Latest news with #JamesJoyce
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Health
- Irish Times
Frank McNally on the Bloomsday fitness progamme (and why Virginia Woolf will never be as popular as Joyce)
An underappreciated aspect of James Joyce's literary legacy - one that might surprise the man himself - is the extent to which he encouraged healthy living, including dietary restraint and aerobic exercise. Well, he encouraged it one day a year, at least. After filing the Bloomsday 'colour' piece for this newspaper on Monday, I checked the health app on my iPhone to find it had clocked up an impressive 21,792 steps (15.4km) since morning: well above the 10,000 benchmark for the Fitbit generation. That didn't include a Dublin Bike trip from Dorset Street - scene of my unsuccessful attempts to find a mutton kidney - out to Glasnevin Cemetery and back. So I wondered in passing if Joyce scholars had ever worked out how many steps Leopold Bloom walked on 16th June 1904. But is the Pope a Catholic? Yes, of course they had. READ MORE The first person I asked, Trinity College English Professor Sam Slote, had retraced Bloom's trajectory ('some suppositions involved') and counted 22,203 steps. Which was gratifyingly close to my total, although I hadn't tried to follow the whole route. Further investigation led me to a study, conducted from Kentucky in 2012, on 'the physical fitness of Leopold Bloom'. This was in general unremarkable (the fitness, not the study). As readers of Ulysses will know, Bloom had a bit of a belly, was called 'lardface' in Barney Kiernan's pub, and at 38 – although young by today's standards – was a man of advanced middle aged in 1904, when male life expectancy was a mere 47.8 years. On the other hand, the study's author Jeff McClung calculated that given his reported height of 5ft 9½ (176.5cm) and weight of 11 stone 4 (71.8kg), Bloom had a Body Mass Index of 23.0, still exemplary in 2025. By McClung's count, the hero of Ulysses walked 8.99 miles (14.48 km) on 16th June 1904, slightly less than I did last Monday; although he went to Sandymount Strand, unlike me, and spent a lot longer wandering around the red-light district. Perhaps the standout finding, however, was that Bloom's calorific intake for the day came to a mere 1200 kcal. Or 1400, 'if he ate the second Bunbury cake that he bought to feed the birds'. Considering the 3,009 kcals he is estimated to have burned, that still left a deficit of at least 1609kcals. Sure the poor man was starving. *** A literary commemoration you heard a lot less about this week, I'm guessing, was Dalloway Day, or 'Dallowday' as some have suggested calling it. Named for Mrs Dalloway, from the 1925 book of that title by Virginia Woolf, it even had a centenary going for it this year. Yet despite describing the events of a single day in June, more than a century ago, and using the same stream-of-consciousness style Joyce pioneered, it doesn't appear to have lent itself to the sort of fancy dress re-enactment that makes Bloomsday a niche tourist attraction at home and a cultural export worldwide. Woolf had very mixed feelings about Joyce's masterpiece. She liked the start of it, up to and including the 'Hades' episode (set in Glasnevin). But overall, she looked down her perfectly formed high-society nose at both the author and his work: 'An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.' Still, in Mrs Dalloway, she paid a kind of homage to Ulysses. And writing style aside, even her life mirrored Joyce's. She was born a week before he was in 1882 and died (albeit a self-inflicted death) only two months after him in 1941. In an article for the Guardian back in 2016, 'It's Time We Celebrated Dallowday', one of her more devoted fans pondered why Woolf's book couldn't be commemorated in the same way Joyce's is in Dublin and around the world. One reason may be that it lacks the epic quality of Ulysses. Or perhaps, conversely, it doesn't have enough fine detail, including a specific date. It's set on a Wednesday in mid-June, while literary detectives say the year had to be in 1923. Based on the calendar for that year, this reduces possibilities to the 13th or 20th, and historic weather reports make the 13th more likely. Even so, this year's main centenary commemoration in London was held - indoors, in a library theatre - on the 18th. Maybe Woolf was too well bred to bother with such vulgar detail. Whatever the reason, she kept the timing vague: 'For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some like Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin…It was June. 'The King and Queen were at the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh, and all the rest of it…' Yes, Royal Ascot was happening in her book too. But unlike Bloom, Mrs Dalloway didn't accidentally tip the 20-1 winner of the Gold Cup. For that and other shortcomings, she will never be truly loved.
