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Giving a sharp sword to a hyper-ass eight-year-old boy goes against all parental logic. But
that’s exactly what happened at the "Knight for a Day Camp," a place
where kids are whole-heartedly encouraged to go completely medieval.

The
"Knight for a Day" summer camp was put on by The Oakeshott Institute, a
Twin Cities foundation that promotes the interest of ancient arms,
armor, and legends, through hands-on education. The Oakeshott Institute, nestled in a remodeled 1880s church, is a virtual Hogwarts Academy right in the middle of Dinkytown. Ever
since Harry Potter rode in on his magic broomstick, whipping up a wand-waving fever, children of all ages have been looking for
mythical activities to partake in. To accommodate all
these eager Muggles, the Oakeshott faculty has put together a Viking
and chivalry summer course as an alternative to the usual park-board fodder of hula hoops and endless games of tag-you’re-it.

On
a recent Friday morning, I watched weapons instructor Galan Poor, a
wiry young man with a huge thicket of hair so wild it looked like it
might come alive and talk, stand before a captivated classroom of
children and teach them the art of war.

"Get me a sword!" Mr. Poor told his assistant. A
college intern then raced to a glass case housing a treasure chest
of ancient killing devices that included a sword used in the First
Crusade. Amongst the axes, spears, and daggers, a rusted Viking sword was chosen and handed to Mr. Poor. He
demonstrated to the class how the Vikings used a chopping and hacking
motion, and not the sharp-pointed fencing-style attack that has been
made popular in movies. In long elaborate swoops, Poor gently brought the blade down on a dummy’s neck and wrists.

"Hack here to cut off his hand!" explained Poor. "Hack it like a piece of tough meat. And swoop down to cut off his foot!"

The blade made a slight ting as he connected with the metal rings of the chain mail draped over the dummy. The
class sat still as crows on a wire, anxiously awaiting their turn to
engage each other and pretend to have their own limbs hacked off. It wasn’t exactly a game of kickball.

Mr. Poor then moved to a dry erase board, where he gave a detailed NFL style play-by-play of Friday’s lesson: The Shield Wall. The
kids were going to reenact the legendary 1066 Battle of Hastings, where
the Anglo-Saxons held off an entire Norman army by standing atop a hill
and forming a tight barrier with their shields. The kids learned all about the war for England’s crown, the ancient art of defense, and the physics of the Shield Wall: If
the shields were lined up correctly, even these little runts would be
able to withstand the mightiest of blows (in this case, rubber dodge
balls.) A dozen boys were so enthralled in the lesson
about flaming arrows and knights on horseback that there was no mention
of boobies, wieners, or farts, which is the holy trinity of discussion
amongst pubescent boys.

The
campers had spent the entire week building helmets, shields, and chain
mail and were finally ready to use their wares in action. Today was battle day.

With
the boom-boom base of low riders bumping down Como Avenue as a
backdrop, Van Cleve Park near the University of Minnesota campus became
the battleground for the thrown of England. On a small grassy knoll, the kids formed a Shield Wall using wooden replica shields that had authentic paint and art design. A tiny kid, who resembled Chicken Little in every way but the beak, pounded his shield and howled with rage. A big lunker of a ten year old stood in the middle and smirked, "This is soooooooo Brave Heart."

Rubber balls flew through across the park and tagged the Shield Wall, filling the air with a sharp slapping sound. The
inner city tuffs playing pick-up ball on the basketball court adjacent
to the fields stopped their game to watch the mayhem exploding all
around the children. A camper with shaggy, summer-streaked hair bent his knees and deflected the balls being thrown at him from the camp councilors. He yelled out in delight as the balls ricocheted off him and back down the hill. The big kid in the middle shouted out, "Hold the wall! Hold the wall!"

After twenty minutes, the kids were spent and Battle of Hastings turned into a glorious massacre. The
runts stationed at the corners of the Shield Wall grew tired and were
picked off. The wall loosened and all the kids were bombarded with
rubber balls. The history lesson was lost as one solitary Velcro shoe was shot into the summer sky as a sign for peace. The kids crumbled to the grass in theatrical mock death.

But a lone girl kept the battle alive. She stood amongst the wiggling bodies of her fallen comrades and tried her best to soldier on. Seven balls came at her and she was comically peppered in the head, stomach, and leg. She wailed with sheer joy.

"She
would’ve cried for days if I had sent her to soccer camp like the rest
of the kids," Maggie Swanson’s mom said about her courageous daughter. "But she loves this."

The beleaguered campers took a break and sat in a shady grove of trees. Then
a burly instructor laid out spears with tennis balls on the tips and
boasted with a great Hail Caesar flair, "Let the Children play with
spears!"

The kids sprang up, grabbed spears, and bolted through the park. A gangly boy, who couldn’t throw a ball to save his life, chucked a spear and hit a target dead on. Congratulatory cheers rang out as chivalry was brought back to the Twin Cities.

