I missed this this morning, today is the 100th anniversary of Molly's 'yes.'

Not only did Google introduce Leopold Bloom and his travels in Dublin
to its 100+ million user base today, but the New York Times crossword
today had a gang of clues around 'Ulysses' and ran the following piece
on the editorial side of its letters page:

June 16, 2004
Bloomsday, 1904

"Sixteenth today it is," thinks Leopold Bloom, and the 16th it was, in
June 1904. James Joyce, age 22, would walk out that very night in
Dublin with Nora Barnacle, whom he later wedded. "Ulysses" is set on
that day — Bloomsday, as it has come to be called — in honor of
Joyce's meeting Miss Barnacle. Many Joyceans have made of Bloomsday a
literary Mardi Gras, an odyssey through Dublin using the points of
Joyce's compass, a day to celebrate Irishness and the peculiar verbal
fecundity of that nation. In a novel full of celebrated talkers, it is
Bloom, Jew and Irishman, who hovers, voice and thought, over the
proceedings. As one barroom patron in the novel says, show Bloom a
straw on the floor and "he'd talk about it for an hour so he would and
talk steady."

All these years later, one somehow thinks of "Ulysses" as being of
that day, June 16, 1904, though it was published in February 1922. It
is still as defiant a comedy as ever, as fictional as a gazetteer,
willing to make a hash of the genres its author inherited. Now and
then, a critic feels the need to tilt against "Ulysses," to complain
of a byzantine difficulty in certain passages, to lament Joyce's leaps
of logic and illogic, his utter sacrifice of plot. But by destroying
plot — reducing it to a kind of geography — Joyce succeeds in
reinventing time. Bloomsday is the most capacious day in literature.
Only the hours of Lear's suffering last longer, and there time passes
in a stage direction. Language has almost never had a surer substance
— a stronger temporal beat — than Joyce gives it in the thoughts of
Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly, along with Stephen Dedalus and
Dublin's assembled hordes.

"Ulysses" has come to stand as the apogee of "elitist" literature, a
novel that carries a kind of foreboding in its very title, the
prospect of a hard road ahead. But there is really no less elitist
novel in the English language. Its stuff is the common life of man,
woman and child. You take what you can, loping over the smooth spots
and pulling up short when you need to. Dedalus may indulge in Latinate
fancy, and Joyce may revel in literary mimicry. But the real sound of
this novel is the sound of the street a century ago: the noise of
centuries of streets echoing over the stones."

(recieved via informant today)