I know, I know, I’m late for Bloomsday, and at this point, I thought you’d have forgotten.

My friends, why haven’t you forgotten?

I mean, you surely know that the world is breaking the sound barrier with how fast it seems to be going to wherever this cozy handbasket might be taking it, wherever it is handbaskets go.

But there you are, thinking about Bloomsday, and wondering to me where your podcast was. I was a little bit flattered, but mostly, this has sent me on a big personal trip round the block of introspection, which is in a really run-down part of town.

I began recording these pieces in early 2005, when I was underemployed and uninspired and ensconced in a world that I thought was being carried faster than the speed of sound straight to a place of agnostic hell, &cet. I was young then, and thought that maybe instead of fighting back against an oppressive and terroristic government, we could instead insert earbuds and drown ourselves in literature, or something. I swear it sounded almost anarchistic at the time.

And I can’t even repeat it today, because I’m old and it’s saccharine, but the sentiment is the same. If you need to plug your ears, have a podcast. Here’s some awfully apt Joyce.

Much love from my hidey-hole, where I spent the bedtime hours in recitation from the beginning of Ulysses in celebration of the hour at hand. But elas, my audience of one was sound asleep by mention of the snotgreen sea.

My own sinus was breaking waves with the same, as it often is these days, but thanks to the magic of audio editing, it is my hope that the sinusital intonations aren’t noticed much. (If one of the many sharp and violent nasal aspirations or other gaggery have sneaked into this recording, please alert me privately? Please?)

(Buy the Whiskey Tit book I’ve published, if you don’t mind.)

In my many years of Bloomsday readings, I’ve neglected to tell you about my first run-in with the text.

It was more years ago than I’ll ever admit, when I had recently moved to New York, and had almost immediately found myself a nice new literary teenage boyfriend. We had only been dating a few weeks when he had given me a copy of Ulysses with the naughty bits highlighted (I later learnt that this was a hand-me-down from his brother, and he had never read much Joyce beyond Portrait, but if you’re a teenage boy looking to get laid, let me assure you that this will do it).

I wanted to impress him, because that’s what you do to teenage boyfriends, so I took him to a staged reading of Dubliners at a bar with a pinhole-sized black-box theatre in the the back. This event didn’t come particularly recommended to me, but in was in the Village Voice, and on Avenue B, so I felt it would be sufficiently edgy enough.

We arrived surprised to find a two-drink minimum required to attend. Now, we were neither seasoned nor legal drinkers, so we ordered four draft beers up front and downed them within a few minutes, to hide future evidence of any wrongdoing. Admittedly, the reading wasn’t so great as I recall– black turtlenecks, very somber, very serious, a deathly production. But two pints down amateur gullets coupled with the snoozer of a show worked its magic, and midway through Eveline (the fourth story in), my guy began snoring.

I spent some time kicking him awake before succumbing myself, and the next thing that entered my consciousness was the polite applause of the audience as the show was wrapping. And while these years later I have better judgment for those who hope to become laid by me, and a more acclimated constitution for a few pints, I remain convinced that it was a shit performance, and not beyond my then-inchoate acumen. At least, we can hope.

Hello and would you just look at the calendar and where has the time gone?

I would make excuses for the lapse in months or tell you what I’ve been up to, but that would be projecting, and if you want to know these things, I’m sure you’ll just ask.

In any event, the theme of tonight’s story hits awfully close to home, so maybe if you listen you’ll understand a little more why I keep creeping back.

A week or so ago, the delightful Joanna Walsh wrote a lovely screed about reading more women writers this year, to which I respond with an approving ROAR and attach herein what I hope is the first of many such in the months to come, in the name of the incomparable Elizabeth Bishop.

Here’s more chatter about #readwomen2014. Read more women. And read more men, too, I think, and more people who don’t quite easily shoehorn into either classic gender.

ps: Some background noise, yes. I’ve moved house, and recording space, again, which means I need to throw my equipment against the walls to get the acoustics just right.

I’m sitting on what may be the most beautiful beach in the world, trying desperately to avoid dropping my computer into the chasms dug in the sand by last night’s hatching turtles, and trying even more desperately to explain to you why it’s been so long since I’ve flooded your Eustachians.

But the beach is no place to explain these things, and Bloomsday’s no day for self-absorption. I’ll come back soon on something nominally resembling a schedule, but in the meantime, Happy Bloomsday and keep your ears clean.

In the Wells Tower profile of Barry Hannah I reference in the spoken introduction to today’s story (which you should treat yourself to), written before Hannah’s 2010 death, the following is offered:

Hannah is not a writer to be read idly, with half a head or heart. His work thrives in his sentences, the best of which require a couple of readings to fully wring their satisfactions. The syntactic rigor and strange music of his fiction occasionally get him classified as a difficult or, less appropriately, a postmodern writer, and are probably why Oprah Winfrey hasn’t called him yet.

It’s too bad Oprah didn’t jump at a chance to call him, I thought, then: it’s too bad I didn’t jump at the chance to write him a letter. Maybe it’s the sentiments of annus novus, or maybe it’s just the blade of edge needing sharpened. But, having recently driven through the parts of the country Hannah writes about, I can assert that “a lot of porches and banjos” wouldn’t be such a bad thing at all.

A few weeks ago, there was a hurricane that you might have read about (unless it blew a rock on top of you and you decided to live beneath it, in which case, my sympathies). During this hurricane, I was away on what was supposed to have been a Caribbean holiday of a few days, which turned into one of a few days plus a few days more plus a few bonus days. Not a bad way to ride out a storm, especially when one is stranded with a good book. Photographic evidence:

I returned to find great areas of my city in all kinds of shambles, but I have every confidence that readers of these pages are already doing what they can to help, so I won’t indulge in (much) proselytising.

Instead, I’ll swoonily admit that had I not been stranded on a Caribbean island with Familiar (BUY: AMZN, INDIEBOUND), I might’ve ended up parched with an atrophied and shriveled brain, wasted and prone to mirage. So you might say that we owe my health, and by extension this podcast, to that book.

So to celebrate, here’s a short piece by the same author, originally published in print by Salt Hill.

I’m sitting here desperately trying not to listen to the U.S. Presidential Debate that’s streaming into my earbuds, because the entire thing seems like such hot-twisted-metal train wreckage that the hairs on my neck get singed just listening to it. And I like my neck-hairs.

And I know that the next month is going to be full of the same, so to spare your hairs, neck-and-other-wise, I’ve recorded a nice long one for you, replete with what I see (through admittedly hazy eyes) as thematic portents to what I’m listening to. Consider this my own personal bailout to you.

You’re welcome.