Comments on: And Now, Five Things You Need To Know About Bloomsday Right Now

By: Perfectly Disgraceful

Perfectly Disgraceful — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:25:31 +0000

Most importantly, it’s my birthday!

By: Hovering

Hovering — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:18:36 +0000

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.

By: Allan Smithee

Allan Smithee — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:16:14 +0000

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.

By: Hovering

Hovering — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:53:27 +0000

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.[?])

By: cb

cb — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:25:09 +0000

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!

By: lord_whimsy

lord_whimsy — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:22:16 +0000

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.