wake | good puzzle would be to cross dublin without passing a pub

Good Puzzle Would Be To Cross
Dublin Without Passing a Pub
by Marta Herschkopf

June 16, 2002: My first official Bloomsday. In honor of the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place, my twin sister and I plan to attend a showcase of readings, recitations, and lectures on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When the time comes to actually hop on the subway, though, we balk. For one thing, The Shawshank Redemption is on TV, and for another, while we worship Ulysses in principle, we suddenly realize that we have never actually opened the book. Thus, my first official Bloomsday celebration consists of a shot of Bailey's and reading the first page of Ulysses, chuckling at "the scrotumtightening sea" (I: 78).² That night, my sister and I vow that the following summer, we will celebrate Bloomsday as it was meant to be celebrated.
June 16, 2003, 8:00 am: I wake up in my bed and breakfast on Lower Gardiner Street in Dublin. My sister and I are in the midst of our own literary tour of the British Isles, timed specifically to coincide with Bloomsday. We have the guidebooks, we have the maps, and we have a full greasy breakfast waiting for us. We have even read the book (well, most of it anyway). At 9:00 a.m., we step out the front door to begin a day devoted to the exaltation of James Joyce.
On June 16, 1904, a chambermaid and a writer "stepped out" in Dublin. They had met six days before on June 10, and the maid had stood up the writer for their first date on June 15. Nevertheless, he had persisted, and, the following day, succeeded. The chambermaid's name was Nora Barnacle, and the writer was James Joyce. Within a year, they would leave Dublin together, and eventually marry.
Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922, is set entirely on that fateful date. It is a meticulous account of the life of two characters, Stephen Daedalus, a tortured student/writer, and Leopold Bloom, a Jewish adman. The book is divided into 18 episodes, named for people and events in Homer's Odyssey, each comprising roughly one hour of the day. Every episode also has its own distinct narrative style, from sentimental romance to Platonic dialogue to train-of-thought monologue, in addition to recurring motifs, such as colors, organs, and technical skills.
Joyce once said that if Dublin were ever destroyed, the whole of it could be reconstructed from his works. In Ulysses, he faithfully renders streets, landmarks, and houses. He even had a friend with the same measurements as his protagonist go to the fictional Bloom's actual address in Dublin, 7 Eccles Street, to verify that he could jump into the gutter by the front door without breaking his neck, as Bloom himself does towards the end of the book. Ironically, like most of Joyce's works, Ulysses was not written while Joyce was in Dublin. Spending much of his life self-exiled in Trieste, Paris, and Zürich, Joyce relied on friends and Thom's Dublin Dictionary to recreate the streets of his youth.
Bloomsday is as much a celebration of Dublin as it is of the life and works of James Joyce. It is observed all over the world, from Sarasota to Melbourne but, understandably, the greatest celebration is in Dublin itself. The first official commemoration of Bloomsday was on June 16, 1954. However, according to Robert Nicholson, curator of the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove and author of The Ulysses Guide: Tours Through Joyce's Dublin, "at the time, the Irish considered Bloomsday to be for American professors."³
Bloomsday first gained widespread popularity in 1982, the centenary of Joyce's birth. On this Bloomsday, the entire "Wandering Rocks" episode, which follows scores of characters taking different paths around the city, was reenacted by actors and city officials. The Lord Mayor himself took part, riding in a carriage to play the viceroy in his cavalcade. "People were very much exposed to the joys of Ulysses that year," Nicholson recalled.4 Bloomsday soon became a city-wide event. Today, Dubliners and tourists alike dress-up in Georgian costume and spend the day visiting the haunts of Bloom and Stephen: pubs, restaurants, bars, and pubs.
Invariably, there are the select few who not only have read the book, but who also actually try to reenact, in their entirety, the actual steps taken by the characters. My sister and I were two such eccentrics. As the rest of Dublin gathered at various hotels to replicate Bloom's breakfast of roast pork kidney (washed down with several pints Guinness, of course), we were trekking to 7 Eccles Street to begin our faithful homage to Bloom.
