Wednesday, February 17, 2016 // The Statement
4B
Telemachus: 8:11 a.m.
The epic begins with a ringing phone.
I pull my pink comforter off of my body, climb
out of bed and answer the phone. I open my front
door to find Kelli, a fellow “Ulysses” reader. Kelli
has dark hair, a nose ring and a wide smile. I
realize I’ve never actually had a conversation
with her.
For our final exam in John Whittier-
Ferguson’s class on James Joyce, we will be
reading all of Joyce’s “Ulysses” aloud. I offered
my apartment as a starting location because the
novel opens in a tower, and I live on the 10th
floor. It’s not Dublin, but I do have a pretty good
view of the Diag.
Kelli and I make awkward small talk in my
kitchen until Yardain walks in, unannounced.
Yardain was one of my first friends freshman
year, and now, in the middle of our senior year,
our relationship has an easy familiarity. Proving
this point, he immediately begins cracking eggs
into a large glass measuring bowl. Watching
him, I realize I’ve made my first error of the day.
“Oh no!” I say. “I don’t have olive oil.”
“It’s fine,” Yardain says. “It’ll be fine.”
I don’t listen. I played a key part in organizing
our group’s reading, and I can’t shake the feeling
that I’m going to mess it up somehow.
I race downstairs, walk to 7-Eleven and
buy some spray oil. I find that the weather is
unseasonably warm for mid-December. When I
get back, Yardain delegates me to the vegetables.
I begin chopping up onions, mushrooms and red
peppers as group members file in. There are 12
of us in total.
My apartment is small, and soon every chair
is accounted for. Three people sit at the kitchen
counter, four on the couches and two in desk
chairs I stole from bedrooms.
David joins Yardain and I behind the kitchen
counter. David is the English major version of a
class clown. In class, he openly begins questions
with, “So, say I haven’t done the reading…” We
all love him, including John, our professor.
Actually, I think John loves him most.
David begins making bacon, which he picked
out when we went grocery shopping yesterday.
He reminds me a bit of Leopold Bloom, the
protagonist of “Ulysses.” Both eat pork for
breakfast even though they are Jewish. Both are
unconquered heroes.
The premise of “Ulysses” is this: Bloom
walks around Dublin, Ireland for an entire day.
He believes his wife, Molly, is cheating on him
at home and refuses to return until late into
the night. We plan to mirror Bloom’s progress.
We’re going to walk all over Ann Arbor as we
read, trying to spend each chapter somewhere
similar to where Bloom was in Dublin.
All 18 chapters of “Ulysses” are named after
and based on chapters in Homer’s “Odyssey.”
“Ulysses” is a modern-day epic.
At some point in the morning, someone
begins reading.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the
stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a
mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing
gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind
him by the mild morning air.
The reading progresses smoothly from one
person to another. The sound mixes with the
sizzling of the bacon and the pouring of coffee. It
all feels calming, like a bedtime story.
Some people are better readers than others.
One group member, Nick, is particularly
fantastic. It seems he was born to read “Ulysses”
aloud.
As Nick reads, I pack my backpack.
Throughout the day, Bloom keeps with him a bar
of lemon soap and a crumpled up letter. I pack
smarter, albeit nearly as light: a zip-lock bag of
goldfish, a phone charger and a small notebook.
We finish the first two chapters, which are
relatively short, and everyone begins to cheer.
“Shut up and read,” David exclaims.
And we do. Someone begins reading the third
chapter as we all stand up and put our coats on.
It is time to leave my island behind. I lock the
door behind me and feel an ocean of uncertainty
ahead of me. Who will I be when I return?
***
English Professor John Whittier-Ferguson is
sitting in his office eating a bagel with cheese.
John is tall, thin and undeniably heroic. He is
dressed in a royal blue button-down paired with
dark wash jeans.
Every two years, on average, John teaches a
course devoted almost entirely to “Ulysses.” In
the class, which I took in my Fall 2015 semester,
we spent the first five weeks with Joyce’s
“Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man,” then dedicated a full nine weeks to
“Ulysses.”
At the end of the course, students get together
in groups and read “Ulysses” aloud from start
to finish. Though optional, the reading stands
in place of a final exam. Students who don’t
participate take a written final that involves
passage identification.
I ask John how the reading is graded.
“Everyone gets an A,” he says. “It’s so much
harder than the exam.”
John’s office is a tribute to Joyce. The
bookshelves are lined with secondary texts, like
“Ulysses Annotated” and a full set of “Finnegans
Wake” encyclopedias.
“Some books have these sort of cultish things
around them and this is one of them,” John says
of “Ulysses.”
