Product Code Database
Bloomsday (Irish language: Lá Bloom) is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June. The day is named after Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses, the events of which take place on Thursday, 16 June 1904. Joyce chose to set his novel on this date as it was the date of his first sexual encounter with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle.
On the 50th anniversary of the events in the novel, a Wednesday in 1954, John Ryan (artist, critic, publican and founder of Envoy magazine) and the novelist Brian O'Nolan organised what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the Ulysses route. They were joined by Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Tom Joyce (a dentist who, as Joyce's cousin, represented the family interest) and A. J. Leventhal (a lecturer in French at Trinity College Dublin). Ryan had engaged two horse-drawn cabs, of the old-fashioned kind, in which in Ulysses Bloom and his friends drive to Paddy Dignam's funeral. The party were assigned roles from the novel. Cronin stood in for Stephen Dedalus, O'Nolan for his father Simon Dedalus, Ryan for the journalist Martin Cunningham, and Leventhal, being Jewish, was recruited to fill (unknown to him, according to Ryan) the role of Leopold Bloom. They planned to travel round the city through the day, starting at the Martello tower at Sandycove (where the novel begins), visiting in turn the scenes of the novel, ending at night in what had once been the brothel quarter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Nighttown. The pilgrimage was abandoned halfway through, when the weary pilgrims succumbed to inebriation and rancour at the Bailey pub in the city centre, which Ryan then owned, and at which in 1967 he installed the door to 7 Eccles Street (Leopold Bloom's front door), having rescued it from demolition. A Bloomsday record of 1954, informally filmed by Ryan, follows this pilgrimage.Link to an account of this day: An account of the first Bloomsday
The James Joyce Tower and Museum at Sandycove, site of the opening chapter of Ulysses, hosts many free activities around Bloomsday including theatrical performances, musical events, tours of the iconic tower and readings from Joyce's masterpiece.
"Every year hundreds of Dubliners dress as characters from the book ... as if to assert their willingness to become one with the text. It is quite impossible to imagine any other masterpiece of modernism having quite such an effect on the life of a city."
On Bloomsday 1982, the centenary year of Joyce's birth, Irish state broadcaster RTÉ transmitted a continuous 30-hour dramatic performance of the entire text of Ulysses on radio.
A five-month-long festival, ReJoyce Dublin 2004, took place in Dublin between 1 April and 31 August 2004. On the Sunday before the 100th "anniversary" of the fictional events described in the book, 10,000 people in Dublin were treated to a free, open-air, full Full breakfast on O'Connell Street consisting of , Bacon, toast, , and black pudding and .
The 2006 Bloomsday festivities were cancelled, the day coinciding with the funeral of Charles Haughey.
Philadelphia – The Rosenbach Museum & Library is home to Joyce's handwritten manuscript of Ulysses. The museum first celebrated Bloomsday in 1992, with readings by actors and scholars at the Borders in Center City Philadelphia. The following June 16th, it began the tradition of closing the 2000-block of Delancey Street for a Bloomsday street festival. In addition to dozens of readers, often including Philadelphia's mayor, singers from the Academy of Vocal Arts perform songs that are integral to the novel's plot. Traditional Irish cuisine is provided by local Irish-themed . In 2014, the Rosenbach's Bloomsday festival went on the road, with two hours of readings at the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, an hour of readings at Rittenhouse Square, and concluded with five hours of readings on the steps of the museum, at 2008–10 Delancey Street. Bloomsday Festival 2014 from the Rosenbach Museum & Library.
New York City – New York has several events on Bloomsday including formal readings at Symphony Space and informal readings and music at the downtown Ulysses' Folk House pub. The Irish American Bar Association of New York celebrates Joyce's contribution to the First Amendment, with an annual keynote speech named after John Quinn, the Irish-American lawyer who defended Joyce's New York publishers in their obscenity trial in 1922. In 2014, New York celebrated Bloomsday with "Bloomsday on Broadway," which includes famous actors reading excerpts of the books, and commentators explaining the work between segments. The 2016 celebration includes a juried competition for the Best Dressed Molly and Leopold Bloom, selected from among attendees by a blue-ribbon panel including image strategist Margaret Molloy several design figures. Joycean costumes to be celebrated this Bloomsday in New York, Irishcentral.com, 5 June 2016
Los Angeles – Each year Bloomsday is celebrated at the Hammer Museum with readings, music and libations.
Kansas City, Missouri – The Kansas City Irish Center currently hosts the Bloomsday celebration, started at the now closed Bloomsday Books in 1995. Usually a day long event, the center hosts readings, a documentary, a play, Irish dancers and a performance by Dublin balladeer Eddie Delahunt. This has been an annual event since its inception.
