Bloomsday '14
Happy Bloomsday 2014! I wrote the below to j_joyce. As you can see, it's an attempt to write in Joyce's style. Unfortunately I am no James Joyce, but it was good fun writing it. It's hardly edited at all - I thought about perhaps revising it, but figured that I'm being arrogant enough claiming I can write in an any way Joycean way without implying that I can do it well, as I would if I were to take it seriously and revise it, too.
Let me tell you all about the day that started too much mine, but then was shared. I returned to my native Dublin from the ever faraway land of Albion, and arrived just too late for fried liver at the bookshop of Messrs. Hodges and Figgis, but just in happy time for some amateur readings of the tale of hero Bloom. The reading read, we decamped hands bookful to Davy Byrne's, the moral pub, to eat as Bloom ate Gorgonzola sandwiches and to drink the hearty black stout of our green land. Outside this longlived establishment and the adjacent shortlived scaffolding were more readings, dramatised shoutily over the sunned and happy crowds. There I made some friends, two smiling and sharpeyed Italians, visiting with their students (who - the students I mean - were elsewhere) to learn (again, the students doing the learning here) English. (For what good the only sart of English ye'll pick up in Dublin'll do ye in any respectable vocation at all, but sure I guess they're better off aren't they with an English with a bit a music to it.)
Hands shook and characters awkwardly ascertained to be at all events acceptable, we three wandered north past Trinity College, through O'Connell Street and its Spire (which we stopped by to look up at, but not for very long, and not much wiser for it, though we did agree that we probably liked it), and eventually to the James Joyce Centre, one of the Bloomsday centres, as you might imagine. The HCE Players from Boston (so local lads then) dramatised a couple of passages, most memorably the blessing of the opening of Barney Kiernan's pub, and Ithaca. They did a fine job of it. (You could tell because the audience was splitting its sides laughing.) A wander up and around the Centre then, to see the table on which Joyce wrote the Night Book that followed today's day book; to watch a short documentary about Joyce's relationship with the National Library; and down to see the door of 7 Eccles Street, the latchkey to which is presumably still in the back pocket of Bloom's trousers that he was wearing the previous day but one (now - how an imaginary latchkey is supposed to open the door I don't know, and perhaps it couldn't (we don't know as Bloom gained ingress through the kitchen door) - but perhaps now nothing else could open the door, as no normal key, I daresay, could open it; for it is a portal detached from any passage, the house now being the site of Hospitium Mater Misericordiae, whose doors need to be bigger, and nothing now behind that door through which Stephen Dedalus accepted graciously and comprehensibly hospitium but brick). Then our own egress, back south past the Spire and O'Connell Street and Trinity College, to Meeting House Square, where, basking in the rare summer sun, we lay back and listened to some music, and some more readings, finishing with Molly's I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Let me tell you all about the day that started too much mine, but then was shared. I returned to my native Dublin from the ever faraway land of Albion, and arrived just too late for fried liver at the bookshop of Messrs. Hodges and Figgis, but just in happy time for some amateur readings of the tale of hero Bloom. The reading read, we decamped hands bookful to Davy Byrne's, the moral pub, to eat as Bloom ate Gorgonzola sandwiches and to drink the hearty black stout of our green land. Outside this longlived establishment and the adjacent shortlived scaffolding were more readings, dramatised shoutily over the sunned and happy crowds. There I made some friends, two smiling and sharpeyed Italians, visiting with their students (who - the students I mean - were elsewhere) to learn (again, the students doing the learning here) English. (For what good the only sart of English ye'll pick up in Dublin'll do ye in any respectable vocation at all, but sure I guess they're better off aren't they with an English with a bit a music to it.)
Hands shook and characters awkwardly ascertained to be at all events acceptable, we three wandered north past Trinity College, through O'Connell Street and its Spire (which we stopped by to look up at, but not for very long, and not much wiser for it, though we did agree that we probably liked it), and eventually to the James Joyce Centre, one of the Bloomsday centres, as you might imagine. The HCE Players from Boston (so local lads then) dramatised a couple of passages, most memorably the blessing of the opening of Barney Kiernan's pub, and Ithaca. They did a fine job of it. (You could tell because the audience was splitting its sides laughing.) A wander up and around the Centre then, to see the table on which Joyce wrote the Night Book that followed today's day book; to watch a short documentary about Joyce's relationship with the National Library; and down to see the door of 7 Eccles Street, the latchkey to which is presumably still in the back pocket of Bloom's trousers that he was wearing the previous day but one (now - how an imaginary latchkey is supposed to open the door I don't know, and perhaps it couldn't (we don't know as Bloom gained ingress through the kitchen door) - but perhaps now nothing else could open the door, as no normal key, I daresay, could open it; for it is a portal detached from any passage, the house now being the site of Hospitium Mater Misericordiae, whose doors need to be bigger, and nothing now behind that door through which Stephen Dedalus accepted graciously and comprehensibly hospitium but brick). Then our own egress, back south past the Spire and O'Connell Street and Trinity College, to Meeting House Square, where, basking in the rare summer sun, we lay back and listened to some music, and some more readings, finishing with Molly's I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.