He’s not wrong. “Ulysses” takes place on
June 16, 1904, a day that has now been dubbed
“Bloomsday,” in honor of Leopold Bloom. All
over the world, in places from Canada to Croatia,
people honor the book by reading it aloud, often
in marathon readings like ours.
Bloomsday began in Dublin in 1954. The
University’s tradition began 37 years later, in
1991. John was just out of graduate school at
Princeton University, and it was his first year
teaching “Ulysses.” Three students — Ethan
Goodman, Jessamyn Hatcher and David Zaft —
floated the idea of a reading instead of a final.
“Like so many great things, it’s student-led
and student-originated,” John says, modestly.
John is the type of professor who keeps in
touch with his students after they graduate.
Every time he mentions a “Ulysses” veteran,
he follows their name with what they are doing
now. Things like, “He went into the Peace
Corps,” or “He’s back in town, applying for an
MFA.”
I wonder, hopefully, if I will be one of these
students in 10 years.
***
Proteus: 9:21 a.m.
We don’t want to split up, so all 12 of us crowd
into one of my building’s two tiny elevators. The
elevator travels two floors down then opens
again. A boy stands still for a moment before
entering.
“Is the other elevator broken?” he asks,
confused as to why there are so many of us.
“Sure,” I tell him.
We reach the first floor and step out, like
clowns getting out of a car. David reads as we
walk through the Diag. His reading is quick, and
An
Ann Arbor
Odyssey
it will only get quicker throughout the day. He is
the fastest reader out of all of us.
It’s still early enough that the campus is
pretty much deserted, and I feel peaceful as we
walk. Soon, I’ll be graduating, leaving all of this
behind. It feels right that I’m experiencing Ann
Arbor, an old place, in a new way.
We end up in Mason Hall, sitting on the tiled
floor with our books on our laps as students
hurry past us, yawning on their way to their 10
a.m. classes. Now, Yardain is reading. He keeps
his voice deep and puts extra stress on every
third word.
A wayward freshman approaches our group.
“Are you guys registering?” he asks.
“No,” we all chant in unison. He walks away,
embarrassed.
As chapter three ends, I run upstairs to turn
in a final paper for an English class. I hand it to
my GSI, Dory, then tell her I can’t stay for our
discussion, because I need to get back to my
“Ulysses” reading. She doesn’t mind.
“I’ve heard of that before,” she says. “That is
so cool!”
***
Calling Ethan Goodman, I feel as though I’m
about to talk to a famous person. Twenty-five
years ago, this man was ambitious enough to
convince his English class to read all of “Ulysses”
aloud. He now works at an important-sounding
New York law firm.
Though John takes no credit for the creation
of the reading, Ethan says John’s teaching style
played a crucial part.
“The way John ran the class, which was really
a collaborative discussion group more than
anything else, seemed to naturally lend itself to
a capstone that was more than sitting in a room
and writing in a blue book,” Ethan says.
I can stand behind this — John’s classroom
does not feel like a place where there is a right
answer. Rather than lecture at his students,
John helps us to dig deeper into passages that
interest us, leading us to unlock key parts of the
text that may be difficult to access. A blue book
exam does not seem the best way to assess how
far a student has come with the text.
Ethan and his classmates did the reading on
half-Bloomsday — so December 16, 1991. At that
point, students hadn’t yet begun to travel around
Ann Arbor, trying to match Bloom’s path in
Dublin.
“Back then it was all in one place,” Ethan tells
me.
The things Ethan says about John’s class,
“Ulysses” and Ann Arbor sound almost too
familiar. It’s as if nothing has changed in all of
these intervening years.
I ask Ethan how “Ulysses” has affected him
over the years. It feels like I am about to hear my
future.
“It seems to reveal itself in various ways
depending on where you are in your life,” he
says. “When you’re a student … it can be one
thing, but later on, when you pick it back up,
you’re going to see certain things in a whole
different light just because you will have gained
some life experience.”
***
Lestrygonians: 1:10 p.m.
A few chapters later, we’re all starving. In four
hours, we trek all over campus. From Mason Hall
we go to the cemetery on Observatory, where
David sits on a grave and Yardain says, simply,
“Don’t do that.” Then, we retrace our steps back
to the Student Publications Building, where we
all have chairs for the first time in a while.
Now, we’re at a long, Harry Potter-esque table
in Pizza House, waiting for our food. It’s a Friday
afternoon and the restaurant is predictably
empty. Music plays overhead, but it can’t
compete with the sound of us reading.
The
waitress
approaches
and
seems
unflustered by our open books. It’s as if people
come in here reading “Ulysses” every day.
Honestly, I’m sure she’s seen weirder. We order
two large pizzas — one vegetable, for non-
carnivores like myself, and one pepperoni.
