Worcester, Mass.

I had a very enjoyable Bloomsday, and I'd like to thank the Worcester County Poetry Association for arranging the events that made yesterday memorable. Thank you.

For those not in the know: June 16, 1904 is the day immortalized by James Joyce in the novel Ulysses, perhaps the greatest novel of the stream-of-consciousness school.

Joyce appears to have chosen that particular date because it was then that he met Nora Barnacle, who became THE woman in his life, and in 1934 his wife. Allegedly Joyce's father, upon learning of Nora's surname, said, "she'll stick with him," a wonderful Joycean pun.

Since my own stream of consciousness decides upon its own twists and turns, let me close this brief entry out by noting that in 2004, Sotheby's auctioned off a letter JJ wrote to Nora in 1909, a sexually explicit letter, that sold for 240,800 pounds, pulverizing the estimated value which had been just 60,000.

I think Joyce would have been happy about that.