So, in the centenary year of Ulysses, this year’s Bloomsday on 16th June was – perhaps slightly confusingly – the 100th (from publication) or the 116th (from the setting of the book in 1904).
Either way, devotees of James Joyce and his most famous work continue to use the day as as a reason to celebrate all things Joycean and in particular the fabulous characters that populate Ulysses, most notably Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Below are some of this year’s highlights for the LitSalon.
‘Bloomsday’ by Nick Midgley on RTE Radio 1
The Bootleg Balloonatics’ Bloomsday Walk in Tufnell Park,
12 June 2022
The Bootleg Balloonatics – organiser Chris Bilton, Paul Dornan and John Goudie – invited Toby Brothers to join them (playing Molly, Milly and Mrs Breen) for a two-hour recreation of Leopold Bloom’s Dublin perambulations in London’s Tufnell Park, performed for an appreciative travelling audience of around 50, ending with gorgonzola sandwiches in the Dartmouth Arms . . . Read more in the Camden New Journal here.
Bloomsday in Dublin, 16 June 2022
A group of intrepid Salonistas – including Sheila Fitzgerald, Leah Jewett, Paul Caviston, Zita Moran (to name just a few) – visited Dublin to enjoy Bloomsday celebrations in situ. The day included the Dublin Balloonatics’ Bloomsday Walk led by founder Paul O’Hanrahan, an early morning swim from the Forty Foot (that’s Toby diving in), a variety of period costumes, a visit to The James Joyce Centre, and an Eccles Cake (or perhaps it’s a toasted teacake) in Eccles Street . . . a good time was had by all!
At a specially convened celebratory lunch on the following day, Toby – who has guided so many in the Salon through this extraordinary literary journey – recited her poem about launching a new Ulysses study:
Launching Ulysses study
A new study begins…
First time faces gather in Hollywood Squares
Alarmed face asks me
Why did he come?
Courtesy or an inward light?
Will they find their way?
Will they stumble and fall into ineluctable modality of the impossible?
This reader wants into the fray, but
“I’m not a believer myself, that is to say…
A believer in the narrow sense of the word.”
And I want to say:
Shut your eyes and See.
Another reader takes tentative steps forward
Her reading wobbles but Buck draws her near
“Are we supposed to like him – or not?”
In Joyce, there are no easy answers.
In the stilted dance of Telemachus
I hope she will catch a grip
And Joyce whispers close:
“That’s the bucko that’ll organise her, take my tip.”
A frustrated reader who hasn’t yet learned to swim in Jim
Scratches at the text
But it is himself he fears
Plenty to see and hear and feel yet.
“The only thing is to walk,
Then you’ll feel a different man.
It’s not far – lean on me.“
I hope they will hear in a profound
Ancient male unfamiliar melody
The accumulation of the past.
I hope that they will hear
The chant of a quick young male form
The predestination of the future.
Look out—gender fireworks ahead
Who will stumble? O, so many rocks!
“Possess her once take the starch out of her”
“O wept! Aren’t men frightful idiots!”
“She does whack it, by George!“
So many cocks.
But if—o, but if they can find
The ample bed-warmed flesh
Yes Yes
FORWARD woozy Wobblers!
Old Ulyssians – Make more room in the Bed!
Reading Ulysses is not only a wonderful literary adventure, it’s also great fun! Our next Ulysses studies (a six-month study beginning in January 2023 and an extended ‘slow read’ option starting in October 2022) are now open for booking.
Also in Dublin . . .
Meanwhile, Salonista Geoff Strange has kindly allowed us to publish below an account of his own independent visit to Dublin for Bloomsday 2022.
The day was long, starting with a brisk walk to the Martello Tower in Dalkey, then walking the strand in Sandymount, then Sweny’s, then The National Museum and for then what we hoped to be a relieving park bench in St Stephen’s Green before our next “appointment.” But could we find a spare park bench anywhere? No! Literally all benches were occupied and occupied, I might add, by a cacophony of bonnet/boater wearing Edwardians, some of whom were even playing American football! At last, we spied a shady bench and after a dash that would impress Usain Bolt, the bench was duly nabbed! We sat and napped only to discover on awakening that we were sat opposite non other than our very own Jim! There he was, plinthed and peering back at us with those dodgy eyes of his. It’s as if he had bequeathed his very own bench to a couple of foot weary flaneurs in our hour of need!
Suitably reinvigorated we left our bench, said bench soon to be taken up as temporary dug-out for those Edwardian garbed American footballers, and made our way to MoLI for a lecture by Paul Muldoon, Irish poet and general polymath about town. He was giving the inaugural Dedalus Lecture entitled, “Spinoza’s Shillelagh: Some Thorny Issues in Ulysses.” We were treated to an hour of poetic investigation of, wait for it, the first three words of the novel. Can you remember them? Of course: stately, plump, and buck. To Muldoon, the whole book is bound within those three words. It was a fanciful and entertaining romp through Irish and Classical literature!
The whole sixty minutes was, in a way, quite Joycean, not through design but in the way he was initially interrupted by the reggae band in the garden, then a stream of late attendees with himself, no less, showing them to their seats and then to cap it all, the gentle murmur of somebody’s mobile phone. All of us reached for our pockets but all but one was safe in the knowledge that it was not ours. For the poor eejit that discovered that it was his phone was bad enough but his woeful inability to firstly find the correct pocket and then work out how to switch the damned thing off, all the time the volume of its inane ringtone getting louder and louder, made me think of how Joyce would actually have loved this!
After that there was only one final destination on the agenda: pints and a toasted sandwich at Peter’s Pub. No, not mentioned by Joyce but this favourite Dublin haunt of mine is so redolent of a bygone era of manners, stools at the bar and none of that musak, maybe similar to Davy Byrne’s in its heyday. As you walk in, they say “how are yer, what’ll you have,” to which the response is two pints please (no need for clarification in this boozer). “No matter, you sit down, and I’ll bring them over. Toastie?” No need to tell you the answer to that!
Several hours later we are back on the DART speeding past Sandymount Strand with not a firework in sight! We look left across the sea denuded strand, peering into eternity.
What a day!
Hope your day was special!
And just to say, Toby, how grateful I am to you for your amazing guidance on this epic journey. You certainly opened an old door very carefully to another way of reading and I can’t thank you enough.
Go raibh mile maith agaibh
