Twas the Night Before Bloomsday . . .

It’s not too late. You can still make your plans for the day that most honors the depth and complexity of the poetic Irish soul, June 16, the day on which James Joyce set his epic novel of daily life shrouded in inner dialogue.

So not late, but that sentence was far too linear. To honor Joyce it needs to be more like:

Anno domini 1904, boy & girl enact simple primitive ritual, tortured soul steps out with Nora of the Barnacle. A connection to cosmos: Praise then of the labyrinth mindmotif of polyglot auteur, AVE Hibernia, for a day cada ano during Solstice less the golden rings. Annuit coeptis NYC’s myriad activities gathered on Bloomsdaynyc:

BLOOMSDAY BREAKFAST IN BRYANT PARK (I’m going to attend)

IABANY BLOOMSDAY CELEBRATION: With the Irish American Bar Association, down at 60 Centre Street. You’ve got to love these guys, celebrating the landmark First Amendment ruling over obscenity laws to publish Ulysses. Keynote speech by Kathleen Sullivan, followed by re-enactment of the 1933 court case, USA vs. One Book Called Ulysses.

RADIO BLOOMSDAY 2011: A 30th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION.
On WBAI 99.5 FM and online Readers include Alec Baldwin, John Lithgow, Jerry Stiller, Garrison Keillor, Wallace Shawn, Kate Valk, Paul Dooley,

ULYSSES MEETS TWITTER 2011
Follow @11ysses. Starting 8:00 a,m, Dublin time (that’s 3:00 a.m. for NewYorker) you’ll get a stream of programmed tweets following the journey of the novel. Interesting assembly of “tweaders”

BLOOMSDAY ON BROADWAY XXX
Isaish Sheffer's yearly valentine to his favorite novel. Will also live stream


I'm a sucker for this creative activity by Joyce’s fans. I don’t pretend to be a true fan or much of a student of the work. The closest I got was one tutorial with Maud Ellmann, the daughter of one of Joyce’s great biographers Richard Ellmann, at Southampton University. As we were discussing part of the novel Maud would say, “Let’s see what dad had to say about that” and break open the biography.

But I understand the desire of the fan to gather, to bring what is an internal experience into the external world, the better to experience it anew in a communal

yes I said yes I will Yes

 Mapeel     6/15/2011     Ireland, literature