Any Demon Deacon who loves roots, rock and reggae knows about Ziggy’s, the famous music venue where bands touring the Southeast felt compelled to crank it up in Winston-Salem. From the start a hangout with Wake Forest alumni running the show, Ziggy’s attracted crowds to its doors just off Deacon Boulevard near BB&T Field for 27 years until it closed after Thanksgiving in 2007.

Eclectic doesn’t even begin to describe the scene. Consider a few of the bands in Ziggy’s history: Ben Folds Five, Phish, The Black Crowes, Dave Matthews Band, Rusted Root, George Clinton, Bo Diddley, Tenacious D, Burning Spear, Hootie and the Blowfish, Bill Monroe and Ziggy Marley, who, by the way, was not the music hall’s namesake.

Learn about the true namesake, the Deacs link and the opening tonight of the new Ziggy’s in the arts district at Trade Street and Martin Luther King Drive in an interview on WFDD.

Tom Radulovic (’83) was at a high school graduation celebration the other day in Winston-Salem when someone noticed his tat. Up went his sleeve, and there it was, a tattoo in full splendor. “I call it the Grateful Deacon,” he says.

It’s a cross between a Grateful Dead skull and a Wake Forest Demon Deacon underscored by the University’s “Pro Humanitate” motto promoting service to humanity. “It’s not exactly yin and yang,” he says. “It exists in tension, which is what I like. Life and death. That’s not what this represents to me. It’s kind of fun, and it pushes that edge a tad further. And it’s also a way to show my school colors.”

Radulovic looks back on his Wake Forest days as the “real formative years” and the time he made “life-changing friendships.” A group of his Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers and a few others have been gathering annually for 25 years to play golf at the beach. He lists them: Rich Wagner, Frank Lash, Guy Beaver, John Knapp, John Passacantando, Ed Thompson, all ’83 classmates. They will convene for the annual “hacking around” later this summer near Charleston, S.C.

“We’ve been through a lot of life events. Birth of kids. Death of parents. The whole thing. It’s been a nice way to stay connected to a group of friends,” he says.

In their honor he got his first tattoo, a flaming golf ball on his leg. But he wanted something more significant, something to commemorate a bond with his dad. His father was ill. The diagnosis was cancer, and the cancer had metastasized. His father was going to need a new hip and he wanted a symbol of hope pierced right on that new hip for the long haul. “He said, ‘I’m going to get a rainbow tattoo,’ and I said, ‘Dad, let’s do it. Let’s go together. He never got well enough to be able to.” His father passed away, but Tom kept thinking about that tattoo pledge.

Last September he knew what he wanted. He went to Earth’s Edge tattoo studio in Winston-Salem carrying pictures of skull tattoos and a Demon Deacon. Now, Tom Radulovic, loyal son, father of two daughters and the religion major who is looking to start his next chapter as a public school teacher, sports a pronouncement of University school spirit that cannot be denied. “It was a great place to go to school,” he says. His Grateful Deacon “is one way to fly your colors and maybe a little bit unique.”

Go Deacs indeed! We’re all grateful Deacons, Tom. Thanks for flying our colors.

Before I sound hoity-toity about noting that it is a day of celebration — Bloomsday — honoring James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” I must confess that this English major has not yet read the master work. I am not among the worthy celebrants today, the date on which the novel takes place in 1904. The world over, Joyce fans are drinking Guinness and eating liver for breakfast. The Washington Post saluted this “nerdiest of all holidays” today by proclaiming that “Ulysses” is “either the bane of readers everywhere or the best book ever written, depending on who you ask (though sometimes those thoughts are also voiced by the same person).”

I decided to ask the opinion of expert Scott Klein, associate professor and chair of the English department known for his great sense of humor. He’s firmly in the “it’s both” camp. He has taught James Joyce every other year since he arrived in 1991. Wake Forest undergraduates know it as English 366, while grad students step into the classroom to experience the deeper literary trip through Joyce’s Dublin in the course known — tee hee — as English 666. The course starts with the short story collection “Dubliners,” moves to the novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” and the last half is devoted chapter by chapter to “Ulysses.” Occasionally Klein has shoehorned Homer’s “The Odyssey” into the semester because “Ulysses” is a modern version, he said, “but it’s just too much to do in one term.” Many of us might agree, that is if we had actually read “Ulysses.”

“I didn’t eat liver, just a bowl of cereal,” Klein said when I asked him how he was celebrating Bloomsday. “I don’t really do much on the day itself, I have to admit, if I’m by myself.”

Some years he is among the Joyce scholars at their annual academic conference, which alternates this time of year between Europe and the United States. Today it’s in Pasadena, and if tradition holds to form the days of the conference will be filled with delivery of the highest form of academic papers and plenary sessions, while the evenings will break out into …. We’ll get back to that.