Economist
3 days ago
- General
- Economist
Blighty newsletter: The migration theory of everything
Blaise Metreweli is the first female head of Britain's spy service, too A lottery decides where they will work Blame James Joyce. And 'fashion' English wine is changing the landscape Cash for everywhere outside the M25 Answer: hospitals and tanks
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
In pictures: Bloomsday 2025
Bloomsday , the celebration of James Joyce's literary masterpiece Ulysses, was celebrated in Dublin today. Named after its anti-hero, Leopold Bloom, and based on his all-day meanderings around Dublin on June 16th, 1904, it has been celebrated annually since 1994 with breakfasts, public readings from the book and the donning of the finest of Edwardian clothing. John O'Reilly and his wife Marianne O'Reilly on their way to a Bloomsday breakfast in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times Singer Simon Morgan (right) and other performers prepare behind the scenes at the Bloomsday breakfast in Belvedere College, Dublin. Photograph: Dan Dennison People gather at the table for Bloomsday Breakfast in Belvedere College, Dublin. Photograph: Dan Dennison Simon Morgan sings for the audience at the Bloomsday breakfast in Belvedere College, Dublin. Photograph: Dan Dennison Baby Nova Forbes enjoying the Bloomsday breakfast in Belvedere College, Dublin. Photograph: Dan Dennison (L-R) Carol Reynolds, Sheena Bourke, Marian Finn, Carol O'Neill, Louise Whelan, Margaret Gray, Rosemary Phipps and Yvonne Rossiter in Ringsend Park, the location of James Joyce's first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw Philip Murphy and Mary O'Neill Byrne at the Joyce Bench in Ringsend Park, Dublin. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw Brendan Byrne plays the ukulele in Kennedy's, Westland Row, Dublin, during Bloomsday breakfast. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times Carole Ward and Liz Kinch enjoying the Bloomsday festivities on Duke Street, Dublin. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times Lisa Tonello from Italy and Issa Ali from Dublin celebrate Bloomsday in Kennedy's, Westland Row, Dublin. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times A group of friends dressed up for Bloomsday on Duke Street, Dublin. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times Raychel O'Connell and her son Tadhg in Bloomsday attire on Duke Street, Dublin. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times Paddy Keogh at Kennedy's, Westland Row, Dublin, for Bloomsday breakfast. Photograph: Tom Honan/The Irish Times
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Bloomsday: Aficionados enjoy a Full Joyce for breakfast then devour extra helpings of Ulysses
It was the usual high-cholesterol Bloomsday in Dublin, with at least half a dozen venues offering the Full Joyce for breakfast, complete with inner organs of beasts and fowls. For a man who spent most of his life on mainland Europe, James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, did little to popularise the continental petit-déjeuner. As licensed by his greatest creation, the breakfast fry-up remains the supreme choice of Joyceans everywhere. Mind you, on Monday you would have been hard pressed to find a mutton kidney in modern-day Dorset Street, where Leopold Bloom bought his on June 16, 1904, in the epic novel. Moses Dlugacz's butcher's shop – fictional to start with – is now a dentist's. But in other victuallers along the Dublin street, a pork kidney was the nearest I could find. READ MORE At Brady's, on the corner with Belvedere Road, a man with an east European accent said the mutton variety was an old-fashioned taste now, although if I was desperate for one, he thought there was a place over on Thomas Street that might still do them. In general, despite its prominent role in Ulysses, Dorset Street is still a Bloomsday-free zone. The nearby Belvedere College, where a Grecian blue carpet was rolled out on the front steps for the occasion, is one of the big breakfast venues, hosting for the Joyce Centre just down the way from it. But, as in 1904, Dorset Street is still too busy being Dorset Street to celebrate its immortalisation in literature. [ In pictures: Bloomsday 2025 - Bright colours, fine clothing and lots of smiles as Dublin comes alive for Joycean celebrations ] Bloomsday 2025 was an occasion for straw hats, in every sense. Unfortunately, those are the only items of Edwardian apparel that suited a sweltering June day in Dublin, with unbroken sunshine and temperatures in the 20s. Dundalk-born Philip Mullen, one of those attending breakfast at