Writing and literature workshops from the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center have elicited rich praise from participants over the years (and spawned Podium, an online literary journal) but this post from novelist Anne Landsman on the lit blog Chekhov’s Mistress—in praise of Michael Groden’s popular course on James Joyce’s Ulysses, which starts up again February 3—deserves a generous excerpt:

Every time I mentioned to someone that I was taking a class on Ulysses, they seemed to misunderstand me, thinking that I was teaching the class. “No,” I had to correct them, “I’m going to be a student again.” It made me feel very middle-aged, as if I had just told them I was learning how to arrange flowers, or taking a tour through Europe on an air-conditioned tour bus. What was next – hot flashes, elderhostels, senility, death?

But then I met Leopold Bloom, and my life changed. For, after all, he was middle-aged too, his mind racing with a thousand minutiae, small and large observations, the world around him both intimate and overwhelming, his history interlaced with the history of Ireland, with all of Western civilization, the wildly ambitious strategy of the book suddenly revealed in all its glory. Michael Groden was the perfect tour guide, and over the weeks that I lost myself in Joyce’s re-imagined Dublin, he and Bloom began to merge. During the break, Mike (as he signed his emails) would wolf down a bagel with cream cheese, clearly starved by the gargantuan effort of shepherding us through the hundreds of pages of the novel.

What had been intimidating to me at nineteen, was intoxicating now. I reveled in the layers of detail and meaning, the music of Joyce’s language, his references to everything under the sun. I found myself laughing out loud at his virtuosic prose, dazzling syntax, moments of peculiar punctuation. Mike played us recordings of the music hall songs threaded through the text, showed us photos of the Dublin streets Bloom wandered, and leading us through the intricacies of the book with the surety of a native, someone who inhabited its pages so fully that he knew all its inside jokes.

I read Ulysses wherever I could for those six weeks, the Vintage edition Mike recommended falling apart just as he said it would, pages detaching themselves from the spine like falling rose petals. As challenging as it was to hold the book in your head, so too was it hard to hold the book in your hands. And yes, I did read Ulysses on the subway, learning how to do it without dropping all the pages on the floor, and relishing the parallels between my own travels through New York City, and Bloom’s through Dublin.

Read more [via Lux Lotus]. Groden also teaches a Ulysses Master Class for experienced Joyceans. And there are many more literary seminars starting up within weeks.