Everything about Bloomsday totally explained
Bloomsday (
Irish:
Lá Bhloom) is a commemoration observed annually on
16 June in
Dublin and elsewhere to celebrate the life of
Irish writer James Joyce and relive the events in his novel
Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in
1904. The day is a
secular holiday in Ireland. The name derives from
Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of
Ulysses, and
16 June was the date of Joyce's first outing with his wife-to-be,
Nora Barnacle, when they walked to the Dublin village of
Ringsend.
Bloomsday activities
The day involves a range of cultural activities including
Ulysses readings and dramatisations,
pub crawls and general merriment, much of it hosted by the
James Joyce Centre in North Great George's Street. Enthusiasts often dress in
Edwardian costume to celebrate Bloomsday, and retrace Bloom's route around Dublin via landmarks such as
Davy Byrne's pub. Hard-core devotees have even been known to hold marathon readings of the entire novel, some lasting up to 36 hours. The first celebration took place in
1954, and a major five-month-long festival (
ReJoyce Dublin 2004) took place in Dublin between
1 April and
31 August 2004. On the Sunday in 2004 before the 100th "anniversary" of the fictional events described in the book, 10,000 people in Dublin were treated to a free, open-air, full
Irish breakfast on
O'Connell Street consisting of
sausages,
rashers,
toast,
beans, and
black and
white puddings, and a pint of
Guinness.
The
Rosenbach Museum & Library, in
Philadelphia,
United States, is the home of the handwritten
manuscript of
Ulysses and celebrates Bloomsday with a street festival including readings,
Irish music, and traditional
Irish cuisine provided by local Irish-themed
pubs.
The Syracuse James Joyce Club holds an annual Bloomsday celebration at Johnston's BallyBay Pub in
Syracuse, New York, at which large portions of the book are either read aloud, or presented as dramatizations by costumed performers. The club awards scholarships and other prizes to students who have written essays on Joyce or fiction pertaining to his work. The city is home to
Syracuse University, whose press has published or reprinted several volumes of Joyce studies.
In 2004 Vintage Publishers issued
yes I said yes I'll Yes: A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday, edited by Nola Tully. It is one of the few monographs that details the increasing popularity of Bloomsday. The book's title comes from the novel's famous last lines.
Bloomsday has been celebrated since 1994 in the
Hungarian town of
Szombathely, the birthplace of Leopold Bloom's father, Virág Rudolf an emigrant Hungarian Jew. The event is usually centered around the Iseum, the remnants of an Isis temple from Roman times, and the Blum-mansion, commemorated to Joyce since 1997, at 40–41 Fő street, which used to be the property of an actual Jewish family called Blum. Hungarian author László Najmányi in his 2007 novel,
The Mystery of the Blum-mansion (A Blum-ház rejtélye) describes the results of his research on the connection between Joyce and the Blum family.
Popular culture references
In
Mel Brooks' 1968 film
The Producers,
Gene Wilder's character is called Leo Bloom, an homage to Joyce's character.
In the musical
2005 version, in the evening scene at the
Bethesda Fountain in
Central Park, Leo asks, "When will it be Bloom's day?". However, in the earlier scene in which Bloom first meets Max Bialystock, the office wall calendar shows that the current day is
16 June, indicating that it is, in fact, Bloomsday.
The movie
Slacker features a character throwing their copy of
Ulysses in a river, while another Richard Linklater movie,
Before Sunrise takes place on
June 16, Bloomsday, with the characters agreeing to meet back in Vienna, Austria in exactly 6 months.
Lilac Bloomsday Run
In
Spokane, Washington,
United States, an annual 12-kilometre race called the
Lilac Bloomsday Run is held on the first Sunday of May. The inaugural Bloomsday road race took place on
1 May 1977, and the race is now one of the largest road races on the West Coast of the US. The connection with the Joycean Bloomdsay is that, according to the event's founder,
Don Kardong, a road race is an
odyssey (like the one referred to in
Ulysses) and ordinary people are involved in heroic journeys every day of their lives.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Bloomsday'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://bloomsday.totallyexplained.com">Bloomsday Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
