DO YOU BELONG?

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Happy Bloomsday to all Joyceans, Dubliners, and Dubliners at heart!

A nice link about Bloomsday:
http://www.irishabroad.com/Culture/Literature/writers/bloomsday/

A nice little article about Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060619fa_fact

I don't have time to track down the exact quote (and I admit to reading Joyce the way I read Woolf, skimming it and then trying to figure it out from the Cliff Notes explanations) but "Do you belong" is from ULYSSES. In one of the narratives it is the recognition that "Do-you-belong" said rather quickly sounds like "Dublin" when on the tongue of a Dubliner (even if he happens to be abroad, as Joyce was when he wrote ULYSSES).

The Irish people, including Dubliners, that I have known here do not know what I am talking about when I say "Happy Bloomsday" to them on June 16th. I still have to begin the explanation with "James Joyce wrote this book..." and then they remember the annual event back home. One of these years I hope to be at the Bloomsday Faire in Dublin on this day.

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race!"

Or, as we Toodlers like to say:

TOODLE ON!!!