Bloomsday is June 16th and it is an annual celebration of the day that James Joyce’s Ulysses’ takes place. The book’s protagonist is Leopold Bloom.
I grew up with this Berenice Abbott portrait of James Joyce. A framed print of it was in one of the bathrooms (we actually had 3) of my family’s apartment. Before I knew who James Joyce or Ulysses was, I thought he was a relative or an old family friend.
Why not? We had a portrait of him in the bathroom.
My father was a bit of a Joyce afficianado and of course they both loved photography.
For a couple of years my friend Michele Madigan Sommerville organized a Bloomsday reading at Ciol, a pub on Smith Street. It wasn’t a start to finish reading of Ulysses (all 265,000 words (like they do at Symphony Space) but a reading of various exceprts and it lasted a few hours and was accompanied by mugs of beer and the like.
This year on June 16th there will be a Bloomsday in Brooklyn pub crawl. There will be Irish music, readings from Ulysses at every stop, as well as food and drink. Even the Old Stone House is getting in on the act! The other participating pubs and non-pubs are: