Re: RAT BLOOMSDAY 1999

[Bobby Mrozek <bby@earthlink.net>]

Bloomsday is roughly a 16 hour annual celebration/observance which 
begins at 8 am on the morning of June 16th and last until 2 am (some say 
sunrise) on the morning of June 17th.

The event, in part:

Commemorates the the original day, June 16, 1904 upon which the events 
of James Joyce's epic novel, Ulysses, take place, the principle 
characters being Leopold and Molly Bloom and Steven Dedalus -- hence 
forth the name Bloomsday.  

Commemorates a sort of a Secular Humanists day of reckoning, as the 
story of Ulysses takes place in one day, but the subtext takes in 5,000 
years of human history -- hence the title "Ulysses" which is the Latin 
form of "Odysseus"(Greek) the hero of Homer's Odyssey. 

Commemorates a sort of international holiday of drunkards, intellectuals 
and sexual liberation.

The event is popular with:

Persons of Irishness, persons of Jewishness (the Blooms are Jews, and a 
certain point against anti-semitism is part of the book), persons who 
read, persons of homosexualness (is that a word?), liberals(and other 
persons who avoid working for a living, ie: theatre artists), etc.  The 
day is more noteworthy in city centers like Baltimore, Philadelphia, New 
York, Boston where there are sizable populations of Gay, Irish, Jewish, 
readers... (although I'm not sure how that last one applies to 
Baltimore, save for the gost of Edgar Allen Poe and H. L. Menecken). 

The celebration is sometimes:

In my foolish youth, I was party to a few observances wherein the 
players tried to stay drunk, awake and sexual active for the full 16 
hours.

I've been to a few classy parties wherein the guest wore costumes (sort 
of Roaring 20's, towards more daring things with feathers and little 
else (it was very warm summer day), and lots of booze and some 
flamboyant toasting and readings, some sad rememberances of dead friends 
and such.

This past Wednesday, I went to a really wonderful party at the Peabody 
Library. The Peabody Conservatory of Music keeps the day rather 
seriously and the celebrating was quite robust. There was a band playing 
Irish music, an endless supply of Guiness and Burgundy, and lots of 
readings from the great book.