Bloomsday, June 16, 1904/2004

Greetings, Gate! Say, Jack, dig out your copy of Ulysses and latch on to the events of this year's centeniary celebrations of Bloomsday!

From The Scotsman.

From the BBC.

From a Canadian newspaper. Dig the line about excreting a pile of steaming literaure!

From USA Today a small article which contains numerous links to other Bloomsday celebrations.

A small article on the NPR site.

The official Bloomsday 100 site.

A small page from the Powells Books website on the Bloomsday Centeniary.


Perhaps the best site yet: The Brazen Head.

And this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Who's afraid of James Joyce? A guide to reading 'Ulysses'

By Frank Wilson

Inquirer Staff Writer


DUBLIN, Ireland - The language of Ulysses is its glory, but also its challenge. It ranges from the limpidly beautiful - "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" - to the formidably opaque: "the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness."

David Butler, the education officer at Dublin's James Joyce Centre, says the book is "about how language surrounds us and conditions us... how we're within language." So the language of the narrative is inextricably bound up with the substance of it. Robert Nicholson, curator of the James Joyce Museum, says this is "a feature of Irish literature generally - the telling is as important as the tale."

The problem is getting a handle on that language. Butler and Nicholson, both of whom have written guides to Ulysses, say one should read the book before reading any commentaries or taking a course in it. Nicholson, who says "there are far too many books about Ulysses," says it's best to "read Ulysses first - then you know what questions you want to ask" - instead of "reaching for books by people who want to tell you what you ought to understand."

The problem with taking a course, he says, is that "any teacher will have a very specific slant or spin" and the reader needs to "get in there with an open mind."

"I think you need... to read the whole thing without any notes," he adds, "which is how I did it, even though I understood only 5 or 10 percent of it."

One problem, Butler notes, is that "a lot of people get bogged down in Chapter 3 and never get beyond it - which seems to me tragic." That's why he suggests starting with Chapter 4, which introduces "one of the great figures of world literature, Leopold Bloom."

That, Nicholson says, "is a very practical way of approaching it... . Joyce presumably intended [the book] to be read in the order in which it was written, but I agree that kills off a lot of potential readers."

The British novelist Anthony Burgess wrote that Ulysses is "a labyrinth which we can enter at any point... . It is one of the very few books that can be picked up at any time, enriching any odd moment... . It is a book for the bedside... . There is enough meat in it to last a lifetime."

The trick is not to worry about getting to the end. For a while, read just one page a day. Get accustomed to the writing, and you'll soon grow comfortable with it.

Is it worth the effort? Does it really have something of value for the weary commuter? Butler thinks so: "The absolute attention to what life is about, why life is worth living - I think that is what is really contained in this book."