the first bloom(sday)

bloomsday, the ancient celtic fertility festival, has not always been about watching theatre majors strut around in period sportswear, or listening to music majors strum the celtic harp, or (worst of all) enduring english majors as they grab you by the shoulder and tell you how to read ulysses is to see the face of god. indeed, bloomsday used to be about lowbrow carousing under the pretense of discussing highbrow literature. take for example this account of the first bloomsday:

The day was 16 June, 1954, and though it was only mid-morning, Brian O’Nolan [Flann O’Brien] was already drunk. This day was the fiftieth anniversary of Mr. Leopold Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin, which James Joyce had immortalised in Ulysses .

To mark this occasion a small group of Dublin literati had gathered …just below the Martello tower in which the opening scene of Joyce’s novel is set. They planned to travel round the city through the day, visiting in turn the scenes of the novel, ending at night in what had once been the brothel quarter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Nighttown.

Sadly, no-one expected O’Nolan to be sober…The rest of the party, that first Bloomsday, was made up of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young critic Anthony Cronin, a dentist named Tom Joyce, who as Joyce’s cousin represented the family interest, and John Ryan, the painter and businessman who owned and edited the literary magazine Envoy.

Kavanagh and O’Nolan began the day by deciding they must climb up to the Martello tower itself, which stood on a granite shoulder behind the house. As Cronin recalls, Kavanagh hoisted himself up the steep slope above O’Nolan, who snarled in anger and laid hold of his ankle. Kavanagh roared, and lashed out with his foot. Fearful that O’Nolan would be kicked in the face by the poet’s enormous farmer’s boot, the others hastened to rescue and restrain the rivals.

With some difficulty O’Nolan was stuffed into one of the cabs by Cronin and the others. Then they were off, along the seafront of Dublin Bay, and into the city. In pubs along the way an enormous amount of alcohol was consumed, so much so that on Sandymount Strand they had to relieve themselves as Stephen Dedalus does in Ulysses… Eventually they arrived in Duke Street in the city centre, and the Bailey, which John Ryan then ran as a literary pub.

They went no further. Once there another drink seemed more attractive than a long tour of Joycean slums, and the siren call of the long vanished pleasures of Nighttown.

__

from: flann o’brien, an illustrated biography by costello and van der kamp (1987)

pictured above on the first bloomsday: john ryan, anthony cronin, brian o’nolan (flann o’brien), patrick kavanagh & tom joyce; (1954). source.

(but i did not shoot the drop cap E)

tudza (a cyberbuddy and notorious crank) made this marvelous graphical pun and says:

I copied the idea of course, but while the original… was done in Photoshop, this was done with a Hi-Point 9mm at the local pistol range.

who needs the adobe creative suite when one has access to FIREARMS!?!?

also: does seeing a large s in this way remind anyone else of ulysses?

quadrivium

even though joyce said this in defense of finnegans wake, this quote is an appropriate epigraph for the slowblogging ulysses project (today’s word is winding). and while we are on the topic of stories that will take thousands of years to complete, there is also this one (which employs a very different delaying measure).

cheer up, mr. joyce—it’s bloomsday!

as tomorrow is the 105th anniversary of bloomsday AND many of you have confessed to me that ulysses is one of your crack books (a book that you have only pretended to have read) AND ALSO the infinite summer project is a hot commodity right now, i thought that i would announce my latest project:

slowblogging ulysses, where i have been blogging the entirety of ulysses since may 4th at the rate of one word per day. i expect to complete the project around noon on the 27th day of April, 2741.

kate beaton crystalises the status of joyce’s letters to nora as the 2 girls / 1 cup meme of 1909. once you read them, you can never unread them. via

another cosmic 3-way

joyce, hemingway, & hirschfeld. (also: h.l. menken was the founder of the american mercury).

jim, vlad, tommy & raynor: a cosmic link

last thursday, i posted a map that vladimir nabokov used when teaching joyce to thomas pynchon. an anonymous operative in dublin axed me where he could get a higher-rez image and i promised that i would look into the matter. this is how my quest starts. how it ends is with me pawing through nabokov’s original papers in the inner-most sanctum of the new york public library. here is the in-between stuff:

part the first: a map quest

the original map is housed in the morgan collection of the nypl. since i was going to be in the city this weekend with some time to kill, i thought i would try and see how close that i could come to getting my greasy mitts on a facsimilie of the map.

i have a long and sordid history of infiltrating libraries and figured that the nypl would be lemon pound cake. it wasn’t. it took 3 levels of access (for which i had no ready documentation) and a lot of paperwork. ultimately the decision came down to the morgan curator, donna barker. my access would be based entirely upon her assessment of 1. how legit that i was (i am not legit) and 2. the reasons for my wanting to see nabokov’s unpublished papers (a whim? scorching curiosity?).

after a lot of blah-blah-blahing i was admitted into room 444. donna then reviewed my paperwork and grilled me for fifteen minutes before finally acquiescing. within the hour i received a folder containing not facsimiles of nabokov’s papers but the real deal—coffee ringed, besmudged, finger-printed, mothball-scented* handwritten notes of one of the giants of western literature!

part the second: notes on his notes

i have handled highly revered objects before. i have made small talk with authors that i admire at book signings. but i have never lost my shit the way i did when a librarian dropped a big folder with nabokov’s personal writings into my lap and told me to go to town. after composing myself, i was able to make a few notes. here are some (in bullet form for ease of reading):

• there were actually 3 different versions of the maps all with mostly the same information. each was on standard letter-sized typing paper.
• nabokov’s handwriting was meticulous and bold with an occasional flourish. i was delighted to see that at points he lapsed into [what appeared to be] sütterlinschrift (seen especially in his medial s’s).
• the maps themselves were not very different from standard ones like this and this.
• nabokov calculates that bloom walks 5 miles throughout the day.
• for reasons not readily understandable, he drew england about 1,000 feet off the coast of dublin.
• while i was sifting through personal notes written by one of the top writers of the twentieth century, sitting in a room containing original manuscripts and love letters by the likes of woolf, pound, yeats, kerouac and james, the curator was reading a patrick o’brian novel.
• in the end, donna would NOT let me photocopy anything. she said that i would first need to get the permission of dmitri nabokov. i joked that dmitiri would probably oblige given his latest decision regarding his father’s literary estate. this joke did not go over so well.
• dmitiri however, failed to prevent me from taking notes and i WAS able to recreate the whole map on my own little scrap of paper. perhaps in 500 years, some pesky hoverboard-riding blogger might con his way into the new nypl so as to catch a quick peak of the raynor/nabokov/joyce map. or perhaps it will wind up as trash and a hobo will use it to toilet train his golden retreiver. only time will tell.

*yes, i sniffed it.

nabokov maps ulysses

In 1969, Nabokov told an interviewer, “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” Nabokov drew just such a map as part of his lecture notes for Ulysses. via

nabokov? joyce? maps? drawings? this image is a burrito of all my favourite things (note: joyce is the guacamole in this metaphor). would you not have donated a litre of your own spinal fluid to audit this lecture‽ added bonus: you would have been able to pass notes to thomas pynchon!

know this as well: nabokov and joyce actually met eachother once in berlin in 1937. the hungarian national football team figured prominently in that encounter.