And Now, Five Things You Need To Know About Bloomsday Right Now
1. Bloomsday, of course, is the annual celebration of the life and work of James Joyce, with specific regard to Ulysses, which you probably tell people you’ve read front to back but in fact have not. Anyway, Bloomsday is today.
2. Bloomsday is a huge, huge deal, of course, in Joyce’s native Dublin — if you lived there, you’d be drunk already — but Philly has a longstanding Bloomsday tradition, thanks in very large part to the Rosenbach Museum, which has in its collections the original Ulysses manuscript.
3. And starting right about now, the Rosenbach plays host to a long, long list of notable Philadelphians, all taking turns in reading aloud sections of Ulysses. It’s the only time all year you’ll see Lord Whimsy and Marty Moss-Coane doing the same thing in the same place and want to give them the same hug for being a part of such an awesome tradition.
4. Often, when you see pictures of Joyce, it’s this po-faced depiction, which always struck us as false advertising. We far prefer the faggy, flouncy Joyce as captured by Bernice Abbott at right, Paris 1926. We might live in amazing times, but we’ll never get to live in a time as apparently awesome in every respect as that one was.
5. There’s nothing wrong with saying Dubliners is your favorite Joyce book. In fact, we just did. Best part of it? We’re allowed to celebrate Bloomsday, too. Happy Bloomsday, everybody!
June 16th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Sitting this year out, alas–down with the swine flu. Contenting myself with Joyce’s delightfully filthy letters to Nora.
Had a nice, juicy selection from “Telemachus” this year, too. Damn.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I’m proud to say I DID read all of Ulysses, but only because I took Intro to Irish Lit. I understood about, say, 43% of the book. Happy Bloomsday to me!
June 16th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Yeah, Ulysses: impenetrable genius and all that. I’ll take everyone’s word for it. Third rail of the notoriously bitchy Ph.D.-lit crowd that has been sulking regularly at Fergie’s since the dude opened the joint.
But great point in #5: “The Dead.” Simply the best damned short story ever written in the English language. (Period.[?])
June 16th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
re: James Joyce
I wish there was a website where you could type a word/words and see all the sentences where Joyce used that word in his published works.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Maybe next year, a clever bar owner could stage a reading of one of Synge’s classics, to commence an hour or two after the Bloomsday activities: “Riders to the Sea,” perhaps, or “Playboy of the Western World.” Both? Hell sign me up now. Coupla Guinni in me and I can do a decent brogue that is just this side of annoying.
Meantime, as for Dublin-based novels featuring peerless cads, I’ll take J.P. Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man” (1955), with a skirt-chasing Harvard boy at Trinity which surely must have come as a welcome retreat from all those Lost Generation/Americans Abroad/ Razor’s Edge-y books (good as many of them were).
(I think also that Donleavy was the inspiration behind the MacGowan/ Pogues tune you mention in another post, no?)
Read the first two pages (all dialogue) and you’ll be in. The Grove Press paperback version features a drawing of a guy with a cigarette and a pint and a bow tie who looks for all the world like Conan O’Brian’s ne’er-do-well little shit of a brother (if Conan even has a brother, that is). There’s a blurb on there, too, from Dorothy Parker in Esquire: “Lusty, violent, wildly funny … the picaresque novel to stop them all.”
Worked for me. Judgment based on this particular cover is sound, folks.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Most importantly, it’s my birthday!