A full day at work followed by dinner with business partners from New Zealand precluded any participation in Bloomsday — a genuine disappointment, so perhaps I can embrace Philip Larkin’s source of inspiration.

Nevertheless, I’ve found myself following Joyce and Bloom all week long, and indeed earlier during my two previous visits in August 2008 and February this year.

My flight arrived early enough that my hotel room wasn’t ready, so I headed north on Grafton Street (“gay with housed awnings”), across the O’Connell Bridge, briefly into the General Post Office, then onto the James Joyce Centre. The museum preserves the front door of Number 7 Eccles Street, where Joyce’s friend J.F. Byrne lived in 1904 and which Joyce used as the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom in the novel.

Jetlag began to catch up with me as I finished the exhibits, so I took the offer of a free lecture at the Joyce Centre to hear a great deal about Phoenix Park that I’d never have learned otherwise. It’s now on my list of places to visit next time I’m in Dublin.

South on O’Connell Street, past Trinity College and the old Irish Houses of Parliament (already the Bank of Ireland in 1904), and back toward the hotel on aching feet…

The next afternoon, I headed north on Grafton Street again, but turned right onto Duke Street, where Davy Byrnes Pub exists in all its nonfictional glory.

He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.

There were far more mouthwatering options on the contemporary menu, but I set aside my disdain for tourist behavior and ordered the gorgonzola sandwich.

Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese.

As much as I missed doing something symbolically Joycean on Bloomsday itself, I realized that Ulysses is everywhere, all the time in modern Dublin, and the real Dublin suffuses Ulysses on every page. An evening in a Dublin restaurant with Antipodean colleagues may have been no less “Joycean” than turning the rusty knob of Leopold Bloom’s front door or eating bread topped with overwhelmingly green cheese.

You can see a more complete photo tour of Joyce and Bloom’s Dublin by Tony Thwaites of the University of Queensland, to whom I’m indebted for some of my own after-the-fact details and choice Ulysses quotes.

Doris McDonald lived in a rent-controlled apartment on the eighty-fifth floor of a building overlooking the Mare Imbrium. After retiring from the observatory with a government pension, she could live comfortably, well compensated for the fact that her body – weakened after decades serving science up here in the sky – could never go home. She chose to live frugally, however, her only luxury a pair of GeneCorp® NeanderClones™ shipped up from below.

She could hear the female, Polly, humming as she washed up after serving dinner. The tune was in a scale unlike anything in the complete library of world music built into the apartment. Polly’s singing always made the hair stand up on the back of Doris’ neck.

It’s not that she was afraid of her ‘Clones – attacks on their Modern masters were a thing of the past, ever since the company had begun neutering the males before delivery. In moments of real panic, shock collars artfully disguised as Celtic torques could be activated at the touch of a button. The anthropological anachronism annoyed only scholars of ancient history. NeanderClone owners had nothing to fear.

Read the complete story after the jump!

Doris settled back in her chair with a book, its screen casting a faint glow on her cardigan. A smile touched her lips. Chaucer, Steinbeck, Hawking – names as meaningless to the illiterate Polly and her race as Watson and Crick, whose science three hundred years earlier enabled Doris to sit here today and read The Grapes of Wrath instead of scouring pots and pans.

There was a pause in the rush of water and clinking of cutlery.

“Polly dear,” Doris called. “Tea, please.” She knew the niceties of language were lost on the Neanderthal mind, dug up as it was from a few bones in Gibralter and grown in a vat. She could just as easily have shouted, “Polly! Tea!” as many Moderns did with no ill effect, but it just seemed, well, nicer – and Doris considered herself a good, compassionate owner.

She heard the hiss and burble of boiling water being poured from the tap into the teapot, followed two minutes later by the chime that told Polly’s chronologically challenged mind that the tea had steeped for long enough. Doris was glad she didn’t have to teach them everything, from how to dress to the steps for making tea. GeneCorp had taken care of all that at the facility where they grew Polly and her kin.

Polly emerged from the kitchen with the tea service. A magnetized ring on the foot of the teacup gripped the steel tray and a lid prevented the scalding tea from flying up into one’s face, but the flowery pattern and delicate handle evoked memories of home. Polly set the tray down on the coffee table in front of Doris.

“Thank you, dear,” Doris said as she picked up the cup. Polly stood there, arms hanging at her side. “That will be all,” Doris continued. Polly stared.

Sam felt instinct kick in as he stepped quietly around the corner, entering the room behind Doris in her chair. By the time Polly had delivered the tea and Doris had lifted the cup to her lips for a first sip, he was standing over her, unbidden and unseen.

In a flash of movement that Doris caught briefly in a reflection from the dimmed TV screen, Sam struck. What she saw never reached the level of consciousness. Sam raised his hands, grasped Doris’ head, then twisted left and down. Doris McDonald’s neck snapped at the third cervical vertebra. Sam’s blood rushed at the sound, but he knew there was much more to do.

“It’s done,” Sam said, waiting for Polly’s next order.

