Friday, June 16, 2006

BLOOMSDAY

June 16 is the annual BLOOMSDAY.

{excerpt}

James Joyce called Dublin the "center of paralysis," and complained in a letter:


"How sick, sick, sick I am of Dublin! It is the city of failure, of rancor and of unhappiness. I long to be out of it." (22 August 1909)



He spent the last thirty years of his life in exile, settling for periods in Trieste, Rome, Zurich, Paris -- anywhere but Dublin.

It is a much remarked-upon irony that his masterpiece Ulysses is not only set in Dublin, but never allows us to forget it. The novel recounts the hour-by-hour events of one day in Dublin -- June 16, 1904 -- as an ordinary Dubliner, Leopold Bloom, wends his way through the urban landscape, the odyssey of a modern-day Ulysses. . . .


{continues about Bloomsday round the world at link above}

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