Well this was the week of Bloomsday.  I'd been looking forward to experiencing Dublin on June 16th since we started making the plan to move to Ireland.  Yesterday (Saturday, June 16th) was the culmination of a week of activities mostly centered around James Joyce' Ulysses .  It was a fun week, we did something almost every day.

We started on Monday with a walk through the city center on the parts of Leopold Bloom's (the main character) walk from the Liffey (the river that runs through Dublin) to the National Museum.  The guide said it was the part of the story focused on digestion and he made a lot of references to where in the human alimentary canal we were throughout, an interesting approach.  The guide was very knowledgeable about the book as a lot of people seem to be.

On Tuesday, we went to a reading of the last chapter of the book, Molly Bloom's (Leopold's wife) monologue.  This, like all the chapters, is sparsely punctuated with a total of eight sentences in the 90-minute reading.  The actress was amazing.  This was done at Bewleys, a cafe on Grafton Street (the main shopping street in Dublin) in a little theater on the third floor.  We were two of only 12 in the audience, hopefully the subsequent days were better for them.  

On Wednesday, we did a bus tour starting from the Joyce Museum at the City Center to Dalky where one of the other main characters, Stephen Dedalus taught school.  On this trip we stopped at the Dublin Jewish Museum, which had little to do with either James Joyce or the character Bloom (who was Jewish) but it was quite interesting to see the museum and synagog as well as hear a little about the history of Jews in Dublin.  The guide was a Joyce scholar from Baton Rouge, LA.  He's spent the last 6 years in Dublin studying Joyce.  An interesting young man, although I wonder what he's going to do when he has to get a job.  I think he's hoping for a university position, which I guess is quite possible since I'd say half of the other 28 people on the bus were university types, all with some expertise in either Joyce or Ulysses. 

On Thursday I took a break from all things Joyce and walked with some new friends in Phoenix Park, a huge park in the city center similar to New York's Central Park.  The Irish President and the American ambassador's house are within, along with an estate called Farmleigh which was the former home of the Guinness family but is now Ireland's Blair house, the place where they put up visiting dignitaries.  It was about 3 miles from the gate to the house and the walk in was great, we ate lunch there during which it started to rain, so the 3 miles out was pretty soggy.  Still it was nice to be with new friends.

On Friday we rested, although I began working on a compensation survey which promises to take up all my time in the next two weeks.  I also completed a presentation on a book I've co-written that I will be giving in Liverpool in July. 

On Saturday we attended the Bloomsday breakfast at the Gresham Hotel in the city center.  There were several really good readings by actors in some of the key characters' roles.  Then I went to the Writer's Museum to attend part of a 28-hour marathon of author's reading from their works. The marathon began on Friday at 10 a.m. and went through Saturday at 2, breaking a Guinness World Record for consecutive hours of authors reading from their own works.  The 111 Irish writers involved successfully beat the record held previously by the Germans for 75 authors reading.  I attended the last 14 readings, including one of my favorites, Roddy Doyle, who some of you might know from the movie The Commitments (which if you haven't seen it, you should, especially if you like rock and roll). 

It was a fun week.  It's just amazing how many people from all over the world come to Dublin for Bloomsday.  It's also amazing how people talk about "Bloom" as if he were a real person, people speak authoritatively about his back story in quite real and historical terms.  I found that part quite amusing.  Less amusing is the incredible pretension surrounding many literary types.  While I know it's a manifestation of insecurity, it just galls me nonetheless.  Anyway, a small gripe in what was otherwise a really interesting week.  Especially for a book I haven't read and don't intend to. 

The next two weeks will be taken up with work.  I'm working on a compensation survey that I'm hoping to get finished by the end of the month, when we are scheduled to go to Donegal to celebrate our 35th anniversary in my mother's home county.  I'll go back to posting on Fridays.