Radio Bloomsday June 16, 2011

Happy Bloomsday Lovers!

2011-06-16T05:28:00.001-07:00

In case, I don't get a chance to write before tonite, the great day is here at last! Listen to us beginning at 7pm EST on WBAI 99.5FM in New York City or online at wbai.org. Los Angelinos can hear us at 7pm their time on KPFK 90.7FM. If you are in New York City, The Hudson Yards Cafe is hosting a listening party at their bar on 10th avenue and 35th Street. All are welcome. The cast members will be hanging out there after they perform and Molly will shuffle in around 3am. Don't be blue mouldy, come listen with us!

One More Day til Bloomsday!

2011-06-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

My bed is my office. I am still in my pajamas and my hair looks like a family of New York pigeons lives in it. Before I belt my jammies, thrown on a saucy pair of heels and run out the door to pick up my boy from preschool, I want to tell you how excited am I for the upcoming sonic explosion rushing our way. In addition to the incredible pre-records I have been mentioning all month, we have two dozen live performers throwing down throughout the broadcast.

Two fierce stage veterans Bernadette Quigley and Fiana Toibin open up our program by performing the first pages of the novel. Yes, a female Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan will hit the airways in just over 24 hours. Bernadette has performed the Molly Bloom monologue at Symphony Space and Fiana was recently on Broadway with Vanessa Redgrave in A Long Day's Journey into Night. Irish actor Lawrence Lowry will be reading from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Comedienne Fiona Walsh performs the poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. Jim Fletcher, who recently played the title role in the Elevator Repair Service's production of Gatz, performs John Milton. Ludlow street veterans and New York superstars Eco-Trippin's Corey Carthew (pictured above in orange) Faux Real Theater's Mark Greenfield, and Laura Barnett, Todo con Nada's Aaron Beall, Melanie Martinez, Anna Goodman-Herrick, The Treehouse Shaker's Mara McEwin and more perform from the Wandering Rocks episode of the novel. Irish writer Frank Delaney, author of the fantastic podcast Re:Joyce, does a Bloom monologue. Other fantastic live performers include Laura Ross, Barry Foley, Jimmy Reardon, and Routh Chadwick! Tune in LIVE tomorrow Thursday night from 7pm to 2am on WBAI, 99.5FM in NYC and on KPFK in Los Angeles. We will be live blogging the show. Send us notes and emails to radiobloomsday@gmail.com

2 days til Bloomsday!

2011-06-14T09:10:00.001-07:00

We are all running around like chickens with our heads cut off here at Radio Bloomsday Central with only 55 hours left until we go live in New York City (LA will hear us on a 2 hour time delay). Yesterday, the superlative Alec Baldwin recorded Tennyson's poem Ulysses which will be our invocation to the gods at the top of the show on Thursday night. It's incredible. We've also received an amazing batch of recordings from the students at Belvedere College in Dublin. Lead by their teacher Louise Curtin, they recorded the complete Nestor episode of the novel which includes the classroom scene as Stephen Dedalus attempts to teach his students the poem Lycidas. Text monster Jim Fletcher then performs that John Milton poem. Belvedere College (pictured above) is of course James Joyce's high school. I was a student at Muckross Park, myself back in 80s with my old friends Louise Butterly and Helen O'Connell.

Colin Middleton, Beau Carley, Cian Buckely rehearse The Nestor episode

at Belvedere College, Dublin for Radio Bloomsday.

Hudson Yards Cafe on 10th avenue and 35th Street in NYC will be broadcasting the entire show. KPFK in Los Angeles will devote 2 hours in the afternoon to our upcoming evening broadcast of Radio Bloomsday. I leave you now with a promo from Alec Baldwin.

Radio Bloomsday Cast List!

2011-06-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

Over sixty performers have collaborated with us this year to create the most sonically satisfying Radio Bloomsday ever. Join us on Thursday, June 16th at 7pm to hear (listed in alphabetical order) :

Alec Baldwin, Laura Barnett, Aaron Beall, Shawnee Benton-Gibson, Marie-Louise Bowe, Cian Buckley, Charles Busch, Beau Carley, Corey Carthew, Routh Chadwick Janet Coleman, Art Coyne, Louise Curtin, Michael Corcoran, Naoise Dack, Frank Delaney, Paul Dooley, Roma Downey, David Dozer, Kate Ellis, Anne Enright, Jim Fletcher, Finbar “Barry” Foley, Lucas Grange, Leo Hanna, Ryan Hargadon, Robbie Harris, Anna Goodman-Herrick, Mark Greenfield, Larry Josephson, Garrison Keillor, Owen Killian, Sam Killian, John Lithgow, Lawrence Lowry, Marc Maron, Melanie Martinez, Emer Mayock, Nick McDonell, Michael-David McKernan, Mara McEwin, Colin Middleton, Paul Muldoon, Caraid O’Brien, John O’Callaghan, Jimmy Reardon, Laura Ross, Bob Odenkirk, Nick Roth, Conor Ryan, Wallace Shawn, Marc Singer, T. Ryder Smith, Jerry Stiller, Tarab, Bernadette Quigley, Fiana Toibin, Francesco Turrisi, Kate Valk, Fiona Walsh and Zeroboy!

And of course are amazing production staff and engineers including Nellie Gilles, Robert Auld, Mark Torres, Jon Almehleh, Reggie Johnson, Max Shawn Rhodes, Max Schmid and Daniel Dunne.

3 days until Bloomsday!

2011-06-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

We are still working away here at Radio Bloomsday Central, touching up the final rundown for the big show this Thursday night June 16 from 7pm to 2am. Let us know if you are planning any Bloomsday Listening Parties and we will send people your way. The Hudson Yards on 10th Avenue and 35th Street has said they would tune in at the bar. The photo above is of Radio Foundation Producer Larry Josephson (working on his thirtieth Bloomsday), producing staff Nellie Gilles, director Caraid O'Brien and the wonderful actor Jerry Stiller.

Radio Bloomsday Preview Today at 11am!

2011-06-12T05:00:00.001-07:00

Listen to a Radio Bloomsday preview hour today, Sunday, at 11am on WBAI 99.5FM or on wbai.org. Artistic Director Janet Coleman and Caraid O'Brien will discuss Ulysses during The Next Hour radio show. We will play some excerpts of the novel from previous Radio Bloomsday broadcasts including performances by Paul Dooley, Anne Meara, Aaron Beall, Nicole Wiesner, Tara Bahna James and more. We will also be playing some music by the wonderful new instrumental ensemble Tarab. If you miss the broadcast you can listen to it on the WBAI archive.

Radio Bloomsday Promo

2011-06-10T18:45:00.000-07:00

Holles Street Maternity Hospital

2011-06-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, T. Ryder Smith dashed over to The Radio Foundation in between performances for War Horse at Lincoln Center. He brilliantly performed an excerpt from the most difficult chapter of Ulysses, Oxen of the Sun. Stylistically, Joyce slaloms through the history of English literature in this episode and it is often the chapter where readers throw the novel against the wall in desperation. T Ryder Smith performed an excerpt written in the style of the seventeenth century poet John Milton as the drunken students chided Dedalus about his supposed sexual exploits.We were discussing how once you have the answer keys, the clues, to Joyce's references, stylistic choices, and plot points, the episode opens up like a beautiful flower and you breath it in. If you do the work to understand the text, and read it and then perform it, the experience is like having a conversation with a brilliant friend and finally understanding what he is saying. It's a rush of artistic and intellectual pleasure and understanding.