the Silk Road cafe in Dublin Castle, recalled that the colourful striped jacket he wore was originally a gamble on the fashion of the New Romantics, circa 1980, catching on in his native town. Instead, he was worn it for 'every Bloomsday since 1982'. But combined with the obligatory waistcoat and the rest of the ensemble, wearing it was sweaty work even before the sun climbed over the castle parapets. John O'Connell, meanwhile, among those Joyceans who had chosen a black suit and bowler hat for the day, was suffering a bit too. And that was even before he decided which of his pack-of-six false moustaches to put on. But mourning gear is part of the price of having to attend the annual funeral of Paddy Dignam, a man who since 1954, when Ulysses re-enactments began, has been ritually buried almost as often as Mayo football. As usual, the biggest Bloomsday attendances per square centimetre were in the diminutive Sweny's Pharmacy, where capacity attendances (about 17 at a time) squeezed in to buy lemon soap or to participate in readings and song. From outside, it looked and sounded like mass in very small chapel in 20th-century Ireland as the readings and hymns leaked out to crowds standing around the door and beyond, some of them smoking. The smokers included Katia Farias Rodriguez from Amsterdam, dressed in Molly Bloom-style blouse, skirt, and hat (also hard work in the balmy temperatures). As a precocious teenager reader once, she used to be challenged by her father: 'Why do you bother with those books? There's only one that matters.' He meant Ulysses, so when that turned up on the reading list for her last year in school, she finally plunged in. Her teacher wasn't pleased, 'because that meant she had to read it too'. Then it turned out that her father hadn't read it at all. Katia ended up having to tell him what it was about. Across the road in Kennedy's pub, Polish ambassador Artur Michalski told me he has attempted it twice without success, although he had earlier read the opening section at the Joyce Tower at Sandycove, so this may be third time lucky. Vastly improving the pub's average readership of the book, meanwhile, was Ana Dahlberg, from Portugal via Sweden. An ex-teacher turned food-and-beverage manager, she has devoured Ulysses five times now, with ever-increasing levels of engagement. Her copy is densely transcribed and complete with an explosion of colour-coded page tags, like confetti at a wedding. Over on Duke Street, at lunchtime, Davy Byrnes was as busy as ever, still benefiting from Bloom's historic change of mind in having a cheese sandwich and glass of wine there in 1904. But there's no such thing as bad publicity in Ulysses, as the revival of the adjacent Burton Tavern testifies. Having first thought of having lunch at the Burton, Bloom instead gave it the sort of the review that might have closed it down had it not been shut already by the time Ulysses was published. Sumptuously recreated last year, the venue now celebrates the link with Joyce. After a long delay, it was at last thrown temporarily open for this year's Bloomsday. The full unveiling is expected next month.
RTÉ News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
'Love loves to love love': Dublin celebrates Bloomsday
Celebrations are taking place across Dublin to mark Bloomsday, the day immortalised by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses. For more than 70 years, the day has been marked throughout the capital with recitals and reenactments of scenes from the author's most famous work. What was traditionally a one-day literary celebration on 16 June is now a week-long festival with multiple events, with this year's itinerary including a run and yoga workshops. The traditional Bloomsday breakfast took place in Belvedere College this morning, where Joyce attended secondary school from 1893 to 1899. Dozens of people in Edwardian costume also gathered at the nearby James Joyce Centre on North Great George's Street where the day is being celebrated in song and spoken word. Among those attending the events is Indian columnist Mayan Austen Sofia who writes a daily column on life in Delhi for the Hindustan Times. He discovered Ulysses during the pandemic and has written about his love for the novel and his experience of the Bloomsday festival in Dublin in a number of columns this week which have been published in the paper which has a print circulation of 18 million and further online readership. He described Ulysses as "Dublin's Sistine Chapel" and says that since he has started writing about the novel a number of his readers have been in touch telling him how they have engaged with the novel.
