AT the start of Moby-Dick Ishmael declares that whenever he feels an irresistible urge to knock the hats off people in the street, he realises it is time to go to sea. I have much the same attitude towards Bloomsday - certainly I have the same irresistible urge to knock the straw boaters off the Joyce-for-a-day trendies who throng into Davy Byrne's for their gorgonzola and glass of Burgundy.
And yet we Irish are a contradictory lot, and thus Davy Byrne's is where I ended up with a couple of friends on Monday night, even though it was the wrong time of the day in which to honour Bloom's visit there, and even though we passed on the gorgonzola (£3) and concentrated on the burgundy - which was rather good, as it should be at £2.95 the glass.
In between, we looked in at the Hodges Figgis symposium, if that's the word, on Danis Rose's new "reader's edition" of Ulysses. This, I'm afraid, didn't detain me long, partly because the event was so packed and partly because, in the few minutes I spent there, it didn't seem to be going anywhere.
Mr Rose appeared to be trying to stir up a contentious debate, asking whether Ulysses was relevant to the average person, and wondering if today's young people would bother to read it or whether it was "slowly sliding into the grave". These questions (perfectly sensible, I thought) were followed by long, awkward silences, as if none of the assembled enthusiasts wanted to hear them being voiced, and I'm afraid I departed before discovering what, if anything, fellow panellists Anthony Cronin and Seamus Deane had to say on the matter.
Instead I legged it across the road to St Ann's Church, where Dublin Corporation had organised a reading by a number of contemporary writers - not of Joyce but of their own work. This event (admission free) exceeded the wildest dreams of the Corpo's arts officer Jack Gilligan, being so crammed that droves of people had to be turned away.
I stayed long enough to hear Paula Meehan declaim her audience-friendly and often striking verse in that sing-song manner favoured by certain poets, and to hear Dermot Bolger less demonstratively read a few poems that were both affecting and amusing. Leland Bardwell, Pat Boran, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Joseph O'Connor were to follow, along with Louis Stewart providing some music, and I'm sure they were all splendid, but I simply hadn't the stamina required in order to find out.
And no, Mr Rose, great book though it undoubtedly is, Ulysses will never be embraced by the "average person", who would much rather devour the latest Patricia Scanlan, or by a significant number of young people, who are far too busy reading this year's equivalent of Trainspotting and the Pulp Fiction screenplay to bother undertaking the onerous task of grappling with Joyce's difficult masterpiece. Deplorable, perhaps, but that's the way it is.
CALL me picky, and I know we all occasionally get things wrong (my recent error in naming Fredric Jameson as Frank Jameson brought irate letters from fans of the winner of Philosophy and Literature's Bad Writing Contest), but I was taken aback to find in the current issue of the London Review of Books, normally a paragon of accuracy as well as excellence, two references to a new John Banville novel called The Untouchables. Is this the book of the Robert Stack TV series? Or the novelisation of the Brian de Palma screen version? In brief, as Oliver Hardy almost said, is this yet another fine Ness?
CONTEMPORARY poetry, how are you? Only one poem in Classic FM's Top 100 poems nominated by listeners is by a living writer - "Warning", by Jenny Joseph. As for the rest, Betjeman scores most often, with six poems chosen, followed by Keats (four), and with Kipling, Tennyson, Yeats, Brooke, Masefield, Eliot, Owen, Burns and Shakespeare on three each.
Third favourite is de la Mare's "The Listeners", second is Kipling's "II", but winner by a clear margin is Wordsworth's clunking "The Daffodils". Give me the Spike Milligan lampoon of it any day.
EVEN more depressing is the result of a survey by the Folio Society, which asked its 50,000 members to name their ten-favourite books of all time.
You may recall that when Waterstone's conducted a similar survey a few months back, the clear winner was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and lo and behold, this New Age testament to whimsy tops the Folio Society list, too, with 3,270 nominations out of 10,000 replies.
And, as in the Classic FM poll, living authors get short shrift - all of the writers named in the top fifty are dead.