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Today, June 16th, 2004, is the 100th anniversary of "Bloomsday" - the date on which the events of James Joyce's Ulysses occur. Ulysses tells the story of a day in the Dublin life of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom, whose lives loosely mirror Homer's Odyssey as explored in a variety of styles (dramatization, newspaper headlines, theatrical script) and erotic and excretory detail that caused the novel to be censored and banned in the U.S. for many years.

There are tributes all over the internet today to Joyce and his writing. Each Bloomsday in many cities including my own, people gather to read aloud from the novel and to talk about Joyce and his writing, which some feel is pretentious claptrap - it's almost impossible to read Finnegans Wake without footnotes that are longer than the book, and Ulysses is nearly as dense - while others feel it's the most significant of the many innovations of Modernism, the movement which spawned both Hemingway's stripped-down minimalism and Eliot's convoluted poetry full of references to other literature.

Groundbreaking as Ulysses may have been, I would like briefly to pay tribute to three women - Harriet Shaw Weaver in England, Sylvia Beach in Paris, and Margaret C. Anderson in New York - who risked scandal, harrassment and prison to publish Ulysses at a time when describing sex even in veiled metaphor could lead to prosecution. My personal web site is named after Anderson's Little Review, a journal of poetry, prose and art whose motto was "making no compromises with the public taste" and which was more than once confiscated by the post office and burned for printing material that was deemed obscene.

Let's hear it for un-popular fiction and scandalous speech.

Trek BBS Today

Below are some of the topics currently being discussed at the Trek BBS:

-What character development would you like to see on Enterprise this fall?

-Is it time for Enterprise to try to be funny?

-Trek vs. Buffy/Angel!

More topics can be found at the Trek BBS!

Trek Two Years Ago

These were some of the major news items from June 2002:

• Linda Park: Blalock And I Get Along Well
  The Hoshi Sato actress said that on "such a testosterone-based set", it was pleasing for her to have another female to bond with.

• Ryan Cast In 'Down With Love'
  Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine) took a role in the comedy Down With Love, starring Renee Zellweger and Star Wars star Ewan McGregor.

• Sirtis Talks Baird's Approach To Trek X
  Troi actress Marina Sirtis said that she and director Stuart Baird had butted heads regarding Star Trek Nemesis because "Stuart doesn't have the knowledge of Star Trek that anyone who's been involved with the show...would just naturally have," claiming that he had told her he didn't care about Star Trek history.

More news can be found in the archives.

Poll Results

Below are the results of the most recent TrekToday poll:

Who's your favorite Trek Nazi? I prefer my Nazis metaphorical. 34.2% - (288 Votes) The Hirogen Captain, 'The Killing Game' 28.2% - (238 Votes) John Gill, 'Patterns of Force' 20.8% - (175 Votes) Evil Alien Nazi, 'Zero Hour' 16.6% - (140 Votes) Total Votes: 841

Please vote in our new poll on whether you'll buy the animated series on DVD!

Today's Television Listings

Tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, UPN will show the Enterprise rerun "Impulse". Here's a synopsis of the episode:

When Enterprise responds to a distress call from a Vulcan ship stranded in the Delphic Expanse, Archer and his boarding team are attacked by insane zombie-like Vulcans.

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