At first when he looks at his script it seems to lie lifeless on the page, inert like the cast-off skin of a reptile. But as he reads, it comes to life. He has a sudden idea: he will set the whole work within the first Bloomsday, which Flann and his friends initiated, a shambolic and drunken walk which started at the Martello Tower, in the presence of Sylvia Beach, who first published Ulysses. Also Flann’s friends, Patrick Kavanagh and John Ryan, and the author’s nephew, Tom Joyce, a dentist.

He writes:

16 June 1954, 10 a.m. Flann O’Brien is already drunk. It is the very first Bloomsday, celebrating Joyce’s great novel, Ulysses.

This is a far better start.

Flann is standing in for Stephen Dedalus and A.J. Leventhal, the registrar of Trinity College, is standing in for Bloom. Leventhal’s only qualification is that he is Jewish.

FLANN: We are here to celebrate a great writer who was illiterate. His every foreign-language quotation in any of his works known to me is wrong. His few sallies at Greek are wrong, and his few attempts at a Gaelic phrase are absolutely monstrous. But he was, as T.S. Eliot said, the greatest master of the English language since Milton.

Now out on the silver verdigris estuary, the skeins of birds appear again, flying fast, and the fishing boat completes is twice daily U-boat dive and Artair is caught up in his script and he has turned himself into Flann-O’Brien-Daniel-Day-Lewis as the magic of creativity consumes and sustains him.

Melissa is writing her second blog. The Dorothy Wordsworth blog has been picked up by a literary magazine and she has had nearly one hundred hits. Some are from feminist groups who think that Dorothy was shabbily treated by her brother. Two are from men who accuse her of being a dyke. But the overwhelming theme is that women are always exploited by men and that the phallocracy will invariably try to keep control. She wonders if some of the writers are lesbians, regarding the phallus as an instrument of oppression, like the knout. It’s amazing how many of the writers don’t know how to spell.