Joyce festival to span several days

Bloomsday has been stretched to more than a week in Dublin this year.

Joyce festival to span several days

Bloomsday has been stretched to more than a week in Dublin this year.

June 16 has traditionally been the 24 hour period when James Joyce aficionados celebrate the hero of his epic novel Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, by dressing up in straw boaters and other clothing of the early years of the last century and touring those parts of Dublin made familiar by the book to act out scenes from the work.

This time, in common with the now-several-days-long annual St Patrick’s Day partying, Bloomsday has become a festival that got under way this weekend and goes on until June 17.

As a result the organisers - based at Dublin’s James Joyce Centre - say more people than ever will be able to take part in events to commemorate their hero.

A spokeswoman said: "We will be inviting people to celebrate Bloomsday as Joyce himself would have wanted, bringing the words of his Ulysses literary masterpiece to Dubliners and their friends on both sides of the River Liffey."

For the uninitiated, Bloomsday, which is also widely marked internationally, commemorates June 16, 1904, when James Joyce first went out with Nora Barnacle, the love of his life.

What happened so impressed the writer that he set Ulysses on the date.

The event will this year feature performances of "bite-size" excerpts from Ulysses in Temple Bar, an area well known to thousands of revellers from Britain and elsewhere, as well as at other locations throughout Dublin.

As well, there are special breakfasts, a bus tour and picnic walking tours, strolling players through the streets of Dublin, lectures, special trips on the DART and an open-air showing of the John Huston film The Dead, which was based on a Joyce story.

David Norris, a member of the Senate, who is chairman of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, said: "Ulysses is a book that is at once difficult, but at the same time essentially democratic.

"It deals with ordinary people on an ordinary Dublin day, so it is appropriate that we reach out this Bloomsday to citizens of Dublin and our friends from abroad."

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