Happy Bloomsday, one and all!
Blooms & Barnacles presents our Bloomsday 2020 episode, a little Bloomsday party you can take anywhere you go.
Many friends and listeners came together to record their favorite passages from Ulysses, and we’ve compiled them into one, gargantuan Blooms & Barnacles episode.
Kelly and Dermot set sail for the time of Vikings and jerkined dwarfs! They discuss the differences of similarly-shaped seafaring vessels, Lochlanns, Fr. Dineen’s Irish dictionary, the intersection of Viking and Celtic cultures in Ireland, torcs, tomahawk, the horrors of 14th c. Dublin, famine, plague and slaughters, the story of the time a pod of cetaceans washed ashore in medieval Dublin, the story of the time the Liffey froze over and people grilled on top of it, Stephen as a changeling, Stephen momentarily becoming displaced in time, and Stephen’s attempt to construct an Irish identity.
Steve Carey of Bloomsday in Melbourne drops by to chat about how to put on a Bloomsday theatre production in the time of Covid.
A lifelong lover of the works of Joyce, Steve Carey is an organizer of the Bloomsday celebration in Melbourne, Australia. He chats with Kelly about (briefly) meeting Richard Ellmann, the joys and travails of adapting Ulysses for the stage, a heroic battle over trousers in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, and how to get a period hearse for your Bloomsday procession. This episode is not to be missed!
Continue reading Ep. 18 – Bloomsday in Melbourne (w/ Steve Carey)
I had the pleasure of curating a series of readings for the 2018 Bloomsday celebration at T.C. O’Leary’s Pub in Northeast Portland, where members of their Ulysses Support Group (aka book club) read portions of the great novel at intervals throughout the day. I tried to choose passages that not only reflected the prose, characters and themes of Ulysses, but that also captured its humor, vulgarity and surrealism. I chose selections that would give the casual listener a taste of the story if they happened to hear all fourteen selections or feel entertained if they were only to catch one. Additionally, I tried to choose passages that would give readers dialogue to play with as an “actor” and capture some of our club’s favorite lines. I wanted to make sure the spirit of the novel came across more than its reputation for difficulty (although I didn’t avoid all the challenging passages). Most of all, I didn’t want it to be boring.
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Below, is brief description of each selected passage and why I chose it along with an approximate page number. I redacted portions of some of the passages since they were just too long (I tried to keep each passage in the 600-800 word range to keep the readings brisk and entertaining). My page numbers are based on the 1990 Vintage International edition of Ulysses.
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