We learned several things that day. First, Dublin has changed quite a bit since 1904. The whole of Bloom's block was leveled in 1982 to make room for Mater Private Hospital. A bronze plaque hangs at the site of #7, while the actual door is on display at the nearby James Joyce center. Second, it is practically impossible to reenact Bloom's journey. Bloom does not go on a leisurely stroll, but literally traverses the city by foot, coach, and train, for a total of 18 miles. Traffic flow and changes in street names and layouts make it difficult, even on bicycle, to do the entire thing.
Nevertheless, we persisted. We "crossed to the bright side" (U 4:77) of the street and made our way across the river Liffey to Westland Row, where we encountered the Ballonatics, an acting troupe who reenacted several scenes from Ulysses that day. The actor portraying Bloom went through the entirety of the "Lotus Eaters" episode, which begins at 9:45 a.m. We trailed him as he picked up a letter for "Henry Flower, Esq." from the post office, attended a church sermon, and bought lemon scented soap at Sweeny's Chemists. At this point in the book, Bloom attends a funeral service in the North of the city. As this chapter transpires within a moving street car, my sister and I skipped to the next two episodes, which take place in Bloom's newspaper office and along O'Connell Street in the city center.
This particular part of Bloom's path is one of the most detailed accounts in Joyce's book, and has thus become a well-traveled tourist trail, with several plaques along the way. Nevertheless, we were shocked to discover that no one was standing homage at the Joyce statue by the river Liffey. After reading a short passage from the funeral chapter, we crossed O'Connell bridge where a girl "placed a throwaway in a hand" (U 8:6) of ours (this one advertised Dublin Bus tours), which I promptly formed into "a crumpled paper ball" (U 8: 57) and tossed into the Liffey. We then lifted up our pinkies so that "the tip of [our] little finger blotted out the sun's disk" (U 8:566), and made our way to Davy Byrne's pub. Bloom's lunch spot is a popular destination for throngs of celebrants eating gorgonzola cheese sandwiches washed down with burgundy, all ridiculously overpriced.
We reconstructed various other parts of Bloom's trail, and then caught a bus to Sandycove, a suburb of Dublin where the book begins. This location is semi-autobiographical, as Joyce himself lived in the Martello stone tower that Stephen inhabits with the infuriating Buck Mulligan, based on Joyce's friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. However, while in the book Mulligan is the perpetual uninvited guest of Stephen, in reality Joyce was free-loading off of Gogarty.
Mulligan's "snotgreen sea" (I: 78) sparkled in the afternoon sun, as inhabitants of the beachfront town gathered to sunbathe and celebrate. In the town itself, bars were crowded with costumed revelers, shops displayed period dress, and old motor cars lined the streets. The tower was opened as a museum on Bloomsday 1962 by Sylvia Beach, Joyce's publisher. It is furnished as described in the book, complete with "a black panther" (U 1: 57) that one of Stephen's friends imagines in the fireplace. There, we interviewed the curator, Nicholson, who autographed our guidebook. Climbing to the roof, we participated in an impromptu reading of "Nausicaa", an episode in which Bloom watches a young girl and her friends. This episode takes place on another beach, Sandymount Strand, which we passed on a commuter train back to town.
We visited the Ormond Hotel, a popular Bloomsday spot for mid-afternoon drinking, and ended the day with a series of readings in Wynn's Hotel, performed by tipsy professionals and amateurs alike. One man opted instead to read a picture book about the devil and kitty cats. Before turning in, we decided to pay a visit to "Nighttown," the red-light district infamous throughout Europe until 1925, when it was raided by the Irish police. In "Circe," the longest episode of the book, Bloom and Stephen patronize Bella Cohen's brothel, and have a series of hallucinations. While the brothels are gone, the spot "remains one of Dublin's danger areas where street crime is common," according to our guidebook.⁵ We arrived at the taxi stand marking the area's entrance at 11:30 pm, and then crossed the street to our bed and breakfast. How convenient.
