Untitled Document

16 June 2004

Bloomday

It is well and truly summer now. Sweat is rolling down my torso and the fan is roaring, vainly trying to shred the humid air.

“Sixteenth today it is," thought Leopold Bloom in 1904, or at least bespeckled James Joyce would have us believe that he did. One century ago a young Joyce met young chambermaid Nora Barnacle. She had a well turned ankle, or so I surmise, since he married her later. He thought so much of his good fortune that he set his epic of the ordinary "Ulysses" on that day.

Those that care about literature call it Bloomsday, since Joyce's book may be fairly called the first non-plot stream of consciousness novel. It is thoroughly Irish, which is to say the opposite of elitist, and is yet the most elite and impenetrable of narratives. I tried to read it once, long ago, and lost myself in 42,000 consecutive words of punctuation-less musing by Leopold's lover Molly.

Joyce had it all there in one of Dublin's dailiest days, pubs and advertising, masturbation and brothels, illicit affairs and the gritty context of the streets. It was so frank, and so avante-guard that it was banned in the U.S. for years.

Apparently the invention of masturbation by former Surgeon General Jocylen Eldars broke the log-jam, and thankfully we can talk about anything we want now.

I like to think of my hurtling through the imperial city in our bold new century is carefully patterned against the anti-heroic text of Ulysses, and the careful reader will see how carefully this rough text slouches through the corridors of stone and marble. I view my landscape in the same manner as Joyce, wondering how the daily passage through life will abrade me. But imagine the difference!

Joyce had no First War, all the empires were secure, and the as West ascendant everywhere, just like the Protestants in Ireland. Queen Victoria was only in her grave three years.

I am trapped in the linear.

I started here at the desk, then crept downtown and then roared out to Historic Heardon for an important meeting over gigantic sandwiches in an anonymous catering shop in a low brick industrial park.

This is not what we want. We must transform from corporate anonymity to vibrant visibility.

The lease was signed on Monday for our new digs, and my sales partner and I drove half-way back to town on the Dulles Access Road to walk the floor of the new property.

It is in the Shopping Bag Building in Tyson's Corners. It is actually called the Tower Building, all brick and a zillion floors tall. But the architectural feature that you can see from the Beltway is the way the distinctive free-standing columns soar all the way to the roof, where they are unified by a free-standing arch.

It makes the structure look exactly like a gigantic shopping bag. My desk will remain in the former Bus Terminal, downtown, but we needed something impressive and representational for our re-entry into the Government sector marketplace.

A place you would be proud to take a customer.

My partner and I walked through the vast office complex. It is a whole floor of rich wood and important looking conference rooms. There is nothing to indicate what this enterprise was, but it was impressive, and the names of all the humans who worked here are still on the doors, as if the place were a cemetery in oiled mahogany.

They told me later the firm had been Arthur Anderson, the accounting firm that lost its soul and shredded the truth.

I would have looked more carefully for evidence, had I known.

But there is so much in the present that it is hard to worry overmuch of the past.

I am concerned about the parabola of democracy in Southeast Asia, worried about the Philippines, wondering if I must throw my little body in front of a policy bus. Can I make any difference? All the attention of the Government is focused elsewhere, and my experience is that I cannot. But I told my friend that I would try, and so I will.

My landscape is so different than Leopold Bloom's. In the heat and sweat of the morning I am having a problem with focus. I am concerned about oil production in Iraq, and the expected but unpleasant spurt of violence as we stride toward the hand-over of power to the Iraqis, ready or not. The campaign against the oil terminals at Basrah continue, one bomb and perhaps two shutting down exports for as much as two weeks. It will cost their treasury a cool billion in that sweltering heat.

In the north, the Kurdish security chief for the fields near Kirkuk was cut down as he left his home for work. Ghazi Talabani was his name and it means “student” in Arabic. His passing teaches us only that there is a malevolent hand trying to split the three major groups. Someone- Sunnis, presumably, killed six Shiite truck drivers near Falluja.

Snipers appeared near the former Saddam International Airport, where the high-value prisoners are held, and ambushed a military convoy, killing at least four contractor workers.

As a contractor myself, I take this personally.

As does my company. We have a huge project in work, re-building a key portion of the Iraqi infrastructure. All out people have been removed to one of the Shiekhdoms further down the Gulf to await the results of the turn-over. In Saudi Arabia, the campaign against orderly export of oil continued as militants threatened to execute Paul Marshall Johnson within 72 hours. He is another one of those big bluff Americans with a tattoo and the grim realization that he is in really deep kimchi.

I doubt that the tax exclusion that makes overseas work so attractive is looking that good to him today.

You would think that all this would be mounting to some sort of ominous denouement, but thankfully, the gods of television brought us basketball again last night. That is why I register but do not feel the growing intensity of the Iraqi violence.

My home-town bad boys did it in five games, wiped slick the mighty Lakers and won the NBA championship. They pressed the agile Kobe and humiliated mighty Shak. Scrappy, pressing defense from a crew of anonymous kids overturned the latest incarnation of the dynasty of the City of Angels.

All five Detroit starters, Rasheed Wallace, Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince and Ben Wallace finished the game in double figures. They put 100 points on the boad, the same number of years since Joyce set Leopold Bloom on the streets of Dublin.

Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown got his first title in 21 seasons in the pros, and the NBA trophy joins the NCAA title he won with the University of Kansas in 1988. He is the first coach to win both.

So, as i walk out into my Bloomday and wonder about how the 16th will treat me, I mutter over my breakfast and say, as Mr. Reagan did when he left this town for the second- to-last time, “Not bad. Not bad at all.”