The Rosenbach Library & Museum’s famed Bloomsday is back in person this year, just in time for the 100th anniversary of James Joyce’s daunting, celebrated, challenging, and exhilarating modernist masterpiece Ulysses. I will be reading from the “Cyclops” chapter around 3:45PM that day, June 16th, a Thursday. In addition to the day itself, the Rosenbach is hosting events related to Joyce and Ulysses, including a conversation with Colm Tóibín about the role music plays in Ulysses (a rather large one, I’d say). You can learn more here.

If you love the novel, or are simply curious about it, or just want to see some odd people obsessed with an incredibly complicated book, well, stop by!

In addition to readings and music from 11AM till 8PM there will also be food and drink from Bonk’s Bar and Crabhouse, Federal Donuts, 2nd Street Sammies, Weckerlies Popalong, John’s Water Ice, and the Bloomsday Cafe.

The museum will also host the exhibit 18 Reasons to Read Ulysses: A Centennial Celebration. “This year marks a century since the publication of James Joyce’s Modernist masterpiece, Ulysses. The Rosenbach, home to the only complete manuscript of the novel and the location of Philadelphia’s annual Bloomsday celebration, marks this occasion with a thematic walk around the novel’s eighteen episodes. The exhibition challenges the novel’s reputation as a difficult book to read, presenting eighteen highlights from the manuscript, each representing a single theme—along with related objects from The Rosenbach’s collections.  Visitors can engage with these thematic groupings separately or connect them to the larger nexus of ideas at play in the novel.”

Here I am doing my best to channel a young Joyce in the garden of the Middle Common Room at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, 1994.

I attended a reception for the Bloomsday readers and had a chance to enter the exhibit. Below are a few photos I took.