Bloom is also eating lunch. A Gorgonzola
cheese sandwich. An interesting choice for a
man who ate pork kidneys for breakfast. My
vegetarian pizza makes me feel closer to him.
Greaseabloom.
There’s so much in “Ulysses” I’ll never get.
Having studied the book for three decades, John
recognizes this. He does not expect his students
to understand the entire book. Part of the beauty
of the marathon reading is that group members
all come with their own backgrounds, and we all
have certain parts we understand best.
“It’s hard to think of a book that’s harder to
read in a college assembly of people, because it’s
very hard to do on your own, even with good
notes and all the best will in the world,” John
says. “It’s one of those things that it really helps
to be a part of a group, encouraging everybody
together.”
At Pizza House, I sit next to Nick, the one
who’s excellent at reading aloud. It turns out
Nick has even more secret skills: He is a die-
hard Shakespeare fan. Lucky for me, I have been
in the market for a Shakespeare fan. Joyce’s
references to Shakespeare are nearly constant.
Nick begins to explain a theory about
Hamlet that Joyce presents in “Ulysses”. When
he finishes, I still don’t really get it, but I’m
captivated anyway. Here I am, in Pizza House,
reading “Ulysses” aloud and discussing theories
on “Hamlet.” This, I think, this is the reason I
became an English major.
***
John has a dream that, he admits, will never
be realized. He imagines all of the generations
of “Ulysses” marathon-readers will one day all
stand in a room together, talking about the book.
In writing this article, I have sort of helped
fulfill John’s dream. I keep reaching out to
former readers, reminding them that they did
this amazing, insane thing and I did it, too. We
might be in completely different places in our
lives, but we all have one thing in common: an
almost unhealthy obsession with Joyce.
I have already talked to Ethan, a member of
the first generation of readers. Next, I call Tom
McBrien, who is of the most recent generation
besides mine and a former Daily Copy Chief.
He did the reading in the Winter 2015 semester.
Though Tom and I are much closer together in
years, his observations about the reading are
completely in line with Ethan’s.
Tom gives a description of the reading
that leaves me laughing out loud and nodding
emphatically, though he can’t see me.
“It was like an English major hazing,” he says,
seriously.
Like me, Tom did the reading in his
senior year. He says, at the time he did it, the
opportunity to wander all over Ann Arbor was
particularly special. He knew that his time with
these places was coming to an end.
“It’s kind of an emotional thing going to
all these different places in Ann Arbor that
I’ve been before, but meshing them with this
incredible work of literature,” Tom tells me. “It
became part of how I see the city.”
Like many of us, Tom’s experience with
“Ulysses” has affected the way he sees the world.
He says he’s found that “Ulysses” has this way of
mirroring life in a way that’s almost spooky.
“There are so many things in it that are
unforgettable and these things keep cropping
up,” he says. “I don’t know what kind of wizard
James Joyce was, but he found the most amazing
way to capture so much of life in that book.”
***
Sirens: 4:32 p.m.
Eight hours in, the rhythm of the book
becomes the rhythm of my thoughts. My
thoughts
are
wandering.
My
wandering
thoughts.
“Ulysses,” as a book, has a liveliness to it.
The book presents thoughts and ideas that can’t
be attributed to any character. It is, at turns,
musical or mocking or angry or tired or sad.
“Sirens” does not abide by the laws of
narrative, but by the laws of music. It has a
prelude. It repeats words just for the sake of
sound, and has random interludes everywhere.
When we reach the prelude of Sirens, we
are all standing on an Ann Street sidewalk. We
gather in a circle and hold our books into the
middle like hands in a cheer. We take turns
reading single lines. It is windy with a slight chill.
The words are a spirit, a possession jumping
from person to person.
Bronze
by
gold
heard
the
hoofirons,
steelyringing.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
The thing about these lines is they start to
make sense when read aloud. Hearing them,
I realize that Joyce heard them, too. That a
chapter relying on sound can’t make full sense if
read silently.
“It shows me how much Joyce read it aloud
in his head,” John says later. “He has a very
amazing sense of the spoken word and the
rhythm of things.”
I don’t doubt this. Joyce was a lot of things:
novelist, poet, lover, father, closet atheist. He
was also a singer and a pianist. In all of his works
— from his short stories to his novels — there is
distant music.
As of the late 1920s, scholars agreed that
both Homer’s epics — “The Iliad” and “The
Odyssey”— were probably the result not of
one man’s genius, but of a centuries-long oral
tradition. Homer was just the guy who thought
to record them.
Joyce wanted to write an odyssey. And he
took it one step further than I realized.
Photos by Grant Hardy / Daily
By Amabel Karoub,
Daily Staff Reporter
Read more online at michigandaily.com
5B
A day with
‘Ulysses’