Spending Bloomsday with Ms B./ Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy Read by Eunice Wong

Nora Joyce, the inspiration for Molly Bloom

Today is Bloomsday, the day lit lovers the world over celebrate James Joyce’s massive masterpiece Ulysses which takes place on June 16, 1904. It is on that same Spring day that the novel’s anti-heroic hero Mr. Leopold Bloom, he “who ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, ” leaves his modest Dublin home for a walk and some kidneys and encounters, among other things, just about everything.

One of the few things that Bloom does not encounter (even if his thinking returns to her continuously) is his wife Molly Bloom. Molly, for her part, is to cuckold Leopold that very afternoon with one Blazes Boylan, a Dublin dandy, (even as her thinking continuously returns to her husband.)

In between these two events just about everything in the world except the end of it takes place. Some of it is very, very sad. Much of it is very, very funny.

Structurally, Joyce designed Ulysses to contain every literary form in existence but he saved the one that is arguably the most intimate – the soliloquy — for Molly, to whom he gives the last 30, 000 or so words.

This Bloomsday my wife and I had the joyfully exhausting experience of hearing Molly’s soliloquy read by Eunice Wong at the Lynn Redgrave Theater at Culture Project on Bleeker Street. Wong’s performance was nothing short of magnificent.

The soliloquy, on one level a stream of consciousness recapitulation of Molly’s day, and on another an endless riff on sex, death, menstruation, politics, theology, the female body, the male body, faith, betrayal and, above all, love, is nothing short of symphonic and as such demands an interpreter of enormous emotional courage and breadth to do it justice. Wong, as Molly, pondered, exclaimed, wept, laughed, whispered, whistled, sang, farted, giggled, danced, cooed, and much more throughout, did it justice. She also displayed Olympian level stamina in the process. An Asian American, Wong chose not to employ a Dublin accent, but rather than take away from Molly’s Irishness, her performance heightened the universality of Joyce’s monumental creation: the sublime Molly Bloom.

Wong was humbling to watch. And also hilarious. And also beautiful.

In short, her rendering of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy was art of a very high order and we were grateful to have experienced it.

Mr. Joyce and his guitar

Fair Contracts For All Rally

Teacher and Unionist Fred Arcoleo

Despite the fact that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has allowed the contracts for all 152 city unions locals to expire, despite the coming mayoral race, despite the beautiful weather, the Fair Contracts For All Rally in City Hall Park was, to put it mildly, underwhelming.

United Federation of Teachers, its members still reeling from a recently released toxic evaluation plan, had by far the largest and most animated turn out.

The poor turn out by other city workers does not bode well for anyone except those who wish to eviscerate unions altogether.

Bloomberg for Perpetuity

After 12 years of his machinations, which is four more years than the millions of New Yorkers who twice voted for term limits demanded, it is doubtful that anyone in NYC above the age of, say, five, has any doubts of the completely ruthless and anti- democratic spirit of Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Still, even those who have tasted Bloomberg’s contempt for the democratic process and ethos may be taken aback by the spiteful little man’s latest stunt: the hiring of the consulting firm The Parthenon Group to craft a plan that will preserve Bloomberg’s dreadful Children First Network, a key component in Bloomberg’s destruction of the New York Public School System, created ostensibly to assist principals and teachers in their ever more complex work loads. They are perhaps the only structure in Bloomberg’s DOE that is loathed in equal measure by administrators, teachers and parent groups. The reason for the mass loathing is simple: the Networks are both crazily expensive and largely incompetent. For an extra bonus they are created not out of geographic communities but rather on abstract demographics, the better to insure relationships are as strained and a-human and as corporate as possible.

Nobody seems to know how one is hired and by what criteria. I’ve been advised by “experts” in my field who never taught a day in their life. The same principals who hire Networks somehow also take orders from them and also live in fear of them. For the past year or so, it seems every time I’ve heard the Networks mentioned it was always in the context of how, come January 2014, they would face the same good riddance as their creator Bloomberg. But their creator, it turns out, has other ideas and would like to extend the Networks well into the mayoralty of whoever it is who comes after him regardless if he or she wants it. To be sure, Mike Bloomberg would like to extend all his ideas into perpetuity if he could,just as he would use his billions to purchase an army of shills to defend them, which is just one of the reasons that New Yorkers will rue the day they allowed a sociopath like Bloomberg anywhere near power for a very long time.

See Gotham Schools article below.

JUNE 10, 2013
DOE secretly enlisted Parthenon to devise plan to save networks
by Geoff Decker, at 8:27 pm
Intent on preserving the Bloomberg administration’s education legacy, the Department of Education has hired a favored consulting firm to craft a plan that would safeguard a signature policy.

The city has hired the Parthenon Group to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the system through which principals choose support organizations to provide professional development, curriculum, and budgeting help.

The consulting firm, which has previously studied school closures and small schools for the department, is charged with crafting a strategic vision to ensure that Children First Networks are preserved when another mayor takes over next year.

“While there is no set of actions that can perfectly ensure ‘sustainability’ of the network model, the goal of the project will be to identify a series of steps that can bolster the odds of sustaining those elements the DOE views as most essential,” the firm wrote in its bid for the project. The confidential bid was submitted in April and obtained by GothamSchools.