The episode takes place at Hollis Street Maternity Hospital where Bloom and Dedalus finally meet joining the drunken medical students as they all wait for the birth of Baby Purefoy. My first experience with Ulysses was a ten year old girl in Dublin waiting in the lobby of Hollis Street for my aunt to finish work. She was a matron at the hospital and would take me to see plays by my first literary heros Oscar Wilde and John B Keane starring those wonderful actors who shaped my theatrical consciousness like Robert O'Mahoney and Mick Lally. While waiting in the lobby, I would watch the tours of American tourists making their Bloomsday pilgrimage to the site of this most difficult episode as Joyce birthed his place into the consciousness of English literature alongside the long laboring Mrs. Purefoy.

On Monday, John Lithgow recorded another difficult excerpt from Oxen of the Sun, written in the style of Charles Lamb whose version of Ulysses, was Joyce's first experience with the Greek legend while a student at Belvedere College in Dublin. This year, several students at Belvedere are recording the Nestor episode of Ulysses as Stephen Dedalus tries to teach his students the John Milton poem Lycidas. Radio Bloomsday veteran Jim Fletcher, that fantastic performer of classic twentieth century literature, will be performing that Milton poem live from the WBAI studios on June 16.

The ethereal Kate Valk recorded the birth of Baby Purefoy for us a few years ago. This year, she reads an excerpt from Cyclops with Jim Fletcher and one of my favorite WB Yeats poem's The Stolen Child which had the whole studio in rapt attention as she performed it. Join us only six days away and listen in live to Radio Bloomsday on WBAI in New York City and KPFK in Los Angeles and on wbai.org anywhere in the world.

Another Day at Radio Bloomsday Central

2011-06-08T07:24:00.000-07:00

The legendary Jerry Stiller stopped by the Radio Foundation to record a couple of Bloom monologues for Radio Bloomsday, which is just 8 days away! First, he recorded an excerpt from Lestrygonians as Bloom thinks about all things people like to eat that he finds disgusting: oysters, unsightly like a clot of phelgm, snails out of the ground, Chinese eggs fifty years old, tainted game, jugged hare.

And then Jerry performed an excerpt for Aeolus, as Bloom walks into the newspaper office, stares at the old man setting the type backwards and thinks of his father and his Hebrew books at Passover: "Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear! All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu. No, that's the other." He was brilliant, rattling off the Hebrew like no other in the middle of this Irish novel.

On Monday, the incredible John Lithgow recorded a dense excerpt from the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses written in the style of Charles Lamb. This is definitely shaping up to be our most incredible Bloomsday celebration ever. In addition to Jerry and John, our cast list includes Alec Baldwin, Wallace Shawn, Kate Valk, Jim Fletcher, Zeroboy, Aaron Beall, Bob Odenkirk, Paul Dooley, Mara McEwin, Corey Carthew, Laura Barnett, Mark Greenfield, John O'Callaghan, Marc Singer, Roma Downey, Melanie Martinez, Laura Ross, Janet Coleman, David Dozer, the students of Belvedere College in Dublin, Fiona Walsh, Fiana Tobin, Bernadette Quigley, Laurence Lowry, Shawnee Benton-Gibson, Marie-Louise Bowe and many more! Director Caraid O'Brien pictured above with Jerry in a photo by Nellie Gilles will perform the complete Molly Bloom episode live beginning around 11.30pm. Don't forget to tune in on Thursday, June 16 at 7pm on WBAI in NYC and KPFK in Los Angeles and on wbai.org anywhere in the world.

Bloomsday: A Very Brief History

2011-06-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

Every year, we encourage our listeners to host their own Bloomsday listening party, at home, in a bar or wherever they like to celebrate. Tips and menu suggestions available here. One of our advisors here at Radio Bloomsday is Professor Michael Groden, the esteemed Joyce scholar. He is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Ulysses in Progress, general editor of the manuscript facsimile series The James Joyce Archive, and author, most recently, of Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual, and Personal Views. Below, Professor Groden explains the history of the world's most famous literary holiday.

Bloomsday: A Very Brief History

June 16, 1904 – Bloomsday – is surely the most famous single day in literature, a day celebrated all over the world. As its 2004 centenary approached, a newspaper headline shouted, One Day Turns 100. Why the day is famous is clear: James Joyce set the events of Ulysses on that day. Why Joyce chose this particular day is less certain. He never said why, and we can only speculate. Not much happened in the world on that day – at least in the Western world – but newspapers did report big events from the days before, including a Russian retreat in the Russo-Japanese War and the sinking of the General Slocum excursion boat in New York’s East River, with the loss of over a thousand lives. According to Richard Ellmann’s biography, Joyce chose this date for a more personal reason, as a gift to his partner and eventual wife Nora to commemorate the day on which she first went out walking with him and changed his life.

Joyce’s first biographer, Herbert Gorman, who wrote with the novelist’s cooperation, claims that nothing unusual happened to Joyce on June 16^th. Several scholars have pointed to the absence of letters or any other evidence to show that Joyce and Nora met on that specific day. Joyce might simply have settled on a day in mid-June around the time of his walk with Nora that met his main requirements: no major world events, no Saint’s Day in the Catholic Church. We can’t know. But Ulysses is a novel that tempers its sadness, satire, and irony with a hearty dose of sentiment, occasionally even with sentimentality. Ellmann’s sentimental explanation for the date remains powerful, the kind of story about a particular day that we’d like to believe is true.

Not long after Ulysses was published in 1922, June 16th began to be called Bloomsday. The Oxford English Dictionary added an entry on Bloomsday in 2005 and cites the word’s first appearance in a letter Joyce wrote in June 1924. The practice of gathering together on the day to celebrate started early on as well, in 1929, when Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier invited Joyce and thirty other guests to a luncheon at the Léopold restaurant near Versailles to honor both the publication of the French translation of Ulysses and Bloomsday’s 25th anniversary. The lunch took place on June 27, eleven days after Bloomsday, but no one seemed to mind.

For many years Dublin had a vexed relationship with Joyce, but the first celebration of Bloomsday there took place 57 years ago, on June 16, 1954. Irish writers Flann O’Brien and John Ryan brought a small group together at the Martello Tower, the setting of Ulysses’ first episode, and from there they took a Hades-like carriage ride through Dublin. One of the men, Anthony Cronin, noted with fascination that in the 1954 Gold Cup race, a horse with the Homeric name of Elpenor won at 50 to 1 odds, even more an outsider than Throwaway was in 1904. Leopold Bloom faces problems when several Dubliners mistakenly think that he has inside knowledge about the Gold Cup and has won a huge pile of money when the 20-to-1 long shot Throwaway wins the race. Especially intriguing to Cronin was the fact that Joyce’s equivalent of Elpenor in The Odyssey is Paddy Dignam, the man whose funeral Bloom attends in the Hades episode.

On June 16, 1967 the first gathering of Joyce scholars took place in Dublin, with academic conferences continuing as annual Bloomsday events in various European and North American cities. Popular celebrations have sprung up not only in Dublin (which started embracing Joyce in 1982, the centenary of his birth) but also in such diverse cities as New York, Philadelphia, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, and Beijing. Many Dubliners now consider Bloomsday to be Ireland’s second most important holiday, and some even rank it above St. Patrick’s Day.

New York can lay claim to the longest continuous association of any city with Bloomsday. The James Joyce Society was founded at the late, lamented Gotham Book Mart in 1947. One of the Society’s meetings each year has usually been on Bloomsday. The annual readings at Symphony Space, broadcast on WBAI, began in 1981. This is Radio Bloomsday’s fourth annual reading devoted exclusively to radio performance and broadcast on the Pacifica Radio Network. So join us in celebrating Bloomsday’s 107th anniversary in the best way we can think of: listening to the people and the city of Dublin, and the day come alive in the words James Joyce gave us on the pages of Ulysses.

