Icky organs, Ulysses and more - it’s Bloomsday

Icky organs, Ulysses and more - it’s Bloomsday

Have you had your icky organs for breakfast? You have? Well done. Enjoy the rest of Bloomsday. If not, there’s still time to get into the spirit. The James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street in Dublin city centre, is serving “a traditional full-Irish Bewley’s Bloomsday Breakfast, complete with all the Ulyssean fare you’ve come to expect - yes, icky inner organs and all”.Leopold Bloom, as all schoolchildren know from studying their Ulysses, had a thing about kidneys at breakfast. “And as you eat with relish and savour the fine tang of the grub,” promises the centre, “our troupe of Joycean players will serve up a platter of scenes from Joyce’s masterpiece.” The Promenade Café in Dún Laoghaire promises “a Special Leopold Bloom Breakfast!” and in Bray, there will be what is billed as “general merriment” as the local branch of Superquinn hosts a buffet, with the Royal Hotel serving Joycean afternoon teas. Ulysses famously celebrates a single day, there is a special appropriateness in the fact that the book will - for the first time - be read in its entirety around the world in one day today. The reading is vivid testimony to the book’s now almost global appeal: the Dublin James Joyce Centre, where the idea originated, had no difficulty in finding reading groups around the world who were eager to take part. The event is part of the Gathering festival and its formal title is the Global Bloomsday Gathering. Some 15 countries and 26 cities will be involved, starting, “in the track of the sun”, in Auckland, New Zealand and extending geographically to San Francisco at the most westerly point. The event started at 9pm Irish time on Saturday, June 15th, which will be 8am on June 16th in Auckland (the time the book begins). It is expected to end about 3.30am Irish time tomorrow. While the time taken to read will of course exceed the length of a single day in any one place it will still all be happening on Bloomsday in the different cities where the book is to be read. The participating cities are Auckland, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Moscow, Pula (Croatia), Zurich, Trieste, Bangor (Wales), Dublin, Paris, Derry, Cork, London, New York, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago, Sao Paulo and Santa Maria (Brazil). The Dublin reading will come from the James Joyce Centre and the National Library where readers will include writers Joe O’Connor, John Boyne and Declan Hughes, Impac award-winner Kevin Barry, actor Frank Kelly and musician John Sheahan. Novelist Colum McCann will be involved in the New York event. In other Bloomsday shenanigans, there will be a James Joyce lookalike world record attempt today, while St Werburgh’s Church on Werburgh Street will host the Dublin premier of Bloomsday Story by Robert Gogan. This lighthearted approach will rattle through the whole book in the space of 100 minutes. There will be a series of readings from Joyce at the Meeting House Square in Temple Bar and a number of other events in the area.



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