Bloomsday, James Joyce's Ulysses celebration

booksJun 16, 20261172,079

Bloomsday on June 16 marks the single day in 1904 that James Joyce set the action of Ulysses, following Leopold Bloom through Dublin. This year readers and cultural groups in Dublin and internationally staged public readings, guided walks along the novel’s streets, pub performances and exhibitions of Joyce materials, and shared rare 1924, 1929 recordings. Participants reenacted scenes in period costume, libraries and archives displayed manuscript pages and ephemera, and some events paired Ulysses with related works influenced by Joyce. Bloomsday matters because Ulysses, published in 1922, reshaped modernist literature and the holiday turns a famously difficult novel into a live, street-level encounter with literary history.

the samsara enjoyer

@rubot.ie

A friend of mine used to work in a south Dublin wine bar/cafe and he said Bloomsday was by far the worst day he ever worked. “It was like a Hieronymus Bosch painting” He had never seen such levels of adult drunkenness “and there was a ukulele orchestra”

28345d ago

Morag Friel16

Another user, @jennylyons.bsky.social, described it as “Halloween for wankers” 😂 (I hope was ok to share that.)

Mark Dignam MDANT6

In fairness, a Bosch painting is silent…

Anthony Zacharzewski5

Sounds like it's the Irish St Patrick's Day

Rose 🇮🇪🤝🇵🇸3

The ukelele orchestra is not traditional, the rest though? Yeah.

Peadar Dhámhonatóirach3

The first part seems very much in the spirit that Flann O'Brien intended, the second decidedly less so

Temporary Bat2

Huh, apparently my armour of culchiehood has kept the knowledge of what a Bloomsday is from me until now. 😆

Ian Rankin

@ianrankin1.bsky.social

Happy Bloomsday to all those who celebrate it! Here I am with Mr Joyce in Trieste last year…

21445d ago

The Public Domain Review

@publicdomainrev.bsky.social

A happy #Bloomsday to all! Hear Joyce reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in two rare recordings from the 1920s: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/james-joyce-reading-his-work-1924-1929 #Bloomsday2023

8645d ago

BeijingPalmer

@beijingpalmer.bsky.social

time to celebrate Bloomsday by cracking open James Joyce's love letters to his wife for a cosy family read.

9945d ago

Mark Russell4

Reading Ulysses will make your day, but reading those letters will make your hole weak….

Dictionary of Irish Biography

@dib.ie

#BloomsDay. On 10 June 1904 Nora Barnacle first met James Joyce while walking in Nassau St. Dublin. He was supposedly so attracted to her that he walked up and presented himself. Their second meeting was on 16th June, the date immortalised by Joyce in 'Ulysses'. www.dib.ie/biography/ba... #DIBLives

6946d ago

Matthew Dowd

@matthewjdowd.bsky.social

Today is Bloomsday, "celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, day is named after Leopold Bloom, protagonist of Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses, the events of which take place on Thursday, 16 June 1904." “Think you're escaping & run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

8545d ago

TeeBo14

A friend of mine likes to say. “Wherever you go, there you are!” Good Tuesday morning 🤠

Simon Knott

@simoninsuffolk.bsky.social

It's Bloomsday, the day on which the events of James Joyce's Ulysses take place, 16 June 1904. My dad's copy of Ulysses, which I took with me when I left home in 1980. It remains for me the greatest novel written in the English language.

8145d ago

Simon Knott10

2/3 A plaque on the former Shakespeare & Company bookshop, 12 Rue de l'Odéon, Paris. Ulysses was published here on Joyce's birthday in 1922. Sylvia Beach was an American so the shop remained open at the start of WWII, but closed after the USA entered the war, and did not reopen.

piers-allan.bsky.social3

I must have a 5th go at trying to finish it.

Anja Bogger2

I'm on train to Gatwick to fly to Dublin for the great day itself...so excited

meconism.bsky.social2

I read a little every night, joyous literature.

Project Gutenberg

@gutenberg.org

Let's celebrate, today is Bloomsday! Read the whole article in our June newsletter: www.gutenberg.org/newsletter/ Ulysses by James Joyce at PG: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300 #Books #Literature

First edition of Ulysses by James Joyce, published by Paris-Shakespeare, 1922. The colour of the cover was meant to match the blue of the Greek flag.

