February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Once again Symphony Space will hold a day-long program of events, beginning at noon, with more than 100 actors reading selections from “Ulysses.” Fans from previous years will be delighted to know that the incomparable Fionnula Flanagan will perform as Molly Bloom. Frank McCourt, Malachy McCourt and Stephen Colbert will also attend.
Symphony Space is at West 95th and Broadway in Manhattan. Tickets: $18, $14 members, $16 students and seniors.
From noon to 3 p.m. there is a whirlwind tour of “Ulysses,” with excerpts from all 18 episodes. From 3-4 p.m.: Joyce’s contemporaries react to his book, including the words of Gilbert Seldes, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams. If you can’t make it, tune in to WBAI 99.5FM to hear all events live.
If “Ulysses” as performance is too hectic for the bookish, then there will be Joyce memorabilia on display at the sumptuous National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South (East 20th Street), but not opening until Monday, June 21, and running through June 30. Opening hours are 9-5; admission is free.
Up in Buffalo, the University of Buffalo boasts the world’s largest collection of Joyceana, some of which has been sent to Ireland for the blowout Joyce bash being organized by the Irish government. There is plenty left to see in Buffalo, however. A free exhibit will run from June 8 through Sept. 22 in the university’s Poetry/Rare Books Room, 420 Capen Hall on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.
Also in Buffalo, from 5-10 p.m. on June 16 will be the centennial celebration of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” at Irish Classical Theatre Company’s Andrews Theatre, 625 Main St. See www.irishclassicaltheatre.com. Free and open to the public.
And some further heartening news from Buffalo: academic Sam Slote, who works alongside curators at the James Joyce Collection, says “Ulysses” isn’t nearly as hard to understand as many people think.
“It is actually a fairly simple book,” Slote said recently. ” ‘Ulysses’ is about life,” he added. “This may sound trite, and it is trite, but then so is life.”
You might need to drink while pondering that remark, and many Irish bars in New York City and its environs will be celebrating Bloomsday in the usual way. The best option is Ulysses’ Bar on beautifully restored Stone Street in Lower Manhattan. Here, in the narrow gray cobblestone streets of old New Amsterdam, you’ll find an atmosphere something akin to Dublin. Ulysses’ Bar, from the same stable as Puck Fair and Swifts’, celebrates its first anniversary on Bloomsday and will offer up an all-day breakfast of such profanity as to make a rabbi recoil: kidneys galore, a reading by writer Colum McCann from the book, a carvery lunch, something tempting titled “An Assignation with Molly Bloom” at 3 p.m. and a seisun. There will be an open bar from 10:30 p.m. until midnight.
As long and narrow and dark as Stone Street is the James Joyce Public House at 166B Mamaroneck Ave., White Plains, in Westchester County, where Bloomsday will be celebrated with a similarly hearty menu and readings and a video will be shown throughout the day of Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s wife, whom he met on June 16, 1904 — hence his choice of that date for the day on which he set Leopold Bloom off on his wanderings. For further information, call (914) 397-1077.
Bloom, an unobservant Jewish Irishman, has long fascinated Jewish scholars, writers and thinkers around the world, and this 100th Bloomsday sees … … …
Even if you can’t face plowing through “Ulysses” the novel, Bloomsday is also a time to remember the other great story associated with “Ulysses,” of censorship, rejection and vilification, resulting in court cases about its literary merit that have influenced the debate over censorship in the world’s democracies ever since.
So if you find yourself on June 16 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, add to the quirks of the day by raising your glass to John Woolsey of 131-135 East 66th St. Woolsey was the federal judge who made the historic decision in December 1933 that Joyce’s “Ulysses” was not obscene and could be published in the U.S. Woolsey, whose apartment building on East 66th was noted for its extravagant parties, must have been a good sort, because in his decision he wrote that Joyce’s frequent sexual references in the book were of literary merit. “It must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring,” Woolsey wrote charmingly of Joyce.
There are many good reasons to celebrate Bloomsday. Who cares if you haven’t even cracked the spine of “Ulysses”? Think of it this way: on June 16, people across the entire world will eat and drink, will pause to muse upon a most peculiar book, and while feasting on all-day Irish breakfasts and prodding fried kidneys with their forks, will wonder at celebrating the 100th anniversary of a day that is fictional. Somewhere the ghost of Joyce must be grinning.