Our Bloomsday was a relatively tame one, as most die-hard Joyceans are waiting for Bloomsday 2004, which marks the 100th anniversary of the original Bloomsday. Festivities such as another large-scale "Wandering Rocks" recreation are already in the works. The biennial James Joyce Symposium will be held in Dublin for the first time in 12 years, and one huge celebratory breakfast is planned. True, these events have happened before, but Nicholson admitted that for elaborate Bloomsday celebrations "it's kind of dificult to pull out more stops."⁶
Elsewhere, there are other options. Major and not so major international cities hold their own Bloomsday celebrations. Various cities in Ireland, such as Galway, Nora Barnacle's birthplace, sponsor smaller-scale celebrations. The James Joyce Society hosts gallery shows, readings, and concerts year-round in New York City, with a peak concentration of events around the time of Bloomsday. Seville is a city new to hosting Bloomsday celebrations, but in recent years, Spanish Joyceans have gathered to read passages aloud and then indulge in kidneys and Guinness in an Irish pub. And in San Diego, Guinness-lovers in Georgian costume gather at "The Ould Sod" pub for a double-decker bus pub crawl (with several kegs in tow for those long stretches in between).
While reading Ulysses may always remain an esoteric accomplishment of academics and overly-ambitious students, through Bloomsday, Joyce's literary achievements and cultural inspirations are made accessible to those who just like a good pint. After all, Ulysses is hardly stuffy high literature. It includes plenty of naughty bits, from a monologue by a dyspeptic sailor, complete with sound effects, to a schoolgirl's impromptu peep-show for an appreciative Bloom. One reading I attended consisted entirely of passages related to bowel movements, while another recreated the complete Catholic Mass in Joycean pun-satire. The book encompasses all locations in Dublin, from the National Library to Nighttown, and characters from all walks of life. On Bloomsday, my sister and I encountered Irish bartenders, American truck drivers, Australian journalists, and Japanese college students. So spend the day obsessively tailing a fictional character or wallowing in a sordid pub; each activity is a fitting homage to Joyce's all-embracing celebration of life and Dublin.


Good Puzzle Would Be To Cross Dublin Without Passing a Pub by Marta Herschkopf

June 16, 2002: My first official Bloomsday. In honor of the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place, my twin sister and I plan to attend a showcase of readings, recitations, and lectures on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When the time comes to actually hop on the subway, though, we balk. For one thing, The Shawshank Redemption is on TV, and for another, while we worship Ulysses in principle, we suddenly realize that we have never actually opened the book. Thus, my first official Bloomsday celebration consists of a shot of Bailey's and reading the first page of Ulysses, chuckling at "the scrotumtightening sea" (I: 78).² That night, my sister and I vow that the following summer, we will celebrate Bloomsday as it was meant to be celebrated. June 16, 2003, 8:00 am: I wake up in my bed and breakfast on Lower Gardiner Street in Dublin. My sister and I are in the midst of our own literary tour of the British Isles, timed specifically to coincide with Bloomsday. We have the guidebooks, we have the maps, and we have a full greasy breakfast waiting for us. We have even read the book (well, most of it anyway). At 9:00 a.m., we step out the front door to begin a day devoted to the exaltation of James Joyce. On June 16, 1904, a chambermaid and a writer "stepped out" in Dublin. They had met six days before on June 10, and the maid had stood up the writer for their first date on June 15. Nevertheless, he had persisted, and, the following day, succeeded. The chambermaid's name was Nora Barnacle, and the writer was James Joyce. Within a year, they would leave Dublin together, and eventually marry. Joyce's Ulysses, published in 1922, is set entirely on that fateful date. It is a meticulous account of the life of two characters, Stephen Daedalus, a tortured student/writer, and Leopold Bloom, a Jewish adman. The book is divided into 18 episodes, named for people and events in Homer's Odyssey, each comprising roughly one hour of the day. Every episode also has its own distinct narrative style, from sentimental romance to Platonic dialogue to train-of-thought monologue, in addition to