The Endless Conversation

2011-05-31T09:18:00.000-07:00

As Joyce moves through the history of English language literature in Ulysses while at the same time pushing it forward in his tale of a day in Dublin in 1904, he engages and comments upon the writers who went before him and lodges himself firmly in the (sub)consciousness of the writers who came after him. As we put together the seven hour radio show, thematically weaving together Joyce and Yeats and Milton and Callaghan, what emerges is an extension of Joyce's literary conversation with no end in site. Joyce himself correctly stated that his novel "was sure to keep scholars busy for centuries." And in fact, the business of Joyce scholarship is a cottage industry with thousands of books written on his works as well as a Joyce expert in the majority of universities worldwide.

Rehearsing and recording various excerpts from Ulysses, pairing scripts with fearless actors who love to bite down on a difficult, elusive or challenging text, is a thrilling experience. On Friday at KCRW in Santa Monica, we recorded two extraordinary international actors, Roma Downey and John O'Callaghan both of whom were born in Ireland. John has recorded for us many times and the sexual energy he brings to the character of Bloom is both titillating and thrilling. The beautiful Roma Downey recorded for us for the first time this year and she was was hilarious and moving portraying three characters - the narrator of Lotus Eaters, Bloom's penpal lover Martha and a dirty slut from the lane. The chemistry between these two deeply Irish performers brought out the pulsating humanity of the text, nevermind its sexiness, and will be yet another highlight of our broadcast this year.

Every year, I emerge out of Radio Bloomsday with a deeper understanding of the text, as more layers are revealed and the puzzle pieces in the more difficult passages start clicking together. Joyce is continually referencing himself, beginning conversations at 10am and continuing them in Molly's monologue after midnight. Not finishing them of course, Joyce never finishes a conversation. I love Bloom's endless flights of fancy as he imagines other lands and cities and women. In Calypso, read by Wallace Shawn and Anne Enright, he conjures up the "Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa." In the Lotus Eaters excerpt read by Roma Downey and John O'Callaghan, he continues a fantasy of the Middle East: "The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far niente, not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt."

Meanwhile, its hot as Hades in New York City, by 9am I am already shvitzing like a ferd (sweating like horse in Yiddish) as Bloom might have said but never did. After our late May monsoons, there is no more Irish rain here to set the scene and like Bloom I find myself lusting after the weather I cannot have. I am reminded of the beautiful Joyce poem "She weeps over Rahoon" which reminds me of sitting in my Granny's living room looking at the rainfall outside her window on Rahoon Road in Galway, the birthplace of Nora Barnacle, Joyce's wife and inspiration for Molly.

Rain on Rahoon falls softly,

softly falling where my dark lover lies

Sad is his voice that calls me

sadly calling at grey moonrise.

The wonderful musician Marie-Louise Bowe from Laois will be reading that poem and others on Thursday, June 16th. Join us on Radio Bloomsday from 7pm to 2am on WBAI in NYC and KPFK in Los Angeles and on wbai.org from anywhere in the world.

Behind the Scenes in Berlin

2011-05-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

Our artistic director for Radio Bloomsday, the arts director for WBAI, Janet Coleman, is on tour with a show in the weeks leading up to June 16th. In between performances, she has been coordinating actors and engineers from hotels, backstage and afterparties in Europe. The Life! She writes to us today from Germany:

I am in Berlin with the New York City Players, opening tonight at the Hau Zwei in Richard Maxwell's "Neutral Hero." We started this tour almost five weeks ago with a premiere in Brussels, then shows in Vienna and Hamburg. We are sort of the international contingent of Radio Bloomsday, with the playwright/director Richard Maxwell and two of the players, Rosie Goldensohn and me, veterans of the WBAI Joyce marathon. For our opening run, we were joined in Brussels by even more Bloomsday players: Kate Valk (arriving right after the Wooster Group's Antwerp run of "Vieux Carre", Jim Fletcher (a non-touring New York City Player, also Jay Gatsby in the Elevator Repair Service's great production of "Gatz"), and Tori Vasquez (Daisy in "Gatz," and also Mrs. Richard Maxwell.Delores Maxwell, their daughter, is four years old, a temporary restraint on her ability to read "Ulysses," not on her status as a world traveller and theater goer.)

Rich Maxwell once described the setting of "NH," which takes place in an unnamed but richly described small-town in America -- possibly in Minnesota --as his Dublin. Like "Ulysses," it's an exploration of the hero myth though told in the most American of authorial voices.

I salute the Los Angeles contingent of Radio Bloomsday and its brilliant recorded work at KPFK, WBAI's sister station. I am thrilled that two of my favorite Second City alums, Bob Odenkirk and Paul Dooley were able to play together this year, not just wave at each other on Cahuenga Blvd.

After Berlin, the NYC Players returns to NYC for one day, then on for a week in Montreal. After that, for me, it's all James Joyce and Caraid O'Brien all the time. It's quite stunning to be in my airborn Dublin, Geniusville.

Pa is dead. Misery! Misery!

2011-05-25T06:48:00.001-07:00

We often forget the main event of Bloom's day as we go through the many experiences that make up his world on June 16, 1904, his breakfast, his toilet, his errand running, his getting thrown out of a pub, his heavy lunch, his bath, his attendance at mass, his visit to the newspaper office and later to the seaside, his visit to the hospital to check on poor Mrs. Purefoy in yet another long labor, his carousing with Stephen Dedalus at the whore house, their drunken walk home, his lost key, his scrambling to get over the fence and sneak into his own house, his last act of kissing his wife goodnight on her bottom. There are also his many musings on food, life, wife, sex, her affair with Blazes Boylan, the time when he was courting Molly as a young man, his pen pal lover Martha, his own dead son, his own dead mother, his own dead father. What gets Bloom out of the house that morning, however, is the unexpected death and funeral of his friend, Patrick Dignam at 11am that morning. What keeps him from returning home, of course, is the knowledge that his wife is planning to consummate her affair with her lover.

The Calypso episode which Anne Enright and Wallace Shawn perform in its entirety begins with Molly asking about the funeral and ends with Bloom muttering aloud "Poor Dignam." He chats with his old girlfriend Josie Breen about the death explaining why he is wearing mourning clothes in Lestrygonians and we are there in the pub during the Cyclops episode when Alfie Bergan hears that his friend has died for the first time. One of the most poignant moments in the novel is Dignam's son little Patrick Aloysius doing an errand for his mother on the afternoon of the day his father is buried during The Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses. Little Patrick is relieved to escape the weeping of his mother and her friends, proud to be in special clothes and missing school for the day. His attention is drawn by a photograph in a store window advertising a boxing match. He wonders if he will be able to sneak out to see it, before he realizes the date of the match has passed. And then the brutal suddenness of his father's quick death takes hold of him. In all his innocence he says of his father, a famous alcoholic, in that segment:

"The last night pa was boosed he was standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney's for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn't hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he is in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night. "

The legendary radio host and writer Garrison Keillor recorded the tale of Patrick Dignam with such sad beauty and compassion for us last week. Patrick's grief reminds me of the the title character in another great Irish novel, Roddy Doyle's Booker Prize Winner Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha.

