Post-Pandemic/Pre-Centennial: Bloomsday 2021

In contrast to the locked-down and limited virtual Zoomsday we all experienced during the past year of Covid-19, Bloomsday 2021 seemed to compensate for our long claustrophobic nightmare by featuring a head-spinning plethora of both digital and live events to choose from, with some spread over several weeks before the big day. It was as if the world was suddenly and simultaneously making up for lost time while getting ready for festivities being planned for the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Joyce's novel in 2022. So this year's commemoration of Ulysses gratefully came as a relief from last year's, but it also served as an anticipatory celebration prior to the upcoming centennial.

Live activities began well before 16 June with the forty-fifth running of "The Bloomsday Worldwide," a 12K/7.5 mile foot race (or walk) on the course of one's choice, the only rule being that it had to be completed between 30 April and 9 May, for reasons unknown. The event's Spokane, Washington, organizers announced that a record 21,000+ people in twenty countries had registered this year, including eighty "Perennials," folks who have consistently run or walked the distance annually since at least 1979. Also announced, for the first time, 450 "Bloomsdogs" signed up in a special four-legged category; no word on whether one was named Garryowen. Highlights may be viewed at <bloomsdayrun.org>.

Of course, the main event for cognoscenti was the 27th International James Joyce Symposium, rescheduled from last year and held on-line between 14 and 18 June. Dubbed "Omniscientific Joyce," the symposium was hosted by the Trieste Joyce School with support from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the embassies of Italy and Ireland, as well as Culture Ireland. It featured over fifty presentations spread over seven sessions, with plenary speakers including Colm Tóibín, Eric Bulson, Catherine Flynn, and Cóilín Parsons. A highlight of the symposium was a roundtable discussion about the late Michael Groden and his book The Necessary Fiction: Life with James Joyce's "Ulysses." Convened by Groden's longtime Ulysses Reading Group partner Austin Briggs and Zoommeister Morris Beja, participants from around the world included Maud Ellmann, Anne Fogarty, Vicki Mahaffey, Margot Norris, and Terence Killeen, among others, with Mike's widow, Molly Peacock, responding.

On 14 June, the University of Buffalo unveiled a new thirty-sixfoot-tall head-and-shoulders mural portrait of Joyce painted on the side of an office building at 181 Franklin Street in Buffalo, New York. The image is meant to promote UB's Poetry Collection, the world's largest repository of Joyce material, comprising "more than 10,000 pages of the author's working papers, notebooks, and manuscripts, etc.," according to a press release. Joyceans of a certain age will recall that the core of UB's Joyce collection came from Sylvia Beach in the late 1950s. UB has also initiated a fund drive with the aim of creating an on-campus Joyce Museum that will include exhibition spaces, collection preservation and acquisition endowments, a curator's position, and other programming. Some Joyceans suggested that the mural is not big enough; others argued that Joyce might have preferred his favorite portrait of himself for downtown Buffalo—the one taken of his back!

Wednesday morning, 16 June, broke sunny and mild. Eschewing the inner organs of beasts and fowls, I leaned into some eggs (sunnyside up!) for breakfast. Still thinking about that worldwide Bloomsday run/walk, I took a consolation 2.5 mile stroll around my local lake. After a light lunch—a gorgonzola cheese sandwich—I devoted most of the early afternoon to trolling the Internet for Ulysses and other Joyce-related events. Among the more intriguing offerings sampled this year were RTÉ Radio 1's fifty-three-minute play "The United States Versus Ulysses" by Colin Murphy and the Dublin James Joyce Centre's film streaming of "Pomes Penyeach" set to mystical contemporary music. I also checked out several of the short selections posted as part of the Centre's Bloomsday Film Festival 2021. The touching eight-minute...