recurring motifs, such as colors, organs, and technical skills. Joyce once said that if Dublin were ever destroyed, the whole of it could be reconstructed from his works. In Ulysses, he faithfully renders streets, landmarks, and houses. He even had a friend with the same measurements as his protagonist go to the fictional Bloom's actual address in Dublin, 7 Eccles Street, to verify that he could jump into the gutter by the front door without breaking his neck, as Bloom himself does towards the end of the book. Ironically, like most of Joyce's works, Ulysses was not written while Joyce was in Dublin. Spending much of his life self-exiled in Trieste, Paris, and Zürich, Joyce relied on friends and Thom's Dublin Dictionary to recreate the streets of his youth. Bloomsday is as much a celebration of Dublin as it is of the life and works of James Joyce. It is observed all over the world, from Sarasota to Melbourne but, understandably, the greatest celebration is in Dublin itself. The first official commemoration of Bloomsday was on June 16, 1954. However, according to Robert Nicholson, curator of the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove and author of The Ulysses Guide: Tours Through Joyce's Dublin, "at the time, the Irish considered Bloomsday to be for American professors."³ Bloomsday first gained widespread popularity in 1982, the centenary of Joyce's birth. On this Bloomsday, the entire "Wandering Rocks" episode, which follows scores of characters taking different paths around the city, was reenacted by actors and city officials. The Lord Mayor himself took part, riding in a carriage to play the viceroy in his cavalcade. "People were very much exposed to the joys of Ulysses that year," Nicholson recalled.4 Bloomsday soon became a city-wide event. Today, Dubliners and tourists alike dress-up in Georgian costume and spend the day visiting the haunts of Bloom and Stephen: pubs, restaurants, bars, and pubs. Invariably, there are the select few who not only have read the book, but who also actually try to reenact, in their entirety, the actual steps taken by the characters. My sister and I were two such eccentrics. As the rest of Dublin gathered at various hotels to replicate Bloom's breakfast of roast pork kidney (washed down with several pints Guinness, of course), we were trekking to 7 Eccles Street to begin our faithful homage to Bloom. We learned several things that day. First, Dublin has changed quite a bit since 1904. The whole of Bloom's block was leveled in 1982 to make room for Mater Private Hospital. A bronze plaque hangs at the site of #7, while the actual door is on display at the nearby James Joyce center. Second, it is practically impossible to reenact Bloom's journey. Bloom does not go on a leisurely stroll, but literally traverses the city by foot, coach, and train, for a total of 18 miles. Traffic flow and changes in street names and layouts make it difficult, even on bicycle, to do the entire thing. Nevertheless, we persisted. We "crossed to the bright side" (U 4:77) of the street and made our way across the river Liffey to Westland Row, where we encountered the Ballonatics, an acting troupe who reenacted several scenes from Ulysses that day. The actor portraying Bloom went through the entirety of the "Lotus Eaters" episode, which begins at 9:45 a.m. We trailed him as he picked up a letter for "Henry Flower, Esq." from the post office, attended a church sermon, and bought lemon scented soap at Sweeny's Chemists. At this point in the book, Bloom attends a funeral service in the North of the city. As this chapter transpires within a moving street car, my sister and I skipped to the next two episodes, which take place in Bloom's newspaper office and along O'Connell Street in the city center. This particular part of Bloom's path is one of the most detailed accounts in Joyce's book, and has thus become a well-traveled tourist trail, with several plaques along the way. Nevertheless, we were shocked to discover that no one was standing homage at the Joyce statue by the river Liffey. After reading a short passage from the funeral chapter, we crossed O'Connell bridge where a girl "placed a throwaway in a hand" (U 8:6) of ours (this one advertised Dublin Bus tours), which I promptly formed into "a crumpled paper ball" (U 8: 57) and tossed into the Liffey. We then lifted up our pinkies so that "the tip of [our] little finger blotted out the sun's disk" (U 8:566), and made our way to Davy Byrne's pub. Bloom's lunch spot is a popular destination for throngs of celebrants eating gorgonzola cheese