The entire Wandering Rocks episode in Ulysses is a snapshot of Dublin during that one late spring afternoon in 1904, broken down into eighteen segments each one focusing on a different character or characters in the novel. We will be featuring several segments from Wandering Rocks, Joyce's micronovel set in the middle of his macronovel. In this chapter, Bloom buys a dirty book for his wife, in an excerpt that will be read by comedian Marc Maron. Blazes Boylan flirts with a shop girl and buys Molly, whom he refers to as an invalid, a gift which will be performed by Radio Bloomsday veteran Alec Baldwin. The brilliant young novelist Nick McDonell (below) performs Stephen Dedalus browsing in a bookstore where he chances upon his young, hungry sister. She is trying to buy a french primer to better herself, despite the fact that their mother has just died, their father is an alcoholic and they never have any food in the house. Stephen wants to save her but cannot, the tremendous weight of his artistic ambition propels him forward:

"She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.

We.

Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite.

Misery! Misery!"

Eighteen deeply human moments in dozens of people's lives, as moving today as they were when they were written. What we seek to highlight during our broadcast of Radio Bloomsday is the longing, the desperation, the pain, the beauty, the hope and the dreams behind the hundreds of Dubliner's who populate Joyce's mind, decades after he physically left that city forever and continued to write in Zurich, Pola and Paris. Please join us as we investigate the psyche of the human soul as seen through the mind of James Joyce on Thursday June 16, 2011 in WBAI 99.5FM in New York City, on KPFK 90.7 in Los Angeles and on www.wbai.org anywhere in the world.

30 years of Bloomsdays on the Radio

2011-05-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

Dozens of actors, writers and engineers, from coast to coast, come together every year to create our seven hour broadcast of artists interpreting James Joyce's Ulysses, Radio Bloomsday. Last year, we interviewed our artistic director and the Director of Arts Programming at WBAI, Janet Coleman, who is working with us on Radio Bloomsday from her European tour of Neutral Hero, a new play by Richard Maxwell, another Radio Bloomsday performer. This year we turn our attention to our producer, Larry Josephson (pictured at left). Larry has been broadcasting Bloomsday on the radio for thirty years. A Peabody-Award-Winner he has spent 45 years in public radio as host, producer, manager and engineer. He started the nonprofit, The Radio Foundation in 1977 as a means to produce and distribute his work, and that of others.

Larry was the host of an infamous grumpy morning program on WBAI, New York (1966-72). A series of local and national programs followed: “MODERN TIMES,” “BRIDGES: A Liberal/Conservative Dialogue;” an 8-hour documentary, “ONLY IN AMERICA: The Story of American Jews;” and “What Is Judaism? Conversations with Rabbi Ismar Schorsch About Seven Jewish Holidays.”

Josephson is also responsible for the revival of Bob & Ray on public radio, CD and in Carnegie Hall, after they were no longer commercial. He holds a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley, and has taught radio production at the New School and NYU.

Director Caraid O'Brien interviews Larry at his Upper West Side studio.

How long have you been producing Ulysses for the radio?

1981 was the first year I produced Bloomsday for radio. In the late 70s there was a Bloomsday marathon reading broadcast on WBAI from the Shakespeare & Company bookstore on 81st and Broadway, now a discount cosmetics outlet. When the store went out of business I went to Isaiah Sheffer and suggested we take over the tradition and broadcast a show live from Symphony Space, which we did for 27 years. In 2008, I decided to produce a Bloomsday exclusively for radio, broadcast live and on tape from the WBAI studios on Wall Street. The radio-only concept allows us to record actors who can’t come down to WBAI live—Alec Baldwin, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Wallace Shawn, Anne Enright, Paul Muldoon, Bob Odenkirk and many others. I invited Caraid O’Brien to direct and to perform Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Janet Coleman, WBAI’s Arts Director, serves as Artistic Director of the project.

What was your first experience with Ulysses?

The first time I encountered the book was in 1978, hearing it read over WBAI from Shakespeare & Company. I loved it as sound art, to me it’s verbal music. I believe that it was written to be read aloud, to be declaimed, whatever Joyce’s intention. It’s a feast for the ear as much as for the eye.

Most educated people haven’t read the book. If I had nickel for every time someone confessed to me that they have never read Ulysses, or started and gave up, I’d be a wealthy man.

So your first encounter with Ulysses was when it was read aloud at a Bloomsday?

Yes.

And since then you have devoted 30 years to performances of Ulysses on the radio?

Yes.

Larry (with beard) in a 1969 photo by Richard Avedon for a piece on WBAI in New York Magazine.

What are your favorite parts of the book?

The opening of the book has a certain resonance, “Stately Plump Buck Mulligan…, and Molly, the end of Molly, starting from “the night we missed the boat at Algeciras” ... to the final “Yes.” It’s some kind of a miracle that a man could write Penelope. I can’t think of another man who could have gotten into a woman's mind like Joyce did. Caraid, I like your Molly best, it sparkles like champagne. Fionnula Flanagan's is completely different, like a full bodied wine. Both are amazing performances. The stamina, not to mention bladder control, required boggles the mind.

Ulysses is very funny. I love the jokes: Mr. Deasy’s line from the second chapter – “Why didn't they kick the Jews out of Ireland? Because they never let them in.” That’s funny and sad.

What else speaks to you about Ulysses?

I love the language. And the languages: English, Greek, Latin, Gaelic. That it’s about all of life and death, sex and food—and drink---compressed into one day. And how disrespectful and mocking it is to the church and the clergy. I like the fact that there is an incredible amount of scholarship about Joyce and Ulysses, Joyce and his relationship to his wife, Nora Barnacle, the letters and poems we read. And its publishing history, including the battle with censors. The fact that Bloomsday is celebrated all over the world on the same day is inspiring to me; it’s great to be a part of that.

I also like the sound of the character names: Blazes Boylan, Patty Dignam (R.I.P), Stephen Dedalus, Mr. Deasy, Corny Kelleher, Bella Cohen, Father Conmee, S.J, and, of course, Mr. Leopold Bloom.

You have produced a radio documentary on history of the Jews in America. Do you relate to Bloom’s Jewishness?

I don’t think of Bloom as a Jewish character (according to Jewish law he isn’t—his mother was a Christian, his father converted to Christianity), nothing he does is particularly Jewish. Only the drunken, anti-Semitic louts in Barney Kiernan’s pub define him as a Jew.

However, he is one of the few Jews in mainstream literature that isn’t a despised character like Fagan or Shylock. He is the outsider in his own (Irish) society.

Another association with Ulysses: my first wife and I had a baby who died at 18 months; the marriage broke up soon after. It is still very painful to this day, so I identify with Molly and Leopold that way.

(Bloom lost his newborn son Rudy 11 years before Ulysses takes place; he and Molly haven’t slept together since then.)

When did you first become involved with WBAI?

I was a computer program for IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY, a form of hell for a single man from LA who’d never seen snow. In 1965 I finally got a transfer to an IBM office in New York City. Since I knew no one in the city, I volunteered at WBAI as a recording engineer. Bob Fass, my radio mentor, got me a job as an announcer in 1966. Shortly after most of the staff, including AB Spellman, the morning host, walked out over a dispute on how to cover the Vietnam War. I auditioned, got the job and the rest is history. I broke all the rules of morning radio—eating my breakfast on the air and reviewing it at the same time. Occasionally, I was so depressed I couldn’t speak and just played music--one morning I played “Lady Madonna” over and over for two hours. Other mornings I showed up late or not at all.

I was called “the morning mayor of the revolution.” but I was skeptical of the sixties movements, especially the alleged transformative power of drugs and sex but I was against the Vietnam war and supportive of civil rights.

I don’t think human nature has changed much since we climbed out of the primordial slime. Rage and passion are just the same, one’s basic needs for security and love, to raise children, have always been there and will always be.

