think of, love our jobs. There may be one or two of us who have a job that we believe matters – that the work we do contributes to society and that we are doing important work.

But, for the most part, we all merely tolerate our jobs. None of us are doing something for money that we love. And that breeds resentment. Resentment of our situations, and, on an inherent level, of ourselves. We resent that we are forced to work forty or more hours a week for someone else. We want to be creating art, or music, to be living and experiencing life instead of merely existing within it.

And we do create, but not nearly as prolifically as we would like. We drink to escape the disconnect we feel within ourselves. And I want to go one further, and say that the disconnect is much deeper, and that it is a disconnect from our own wild nature.

We are animals, we are wild beings. We are hardwired for wildness, even someone who has never left the city, even that person longs to be connected with nature in some fashion, because we are a part of nature. We were not meant to slave away for hours a day in a cubicle in front of a computer. We were meant to be outside, and because of that, our ancestors lived off the land, planted gardens from which they got their food, raised cattle from which they gained their sustenance. We are so disconnected from that, believing our food to come from Acme, or Safeway, or Albertsons, wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic. We put faux natural products into our bodies further removing us from our wild nature.

I am not romanticizing the lifestyle of people who came before us. I understand that working off the land is hard, but I believe that those folks had a better connection with the land, with nature, with themselves, and with their true wild nature.

I feel this everyday in my life, and am trying to pay attention to the occurrences of wildness in my daily experience. Even if it is something as simple as stopping on the way to work to smell the lilacs in bloom, something as simple as stopping for fifteen seconds to soak up the sunshine, warm on my face. Sometimes simply being aware of the wild nature we all have is a step closer to reconnecting with that wild nature.

I am much less articulate about this subject than is Becca.