Bloomsday 2022

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit…

Those who have not YET read Ulysses may wonder what all the fuss is around Bloomsday, 16 June. There are those books you read that shift your world view – adding more intense colours to the interior and exterior landscape, have you rolling a favourite line or two sweetly in your mind – and then there are those few works that blast the mind right open: frustrating, challenging and ultimately symphonically exploding your understanding of what language can do, of what we might be able to understand about ourselves, each other, through the medium of language. Ulysses is the latter. 

Having stumbled, trotted and slip-slided through this beautiful work many times now with such wonderful minds, Ulysses is in my bones – constantly reminding me that any given day, for any regular person, can be epic when we attend to the mind’s stream…Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all….

On this, the 100th year anniversary of Joyce’s publication, the Salon is proud to highlight some of the many ways readers and would-be readers celebrate this work that warmly embraces the rhythm of life. 

• On Sunday 12 June Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE’s Drama on One (more to follow on this).
• On the same day in London the Balloonatics (joined by, ahem, me) will enact the second annual Tufnell Park Bloomsday Walk.
• Meanwhile, a group of Ulyssians and Wakians from the Salon will head to Dublin to experience the carnival in the streets that celebrates this bounding work.