A four year old named Katie would call in every day and talk about her day. Lisa, a 14 year old student at the Nightingale School would call in with cynical tales out of school. WBAI never sent out a press release. I started out in March, 1966; in September I opened the Times to find a review of my show by Jack Gould, their TV radio critic, who loved the show and gave me a great review. I did the morning show for 6 years. After the baby died, I couldn’t talk about it so went back to Berkeley to finish my degree. Two years later I returned to WBAI as station manager. As a station manager I made a good radio producer!

People think of me as a typical New York Jew but I was born a typical LA Jew, transformed into a New York Jew after living here for 50 years.

What is WBAI’s connection to literature on the radio?

WBAI became a Pacific station in 1960 after the eccentric philanthropist, Louis Schweitzer, donated the station to Pacifica. In the seventies WBAI did a marathon reading of “War and Peace,” mostly live, with William F Buckley, Morris Carnovsky and a cast of hundreds, using community members as well as professional actors. “The people” reading the people's novel. In the sixties and seventies, original and traditional radio drama, cultural criticism and reviews were an essential part of WBAI’s schedule, along with news and public affairs. The station became highly politicized in the seventies, divided against itself, driven by identity politics, so cultural programming with broad appeal started to fall away.

Radio Bloomsday’s artistic director, Janet Coleman, has done yeoman service in keeping literature and radio drama alive throughout her career at the station.

Who do you hope is listening in to Radio Bloomsday?

People who love Ulysses or who will learn to love it after listening to Radio Bloomsday, because it’s a wonderful piece of literature read by great actors. Having a book read to you goes back to infancy, it is a primal experience. There is a long history at NPR, Pacifica and on the BBC reading books to listeners, just like mother.

Why do you produce Ulysses for the radio every year?

It is an activity that is something I am very proud to be part of. I enjoy it. I am very pleased that I have made Ulysses readings happen on the radio for 30 years. It has given me a lot of pleasure, a bit of prestige and it fulfills the motto of the Radio Foundation, “Devoted to the Art of Radio.”

Happy Birthday to a Brilliant Bloom

2011-05-20T06:19:00.000-07:00

Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly are an artistic couple, he is always dreaming and scheming to get her onstage, writing sketches, stealing operas, arranging concerts in which she appears. They fell in love over Lord Byron's poetry whose book of poems Bloom gave Molly while they were first courting. Molly mistakenly thought he was a poet because he dressed like one, a deception she's never quite forgiven him for. It is their love for and frustration with each other that keeps this novel stitched together. There is even a book entitled The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom that imagines their relationship in greater detail inspired by textual clues from Ulysses. You know that old Irish saying, in Molly's heart, a flower Blooms. Today is the birthday of my own personal Leopold Bloom in residence, the Obie award winning theatrical impresario, director and actor Aaron Beall. He first played Bloom onstage at Symphony Space in 2004 for the centennial celebration and has appeared in every Radio Bloomsday I have directed since.

In honor of Aaron's birthday, here in an excerpt from last years Radio Bloomsday directed by and starring Aaron Beall as Bloom with the fantastic actresses Nicole Wiesner and Tara Bahna James as the bitchy sopranos Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy from The Sirens episode of Ulysses.

All Spirits - Dead and Alive

2011-05-18T04:24:00.000-07:00

Still raining here in Manhattan as I work on the rundown for this year's Radio Bloomsday, our seven hour broadcast of excerpts from James Joyce's Ulysses. When I first started working on creating epic Bloomsday celebrations about a decade ago, I would frequently convene planning meetings and rehearsals at bars and beer gardens. One of my favorite locations was the backgarden at Rudy's in midtown Manhattan where you can still get a picture of watery beer for under ten dollars. That year, we scored and staged the Cyclops episode of the novel which of course takes place in a bar and ends famously with the one-eyed fenian, The Citizen, dinging a biscuit tin in the direction of Bloom's head because Bloom dared to list Jesus, Mercadante and Spinoza among famous world changing Jews. Frank McCourt played the narrator, Malachy McCourt was the citizen and Aaron Beall played Bloom.

Alas, my bar rehearsals are no more and I fully admit to being a failed hedonist. Recently, I have traded one sort of spirits for another and have started meditating to focus my energy and calm my mind. With that in mind, I have been particularly enjoying all of the metaphysical references in the novel from Bloom's meditation on the decomposing body in Hades to Molly's questioning of the meaning of metempsychosis, the movement of the soul to another body once its host body dies, at the top of the Calypso episode. The novelist Anne Enright and the playwright Wallace Shawn will be performing that episode in its entirety around 8pm on June 16. The Victorians were very into seances and the occult and Joyce riffs on this both in theme and writing style. There is a hilarious parody of a description of a seance in the Cyclops episode that the lovely actress Judy Graubart performed last year.

Another favorite excerpts from last year's broadcast was the vocal acrobat Zeroboy performing an excerpt from the Hades episode of the Ulysses. The scene takes place at Paddy Dignam's funeral, which is of course the purported main event of Bloom's day and leads to all sorts of thinking about this life and the next. You can hear an excerpt from Zeroboy's performance in the video above. Zeroboy will be performing a new excerpt for us this year. Don't forget to tune in this June 16th, to hear him live. Special Thanks to the wonderful website www.joyceimages.com for their help with this video.

A Recent Visitation of Jupiter Pluvius

2011-05-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

New York is feeling much like Dublin today. Thundershowers, wet winds and drenched socks took hold of the city during "a recent visitation of Jupiter Pluvius," this mid May morning. The rain has stopped, the trees are washed but the pavement is still dark with damp. As Joyce writes in one of his early poems about the rain: " Rain has fallen all the day./ O come among the laden trees:/ The leaves lie thick upon the way/ Of memories." Performer Marc Singer describes Dublin in similar circumstances as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom walk home after a rain shower on Radio Bloomsday this June 16, less than a month away!

Water is almost a character in Ulysses as well it might be given the typical wet and rainy Irish climate. Of course, Ireland much like Manhattan, is an island surrounded by water, and its writers talk often of the sea.

Several chapters of Ulysses take place by the Sea. "Thalatta! Thalatta!" The novel begins in the Martello Tower as Dedalus watches Buck Mulligan shave and take a bath in the ocean. Stephen refuses to swim, and admits to being a hydrophobe, or at least that is what he tells Bloom at the end of the novel in the Ithaca episode, explaining why he doesn't want to wash his hands. Later in Proteus, he walks on the beach thinking of his past and imagining his future. You will hear the poet Paul Muldoon perform an excerpt from the second half of this chapter on Radio Bloomsday.

Even Bloom has his moment by the sea. In the Nausicaa episode, we return again to the Atlantic Ocean as Bloom watches the fireworks and the girls playing in the sand. I also love the end of Lotus Eaters episode which also sets Bloom in a body of water, the bath: " He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

Yesterday, I was discussing Ulysses with the charismatic actor, Jim Fletcher, who recently played the title character in Gatz, Elevator Repairs Service's unforgettable performance of the complete text of The Great Gatsby. He will be performing John Milton's poem about a shipwreck Lycidas on Radio Bloomsday, which is referenced several times throughout Ulysses by the students in the Nestor episode and by Dedalus in Proteus as he walks along the strand. Milton wrote the poem about his college friend, another aspiring writer, who died in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland. It is obviously a favorite poem of Stephen's. He has emerged alive from the shipwreck of his life, not to be romantized as the poet who could have been but challenged to become the writer of his dreams. Can he do it? Even if his snarky friends keep him from being published in their literary journal. Who will help Stephen find his place on the literary landscape that is his destiny? No one offers to help him, it seems except Bloom, and Bloom can barely get Molly a singing gig once a year.

