Bloomsday

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This article is about Bloomsday, the holiday. For the road race, see Lilac Bloomsday Run.
Bloomsday performers outside Davy Byrne's pub
Bloomsday performers outside Davy Byrne's pub

Bloomsday 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.

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[edit] Bloomsday activities

Street party in Great George Street, 2004
Street party in Great George Street, 2004

The day involves a range of cultural activities including academic conferences, Ulysses readings and dramatisations, pub crawls and general merriment. 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 April 1 and 31 August 2004. On the Sunday before the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday in 2004, 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 will 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.

[edit] Popular culture references

In the musical version of Mel Brooks' The Producers, Matthew Broderick's character is called Leopold Bloom. In the evening scene at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, he 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 San Francisco-based band, Bloomsday, was founded by Joyce enthusiasts who incorporate the theme of "epic in the ordinary" into their work.

[edit] Lilac Bloomsday Run

In Spokane, Washington 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.

[edit] Other celebrations

Other cities where Bloomsday is celebrated:

  • Toronto, Ontario, Canada – walking tour of local landmarks suggestive of those in Ulysses

[edit] External links

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