On this date in 1904, Leopold Bloom took his epic journey through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. ReJoyce Dublin tells us:
“Bloomsday”, as it is now known, has become a tradition for Joyce enthusiasts all over the world. From Tokyo to Sydney, San Francisco to Buffalo, Trieste to Paris, dozens of cities around the globe hold their own Bloomsday festivities. The celebrations usually include readings as well as staged re-enactments and street-side improvisations of scenes from the story. Nowhere is Bloomsday more rollicking and exuberant than Dublin, home of Molly and Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, Gerty McDowell and James Joyce himself. Here, the art of Ulysses becomes the daily life of hundreds of Dubliners and the city’s visitors as they retrace the odyssey each year.
There was an interesting piece in the NYT Book Review a week ago by John Banville called “Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday,” discussing, among other things, that:
“Joyce liked to boast that ”Ulysses” was so detailed a portrait of Dublin that if the city were to be destroyed — an eventuality that in his darker moments of Hibernophobia he would probably have welcomed — it could be rebuilt brick by brick, using his book as a model.”
Find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/books/review/13BANVILL.html?pagewanted=2