Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, a day to celebrate James Joyce's novel Ulysses, whose action takes place on June 16th, 1904 (books by this author). It's called Bloomsday because the main character in the book is Leopold Bloom, a Jewish ad salesman who lives on the north side of Dublin. Bloom is introduced in the fourth chapter of Ulysses; he eats breakfast and serves his wife breakfast in bed. Joyce wrote: "Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting [his wife's] breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere." Bloom doesn't have much work to do on June 16th, so he spends most of his day wandering around Dublin doing errands. In the morning, he leaves his house on 7 Eccles Street, walks south across the River Liffey, picks up a letter, buys a bar of soap, and goes to the funeral of a man he didn't know very well. In the afternoon, he eats a cheese sandwich, feeds some gulls in the Liffey, helps a blind man cross the street, and visits a couple of pubs. He thinks about his job, his wife, his daughter, his stillborn son; he muses about life and death and reincarnation. He knows that his wife is planning to cheat on him that afternoon at his house, and he spends a lot of time thinking about the days when his marriage was happier. Bloom thinks: "Remember when we got home raking up the fire and frying up those pieces of lap of mutton for her supper with the Chutney sauce she liked. And the mulled rum [...] Sitting there after till near two, taking out her hairpins. Milly tucked up in beddyhouse. Happy. Happy." In the evening, Bloom wanders around the red-light district of Dublin, and eventually meets up with a young writer named Stephen Dedalus. Stephen is drunk, so Bloom takes him home with him and offers to let him spend the night. They stand outside looking at the stars for a while, and then Stephen goes home and Bloom goes inside and climbs into bed with his wife. Joyce chose June 16, 1904, as the date for his novel because it was on that day that he went on his first date with the love of his life, Nora Barnacle. Joyce gave the first printed copy of Ulysses to Nora, but she tried to sell it to a friend visiting from Dublin. She only read 27 pages of the book, including the title page. She once asked Joyce, "Why don't you write sensible books that people can understand?" On June 16, 1924, the 20th anniversary of Bloomsday, Joyce wrote in his notebook, "Twenty years after. Will anyone remember this date?" Today, it is a national holiday in Ireland. People will celebrate the book by reading passages aloud, visiting all the places mentioned in the book, and eating the favorite foods of the character Leopold Bloom. It's one of the only holidays in the world that's based merely upon a date in a work of fiction.