LA’s “June Gloom” sent tendrils of mist through the mountains and a canopy of clouds over my early morning walk in the Santa Monica Mountains today — enough Irish-type weather to remind me that June 16th is Bloomsday, the day Leopold Bloom and two other characters meandered through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
With the spin of the earth and time differences, that means pilgrimages have already been made in Paris to the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, named after the original epicenter where Sylvia Beach published Joyce when others lacked the audacity and vision.
Dublin is already in full celebration swing. Joyce's name is on people’s lips and pillows, from the multiple pubs that have Joycean claims to the lavish Ritz Carlton Powerscourt Hotel’s turn-down service with Joyce quotes this week. Dublin’s James Joyce Center, the Writer’s Museum, and the Literary Pub Crawl all have tributes, and there are special readings and literary walks.
What other gatherings in the world focus on a single author, a single place, and a single day? Back in my college days, I dove into an entire book focused on a single day, but it was Mrs. Dalloway, not Ulysses. Published in 1925, just three years after Ulysses, the novel threaded a different social setting and scope. I don’t know of any Dalloway Days celebrated in the world.
After college, my engaging first job was company-managing theater shows in San Francisco, which meant I participated in the SF opening of a show called James Joyce’s Women, starring the show’s creator, the talented Fiounulla Flanagan, with her husband Dr. Garrett O’Connor. The tour-de-force performances of Molly Bloom and other Joyce females were staged by Burgess Meredith, a theatrical hero.
James Joyce’s Women played to full houses. I would like to think it was the scintillating blend of great acting, superb subject, and sensual language, but it was perhaps the collective crowd’s gasp when Fiounulla appeared in a bed naked that created the buzz.
Life galloped and sauntered in many directions since then, but this past spring, an invitation to Ireland awakened my dormant interest in Joyce. I would be heading to Dublin, a “UNESCO City of Literature,” with its Writer’s Museum, the Long Room of books at Trinity College (a bibliophile mecca), and, yes, the cobblestoned pathways walked by Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Yeats, Jonathan Swift, and James Joyce
I found my annotated copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and picked up Dubliners at the Agoura Hills Library, and proceeded to devour it in two sittings, transported through time and place.
But now I have returned from a very recommendable trip to Ireland, and it is June 16th, and I still have not read Ulysses (despite being allowed to check “college-educated” on forms). This morning, I downloaded Ulysses to my iPhone, for my next transatlantic flight, traveling light with heavy reading. In the palm of my hand, I began: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.”
June 16th in LA was immediately less gloomy.
Happy Bloomsday.
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