But Bloom has ulterior motives. He sees Stephen as a possible suitor for his daughter Milly. His wife Molly has her own designs on the young poet, however. As she says during her monologue fantasizing about being the muse of the handsome writer:

they all write about some woman in their poetry
well I suppose he wont find many like me
where softly sighs of love the light guitar
where poetry is in the air
the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully
coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa
the lighthouse at Europa point
the guitar that fellow played was so expressive
will I ever go back there again
all new faces
two glancing eyes a lattice hid
Ill sing that for him
theyre my eyes
if hes anything of a poet
two eyes as darkly bright as loves own star
arent those beautiful words
as loves young star
itll be a change the Lord knows
to have an intelligent person to talk to about yourself
not always listening to him and Billy Prescotts ad
and Keyess ad and Tom the Devils ad
then if anything goes wrong in their business we have to suffer
Im sure hes very distinguished
Id like to meet a man like that
God not those other ruck
besides hes young

Tune in on Thursday, June 16th at 7pm to hear Stephen, Bloom, Molly and more on WBAI in NYC and KPFK in Los Angeles and on wbai.org from anywhere in the world!

One Month Til Bloomsday!

2011-05-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

Today is Monday, May 16 - one month to go until Radio Bloomsday 2011 is broadcast live on WBAI 99.5FM in NYC and on KPFK in Los Angeles. Preparations are well underway on both coasts and several countries. In addition to our live performances, we have several pre-recorded segments as well. Last week, we recorded three fantastic actors at the KPFK studios in Los Angeles. Actor Marc Singer makes his Radio Bloomsday debut this year. Marc performs an excerpt from the Eumeus episode as a drunken Leopold Bloom supports an even drunker Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin on their way home after a wild night. Bloom and Dedalus have spent the night carousing in a whorehouse where all of Blooms scatological fantasies were realized. He does a wickedly funny turn narrating the end of this very long day. Last years listeners will remember hearing Charles Busch perform the infamous Madame Bella Cohen practicing her sadomasochism on our heros.

Paul Dooley and Bob Odenkirk who both performed Bloom monologues last year, joined forces brilliantly this year to record several of the Questions and Answers from the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses. Written in the style of Catholic Catechism, this penultimate chapter of Ulysses consists of 309 questions and answers about the main characters in particular and the universe in general. This episode, known for its relentless details, pinpoints Bloom and Molly's location with lattitude and longitude, and includes an extremely long list of men who might have slept with Molly.

The poetic quality of Ithaca is impossible to ignore, however, in spite of its Catechetical format. It is in this chapter, that Bloom and Stephen stepping outside for a piss look up at the sky and see, "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" and a more detailed description of dueling streams of urine you would be hard pressed to find anywhere. Bob as Bloom compares women to the moon. Paul as Bloom remembers his favorite memories of his daughter Milly before kissing "the plump yellow smellow melons" of Molly's rump, a touching gesture that so enrages his wife as we will hear during her following two and a half monologue, performed in its entirety one month from today.

But first, I will leave you with Molly's outrage as another amazing actor, Radio Bloomsday regular, Jim Fletcher is on his way over for a rehearsal.

any man thatd kiss a womans bottom

Id throw my hat at him after that
hed kiss anything unnatural
where we havent 1 atom of any kind of expression in us
all of us the same
2 lumps of lard
before ever Id do that to a man
pfooh the dirty brutes

Spicey Books

2011-05-11T18:09:00.000-07:00

On February 2, 1922, James Joyce's 40th birthday, his publisher Sylvia Beach, gave him the most wonderful present, one he had been dreaming about for many years. She gave him his first printed copy of Ulysses, together with bunches of blue and white hydrangeas matching the color scheme of the novel’s cover – the national colors of Ireland and Israel. Later that year, the Egoist Press published a run of 2000 copies, 500 of which were burned by the US Postal Service. In 1923, the Egoist published 500 copies in a third printing – 499 of which were confiscated by English Customs. It quickly developed a reputation for being a dirty book. In fact Sylvia Beach says of one of her patrons, "And of course its reputation as a banned book helped the sales. It was saddening, however, to see such a work listed in catalogues of erotica alongside Fanny Hill, The Perfumed Garden and that everlasting Casanova, not to speak of plain pornography like Raped on the Rail. An Irish priest, purchasing Ulysses asked me, “Any other spicey books?”

Like Beach's customer the priest, the novel's heroine, Molly Bloom is a fan of spicey books. In fact, in the Calypso episode of Ulysses, where we first meet the Blooms, Molly is reading just such a book by the improbably named Paul de Kock. Bloom stares at the cover and thinks to himself, "Ruby: the Pride of the Ring. Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent." During this year's broadcast, The Calypso chapter will be heard in its entirety narrated by one of my favorite writers, the Booker Prize winning novelist Anne Enright. The fantastic playwright and performer Wallace Shawn reads Bloom in a performance that is sure to be unforgettable by all who listen in on June 16th.

During this episode, we discover that Molly has finished her book and demands another. Even though Bloom knows that Molly will be reenacting her own erotic scene in their bedroom with Blazes Boylan later that afternoon, he agrees. Later in the Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses, we see him at a porn shop dutifully carrying out his errand. In the bookstore with its onion breathed proprietor and dingy curtain, Bloom chooses Sweets of Sin for Molly. The brilliant comedian Marc Maron, host of the WTF podcast, will describe Bloom perusing the merchandise in this the tenth chapter of the book.

Later, while lying in bed thinking about her day, Molly Bloom critics one of the dirty books purportedly written by priest, perhaps Sylvia Beach's customer coming to check out the competition. Molly says "cant be true a thing like that like some of those books he brings me the works of Master Francois Somebody supposed to be a priest about a child born out of her ear because her bumgut fell out a nice word for any priest to write and her a--e as if any fool wouldnt know what that meant." The complete two and a half hour Molly monologue will be performed live in its entirety at the end of our Radio Bloomsday broadcast by Galway native, Caraid O'Brien.

What is Radio Bloomsday?

2011-05-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

Every June 16th from 7pm to 2am, Radio Bloomsday brings together great artists from all over the world to record James Joyce's Ulysses and broadcast his words coast to coast on WBAI in New York City and on KPFK in Los Angeles. International listeners can hear us on wbai.org. This years celebration will include performers from New York, Los Angeles, London and Dublin. We reinterpret Joyce's words with contemporary voices to make his text accessible and exciting to modern audiences.

Joining us this year to throwdown with the master text monster are artists such as Garrison Keillor, Alec Baldwin, Anne Enright, Wallace Shawn, John Lithgow, Garrison Keiler, Bob Odenkirk, Paul Dooley, Marc Singer, Nick McDonell, Kate Valk, John O'Callaghan, Roma Downey, Con Horgan, Alec Baldwin, Marie-Louise Bowe, Aaron Beall, Shawnee Benton, Zeroboy, Conn Horgan, Janet Coleman, David Dozer, Mara McEwin, Mark Greenfield, Corey Carthew and Jim Fletcher among many others.

The evening ends with Caraid O'Brien performing the complete Molly Episode from 11.30 to 2am traditionally listened to by readers at home while tucked up in a bed.

More details to be announced daily via this blog.

The Music of Joyce

2011-05-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

James Joyce's first dream was to be a professional singer, but after he placed second to the legendary tenor John McCormack in a school singing competition, he chose instead to focus on his writing. I like to think of the student Joyce mooning around Dublin, dreaming of being a famous singer while writing essays about Ibsen. He was not a man for whom second best was an option. He certainly draws from his musical training in his writing, however. The soprano Molly Bloom, with her gasping career and annual public performance, has as much in common with Joyce the singer as she does with his wife Nora Barnacle.

