Happy Bloomsday!

[deutsey]

http://www.rejoycedublin2004.com/

:beer:

[punpirate]

1. Hello, Leo...

... get to work on your adventure. *smile*

Now, where the hell is my copy of Ulysses?

[deutsey]

3. Molly's, um, busy today...

so I have a looong day ahead of me.

[Stephanie]

2. Yes!

.

[deutsey]

4. A toast to The Artist

:toast:

[deutsey]

5. "Ulysses" will be read on KPFA tonight and into tomorrow daybreak

Tonight at 8:00 pm

Special Broadcast
Bloomsday on KPFA
A reading of
James Joyce's Ulysses


KPFA presents a centenary celebration of "Bloomsday" with a marathon reading of James Joyce's Ulysses beginning at 8 pm, and through the night to dawn, closing with the infamous Molly Bloom Soliloquy. 100 actors will gather on New York's Broadway to read selections from the novel that plotted the course of modern literature, and wound up in the courts in the fight about indecency versus free speech and freedom of the press. Readers include Frank and Malachy Mc Court and the incomparable Fionnula Flanagan as Molly Bloom. Hosted by Susan Stone of KPFA's Arts and Humanaties department.

www.kpfa.org

[Book Lover]

15. Thanks for the info!

I'll be tuning in. I read some of Ulysses to my nearly-19-month-old last night. He didn't understand a lot, but he did drool quite a bit.

[bloom]

6. yea!!

:party:

[bloom]

7. kick

:beer:

[bloom]

8. from the NYTimes RE: Bloomsday

"Sixteenth today it is," thinks Leopold Bloom, and the 16th it was, in June 1904. James Joyce, age 22, would walk out that very night in Dublin with Nora Barnacle, whom he later wedded. "Ulysses" is set on that day ? Bloomsday, as it has come to be called ? in honor of Joyce's meeting Miss Barnacle. Many Joyceans have made of Bloomsday a literary Mardi Gras, an odyssey through Dublin using the points of Joyce's compass, a day to celebrate Irishness and the peculiar verbal fecundity of that nation. In a novel full of celebrated talkers, it is Bloom, Jew and Irishman, who hovers, voice and thought, over the proceedings. As one barroom patron in the novel says, show Bloom a straw on the floor and "he'd talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady."

All these years later, one somehow thinks of "Ulysses" as being of that day, June 16, 1904, though it was published in February 1922. It is still as defiant a comedy as ever, as fictional as a gazetteer, willing to make a hash of the genres its author inherited. Now and then, a critic feels the need to tilt against "Ulysses," to complain of a byzantine difficulty in certain passages, to lament Joyce's leaps of logic and illogic, his utter sacrifice of plot. But by destroying plot ? reducing it to a kind of geography ? Joyce succeeds in reinventing time. Bloomsday is the most capacious day in literature. Only the hours of Lear's suffering last longer, and there time passes in a stage direction. Language has almost never had a surer substance ? a stronger temporal beat ? than Joyce gives it in the thoughts of Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly, along with Stephen Dedalus and Dublin's assembled hordes.

"Ulysses" has come to stand as the apogee of "elitist" literature, a novel that carries a kind of foreboding in its very title, the prospect of a hard road ahead. But there is really no less elitist novel in the English language. Its stuff is the common life of man, woman and child. You take what you can, loping over the smooth spots and pulling up short when you need to. Dedalus may indulge in Latinate fancy, and Joyce may revel in literary mimicry. But the real sound of this novel is the sound of the street a century ago: the noise of centuries of streets echoing over the stones."



Also - google has a tribute today.

[Magrittes Pipe]

9. Happy Bloomsday, all!

:toast: :beer: :party: :bounce:

[Feanorcurufinwe]

10. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes

[deutsey]

11. "The movements which work revolutions in the world

are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside."

:thumbsup:

[deutsey]

12. Another kick

[Maeve]

13. A few notes on James Joyce and June 16th

facts taken but not copied verbatum from today's Columbus Dispatch article by Robert Flanagan (page F4, not available on-line)...

The whole of "Ulysses" takes place on June 16, 1904 so Dublin is celebrating this as the centennial; it could also be called the 50th anniversary. The term Bloomsday was coined in 1954 by Joyce's Paris publisher, Sylvia Beach. Five Dubliners--literary critic Anthony Cronin, dentist and writer's cousin Tom Joyce, painter John Ryan and Brian O'Nolan (civil servant but best known as writer Flann O'Brien) and poet Patrick Kavanagh--took a horse-drawn cab to Sandymount, each assuming the identy of one of the book's characters.

They planned to tour all the novel's sites but stopped short at the Bailey, Ryan's pub on Duke Street. The tradition of abandoning the tour for pints continues to this day. :beer:

Although Dublin is the main site for Bloomsday events, others take place in Australia, Canada, New York, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, San Diego and Philadelphia.

June 16, 1904 was the day Joyce first "walked out" with Nora Barnacle, his wife and inspiration.

The book was frst published in 1922 and has been the center of debate ever since. Virginia Woolf called it "..merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges" while Hemmingway called it "a most goddamn wonderful book." Yeats couldn't finish it, Hart Crane called it "easily the epic of the age." Joyce is quoted as saying "The only demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works."

And Bloomsday suggests that some of them do. :toast:

Slainte!

[Cornus]

14. For crossword puzzle fans...

...was also the theme of today's NY Times puzzle!

[NightTrain]

16. I have a confession to make.

Twelve years ago, when I was 26, I made a valiant attempt to read ULYSSES. Unfortunately, once I had gotten about 75 pages into the book, I realized that I hadn't a fucking clue as to what I had been reading! As such, I put the book aside and never picked it up again.

Either ULYSSES was beyond me or James Joyce was full of shit. You make the call.

On the other hand, I very much liked Joyce's THE DUBLINERS and PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN!