HAPPY FUCKING BLOOMSDAY ALL YOU CRAZY MODERNISTS

I cared a little more about June 16th-as-Bloomsday back when WNYC still used the date to broadcast nearly a day's worth of marathon readings of Ulysses and other Joyceanalia. Now I cannot love WNYC, for it is a despicable NPR gigolo, purveyor of Ira Glass and tote bags. And Nina Totenberg. But no Bloomsday on Broadway. FUCKERS.

sigh...

good times, good times.

The Pinefox went on a Bloomsday tour yesterday (in between getting into fights with Spanish football fans) and discovered that many tourguides know very little about "Ulysses".

Some fans of it say that the key is to read ir aloud, possibly in an Irish accent. This is beyond me - it takes all my effort to do my own accent.

Hello, ilx.

xp ^^truth, also it is really easy if you read it in conjunction with one of the many guides out there i.e. the new bloomsday book by blamires

i love the questions chapter--ithaca! but i wont quibble. its a book that wants you to dislike parts, i think.

this is one of my favorite ilx posts:

OK, OK.
1. Don't read him. Dubliners is blank and empty of significance, the Portrait is theocentric and tedious, Exiles is an embarrassing failure and never revived, Ulysses is a homely family homily in disguise, Finnegans Wake is a self-indulgent crossword puzzle no-one should bother with.

2. Don't get distracted by anecdotes - people rehashing some apocryphal story about something that JJ once said to WBY, or something one newspaper said about U. It's astounding how untrue most of these are.

3. I don't know that anyone else had, or has, registered the movement of things like him - objects, I mean, fluttering pieces of torn paper blown on a light breeze under a railway bridge or eddying back and forth on a tide; a door opening or closing on imperfect hinges; the sort of things amid which we (still) live.

4. Not just 'things' but social processes - how many times have I been out for a night in a boozer or three and been reminded of Sirens / Cyclops / Oxen, the way that he understands how gatherings work, how geezers get together, come in at five and pop back at seven, pass a newspaper report around the table and try to find the funniest things to say about it, while someone colourfully offers another round;

5. or those ordinary actions that I was so astounded to find in U, first time around - getting up and bantering while cooking breakfast (milk, cream, lemon - simply beauties), walking home drunk in the middle of the night - things no-one ever notices about Joyce.

6. Felicities: colons: rhythms: full stops. Periods.

7. Lists: catalogues: series: sequences: successions: which interrupt a narrative and lurch sideways, out of 'time' and into frozen textual 'space', for as long as they want, until they have become as extraordinarily funny as they care to be.

8. 'Humanity' - I mean, compassion, care for 'ordinary people', interest in things that others had thought beneath them, 'daily life'.

9. Yet not just a generalized wash of 'liberalism', perhaps - noteworthy enough in itself, next to so much of the rest of modernism - but something harder and more clear-eyed in its political calculations. Wells called the Portrait a book that only an Irish Catholic could have written, a quasi-Republican complaint, a Fenian yawp: what if the mass of historical data and learning in Ulysses and maybe beyond is really an immense, dense, complex political analysis, the pen as scalpel, 'lancet of my art', casually pricking the bulbous balloon of post-Victorian imperial culture?

10. Read him: Dubliners is hard as the side of an engine (Pound), the Portrait dares to denote childhood as no-one else had, Ulysses is all we need, the Wake might be what we need when we've just about, improbably, had enough of all we thought we needed.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, August 28, 2001 8:00 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

xp to max- i accept all of that (i used to be a die-hard 'ulysses is some bullshit nonsense' challoper in my early days, but now it's more that i'm probably afraid that i don't have half of the relevant knowledge to do it justice as a reader)

yeah. books get intimidating sometimes. joyce doesnt really like to tell you anything either--he prefers you to figure stuff out on your own, which is frustrating, but it can also be liberating, realizing that you dont really HAVE to know at all times exactly where bloom is or what his relationship is to his interlocutor or why he says or does this. (i feel the same way abt gravitys rainbow--i read the whole thing last year and i think i "got" the large strokes of the plot but certainly there was a huge portion that just went directly over my head and i still loved it)

you comfort this one dude tbh

And, like dyao said, don't be afraid of using Cliff Notes or Harry Levin's invaluable if pedantic guide to help.

ah wouldn't it take the fun out that way though?

Not if you reach the point where you're confident enough to say, "Screw this guide."

oh i'm that already, albeit in a doomed-to-fail homer simpson tribute

there's a Ulysses movie? playing on irish tv atm.

I'm gonna do it. Got myself a secondhand edition from the bookstore to celebrate Bloomsday, and I'm going to read it. (apparently I have the Gabler edition if it means anything to anyone).

I'm excited! I feel ready.

Yes.

Wait, I mean

http://www.peterwexlerstudio.com/Red_Bars/BLACK_DOT.gif

This year Bloomsday fell on a weekend

happy bloompsday one and all

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jl7l9

this was a medium treat y/day

mr. leopold bloomps ate w/ relish the inner organs of goons and trolls..

― Blazes Boyband (Pillbox), Thursday, January 20, 2011 2:26 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

This year Bloomsday fell on a weekend

^ irl lols

I feel stately plump this Sat night

Dedalus hears a shout in the street and

Turned on BBC a few days ago, didn't expect to hear Gogarty talking about the color of Joyce's eyelashes (chestnut.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jl7l9

this was a medium treat y/day

― Mexès Coleslaw Massacre (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 17 June 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So that's where Mark Lawson has ended up? Was put off everytime I heard his voice introduced but it clicked with me in the last segment toward midnight. Much better w/ radio then.

The discussion was bad tho'. Made me think we shd all forget this and move onto FW.

This year Bloomsday fell on a weekend

^ irl lols

― brödinger's cat (Pillbox), Saturday, June 16, 2012 10:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

x2

the discussion-y bits and the limited scope of the adaptation was why i'd call it only a "medium" treat, but it was a sweet surprise to turn the radio on and hear decent actors reading the excerpts

Agree, nice to get a reminder of how truly great Molly's soliloquy is!

i don't understand the weekend lol?

Time once again to raise a glass to Stately plump Buck Mulligan and company.

These guys added a welcome colour to d2 and environs this am

"Words? Music? No: it's what's behind. Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded."

i've always imagined the citizen as john goodman bc of oh brother

Interesting. iirc the citizen is gertie mcdowell's grandfather, which i think is a nice touch

Poop and onions! Missed it!

It was the first time since I was a teenager that I haven't read Ulysses on the 16th. Just didn't have my copy with me .

Every year (except the one year I made it over to Dublin to celebrate) it creeps up on me unawares. I did post about it yesterday but then UK news took over and it didn't seem particularly important.

mocker serious etc

It rolls around once again. Got a copy of the book out to have a wee dip into through the day and might watch/listen to a few online readings/performances.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/15/bloomsday-james-joyce-celebration-goes-online-ulysses

A pint of plain is your only man.

Sorry, wrong thread.

haha!

Totally forgot this year and didn't see any mention of it to remind me until today.

Frauenzimmer

bloomps

Leoplod Bloomps.

Your head it simply bloomps

No greater joke in all fiction than the transition from Gertie pining to Bloom finishing up

I still don't get U.P.: up.

Thought I figured it out once, but I’ve long since forgotten

You pee up

That's what I thought though this site thinks that's a stretch and it just means UP as in done for - it does a good job of citing similar & contemporary usages: http://m.joyceproject.com/notes/080010upup.html

I feel like it could be as simple as the unintelligibility of the message having a negative effect on a guy with already shaky mental health