I was wrong when I wrote a while back “Nothing in Washtenaw.” Apparently the cicadas are all over Superior Township. Weird.

There’s a thread over at LISNews about Bloomsbury and James Joyce and Ulysses and the whole hundred-year mark thing. I’m greatly enjoying the history. It’s a nice break from non-stop Reagan worship and electioneering news. But I have to say that, although I had a brief moment a week or so ago when I thought I might be brave and studious and librarian-ish and perhaps more than a little pretentious and try to tackle the vast Joycean behemoth, I stopped in front the shelves on the third floor of Hatcher where all the multifarious Joyce editions and critical commentaries and facsimiles of the original manuscripts reside, and I knelt in front of all those overwhelming books, and I lost heart almost immediately. Too much, too much, there is such a thing as too much of a thing. And such it was. My praises and respects to you, Mr. Joyce, but tackling your masterpiece will have to await another day.

We’re back, it seems. Thanks to some hard effort by David in San Francisco and advice from Jason at TextDrive, the Beagle is back. Did you miss us?