Thursday, June 17, 2004
It's Bloomsday.
Today is Bloomsday, a day to celebrate James Joyce's novel Ulysses, whose action takes place on June 16th, 1904. It's called Bloomsday because the main character in the book is Leopold Bloom, a Jewish ad salesman who lives on the north side of Dublin.
At one point he gazes across the sand at a young woman, while fireworks go off over the ocean. Joyce wrote: "And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin . . . and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back he had a full view high up above her knee . . . and she wasn't ashamed and he wasn't either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn't resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. . . . And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!"
This year is the centennial of Bloomsday, and there are official Bloomsday festivities in more than sixty countries around the world. Some of the most notable celebrations are in Tokyo, Sydney, San Francisco, Paris, Toronto, Buffalo and New York City—but the biggest celebration is always in Dublin. Today, June 16th, thousands of people will retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom as he made his way through the streets and pubs of Dublin.
(from MPR's Writer's Almanac)
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