Amazingly enough, it is almost the end of May, which means that Bloomsday is just around the corner. If you haven’t already marked your calendar for Wednesday, June 16, get out your red pencil now and circle it! On that glorious day the readings will run from noon to 7 PM, so you can stop by any time, for five minutes or five hours. Once you’ve circled the date you can start digging through your bookshelves for your copy of Ulysses–if you start now there’s still time to get through it by Bloomsday (if you don’t have a copy, you can find the full text through Project Gutenberg, or you can cheat and go with the plot summary we provide on our website)
Around here we’ve been starting to gear up for the festivities in more practical ways–making sure the readers have their scripts, making sure we will have folding chairs,and in my case making sure our annual Bloomsday exhibit gets installed. The theme of this year’s Bloomsday is one that is near and dear to my heart–food. Our Bloomsday czar and consulting curator Laura Heffernan has pulled together a some great objects on this theme for the Bloomsday exhibit, so my job is just to pull the necessary cases out of storage, make sure they are painted and prepped, and that the labels are all ready to go for installation. We’ll be putting in the exhibit on June 2, so you can start to warm up for Bloomsday even before the 16th rolls around.
To whet your appetite, I’ll close with a few pictures from last year’s Bloomsday. Thanks to all who attended last year and we can’t wait to see you again; if you haven’t come before, we can’t wait to see you enjoying your first Bloomsday.