RADIO

The Federal Communications Commission has warned a New York radio station against broadcasting its annual “Bloomsday” readings from James Joyce’s “Ulysses” on June 16, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Although noncommercial radio station WBAI had broadcast Molly Bloom’s erotic ramblings for the last seven years with no complaints, parent company Pacifica Foundation Inc. decided to query the FCC in light of its recent radio language crackdown. FCC commissioner James Quello termed the passage in the literary classic--which he said he had not read--”probably indecent.” He called the explicit language in the Molly Bloom passage (the mildest phrase being “kissing my bottom”) “stuff you deck someone over. I’m amazed it made it as a classic.” When informed of Quello’s comments, Joyce scholar Michael Seidel of Columbia University called FCC regulators “troglodytes and philistines.”