Re-Joyce! Love `Ulysses' or hate it, this book's for you.

Byline: REVIEW By Paul Denison The Register-Guard

Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes

Edited by Nolla Tully

(Vintage Books, 91 pages, $11)

Probably the most famous day in English literature is June 16, 1904, the day on which Leopold Bloom takes a stroll through Dublin in James Joyce's famous novel, "Ulysses."

For decades, devotees have celebrated "Bloomsday" by getting together and reverently reading aloud passages from the book.

Not the whole book, mind you. Isaiah Sheffer, who directs the annual Bloomsday readings by professional actors in New York City, estimates that it would take 32 hours to read all 18 sections in their entirety.

Sheffer starts this ``Celebration of James Joyce, `Ulysses' and 100 Years of Bloomsday'' off with an excellent overview. It's clear that he loves the work as much as others loathe it, but this anthology overall does not suffer from brainless adoration or academic death by explication.

Editor Nolla Tully artfully, possibly even gleefully, lets both admirers and detractors have their say in a slim volume that goes a long way toward explaining why "Ulysses" has both fascinated and repelled readers for so long.

A smart-aleck college student named Tennessee Williams found only Leopold Bloom's soliloquy worth reading and trashed the rest of the book: "A great deal of dullness. Then some dirt. Then more dullness. Then a great deal more dirt and a great deal more dullness. That is my impression of most of `Ulysses,' Williams wrote.

Ernest Hemingway, never one to waste words, at least on paper, proclaimed it "a goddamn wonderful book."

Henry Miller sensed in the book "a profound hatred for humanity" and likened it to "vomit spilled by a delicate child whose stomach has been overloaded with sweetmeats."

Joyce's obituary in the Jan. 13, 1941, Irish Independent gave his masterwork just this: ``His chief works on the Continental period were `Ulysses' and `Work in Progress.' ''

In a letter to Sylvia Beach, George Bernard Shaw wrote that Joyce's depiction of Bloom's day in Dublin was "hideously real," adding that, "In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful."

Actress Fionnula Flanagan, who played Joyce's Gertie MacDowell on film and Molly Bloom on Broadway, writes that "Joyce was everywhere in my childhood, in all the ordinary things we did that made up the fabric of our lives."

Oliver St. John Gogarty, who inspired one of the characters in "Ulysses," later wrote that, "There was something uncanny in his certainty, which he had more than any other writer I have ever known, that he would one day be famous. It was more than wishful thinking. It governed all his attitudes to his compatriots and accounts for what many referred to as his arrogance."

Bearing out Gogarty's impression, this sentence from Joyce himself:

"The only demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works."

If you can't spare that much time, this book is an alternative. It's only 91 pages long, but shows Joyce and his book from many different angles.

It may even inspire you to actually read "Ulysses," as we're all supposed to.

READING

Bloomsday

What: Writers on the Edge presents readings from James Joyce's ``Ulysses'' on the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday

When: 4:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Nye Beach Turnaround, Newport

Dinner: The reading will be followed by dinner theater at the Sylvia Beach Hotel (267 N.W. Cliff St., Newport) and Molly Bloom performing at the Sandbar (722 N.W. Beach Drive, Newport); for dinner reservations, call [phone].