The physical and virtual world lit up for Bloomsday – tweets and Guinness and peripatetic homages flooded the day of those with a Joycean bent.
The twitter feed @11lysses creatively recast the novel in a series of tweets from contributors around the world, then followed it up with reflection on the project with @lysses2.
Many, many photos from the real show celebrations and rejoyce-ing from around the globe: Bloomsday photos
An enjoyable consequence in following any pursuit is the tangental discovery of associated facts and acts. These are some of the discovered treats of Bloomsday 2011:
The copyright on Ulysses expires next year, 1 January, 2012. Opening up the novel to all and sundry – while also creating new potential for future Bloomsdays.
A rap tribute to James Joyce:
Something I initially thought would be boring, but then it effortlessly sucked 45 mintes from my life. ‘A hypertextual, self-referential edition of
Ulysses by James Joyce’.
At Ulyssesulysses.com you can take your understanding and exploration of the novel to new geek-love depths.
Kate Bush wanted to use extracts of Ulysses for a song called ‘Flower of the Mountain’, 22 years ago, but was denied by the Joyce estate; she rewrote it as The Sensual World. Recently it was approved by the Joyce estate, prompting a revisitation by Bush.
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath deliberately married on Bloomsday, 1956, as a form of literary recognition.
See Ulysses transformed into a rich, beautifully crafted graphic novel at Unseen.
And just for a bit of balance, here’s a put-down on Ulysses by none other than Virginia Woolf: “[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