“Good work,” Polly said, swinging into motion. She reached for the pad sitting at Doris’ elbow and looked at the screen. “Grapes of Wrath indeed,” she grimaced.

She flicked the book closed and tried to open the control panel for the mainframe.

AUTHENTICATE, the screen prompted. Polly reached for Doris’ hand and pressed a thumb against the screen. Three notes chimed and the screen switched to a view of the household subsystems. Polly tapped the double-helix icon labeled Security. She tapped Disable Collars.

AUTHENTICATE, the screen flashed at Polly again. She lifted Doris’ right eyelid and held the pad in front of the dead woman’s face. The same notes chimed. She had seen Doris do this half a dozen times when the doctors came to examine the pair for their annual check-ups, guarded by silent men with tranq guns.

“At least it doesn’t ask for her voice,” Polly muttered. She bent the torque from her neck and snapped it in half. Sam did the same.

“Can you run it from here?” Polly asked as she handed Sam the pad.

“I think so,” he said. “I tested it just short of completion that time you dosed her.” He laughed as he pulled a data stick from his pocket and waved it toward the screen with a flick of his wrist. “She had no idea, did she?”

“Just thought she’d dozed off in her chair.” Polly didn’t laugh.

A new symbol appeared on the screen, a triangular piece of brown stone with chipped edges.

“Aren’t you clever,” Polly said. “Send the signal.”

Sam tapped the spearhead.

In hundreds of facilities scattered beneath the swirls of white on the planet hanging in the blackness above Polly and Sam, ten thousand doors unlocked themselves simultaneously.

In millions of houses, three gentle jolts only their wearers could feel coursed through collars locked around Neanderthal necks. They had been waiting for this.

In billions of minds free for the first time in thirty thousand years, something awoke.

The characters, story, and even snippets of McCarthy’s “pretentious, mannered style” (my words) have stuck with me over the last three months, and I find myself considering whether the novel may not be, in fact, utter crap. I hate being wrong, but positive comparisons to The Grapes of Wrath continue presenting themselves unbidden from the back of my mind.

Perhaps it’s time to set aside the wonderful writer Elizabeth’s Hand’s less-than-wonderful post-apocalyptic Glimmering and give The Road a second chance.

McCarthy’s writing is full of incomplete sentences and anastrophe, completely lacks quotation marks, and frequently embeds dialogue in the middle of paragraphs. What truly annoys me, though, is McCarthy’s inconsistent use of apostrophes for contractions. Each of these conventions is a barrier to straightforward reading (though I finished The Road in only a few hours). If they made me stop and think about the language, characters, or plot, I wouldn’t object, but they’re merely distracting.

Naturally, this apocalyptic abomination is being made into a “major motion picture.”

I think what bothers me most is how much attention McCarthy and The road have gotten. With more praise and “book of the year” awards than God’s own Bible, you’d think McCarthy had done something deeply original. Well, he hasn’t. Writers like Joyce experimented with alternatives to standard dialogue punctuation, but I would argue that time has proven their experiments a failure.

And there are far superior works that address how we as humans might react to the end of our civilization and the impending extinction of our species. Two of my favorite examples appear at the end of Elizabeth Hand‘s Saffron and Brimstone. “Echo” and “The Saffron Gatherers” explore similar themes of survival amidst the loss of hope without resorting to needless typographical devices.

Thankfully, I’m not the only one who’s annoyed and even a little angry about The Road‘s undeserved success.

The Bibliophile Baker:

What really irritates me is his apparent aversion to punctuation. For a while I was trying to decide why some words deserve apostrophes, and others don’t, but I think I finally figured it out: he puts apostrophe’s for contractions of words + had, but not words + not. i.e. He’d use some markings, but he didnt use others. This to me is both annoying and pretentious.

Bibliobibuli has an excellent analysis of the specific patterns, along with a roundup of the punctuational criticism from around the ‘net.

Literary Kicks may respect Oprah, but nevertheless has some more well-constructed analysis of McCarthy’s assault on the English language.

And with that, I’m hereby inaugurating my list of…

Writers I Would Like to Punch in the Face

• Cormac McCarthy, for being a pretentious twat.
• Philip Pullman, who doesn’t seem capable of creating a sympathetic character, even in books ostensibly written for pre-adults.
• Michael Crichton, whose varied and single-minded obsessions in each book (chaos theory! quantum mechanics! the Japanese!) seemed about as relevant as an elevator operating manual to a Kalahari bushman.

Having actually met enough reasonably well-known writers to think that there’s a greater-than-zero chance that I might also meet those on this list, I should of course note that I’m a pacifist and wouldn’t think of really punching these guys in the nose. Well, maybe Michael Crichton, since if I met him now he’d have to be a zombie…

• Cormac McCarthy: The Road
• Seamus Heaney: Electric Light
• Mary Oliver: Red Bird
• Frank Herbert: Heretics of Dune

• Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
• When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnell
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
• Collected Poems, 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot
• The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke
• Poems, 1965-1975 by Seamus Heaney
• I and Thou by Martin Buber
• The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo
• Writing the Australian Crawl by William Stafford
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
• Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury