Bloomsday

(Garfield Center)

Happy Bloomsday!

The day is named after Leopold Bloom, the central character in Ulysses. The novel follows the life and thoughts of Leopold Bloom and a host of other characters – real and fictional – from 8am on 16 June 1904 through to the early hours of the following morning.

Celebrations often include dressing up like characters from the book and in clothes that would have been the style of the era. One of the hallmark fancy dress items of Bloomsday is the straw boater hat. Celebrations come in many different forms like readings, performances and visiting the places and establishments that are referenced in the book.

The Bloomsday Breakfast is another common celebration, which involves eating the same breakfast as Leopold Bloom consumes on the morning of 16 June. This includes liver and kidneys alongside the typical ingredients of an Irish fried breakfast.

James Joyce (1882-1941) has been hailed as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and Ulysses is his greatest novel. It was required reading in high school English and college literature; in both cases many weeks were spent deconstructing its meaning.

Ulysses was heavy going for your humble blogger, who had difficulty appreciating stream-of-consciousness writing. However, one benefit of slogging through Ulysses was an early realization that I wasn't cut out to be a liberal arts major. I wasn't interested in chasing down obscure allusions and mapping out similarities to the Odyssey.

It was much later in life that I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both were written in a more conventional narrative style, and the short stories and novel are, IMHO, more readable. Now that I have the time, maybe I'll give Ulysses--and Leopold Bloom--another shot.