Readers often remark upon the musicality of his text and how it is infinitely more accessible once read aloud, not unlike the difference between hearing music and looking at a score. The Sirens episode of Ulysses is among his most musical and includes several musicians in repose including the sopranos, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, Molly's singing partner and lover: Blazes Boylan, Stephen Dedalus' father Simon, who was a great singer until his alcoholism destroyed his talent, Ben Dollard and several others. The chapter opens with list of sounds and phrases, the tap, tap of a blind man's cane, the impertinent snort of a bootboy, the shrill giggles of the sopranos, our hero's farts. It is an overture, whose excerpts are heard in context throughout the following pages. There is even a short musical score within the episode. Last year, Janet Coleman and David Dozer performed the overture followed by Aaron Beall, Tara Bahna James and Nicole Wiesner in a raucous scene from Sirens. Tara Bahna James also sung the traditional Irish revolutionary song The Night that Larry was Stretched.

In addition to presenting great artists interpreting Ulysses, every year we highlight different musicians, some Irish classics like the music of John McCormack, The Pogues and U2 as well as some completely new contemporary acts. When we recorded the great music lover Garrison Keillor last month he turned us on to the late singer Frank Harte (left), whom he performed with when he did A Prairie Home Companion in Dublin. We will be including some of Harte's songs in the broadcast this year.

We are also really excited to be playing for the first time on American radio the music of the fantastic new ensemble out of Dublin, Tarab. Their Arabic name refers to state of ecstasy one enters into as a listener and their members hail from Italy as well as Ireland. Tarab brings together traditional Irish music with Jazz and Moroccan influences to create a completely original sound. The group is only a few months old and already receiving rave reviews. Bloom fantasizes throughout the novel about the Far East and Tarab's music is the perfect accompaniment echoing Joyce's deeply Irish but truly international exotic imagination. In a four starred review in The Irish Times, a reviewer writes "Not perhaps since Andy Irvine’s celebrated East Wind in 1992 has there been such a convincing reorientation of the Irish tradition." You can watch them perform live in the video above but dont forget to tune in to Radio Bloomsday on Thursday, June 16 from 7pm to 2am to hear Frank Harte, Tarab, Garrison Keillor, Alec Baldwin, Jim Fletcher and more!

Joyce Le-Yesman

2011-05-09T06:13:00.000-07:00

The online French literary journal Tales Magazine uses Louie Correia's beautiful photographs of our Molly Bloom to illustrate their article on Joyce Le Yesman. I love the title, Joyce Le Yesman. Joyce was certainly artist who said Yes to the artistic path, who battled poverty, family opposition and responsibilities, Church disapproval and country disavowal to usher in a new age of literary modernity. He ends Ulysses with perhaps the most inspirational, life affirming words in all of literature: "Yes, I said, Yes, I will Yes." He honors the feminine divine by putting those words in the mouth of his heroin(e), Molly Bloom.

James Joyce's Ulysses marks the beginning of modern literature while respecting at least a few thousands years of storytelling, both oral and written, that came before. The Book and the Day are a celebration of the artist's life in particular the writer's life. The denseness of the text allows the reader if we take the time to extrapolate almost any meaning from it, it is biblical in that way. We look to Ulysses for answers, we see ourselves in it and we are grateful. His three main characters have all said Yes to their artistic lives despite the present difficulties they find themselves in. Bloom continues to think of ideas for sketches he might write for Molly and perhaps himself to perform as he struggles through his latest day job. Molly is rehearsing for her one performance a year as she faces the challenge of having only time ahead of her and wondering how to fill it. Stephen works on his poetry, while disastrously attempting to network with his more connected, less talented peers. Surely his days as a high school teacher must soon come to an end? They try through the fog of their own personal and individual pain, amidst the pettiness of the society they find themselves in, to help each other find their truest selves.

I have spent over ten years working on this novel for public performance and this will be my fourth year performing the complete Molly episode live. Our artistic director Janet Coleman has been working on the text even longer and our producer Larry Josephson has been obsessed with this literary holiday since he first saw it celebrated at Shakespeare and Co. over 30 years ago. This is his 30th year broadcasting a Bloomsday celebration. And yet, every year, when May comes around and I know that June is but around the corner, I think to myself, I cannot possibly do this again. Haven't I done it already? Haven't I devoted enough of my artistic life to Joyce. Don't I get it now? Can't I move on?

"Can you?" Joyce says staring at me through the lenses of his coke bottle glasses.

Joyce was an artist whose intellect and artistry challenges every artist who comes in contact with his work. The truth is I have only unlocked a few of the secrets of his novel. And every year, I discover a new key that deepens my understanding of the book, that takes my mind and throws it up against the plexiglass, that ultimately inspires me as a creator. So this morning I say to Joyce, my friend, my mentor: "Yes, we said. Yes, we will yes, we will create another Radio Bloomsday and share your work, your artistic fire, your brilliant mind, your Terrible Beauty with listeners all over the world."

Ashay.

Countdown

2011-05-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

Hello my friends!

The countdown to Radio Bloomsday 2011 begins. Dust off your bowler hat, crack open your copy of Ulysses. Only six weeks to go before our coast to coast radio broadcast of artists interpreting James Joyce's Ulysses, Thursday June 16th on WBAI 99.5FM in New York and on KPFK 90.7 in Los Angeles. We have an amazing show coming together this year, our most international production ever.

More details coming soon!

Radio Bloomsday 2010 Wrap Up

2010-06-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

Radio Bloomsday 2010 exceeded our expectations! It was a fantastic night and thank you all for listening in. We have received so many great letters from our listeners who enjoyed the show. Apologies to our California fans who were outraged when Molly went off the air in the middle of her monologue. The good news is that we will be uploading the entire show soon to this blogspot so that people can listen to it again and again whenever they like, including the entire Molly monologue or any other part you may have missed.

There are so many moments from the night that light up my memory. The Sirens section beginning at 9.20 was one of my favorite performances of all time. It started with our artistic director Janet Coleman performing the overture (the first few pages) together with the Displaced Playwright David Dozer. Then Aaron Beall, Tara Bahna-James and Nicole Wiesner performed the first scene as the two bitchy sopranos mocked Bloom over tea and finally T Ryder Smith performed our final Bloom monologue of the evening. The orgasmic giggling of Tara and Nicole as the bitchy sopranos who had just spent the day sunning themselves perfectly captured the musicality that pulsates through this magical episode of the novel and inspired me to want to stage the entire chapter for next year's show. It was everything we hope to achieve with Radio Bloomsday - artists interpreting Ulysses to illuminate the text for the rest of us.

Janet really loved hearing Paul Dooley and Bob Odenkirk's recording in the green room which she was listening to for the first time. Zeroboy's tribute to David Nolan also was a real highlight of the night. Thank you to our wonderful actors on both coasts and to all the engineers who made the night possible. Each year we go deeper into the text, we understand more and are able to share that with you our audience. Ulysses is like the sea, mesmerizing and infinite, teaming with life and the process of bringing out the colors of the text through performance is rewarding, inspiring and renewing. Thalatta! Thalatta!

We will keep you updated with new developments throughout the year. Meanwhile, please send us your comments and suggestions.

Radio Bloomsday 2011 is just 360 days away.

Listen to the first hour of Radio Bloomsday here

molly

2010-06-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

molly is up and rolling --- all the actors have left to go listen to molly in cabs at last returning home.... back to their abodes.... everything comes to a rest... bloomsday 2010 winding down with one woman's voice bouncing off the skyscrapers and moving at the speed of light through the wires and into the minds and imaginations of bloomians around the round world. listen...