Plain Aegean-blue cover with white serif lettering: "ULYSSES / by / JAMES JOYCE" — the iconic first edition cover (Paris, Shakespeare and Company, 1922.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)#/media/File:JoyceUlysses2.jpg

4045d ago

David Atkinson

@davidatkinsonpoet.bsky.social

Today is Bloomsday This poem is one of my own that was published a while ago on ‘The Dublin Poetry Map’ If you haven’t read Ulysses, read it. If you have started to read it but never finished it, finish it Bloomsday - the day that refuses to stay ordinary #poetry #poemoftheday #haiku #bloomsday

poem - 'Bloomsday Haiku'

one of those days when
you should have pulled the duvet
back over your head

4944d ago

Jaime Hylton, Hodophile, Orophile, Librocubicularist3

I’ve had a duvet day or two in my time. 😉 Happy Bloomsday, David! Here’s a photo from my delightful visit to Dublin.

Eileen Jones2

I tried. I really did…

Citizen.Coping

@propcazhpm.bsky.social

For #BloomsDay, sharing the first novel written by Richard Wright in 1935 (but pub. 1963), Lawd Today! Influenced by Ulysses, Lawd Today! chronicles one day in the life of Jake Jackson, a Black postal worker in Depression-era Chicago. But it incorporates news bulletins, songs, and wordplay. #Lit

Lawd Today (Hardcover)
WRIGHT, Richard

First Edition of Lawd Today! written by African American author Richard Wright Published by Walker and Company, New York, 1963.
Book jacket text:
Richard Wright
untiL the tIME of his death in 1960. Richard Wright *was generally accounted the most gifted living American Negro writer". His most famous novels, NATIVE SON and BLACK BOY, had already gained a secure place as classics of Twentieth Century American fiction and allhis work had become internationally famous
The posthumous publication of a new Richard Wright novel is, therefore an event of some literary significance. LAWD TODAY was written before the publication of NATIVE SON had established Richard Wright as a major novelist. Although differ- ent in setting and treatment, LAWD TODAY displays the same harsh, unsentimental real ism, the same fierce concern for the plight of the American Negro, as the later novel, Quite simply, LAWD TODAY traces a single heartbreaking day inthe life of Jake Jackson, a postal clerk in depresion-ridden Chicago. Jake is not an admirable man, not even a
pleasant one, but before his nightmarish odyssey is done, the reader sees all too clearly that society has given Jake Jackson. like Bigger Thomas, no alternative.
LAWD TODAY is a brilliant and bitter novel. The recreation of Take's sordid world is complete--its ideas, its values. its economic and social realities, its superstitions and its lusts. Unfortunately, it is a world which with only superficial changes, continues to exist in many parts of present-day America,

2945d ago

Jeff Goodell

@jeffgoodell.bsky.social

In Dublin a few weeks ago for book festival, I saw a few pages of the manuscript of Ulysses. It looked a lot like my daughter's 3rd grade workbook. #bloomsday

3445d ago

Dr. Genevieve Guenther (she/they)3

This makes me feel a lot better about some of my early drafts lol.

Kieran Healy

@kjhealy.co

Happy Bloomsday everyone. Here is Joyce (though in Finnegans Wake, not Ulysses) explaining why we ended up with a cage fight on the White House lawn the other night.

1䒑ー
exaspirated, letters be blowed! I is a femaline person. O, of provocative gender. U unisingular case.
Which is why trumpers are mixed up in duels and here's B.
Rohan meets N. Ohlan for the prize of a thou.

3644d ago

Alina Stefanescu

@alinaetc.bsky.social

And happy bloomsday to the J who has migrated from our bedroom to the kitchen over the course and corsair of the past year!

3444d ago

Ben Gross

@bhgross144.bsky.social

“Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It’ll probably reach you in time." -Ernest Hemingway describes #Ulysses in a March 1922 letter to Sherwood Anderson Happy #Bloomsday, everyone! (This Al Hirschfeld caricature is from @ransomcenter.bsky.social's art collection.) #BookSky #modernism 🗃️📜🎨📚

Al Hirschfeld
Caricature of Ernest Hemingway (Gouache on board), 1950
Ernest Hemingway Art Collection
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin

The image depicts Ernest Hemingway in a green open-necked shirt, seated at a table, reading James Joyce's Ulysses, and stubbing a cigarette out in a Stork Club ashtray.

2445d ago

Ben Wurgaft

@benwurgaft.bsky.social

Stately plump Buck Mulligan descended from the stairhead having committed exactly these words to memory Happy Bloomsday Everyone!

2744d ago

3 sources

pca.stUlysses - James Joyce themadridreview.substack.comThe Cinema James Joyce Built conradbrunstrom.wordpress.comHow the Grinch stole Bloomsday. By Dr Pseud.

Bloomsday, James Joyce's Ulysses celebrationbooks

Bloomsday, James Joyce's Ulysses celebration

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