Kansas City Star Reviews Bloomsday in KC
Go HERE for Bloomsday 2007 in KC
NOTE: The following relates to the 2006 event, though much of it applies to any year:
Some Irish chancer gets his stereotypical mug in the Kansas City Star, for having an Irish accent reading an Irish book in close proximity to an Irish flag that the Star describes as Orange, White and Green - which you all know to be the flag of the Ivory Coast because you’ve been watching the World Cup. Or perhaps the flag was facing out of the bookstore.
Truly Bloomsday 2006 in Kansas City was a superb weekend - for it lasted two days. And if you didn’t partake too much of the Boulevard Stout, you would have been able to count seventy-five people present during the Night-town in Ulysses play.
Michelle Strausbaugh in the Star mentions something I regularly forget to say - Ulysses is laugh out loud funny. Reading was a lot of fun. The play was a blast as always. The harpist was great. Eddie and Gabe were excellent on Saturday. The beer and wine flowed.
The dense prose was transmitted so well that even audience members wearing attentive-yet-puzzled expressions got the jokes when a play based on the book was read by a dozen or so volunteer actors. By the ending soliloquy, it was clear what the cryptic quote on the back of numerous T-shirts was all about. Ulysses’ famous last words — “yes I said yes I will Yes” — arose from the lips of Molly Bloom, wife of Leopold.
See Also:
• Bloomsday in Kansas City, Missouri
• Tom & Nancy Shawver’s Bloomsday Books
• Jame Joyce Scribble
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
The first time I tried to read Ulysses was for a day long seminar on the piece at the Smithsonian. My dad was supposed to go, but then at the last minute had to travel, so I was the lucky sub.
I bought my copy, figured it’s only 700 pages or so, I can read this in a week. Yeah. So, I started reading it, got up, grabbed my Oxford English. Discovered that the words I wanted to look up weren’t actually in the dictionary. The only way I was able to understand it was to read it out loud. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not a book meant to be read silently to oneself, but rather read aloud with friends.
And no, I still haven’t finished it. It’s on the list.
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