![]() ![]() In Oslo, Norway, the Ibsen Museum is offering lectures about Joyce from Joyce scholars. From walking tours cribbed directly from Ulysses, to conversations with the likes of Stephen Fry, to popping by for a Gorgonzola sandwich and glass of Burgundy at Davy Byrne's Pub, the possibilities for merriment are limitless. Nonetheless, people in the Irish city, who have been celebrating Bloomsday since 1954, are tracing Bloom's famous journey with over 40 events today. It's ironic that Ireland's most famous export often complained about his native nation, once calling Dublin "the city of failure, of rancor and unhappiness" in a 1909 letter to a friend. ![]() In the words of The Paris Review's Jonathan Goldman, Bloomsday "can be stately and meticulous or raucous and chaotic-or, somehow, all of the above." Bloomsday, celebrated worldwide, honors Ireland's most famous literary export with Joyce look-alike contests, picnics where the giblets and gizzards and stuffed roast hearts are abundant, and readings. ![]() The holiday draws its name from Ulysses's protagonist, Leopold Bloom, who in the novel embarks on a daylong exploration of Dublin's alleys and avenues, an odyssey depicted in hour-by-hour detail. "History," James Joyce wrote in his magnum opus Ulysses, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." That hasn't stopped bookworms and surly Joyce fanboys alike, though, from celebrating Bloomsday, an event that commemorates the very day depicted in the gargantuan novel, June 16, 1904. ![]()
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