Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergan.

This day, December 6th, 1933, Ulysses can enter the United States.

This is based on a really fascinating court ruling, not one about immigration, but one about

the book Ulysses by James Joyce.

Over the previous five years or so, the book had been basically officially barred from being

imported and distributed in the United States because it was deemed too obscene. So in this ruling, as the

New York Times put it, Judge John M. Woolsey concluded that, quote, Joyce's stream of consciousness

study of everyday life in Dublin was many things,

brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure, honest and disgusting, the one thing it was not,

he ruled, was obscene. The case was actually called I love this United States

verse one book called Ulysses and there are also tons of other really fascinating

tidbits in here it also of course set a precedent and gets it all

sorts of questions about art and obscenity, censorship, free speech. So here to

discuss one book called Ulysses is as always Nicole Hammer of Columbia. Hello Nicky.

Hi dirty and our special guest for this episode someone we've been trying to get on the

show for a long time one of my favorite people authors and radio host Kurt

Anderson Kurt welcome to the show hello both of you happy to be here and I will plug your latest book is called evil genius is the previous book fantastic work is called fantasy land but we are here to talk about one book, Ulysses, and

Kurt, I'm giving you the task of summarizing Ulysses for our listeners.

Well, that will take the rest of the 20 minutes.

No, there is obviously a long way to summarize this very long book and there's a short way. The short way I guess would be to say it is the thoughts that go through the mind and some of the behavior that happens in the lives mainly of two guys,

Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom and also some women, Molly Bloom and others.

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