Last night, The University Club of St. Paul hosted their annual Bloomsday celebration, honoring James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel whose action takes place on June 16, 1904. A group of eighty or so people, primarily sexagenarian (by one superficial participant’s observations), gathered in a well-lit room.

Aside from a fairly amazing reading of Molly’s soliloquy (by Molly Culligan, who could play Maude in Harold and Maude if it ever needed to be re-cast), little of the evening’s events had much to do with the book itself. There were some Irish folk songs, some Irish-flamenco folk songs, a reading from a contemporary book that has been compared to Ulysses, and then some poems about Joyce and his tome.

At first I thought this was a little strange — shouldn’t a holiday about Ulysses focus its festivities on the text? But then I was all like, Nah — that would probably be kind of boring, or at least predictable. I assume that everyone who celebrates Bloomsday has read Ulysses (who else would possibly care?) and maybe wants something separate from analyses and praises of the book.

In Dublin they do these sort of scavenger hunts, where people follow the paths of Leopold Bloom and/or Stephen Dedalus — the novel’s principal characters — throughout the city, but that can’t really be replicated in the Twin Cities, despite St. Paul’s deep Irish roots.

So then I thought about Bloomsday’s temporal proximity to Father’s Day, and how maybe it should or could be a sort of anti-Father’s Day. One of Ulysses‘s central themes is about the disowning of one’s dad; Stephen is constantly trying to sever his ties with his father, while in a very morbid sense Bloom has been disowned by his son, who died. In The New Bloomsday Book — a wonderful paraphrase of Ulysses for any first-time reader — Harry Blamires describes what happens in the "Circe" episode: "Stephen runs away from his destiny. He flees the Pater, whether God, fatherland, Simon [his dad], home, Bloom, in his pursuit of freedom. Hunted, he gives the hunting cry, and Simon Dedalus swoops down on him like a buzzard."

Declan Kiberd adds to this in his introduction to Penguin’s Annotated Student Edition of Ulysses, "The revolt of the son is never the cliché-rebellion against a tyrannical parent, but the more complex revolt against the refusal or inability of an ineffectual father to provide any lead at all."

Maybe for Bloomsday, all sons (and daughters) could run around with leashes padlocked around their necks, though no one holding the leash. All the fathers (and mothers) could have the keys to the padlocks … and then lose them (another theme of the book is of lost keys/access/acceptance/etc). The day could be spent trying to wriggle out of our respective collars, probably to no avail. Just a thought.

That was the first part of the post. Now comes the second part.

As mentioned above, the crowd at The University Club was kind of small and kind of old. While no doubt there are some tight-jean’d hipsters out there reading Ulysses so they can say they read it, it’s a little sad to me that the book’s following seems to be dwindling.

I’m not sure if it’s critics, or professors, or what, but there’s definitely a stigma about the novel that suggests it’s impenetrable. Ulysses is kind of like the stone that held Excalibur — we are told and believe that something invaluable and amazing exists therein, but it’s simultaneously insinuated that, for the commoner, extracting that value is damn near impossible. There are a lot of potential readers, I think, who won’t approach the book because they think it’s inaccessible. In fact this might be the fault, or intention, of Joyce himself, who declared that his book was written as a kind of practical joke to keep critics busy for a hundred years.

Which is why it was so refreshing to come across this passage written by Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange, etc) in his book ReJoyce:

My book does not pretend to scholarship, only to a desire to help the average reader who wants to know Joyce’s work but has been scared off by the professors. The appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce’s big joke; the profundities are always expressed in good round Dublin terms; Joyce’s heroes are humble men. If ever there was a writer for the people, Joyce was that writer.

And really, the entire novel supports this thesis. While much of the prose is intentionally difficult and obfuscated, the dialogue is mostly straightforward — and powerful. Joyce said that what he intended to do was take a sandblaster to the history of the novel and wipe the slate clean. Each of the eighteen episodes presents us with a literary style that is emulated, satirized, and then discarded.

And then, finally, there is Molly’s soliloquy. It is Joyce’s gift to literature, the form of stream-of-consciousness writing. (Vladimir Nabokov calls it "Stepping Stones of consciousness" because he doesn’t believe it’s an actual stream — he argues that people think in images as well as words, and because there are no actual images in Ulysses, it cannot be the complete flow.)

Molly, Bloom’s adulterous wife, is vulgar, simple, indulgent, human. And we get to see her thoughts and emotions from inside her skull. The lack of punctuation is dizzying, but as for the actual words, there’s nothing difficult about Molly’s internal monologue. Once you sync your own brain to hers — which happens pretty naturally — you can easily understand her thoughts. Of Bloom, for example, she thinks, "he never goes to church mass or meeting he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one yes."

The rest of the book is necessary — it prepares us for the soliloquy, which might not have the same revelatory power without the slog it takes to get there. Nevertheless, Molly and the other characters, through their actual words and thoughts, transmit enough revelations — in mostly plain English — that really anyone can grasp the power of Ulysses. So, hopefully next year there will be some fresh faces at Bloomsday.