Syracuse, New York – The Syracuse James Joyce Club holds an annual Bloomsday celebration at Johnston's BallyBay Pub, at which large portions of the book are either read aloud, or presented as dramatisations by costumed performers.
Wichita, Kansas – Bloomsday is honoured by a presentation on James Joyce (often by Dr. Marguerite Regan) as well as readings from Ulysses and Irish folk music, sponsored by the Wichita Irish Cultural Association.
Portland, Maine – Readings from Ulysses at the Maine Irish Heritage Center, corner of Gray and State Streets.
Tulsa, Oklahoma – The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, Booksmart Tulsa, and the Guthrie Green began an annual Bloomsday pub crawl in the Brady Arts District of downtown Tulsa in 2014. Annual Bloomsday event to celebrate James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. Tulsaworld.com, Jun 14, 2016
Phoenix, Arizona – the Irish Cultural Center and McClelland Library sponsor a weekend Annual Bloomin' Beerfest with live Irish music, a costume contest, and live readings.
Bloomsday in Melbourne has a proud history of engagement with the work of James Joyce. Since 1994, a committee of Joyceansnow known as 'Bloomsday in Melbourne'has read and re-read Joyce and mounted theatrical events designed to communicate the joy of Joyce to its loyal patrons. In 2019 Bloomsday in Melbourne mounted a production of Tom Stoppard Travesties at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne. In 2020, Bloomsday in Melbourne created an online series of eighteen short films, corresponding to each of the episodes of Ulysses. The films featured well-known Australian actor Max Gillies. In 2021, Bloomsday in Melbourne announced that it was to present Love's Bitter Mystery: the year that made James Joyce, as an 'intense immersive theatrical experience' at Melbourne's Villa Alba in Kew, Victoria. The play, written by Bloomsday in Melbourne's Steve Carey, focuses on a key period in the young James Joyce's life, between his first failed exile in Paris in 1902 and his departure for Europe in September 1904.
Since 2006 Bloomsday has been celebrated every year in Genoa, with a reading of Ulysses in Italian by volunteers (students, actors, teachers, scholars), starting at 0900 and finishing in the early hours of 17 June; the readings take place in 18 different places in the old town centre, one for each episode of the novel, and these places are selected for their resemblance to the original settings. Thus for example "Telemachus" has been read in a medieval tower or on a terrace overlooking the port, "Nestor" in a classroom of the Faculty of Languages, "Proteus" in a bookshop on the waterfront, "Scylla and Charybdis" in the University Library, and "Cyclops" in an old pub. The Genoa Bloomsday is organised by the Faculty of Languages and the International Genoa Poetry Festival.
In 1956, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were married by special licence of the Archbishop of Canterbury at St George the Martyr Church, Holborn, on 16 June, in honour of Bloomsday.
Pat Conroy's 2009 novel South of Broad has numerous references to Bloomsday. Leopold Bloom King is the narrator. The book's first chapter describes the events of 16 June 1969 in Leo's story.
In the novel by Enrique Vila-Matas Dublinesca (2010), part of the action takes place in Dublin for Bloomsday. The book's main protagonist, Riba, a retired Spanish editor, moves to this city with several writer friends to officiate a "funeral" for the Gutenberg era.
American playwright Steven Dietz's 2015 play, Bloomsday, features an American man returning to Dublin in search of a woman he met on a Ulysses tour years earlier. The play premiered at ACT Theatre in Seattle, WA. It received the 2016 Steinberg New Play Award Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association. It has been widely produced in the United States.
Richard Linklater alludes to Ulysses in two of his films. In 1991's Slacker, a character reads an excerpt from Ulysses after convincing his friends to dump a tent and a typewriter in a river as a response to a prior lover's infidelity. The film also takes place over a 24-hour period. In 1995's Before Sunrise, events take place on 16 June.
A 2009 episode of the cartoon The Simpsons, "In the Name of the Grandfather", featured the family's trip to Dublin and Lisa Simpson reference to Bloomsday.
The Sensual World/Flower of the Mountain is a song by English singer-songwriter Kate Bush using words taken from Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses.
U2's 2009 song "Breathe" refers to events taking place on a fictitious 16 June.
Dublin band Fontaines D.C.’s song “Bloomsday” from their 2022 album “Skinty Fia” also references the holiday.
Native American alt-folk musician Samantha Crain released a single named after Bloomsday in 2021.
|
|
