No room for doom and gloom as Joyce fans unite for glorious Bloomsday celebrations
JOYCE FANS, some plump, many stately, ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls as Bloomsday kicked off yesterday morning at Caviston’s in Sandycove.
Nutty gizzards and fried mutton kidneys were on the morning’s menu, with proprietor Peter Caviston greeting all-comers, pressed and dapper in his Joycean best and sporting the obligatory Bloomsday boater hat.
Jim Bennett and Michael Carney were in early attendance, bespectacled and dickie-bowed, with two well-thumbed copies of Ulyssesnestled next to their breakfast remains.
"In a sense, you can read Ulyssesnon-stop," said Carney, to which Bennett replied: "You could read it 10 times and you still wouldn't come to grips with it."
Both men are members of the Bloomsday committee, and were filling up for a day of Joycean peregrinations, to include a dip in the Forty Foot, lunch at Davey Byrne’s pub and readings at Farrington’s in Temple Bar, with the whole thing winding up in Mulligan’s some several hours hence.
Outside, Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport Mary Hanafin had arrived for her Bloomsday breakfast, on a day that aptly straddles two elements of her own portfolio. “For me it’s linking two things: The cultural element through Joyce and the tourist element.” Though she admitted she had not read the book that spawned this day of pinstripes and dickie bows “from cover to cover”, her defence was that she’d “probably heard it from cover to cover” at various readings on Bloomsdays past.
As she sat down to eat with relish, writer and historian Tim Pat Coogan pulled up in the back of a 1926 Lancia Lambda. “Molly Bloom’s soliloquy is a wonderfully apposite thing this year,” he said after disembarking for breakfast. “I believe Richard Bruton has passed out the soliloquy to all his followers, and they’re all saying ‘Yes, I will, Yes!’”
Back at the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street, Senator David Norris was holding forth on the joys of Joyce. “On a lovely day he gives us cause to celebrate life and to laugh,” he said, adding that those attending the breakfasts were “convulsed with laughter” at the performances and readings, to which they were being treated as they tucked into their offal.
Claiming credit as the first to begin the Bloomsday tradition of dressing up in clothes from Joyce’s time, Norris acknowledged: “I’ve become a fashion statement.”
Those who missed breakfast had the opportunity to gorge on gorgonzola in Davey Byrne’s for lunch, then amble over to Meeting House Square where actor and director Alan Stanford hosted a readings and performances, including an appearance by the ubiquitous Senator Norris.
A sun-drenched square packed with Joycean adherents and bemused tourists joined in with Morgan Crowley's rendition of Molly Bloom's Love's Old Sweet Song.
Seán Carr from Donegal was spoiled for Bloomsday choice. “There are so many things happening,” he said.
His companion, Johanna Hegarty, didn’t seem to mind whither their Bloomsday wanderings led them. “It’s a great bit of fun,” she said with all the spirit of Molly Bloom herself. “There’s so much doom and gloom. But this is a celebration of life – and of Dublin!”