A group of Dublin-based Joyceans marked the 'Gloomsday' event, celebrating the darkest aspects of James Joyce's Ulysses on December 15th, the date furthest from Bloomsday.
To a group of Dublin-based Joyceans with too much time on their hands last weekend, this seemed like a good excuse for pints Sunday was the chronological aphelion of Bloomsday , June 16th, the date on which James Joyce ’s Ulysses is set. “The chronological what?” I hear astronomy-challenged readers ask.
So before proceeding, I refer those to the Ithaca chapter of Joyce’s book where, while engaged in very earth-bound activity – synchronised urination – in the back garden of No 7 Eccles Street, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus gaze upwards at the stars. “Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?” asks one of the catechism-style chapter’s 309 questions. And amid the long answer is this: “. . . the almost infinite compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion”. Yes, readers, the aphelion is the point of an orbit where a planet, asteroid, or comet is farthest from the sun. December 15th, similarly, is the date in the calendar most distant from June 16th. To a group of Dublin-based Joyceans with too much time on their hands last weekend, this seemed like a good excuse for pints. Thus it was that on Sunday night, we met in Davy Byrne’s pub – Ulysses Central – to mark the inaugural instalment of an event hereafter known as Gloomsday. In keeping with the theme, the beer consumed was dark. So was the food: the pub’s excellent Beef and Guinness pie. One of those present, however – publisher Cormac O’Hanrahan – had also taken the trouble of printing a sort of missalette, featuring his selection of the book’s bleaker passages, mostly drawn from the Hades episode: Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Via this, we all took a turn with readings “from the Book of Gloom to the Gentiles”, the lighter parts of which included Bloom’s ironic musings on the Last Day and Judgement: “That last day ide
CULTURE CELEBRATIONS JAMES JOYCE ULYSSES GLOOMSDAY BLOOMSDAY IRISH CULTURE
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