I've been watching...

... tonight, the 1967 film version of Joyce's Ulysses, which could be nothing more than flawed, given the impossibility of compressing the many hundreds of pages of Joyce's dense and intricately layered text into two hours of film.

But, still, I remember going to a viewing of the film while in graduate school, decades ago, and at its conclusion, encountering a bitter, unhappy Irishman who happened to teach the criticism course in which I was enrolled, and who, as we all were leaving, remarked, "it's like a bad home movie of one's home town."

I suspect that the Irish academic, many years ago, found Bloom's existence a bit too close to his own life, and had to reject it out of hand in self-defense. The film is hardly a bad home movie of Dublin, whatever else it might not be.