sandwiches washed down with burgundy, all ridiculously overpriced. We reconstructed various other parts of Bloom's trail, and then caught a bus to Sandycove, a suburb of Dublin where the book begins. This location is semi-autobiographical, as Joyce himself lived in the Martello stone tower that Stephen inhabits with the infuriating Buck Mulligan, based on Joyce's friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. However, while in the book Mulligan is the perpetual uninvited guest of Stephen, in reality Joyce was free-loading off of Gogarty. Mulligan's "snotgreen sea" (I: 78) sparkled in the afternoon sun, as inhabitants of the beachfront town gathered to sunbathe and celebrate. In the town itself, bars were crowded with costumed revelers, shops displayed period dress, and old motor cars lined the streets. The tower was opened as a museum on Bloomsday 1962 by Sylvia Beach, Joyce's publisher. It is furnished as described in the book, complete with "a black panther" (U 1: 57) that one of Stephen's friends imagines in the fireplace. There, we interviewed the curator, Nicholson, who autographed our guidebook. Climbing to the roof, we participated in an impromptu reading of "Nausicaa", an episode in which Bloom watches a young girl and her friends. This episode takes place on another beach, Sandymount Strand, which we passed on a commuter train back to town. We visited the Ormond Hotel, a popular Bloomsday spot for mid-afternoon drinking, and ended the day with a series of readings in Wynn's Hotel, performed by tipsy professionals and amateurs alike. One man opted instead to read a picture book about the devil and kitty cats. Before turning in, we decided to pay a visit to "Nighttown," the red-light district infamous throughout Europe until 1925, when it was raided by the Irish police. In "Circe," the longest episode of the book, Bloom and Stephen patronize Bella Cohen's brothel, and have a series of hallucinations. While the brothels are gone, the spot "remains one of Dublin's danger areas where street crime is common," according to our guidebook.⁵ We arrived at the taxi stand marking the area's entrance at 11:30 pm, and then crossed the street to our bed and breakfast. How convenient. Our Bloomsday was a relatively tame one, as most die-hard Joyceans are waiting for Bloomsday 2004, which marks the 100th anniversary of the original Bloomsday. Festivities such as another large-scale "Wandering Rocks" recreation are already in the works. The biennial James Joyce Symposium will be held in Dublin for the first time in 12 years, and one huge celebratory breakfast is planned. True, these events have happened before, but Nicholson admitted that for elaborate Bloomsday celebrations "it's kind of dificult to pull out more stops."⁶ Elsewhere, there are other options. Major and not so major international cities hold their own Bloomsday celebrations. Various cities in Ireland, such as Galway, Nora Barnacle's birthplace, sponsor smaller-scale celebrations. The James Joyce Society hosts gallery shows, readings, and concerts year-round in New York City, with a peak concentration of events around the time of Bloomsday. Seville is a city new to hosting Bloomsday celebrations, but in recent years, Spanish Joyceans have gathered to read passages aloud and then indulge in kidneys and Guinness in an Irish pub. And in San Diego, Guinness-lovers in Georgian costume gather at "The Ould Sod" pub for a double-decker bus pub crawl (with several kegs in tow for those long stretches in between). While reading Ulysses may always remain an esoteric accomplishment of academics and overly-ambitious students, through Bloomsday, Joyce's literary achievements and cultural inspirations are made accessible to those who just like a good pint. After all, Ulysses is hardly stuffy high literature. It includes plenty of naughty bits, from a monologue by a dyspeptic sailor, complete with sound effects, to a schoolgirl's impromptu peep-show for an appreciative Bloom. One reading I attended consisted entirely of passages related to bowel movements, while another recreated the complete Catholic Mass in Joycean pun-satire. The book encompasses all locations in Dublin, from the National Library to Nighttown, and characters from all walks of life. On Bloomsday, my sister and I encountered Irish bartenders, American truck drivers, Australian journalists, and Japanese college students. So spend the day obsessively tailing a fictional character or wallowing in a sordid pub; each activity is a fitting homage to Joyce's all-embracing celebration of life and Dublin.