Necro New York

In the twelve or so years I’ve lived downtown I must have walked by the gated New York City Marble Cemetery, sandwiched unexpectedly on 2nd Street between First and Second Ave, more times than I can tell. I can tell the first time, however, as it was introduced to me by the woman who was to become my wife, who also pointed out that one of its celebrated dead had the unfortunate fate of receiving the name “Preserved Fish.”
Since that day, many is the time that in passing I would stop to take in the cemetery and maybe try to read the passages on one of the monuments closest to the street. The place never failed to move me in some small way, either as a kind of memento mori (“remember that you will die” ) or by its haunting Edgar Allen Poe-ish beauty, especially during a fall twilight or at dawn. But other than harboring the remains of Mr. Preserved Fish, I didn’t know the first thing about the place.

What I did know was that those who covet Manhattan real estate, possibly the most valuable on planet Earth, have time for neither tears nor the dead nor hallowed ground. To such folk there is but one thing on this earth that is sacred. This was made shockingly clear with the accidental discovery of what is now called the African Burial Ground during the construction of the Federal Building downtown in 1991 which led to the rediscovery ( begging the question of how such a place of such size and import can be forgotten in the first place) of what was the central cemetery for New York’s African Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries. The cemetery stretched from what is now Duane Street all the way to Worth Street, which is something to consider in terms of what you’re walking on the next time you are strolling through Foley Square. Also something to consider the next time you’re hanging in Washington Square Park which was once both a hanging ground and a Potter’s Field: a kind of one stop shopping for the criminal and the destitute.

None of the above was on my mind this morning when I went out for a stroll with my daughter and I was happily surprised (and surprised that it made me happy) not only to find the gates of The New York City Marble Cemetery wide open and non-mourning looking people ambling about but lawn chairs strewn hither and thither for those who wished to take a long look.

That was me. I took my time — the silence of the place invited me to – and read the names and dates of just about every monument I could. There are some interesting souls in there, among them John Lloyd Stephens, the “founder of Mayan archeology,” who published Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and the Yucatan in 1849. What was left James Monroe was also in there for a time until the state of Virginia removed his remains and reburied them in Richmond, a job I am happy to have had nothing to do with.

It is a strange but not unpleasant sensation to walk among the silent dead in the middle of such a crazed city and it certainly helps put things in perspective.

Demoralization and Dejection On Chancellor’s Conference Day

Today as part of Chancellor’s Conference Day, my fellow teachers and I were obliged to sit through a talk on “Teacher Effectiveness” which seems to be the code word for the brand new teacher evaluation plan released by NYSED Commissioner King on Saturday and to be implemented beginning this September. It was for many of the teachers present the first real exposure to the speeding locomotive racing straight at their hearts and heads.

The presentation was as strange as the subject matter was overwhelming. We sat, the bunch of us, staring at a projector screen filled with graphs and charts while a disembodied voice of a DOE official called “Dave” bumbled his way through the graphics.
Halfway through, disembodied “Dave” was replaced by disembodied Shael Polakow- Sharansky, chief academic officer of the NYC Public Schools. Introduced by “Dave” as “Shael” as if he were an old pal of ours, Sharansky droned on and on and on about a system built upon junk science that seems to be designed to exhaust teachers for the sake of exhausting them, keep administrators and teachers at each others throats, and above all create a climate of perpetual fear. All of this, of course, is to put children first and insure that they would be collage and career ready. Sharansky informed one and all of how we were one and all to be judged, and if need be, fired if we proved to be “ineffective” as teachers.
The torrent of information seemed not merely horrible but interminable. Even though I was familiar with much of what “Dave” and “Shael” were going on about, in time the sheer volume, vulgarity and ruthlessness of the stuff shut down my brain. At the same time I knew most if not all of my colleagues were hearing this for the first time.

Every by and by, I looked around the room and studied the faces and eyes of these decent, hardworking talented teachers I’ve come to know and respect and care about over the years. In time, as the disembodied voices droned on, their eyes grew blank or fearful, their faces masks of dejection. Once in a while I’d catch a colleague’s eye from across the room and they would inevitably shake their head as if to say, “This is insane.”
At last the weird presentation on “Teacher Effectiveness” drew to a close and our principal, a decent and caring person if there ever was one, did her best to address and disperse the palpable distress in the room but to no avail. The truth, moreover, is that she too is in the crosshairs. The mood remained funereal and appropriately so. These were not people who were against “accountability, ” a word that along with “compliance” has taken on an almost sacred status in the Church of Corporate Education Reform. These were people who, like all people, wished simply to be treated fairly and with the dignity of their chosen and noble profession.
Gone.
Slowly, as if recovering from shock, people drifted out of the big room. I watched them as they walked and knew what they were thinking because we were all thinking of variations on the same theme: “How did my union agree to this?” and “Who could sustain such a work load?” and “How long will it be before I’m fired?” and “How will I feed my kids ?”
I imagine the disembodied presentation was held in hundreds of schools across the city today to very much the same effect, which is to say, complete demoralization of the teaching staff.

It is impossible to conceive of any thing good coming out of any plan this joyless, this convoluted, this degrading, this a-human. But something will come, that is for certain.

Ours is a very vicious and violent hour.