Jun
Bloomsday 2010 – a day to celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses
Filed Under (General) by ronan on 16-06-2010
“The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the storm-tossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.”
Joyce, J Ulysses pp329 Bodley Head 1941 or in later editions e.g. Penguin, the opening paragraph of Chapter 13.Portrait of the Writer
Today, if you stand in the same spot as Bloom did on Sandymount strand I think you might not only see the spire of the Star of the Sea church but also perhaps the top of the newly built Aviva stadium which replaces the Lansdowne Road rugby ground. Joyce although attending two great Jesuit rugby playing schools; Glongowes College just outside Dublin and Belvedere College in the heart of the city, was himself not a player. His schooldays are well documented by Fr. Bruce Bradley SJ who incidently was my (very patient) Latin teacher and also my rugby trainer while I was at Belevedere.
The paragraph I quote above begins one of my favourite chapters. It also reminds me of the final parts of the short story in Dubliners entitled ‘The Dead’. It also raises a question for the many Joycean scholars as to how many churches are named in the works of JJ. Not an easy one, for example “riverrun past Eve and Adams from swerve of shore to bend of bay…” the opening (or is it the closing?) line of Finnegans Wake refers to the church of St Francis of Assisi known to locals as Adam and Eves on the Liffey.
Today is known as Bloomsday; the 16th June 1904 is the day on which all the action in Ulysses takes place – Leopold Bloom – the wandering Jew – embarks on an odyssey through the streets of Dublin his inner thoughts and encounters form the basis of this wonderfully evocative depiction of Edwardian Dublin.
In 1988 I took part in the ‘Bloomsday tour’ and the celebrations in Dublin – this coincided with the Millennium celebrations of the city it having been founded in 988. I thoroughly enjoyed the day and was interviewed by a US TV station as I sat in Davy Byrne’s pub drinking a large brandy and port a medicinal necessity to sustain my body and mind for the 18 hours of daylight. It being pre-web days I never saw the broadcast. I often wonder what a similar adventure might be like now. I did have a vague idea that to design an iPhone app that provided rich media content (for example there is a lot of music in Ulysses), might be popular but an even better project would be to consider how the characters would behave and interact were they to have had todays technologies! What would Molly’s txt msgs to Blazes Boylan have contained? Would Bloom ditch his interior monologue in favour of Twitter? What wonders would we find on Buck Mulligan’s blog?
Enjoy the day!
James Joyce - by me this morning!
