Off I Go!

As I'm off in about an hour, I thought I'd let you all in on the plan.  I'm open to suggestion, but there are some high points I'm not willing to miss, even though some of them might seem strange to readers and certainly to some drivers in Dublin.  For example, here's the beginning of the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses: 

     

        What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?

    Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford Place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George's church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends.

Clearly, I'm going to have to do this, particularly the last bit, when I may well disturb traffic as I photograph myself cutting across the street.  

In addition, I'm hoping to take a swim, as "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" does in the first chapter, a the Forty Foot, which isn't a forty-foot plunge.  At least, I hope it's not.  In the final chapter, Molly thinks to herself, "The sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head."  Well, I'm going to try to do THAT as well, if I can find the spot.

Will I walk "into eternity on Sandymount strand," as Stephen does in the "Proteus" chapter? Will I close my eyes, as he does?  Just try and stop me. 

Apart from that, I imagine I'll visit 7 Eccles St., where Bloom and Molly lived.  The house is not there anymore, but as they're fictional, I don't suppose it matters.  I'll look at where it would have been.  There's a Dublin Writers Museum, the James Joyce Cultural Centre, Trinity College, a literary pub crawl, and friends I haven't seen in 30 years and others I haven't met yet.  

So, I'll blog again tomorrow morning after I've arrived.  For now, it's a quick farewell to my sleepy wife (who walked a marathon to raise money to fight Breast Cancer last night and may sleep for the duration of my trip) and to my daughter (who's driving me to the train), and a long one to Jeeves the dog.

Why I'm Doing This

So, the history of this begins, I suppose, when I read Ulysses for the first time in the spring of 1981, at the end of my freshman year in college.  The end of the "Circe" chapter simply knocked me over, and the very end of the novel has stayed in my head for years.  Molly sits in bed at 7 Eccles Street (which no longer exists) and remembers when she and Bloom were on Howth Head.  Here is the spot, and, if I'm lucky and persistent, I'll publish a photo of myself standing here (or hereabouts) on Tuesday.

Hello!

So, hello all and welcome to the first sentence of the first post of the blog of the trip to Ireland I'm taking tomorrow.  Choate in its infinite kindness and generosity is sending me off to Dublin, where I'll be following the path of Joyce's Ulysses and generally having adventures.  I'll be blogging about the trip in this, my very first blog.