Her name was Aphrodite, and she rides the crimson shell,
And you know you cannot meet her, for you’ve touched the distant sands,
With tales of Brave Ulysses, how his naked ears were tortured, By the sirens sweetly singing
Clapton/Sharp
On June 4, 1904, Leopold Bloom wakes up in his non-descript Dublin apartment. He fries himself up a joint of pork. He plays with his cat. He makes his wife tea, wherein she reminds him of a rendezvous she had arranged with a man (aptly named Blazes Boylan) that afternoon, demanding his absence from the premises at the appointed hour. He runs a couple of business errands, goes to a funeral. Wanders around Dublin doing nothing much.
He finds himself, at one point, on the banks of the Irish Sea, whereupon he espies a young girl, who evokes a (possibly two-way) fantasy. She departs, and he realizes she is lame. So, he moves on. Checks in at some pubs in the Temple Bar, where he is, as is commonly the case, disrespected. Gets drunk that night. Goes home and makes up with his wife.
This, in essence, is the storyline of James Joyce’s iconic novel “Ulysses” – considered improbably both one of the greatest works of modern literary fiction and among the most unreadable (though — take my word for this — it’s a walk in the park compared with “Finnegan’s Wake”, a book about which it can only be said that anyone claiming to have actually read it is almost certainly lying).
I am proud to state that I did manage to get through Ulysses, though not without the help of the usually reliable SparkNotes study guide. I believe that, interpreted correctly, the novel challenges the reader with a single question: what was the point of it all?
Well, to me the unifying message, though obtuse, is rather profound. That the single day in the life of even the most ordinary, least interesting, most mundanely flawed among us, can be viewed as an epic, Homeric journey, with activities such as the ordering of one’s lunch or the riding on a trolley car worthy of chapter titles such as Proteus, Cyclops and Penelope.
I find this concept inspirational. Our lives are little more, after all, than a series of moments, which we can choose to either trivialize or enshrine. At least in my better moods, I have chosen the latter, and have thus privately celebrated “Bloomsday” every year. But this past Tuesday being a milestone — the 120th Bloomsday — I took the extreme (for me) step of posting an acknowledgment on Facebook. It read as follows:
“Bloomsday 120. ReJoyce”.
Note the pun of the last word, which I’d like to claim but as my own, but was instead lifted from Grace Slick, who wrote it as the title of a Ulysses-honoring song that was included within one of my favorite albums of all time: “After Bathing at Baxter’s”.
At any rate, I expected my post to go viral, or at minimum, that a goodly number of my erudite friends and followers would respond to/acknowledge my homage.
What did I get? Bubkis. No comments. No likes. No emojis of any kind. Not gonna lie. My feelings were hurt, but I’m a big enough person to look past this outrageous insult of omission. More than that, I feel sorry for those teeming millions of non-responding keyboards. Or, as Cream put it:
Tiny purple fishes, run laughing through your fingers.
Because I fear that they fail to realize that there’s a good deal of Leopold Bloom in each of us. Tragically average, indistinguishable from the masses, we spend our days wandering around, insulted, cuckolded, ignored, but not oblivious, and thus wondering what the devil it all means.
Market participants are exemplary of this, as, for many of them, they awake each morning to Bloom’s world as it existed on June 4, 1904. They traverse their screens, interact with other schnooks, read unimaginative, consensus-based research, check support and resistance, and make their trades. Their peers are laughing at them, and, for an unfortunate, indeterminate subset, their wives are at home getting smashed by their singing coaches.
That, often, they make money is beside the point. It is, remember, a Bull Market. So, for many of us, we wander through a latter-day, delusional, dollarized (digitized?) Dublin, circa June 1904. And here, I’m reminded of my experience in 2021, when I could hardly leave my house without someone, often of faint acquaintance, buttonholing me to inform me that: a) they were making a fortune in the markets; b) it was only the beginning, because c) (so they believed) they had “cracked the code”.
Almost all were singing a different tune in ’22, but that’s precisely the point.
And this June, which not only features Bloomsday 120, but also the 80th anniversary of D-Day, seems no different than the rest. Equity markets are enjoying a bang-up year, but alpha has been hard won (if, indeed, won at all) over the last rolling quarter. Earnings and guidance have been stable to strong, Inflation is in tolerable ranges. NVDA has sucked all the oxygen out of the room, having a) crossed the quaint $3T valuation threshold, in doing so; b) reached a capitalization of >$100M per employee; and c) generated, on a single day last week, more volume than the next twenty most active stocks combined.
Meantime, the most recent point on which our wandering wits have focused was Friday’s Jobs Report. Which was a superficial blowout, but, as has routinely been the case, contains much ambiguity in its detail. Because (among other matters) in America, we are not content with a single Employment measure, but rather rely upon two. And the less respected, more Bloom-like of these (Household Survey) showed not a large expansion in payrolls, but rather a significant reduction.
Not sure how they measured these things in early 20th Century Ireland, but, for the record, Bloom was a print advert salesman, and probably did pretty well. Until Radio/TV. Then the Web. And now, AI/NVDA.
The market was flat-to-down on the news, as it was, in Blooms-world at any rate, expected. Because everyone was kinda hoping for some Employment weakness, not a bona fide pull-back, you understand, but a softening sufficient to keep hope alive that the Fed fairies would float down for some dainty rate cutting. Which we all could sorely use. Particularly consumers who borrow – a group that is now throwing off record-level delinquencies.
So, part of me still feels we’re being played. That Blazes Boylan is romping with the missus in our marital bed, that our friends with whom we exchange bon mots are deriding us – often behind our backs but episodically in our faces.
Like Bloom, we soldier on. The FOMC is on the docket this week, nestled in immediately after the PPI and CPI drop. It all is destined to follow script, with the Fed standing pat, while issuing vague language so as not to entirely discourage market participants into entirely cooling their rate-cut-expecting jets, and with Inflation figures providing scant illumination.
So, likely, we will spend the remainder of June wandering the backstreets to little purpose — other than to allow sufficient time for our cucking sequence to have ended, so that we may return home in a state short of abject humiliation. After that, it sure ought to be quiet. What creates the most dramatic tension in the back half of the month is the pending Biden/Trump debate. I won’t plunge into any depths here, but it should be worth watching as a piece of performance art if nothing else.
Investors aren’t seeming to care. And, on a happy note, I believe they remain oblivious, and that the market will continue its docile upward trajectory.
And, as we belatedly celebrate Bloomsday, it is entirely fitting that it be so. Because >700 pages of pathos and bathos notwithstanding, Ulysses is an uplifting tale of love and redemption. Molly (Mrs. B.) is left unfulfilled by her afternoon adventure, and (spoiler alert), in the end, remembers the authenticity of her marital bond. Bloom lovingly takes her back:
“He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”
All of which may be a bit too graphic for those, like me, who have tender sensibilities. But, somehow, it reminds me of our mellow, yellow, smellow markets, which vex and worry us. But at the end, like Molly, offer us the following siren song, rendered all the more painful because we have lashed ourselves to the mast to preclude following it. And thus, it tortures our naked ears all the more.
“I said yes I will. Yes”.
TIMSHEL