Bloomsday in Kansas City Part 2
It’s Bloomsday. And just like Bloomsday, I’m in Dublin. Trying to avoid a pub all day.
A good puzzle as it happens.
But in Kansas City tonight you get a 2nd opportunity this year to celebrate Bloomsday.
Irish traditions have a history in Kansas City of being moved from their traditional dates, due to that most modern of diseases, convenience.
Bloomsday in Kansas City in 2008 is more and less convenient than previous years.
KC Literary Festival
It used to be that Bloomsday would move to the nearest Saturday but this year Bloomsday activities moved a full month. Because there were books about. Literary books. And a festival. And Bloomsday was a festival long before the Kansas City Literary Festival was born on the Plaza.
Bloomsday in 2 parts
So a month ago Kansas City was treated to progressive rambling performances from Joyce’s Ulysses on the Plaza. But tonight, June 16, 2008 at Raglan Road, the new Irish pub in downtown KC, Bloomsday is the main course. Which is only fitting as today is June 16th, the actual Bloomsday, unmoved, and to hell with work nights.
Raglan Road
At 9.00pm there will be actors perform scenes from Ulysses. Live Irish music, lots of Guinness and speciality Irish dishes. And everyone is encouraged to dress up in Edwardian style costumes.
Edwardian
Edwardian? Edwardian is to Victorian as the 1980s are to the 1970s. There are prizes for Best Bloomsday Costume…
Funny Joyce Video
And for those who for some reason think Ulysses and James Joyce is stuffy and not at all funny, have a look here at this short Irish film by Donald Clark featuring Joyce and fellow Dublin writer Samuel Beckett, as they play a game of Pitch ‘n’ Putt. I’ve long thought that James Joyce was the prototype for Jake Stevens:
What is Bloomsday?
And what on earth is Bloomsday anyway, you ask? On June 16 in 1904 James Joyce sent an Irish character called Leopold Bloom on a 24-hour odyssey around Dublin in his novel Ulysses, though he didn’t actually send him on that epic journey until the book was published in 1922. Even then, the celebration of the day, the day in which the book is set, didn’t begin until some time in the 1930s when Joyce was cavorting with Beckett in France and realised it was June 16th, Leopold Bloom’s Day in Ulysses. And it has been Bloomsday ever since.
Some of my favourite moments in Kansas City are from Bloomsdays through the years.
Read Bloomsday in Kansas City last year - the last Bloomsday at Bloomsday Books.
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
The video is a masterpiece. Wonderful stuff! Wonderful!