Klein is quick to say “Ulysses” is not a summer read. “It expects all kinds of erudition from one, but what it gives you is not only some of the most spectacular use of language in the whole English tradition and terrifically, pyrotechnically wonderful uses of the English language, but unlike some experimental works it also provides one with an extraordinarily richly detailed and emotional, psychological experience. It’s probably not only the greatest experimental novel ever written, but it’s also one of the most moving realistic novels ever written. I can’t think of any other work of avant-garde art that manages to simultaneously be terrifically intellectual and abstract and difficult but also have a core of really deep human feeling.”

In short, that’s why people celebrate the day, he said.

I asked Klein to give us a synopsis:

Ulysses is about two main characters: One named Leopold Bloom, and he’s an average kind of man in his late thirties, and his wife, Molly, who’s a concert singer. It all takes place on this day — June 16, 1904, on a day when Bloom is afraid his wife is about to have an affair with the business manager. And at the same time, there’s a young man wandering the streets of Dublin named Stephen Dedalus, who had been the main character of “A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man,” something of a self-portrait of the young Joyce. He’s intellectual and he’s disaffected and his mother died the year before, and he doesn’t get along with his father. So he’s feeling adrift. He’s looking in a sense for a direction for his life; he’s sort of looking for a surrogate father figure. Leopold Bloom, who is older than he is, lost a son a few years before and is looking for a kind of surrogate son figure. And so the trajectory of the novel is the whole day — hour by hour of the two of them separately; and then they come together late in the evening. The big question of the book is what kind of bond do they form with one another when they do meet late at night on June 16, 1904.

The Penguin Classics version is 1,040 pages long. As far as Klein knows, not one of the roughly 200 WFU students he has taught in his Joyce classes has dropped out of English 366 (or English 666) because of the book’s difficulty. “I do tell students that once they’ve read it, like with few other books you have bragging rights for the rest of your life when you say, ‘Well, when I read ‘Ulysses ….’”

I feel deflated again by my half-century failure to have even cracked the tome.

Nor can I foresee any chance of joining the revelers at the Joyce academic conferences here or abroad. They sound as though they offer a distinct form of frivolity unseen in these parts unless you count a Renaissance Faire. After the academic matters are conducted during the day, the evenings turn into an over-the-top Joyce-a-palooza. “There are dinners in which people sing parody songs with words taken from Joyce’s work, and I cringe when I think of this. There are very esteemed scholars who play Joyce charades, believe it or not,” Klein said, adding it’s a bit embarrassing, the “cultish” aspect of the conference evenings, considering how some scholars dress as characters from Joyce’s works and act out scenes. “It’s a little bit like being at a ‘Star Trek’ convention. I don’t go quite that far in my enthusiasm.”

Now Klein is talking. “Star Trek”: I can say I have seen that one on TV.

I wish I could say that by next Bloomsday I will have completed the masterpiece, but I think the chances of that are equal to my ordering liver for breakfast at The Pit. Give me a few years.

My book club in Winston-Salem is reading “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement” by Jane Ziegelman. It reveals the social history and culinary heritage of immigrant families of various ethnicities who lived at 97 Orchard on the Lower East Side. When I reached the section about the Italian immigrant family, I was struck by Ziegelman’s description of how newcomers felt abiding, strong connections to their native villages in Italy. As they settled into New York, they tried to recreate the geography of home, from establishing regional restaurants to holding festas that honored their village’s local saint.

“Italians have a word for the special connectedness felt among towns people,” Ziegelman writes. “Campanilismo, from the Italian word for ‘bell,’ describes the bonds of solidarity felt among people who live within hearing distance of the same church bell.”

What, you might ask, does that have to do with Wake Forest?  Only this: One of the delights for me in my year back at Wake Forest has been listening once again to the bells of  Wait Chapel. According to Wake Forest history, the first 47 bells of the Janet Jeffrey Carlile Harris Carillon were given in 1978 by the Very Reverend Dr. Charles U. Harris (’35) in honor of his wife. In 1981, Mrs. Harris gave the final bell, a bass E-flat, in honor of her husband.

The early years of the carillon coincided with most of my undergraduate days. It always seemed the bells tolled especially for us, the students of the time. In truth from the beginning, they tolled for all of the Wake Forest community, and they have rung out, with precision, ever since. Campanilismo.  There is a bond of solidarity that links all of us who stopped for a moment at the sound of the first chime, looked up at Wait Chapel and listened to the bells. And our spirits lifted, not unlike the spirits of Italian immigrants remembering their village church bell. This is what it feels like to come home.