fwriction

Happy Bloomsday! For those that don’t know, Bloomsday is celebrated by fans of James Joyce’s Ulysses every year on June 16. Why that day? The novel itself takes place over just one day—June 16, 1904—and follows the adventures of two men, Stephen Dedalus (from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Leopold Bloom (hence the name “Bloomsday”), living in Dublin. Though there has always been controversy surrounding the book, Ulysses is, at heart, a celebration of love and life.

Today’s Story of the Day comes, not from Ulysses, but from Dubliners, Joyce’s collection of short stories, and is one of my all-time favorites (best opening line ever, perhaps):

“She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it — not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field — the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.”

More Bloomsday fun:

“Stream of Conviviality for Leopold Bloom’s Day,” by Amanda Petrusich (from The New York Times)

“The Heirs of Joyce’s Ulysses,” by Joshua Cohen (from The Daily Beast)

A Gotham Bloomsday, from Paper Cuts

Ulysses Censored Yet Again, This Time by Apple, from The New York Times - (Update: Ulysses wins!)

Bloomsday All Over, from the Los Angeles Times

Frank Delaney explores Ulysses, via podcast

Bloomsday 2010, Celebrated Around the World (via The Huffington Post)

Two Women’s Modern Odyssey

A reading of “Eveline,” from the New Haven Review

Bonus story: “Araby,” by James Joyce (from Dubliners)

“Me. And me now.” -James Joyce, Ulysses