Happy Bloomsday! The World Celebrates James Joyce By HARVEY MORRIS LONDON — The Irish, at least, were taking a break from the pervasive euro-gloom on Saturday to mark Bloomsday, an annual celebration of the life and work of James Joyce and of his most famous fictional character, Leopold Bloom. Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses follows Bloom as he goes about his day in Dublin on June 16, 1904. The celebrations were to include public readings of the book, which runs to a quarter of a million words and has been described by enthusiasts since its publication in 1922 as among the greatest works of 20th-century literature. More than 100 Irish writers, headed by the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, were attempting to break a world record by reading consecutively for 28 hours at the Irish Writers’ Centre. Are you following the #Bloomsday readathon over @IrishWritersCtr ? An amazing 111 writers over 28hrs.Watch live here bit.ly/KypC2x — Hughes & Hughes (@Hughes_Books) June 15, 2012 Elsewhere, public readings were no doubt being lubricated with ample supplies of stout in the Dublin pub-land that Joyce immortalized. My colleague Rosie Schaap acknowledged a “not-so-subtle nod” to Ulysses in her recent drinker’s guide to the Irish capital. The more intrepid planned to emulate the culinary tastes of Leopold Bloom as described in the novel. Joyce’s hero: “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” Written in a modernist, stream-of-consciousness style, Ulysses is not an easy work. Max Eastman, an American critic, ranked Joyce, along with Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot, among the “Unintelligibles” of world literature. Joyce himself, who never made a penny from a book that was for years banned for obscenity in the United States and Britain, and shunned in his native Ireland until the 1960s, said: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” There is additional cause for celebration on this year’s Bloomsday. Seventy years after the author’s death, the copyright on his works has expired and they have entered the public domain. As PBS noted: “Many events in Dublin and elsewhere can finally put on performances and readings of entire sections of the novel without fear of legal recourse by the Joyce estate.” It marked “a new era for biographers and scholars who are now free to publish him or parts of his work without the permission of the fiercely protective, and often litigious, Joyce estate,” the Irish broadcaster RTE commented. As usual, the celebrations were not being confined to Ireland or its capital. Among the global Irish diaspora and among Joyce fans everywhere, the day was being similarly marked. In New York, the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, was proclaiming Joyce “an honorary Brooklynite” at a literary pub crawl through Park Slope.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 04:28:40 +0000
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