Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Ulysses - The Musical

In addition to my hellishly long "Paradise Lost: The Musical" post from a while back, I also once imagined what an opening chorus might be like for a musical version of Ulysses. The result of this English-major weirdness was a song called "Dublin (That's the Way It Goes)", and having nothing much else to post today, I thought I'd post some of that, just to be silly:

Oh, ev'rybody
Is in the dumps
In Dublin.
We drink hot toddy
And feel like chumps
In Dublin.
There's not much to relish
In a life so hellish,
But we cling to the comforting myth
That we would have been happier with
A regime patriotic and Parnell-ish.
The gloom's incessant,
So keep the cup
A-bubblin',
A strong depressant
Will cheer us up,
We suppose.
Since we're never getting better, we'll get drunk instead,
While we quote a lot of books we've never even read --
In Dublin,
That's the way it goes.

Our deep desires
Decay and die
In Dublin.
Those creepy friars
Are riding high
In Dublin.
Ev'ry new confession
Is a new obsession,
But we guess it's the way that we're built,
'Cause we're stricken with sickening guilt
And a big dose of Catholic depression.
No other city
Is half as low
Or troublin',
Our sweet self-pity
Can bloom and grow
Like a rose.
Things are worse for Mr. Bloom, whenever he's in bed,
He thinks he's good, but Molly thinks that he's The Dead --
In Dublin,
That's the way it goes.


And yeah, "bloom and grow" was an intentional Sound of Music joke.

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