The epic is often compared to “Seinfeld,” because not all that much happens. It certainly doesn’t have the action of “The Odyssey,” upon which it is patterned. But it does boast, as Merve Emre wrote in The New Yorker, “a cultural literacy presented as godlike in its extent.”Colm Toibin, the renowned Irish writer who teaches my class, wrote in The Financial Times about the book: “For the ordinary reader, it has the same cachet as running a marathon does for the ordinary athlete,” he said. “It is a challenge and then, for those who have read the book, a matter of pride.”“Ulysses,” he added, “‘in all its generosity of style, its plenitude, the open sensuality of its characters, its lack of piety and respect for authority, its placing of a freethinking cosmopolitan Jewish man at its center, can be read as a contribution to the Irish argument, the tone of the book as a blueprint for what Irish life might be like after independence.”Small moments, Toibin said, “glitter and shimmer” because of Joyce’s wild flights of language.I bought a copy in Dublin long ago. But I had never mustered the will to read the story of love, desire and disconnectedness played out on Dublin strolls on a single day, June 16, 1904 — the entwined stream-of-consciousness sagas of Stephen Dedalus and Molly and Leopold Bloom — until now.You’d think I would be accustomed to deciphering the incomprehensible after the last five years in D.C.Donald Trump’s upside-down utterances. Kevin McCarthy’s demented backtracking. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s inanity, accusing Nancy Pelosi of siccing her “gazpacho police” on lawmakers.This era of gobbledygook has also featured the Republican National Committee issuing a resolution that the barbaric attack on the Capitol was “legitimate political discourse.” This was so outrageous that Mitt Romney had to brush back the chair of the R.N.C., his niece Ronna Romney McDaniel. Aside from Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, most everything the Republicans do is cowardly; they are so afraid of the Trumpsters supporting the vandals that they tried to legitimize illegitimate discourse by calling it legitimate discourse. Shameful.