Petrified Truth: Today is Bloomsday 2004

June 16, 2004

Today is Bloomsday 2004

A century, and an age, ago -- on June 16, 1904 -- Leopold Bloom, a good man who never existed, spent an extraordinary 24 hours in Dublin, Ireland, and thereby birthed the modern novel. People around the world will celebrate this day as James Joyce's Bloomsday.

Poet Ezra Pound made a pilgrimmage to Zurich in 1967 to visit the grave of his old friend James Joyce.
##########

As noted last year in the Sydney Morning Herald:

There are many puzzles attached to James Joyce's Ulysses, not the least of which is its reputation of being unreadable. It might be the greatest novel in the English language, so it goes, but who can read it?
For those who can, there is no puzzle: Joyce's account of one day in the life of his antihero, Leopold Bloom, is as spellbinding as the entire history of Odysseus's journeys during the Trojan wars in Homer's Odyssey, on which it is loosely modelled.

The spell is first cast by Ulysses' virtuosic language. Rich in puns, invented words and literary and mythological allusion, it is like a new kind of "reading-music" playing in one's head, scored from some long-forgotten memory bank. Homer might have given us "the wine-dark sea", but Joyce gives us the deep, dark night sky, "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit". Heavenspeech in the awkward, broken accents of earth, as one critic described it.

Or it could be his equally virtuosic use of stream-of-consciousness narrative, where characters' thoughts can begin each to their own self, then collapse and meld together into the storytelling, creating a multiple world of being and sensation. Whatever the spell's first cause, nevertheless it has sustained Ulysses' reputation as being the book that changed the novel forever.

The riddles of Ulysses - its allusions, meanings, characters - have kept scholars busy for the past 80 years since its publication in 1922; if Joyce has his way, they will for centuries to come. He claimed to have filled Ulysses with enough enigmas to keep "the critics busy for the next 300 years".

Listen to James Joyce himself read an excerpt from Ulysses, as recorded by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co., and first publisher of the great book.

UPDATE:
Unfortunately, there is some scary Bloomsday news. Is nothing sacred?

The first ever computer virus that can infect mobile phones has been discovered, anti-virus software developers said today, adding that it has the potential to render many phones virtually useless.
The French unit of the Russian security software developer Kaspersky Labs said that that virus - called Bloomsday - appears to have been developed by an international group specialising in creating literary viruses that try to "show illiterate technophiles the power of the written word."

"I was really freaked out when I turned on my phone and found this convoluted narrative mess crawling across my screen," said Jack Clemson, a University of Washington student who owns one of the first known infected phones. ""Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed…" I was pretty sure that wasn't my girlfriend texting me about lunch."