Celebrating the life and work of James Joyce
What are your plans for Bloomsday? Over on Twitter, they're urging us to eat "ghastly things for breakfast". I'm not sure I can be tempted to start the day with "the inner organs of beasts and fowls ... thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes", but I could easily be persuaded into a pint later on. "I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click." It might only be ten o'clock but I'm thirsty already - yes, I said yes, I will, yes.
Today is Bloomsday, an anniversary rejoycing the life and work of writer James Joyce. It is not Joyce's birthday, mind you, but the day on which his magnum opus Ulysses is set: 16 June 1904.
So! Whether you're planning to reacquaint yourself with the Irish writer's prose - the sprawling modernist mess that is Ulysses (?) - or perhaps just joining in the spirit of celebration, here are a few links that might help get you in the mood:
- Bloomsday: James Joyce Quiz at The Guardian
- Bloomin' Marvellous! Joyce and Trieste.
- Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living
- Mark Harkin, 'James Joyce's Ulysses - why the fuss?'
- Rare Recording of James Joyce reading
- Bloomsday at Wikipedia.org
- Will Self: Psychogeography, 'The People's Joyce' in The Independent
- Bloomsday Listings at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin
- James Joyce: Literary Criticism (Courtesy of ReadySteadyBook)
- John Kidd, 'The Scandal of Ulysses' in the New York Review of Books
- Richard Ellmann, 'The Big Word in Ulysses' in the New York Review of Books
- Declan Kiberd. 'Ulysses, modernism's most sociable masterpiece' in The Guardian
- Twitter takes on Ulysses (from The Independent)
- PoMo Month: James Joyce and Jacques Derrida in the Los Angeles Times
I don't know about you, but the spirit of my celebration is taking the form of a cold glass of Guinness.