--mannix

technical difficulties!

2010-06-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

technical difficulties! a glitch and a switch from byron to baldwin! the beauty and terror of live radio....

there will be none of beauty's daughters....

there will be none of beauty's daughters....

there will be none of beauty's daughters....

dead air recovered.

molly waits in the wings.

t blogs in passing

2010-06-16T19:22:00.000-07:00

It is wonderful to listen to in the green room, and funny to see the actors leave the booth afterwards, with brows wrinkled, worried that they hadn't done well, going over the list of their imagined mistakes. Good thing our self-perceptions are rarely accurate.
What is best, I think, after all the prior furious dives into and finicky leans over the sea of Joycean exegesis. to make sure we had the intricacies of reference down, is that the readings themselves are so simple and fun, and - we can hope - capture what was the reaction of Joyce's circle of friends when he first read the work aloud to them: laughter, wonder, joy. - TRS

2010-06-16T18:09:00.001-07:00

Caraid O'Brien is a magician with Joyce, her performers, the Joyce line-up. How exciting to be a part of such a talented crew of performers and artists.-MaraMcEwin

photo trs: wbai green room

2010-06-16T17:30:00.000-07:00

Aaron Beall and Nicole Wiesner chatting backstage. They will be performing together in the Sirens episode at 9.30

2010-06-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

Listening to my dear old friend Paul Dooley read Bloom. I never realized he was actually Irish. But that too! says our artistic director Janet Coleman

photo by trs: aaron and janet

all quiet in the green room

2010-06-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

all quiet in the green room -- actors rehearsing-- murmellingwords floating around -- rosie eats a cracker...

photo by trs: rosie and jim

all quiet in the green room

2010-06-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

all quiet in the green room -- actors murmelling their words -- getting ready for airtime -- impromptu rehearsals in wbai offices -- jerry stiller as bloom on the monitor -- staten island ferry pulling in out the wbai window -- rosie eats a cracker...

2010-06-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

Tara Bahna James has just arrived and is discussing her performance with the composer and banjo player Christian Imboden.

2010-06-16T16:26:00.001-07:00

Paul Muldoon is on now, a brilliant poet on a brilliant poet.

T Ryder Smith read the first few pages of the book, playing all the characters. It was also amazing.

The studio is a hot, Caraid has already changed shirts.

James Kennedy has just walked in. He is reading Bloom at 8pm. Caraid remembers the first time she saw him on television as a criminal in the Irish police show The Bill.

hag of beare!

2010-06-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

barbara vann was awesome as the hag of beare! (an 8th century anonymous irish poem) scary! spooky! intense!

go see nize baby at medicine show 549 w 52nd street a theatrical trip into comic strips and ferry tales from new york in the roaring '20's!

2010-06-16T16:03:00.000-07:00

mom sounds great!

Live Blogging Radio Bloomsday

2010-06-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

we're live! we're rolling! bloomsday 2010 is underway!

Happy Bloomsday!

2010-06-16T11:17:00.000-07:00

Happy Bloomsday Friends! Listen in tonite at 7pm EST! Just click on the links to your right.

In NYC: WBAI 99.5FM

KPFK is broadcasting the show in Los Angeles, 7PM their time 90.7FM

Slouching Toward Bloomsday: 26 hours and counting

2010-06-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

We will be broadcasting live in just over 24 hours from WBAI 99.5FM in New York City. KPFA in Los Angeles will be carrying the complete show also with a three hour time delay. You can listen to the show on our blog by clicking one of the links to your right or by visiting wbai.org or pacifica.org

We will also be live blogging from backstage during the show here at radiobloomsday.blogspot.com At 9am this morning in midtown Manhattan, we had an enjoyably intense rehearsal with Mara McEwin and Jim Fletcher who will be performing two extremely difficult excerpts from Oxen of the Sun, written in medieval prose during the 9pm hour. Together, the three of us broke that text down with Jim and his secret love of Chaucer leading the charge. They are going to be great. Also at 9am this morning (west coast time) in Los Angeles at the Pacifica Archives, we recorded Bob Odenkirk as Bloom contemplating childbirth. Bloom sounded great, very funny, in his Chicago voice. Bloom is obsessed with the trials and tribulations of women giving birth, which is typical of his gentle, thoughtful nature. He is a very sensitive fellow. Lord Byronesque indeed.

On Friday, real life couple John O'Callaghan and Jaason Simmons recorded some of Lord Byron's poems that Bloom gave Molly when they were courting and honestly I have never heard two voices sound more sexy. O yes and Paul Dooley who also recorded his piece in Los Angeles last week is fantastic as a hungry cranky Bloom scouting around for his lunch, disgusted with the men he sees shoving meat in their craws. Our marathon of Bloom monologues beginning just before 8pm is going to be a highlight for sure. Not to overdue the superlatives, but this is definitely the most thrilling Bloomsday I've ever worked on.

We have over two dozen actors and singers performing live tomorrow and you can find out more about all of them by clicking the links below right. I am fairly brain dead at this moment but very excited. Write to us at radiobloomsday@gmail.com and let us know what you think during the show. It should be available to listen to online for at least a week after the live broadcast and hopefully longer. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for Tuning in!

Zeroboy's tribute to David Nolan

2010-06-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

Ever since we began broadcasting Radio Bloomsday live from the WBAI studios on Wall Street, David Nolan was our technical director. When all of the other actors had gone home and I was deep into my Molly monologue, wondering if anyone in the world was listening, David's face was the only one I would see as he came in to check my mike and the sound levels. He was the physical representation of our invisible audience listening to the show at their computers or beside their radios across the country and the world.

David was a radio host, a sound archivist, an engineer and completely irreplaceable among many other things. He was a founding host of Morning Dew, a Grateful Dead tribute program. A long time East Village resident, David died suddenly of a heart attack this past February.

His friend for two decades, fellow artist and resident of the East Village, the vocal acrobat Zeroboy (below) has recorded a tribute to David that we will be broadcasting during Radio Bloomsday this Wednesday evening, June 16th. In Ulysses, Bloom's day begins with attending Paddy Dignam's funeral, a friend who died suddenly of a heart attack. Zeroboy plays Bloom at the funeral wondering about the thin veil between life and death. Zeroboy's tribute to David is a soundscape of Joycecean word play created specifically for radio and include's Zeroboy's signature self created sound effects throughout the piece. Our audio engineer Bob Auld did fantastic work layering Zeroboy's sound effects behind his interpretation of Joyce's text. The result is a noir Zombie take on Ulysses, the first of its kind and a fitting tribute to a sound artist like David.

It will be played during the 8pm hour as part of our symphony of Blooms as actors such as Jerry Stiller, Paul Dooley, James Kennedy, Bob Odenkirk, T. Ryder Smith, Jim Fletcher and Aaron Beall perform the inner monologues of Leopold Bloom.

Bloom's thoughts on life and death from the Hades episode of Ulysses: "You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way. Gravediggers in Hamlet. Shows the profound knowledge of the human heart. Daren't joke about the dead for two years at least. De mortuis nil nisi prius. Go out of mourning first. Hard to imagine his funeral. Seems a sort of a joke. Read your own obituary notice they say gives you second wind. New lease of life. Poor Dignam!

Bloomsday in Brooklyn

2010-06-13T04:09:00.000-07:00

Mannix, age 3 and I attended Bloomsday in Brooklyn yesterday. It was a very sweet affair of about 50 people standing outside pubs reading excerpts from Ulysses. We were not allowed inside the pubs, alas, the world cup had them all filled to capacity, but the roaring of the crowds behind us made for a celebratory backup track. It was a walking tour of bars along fifth avenue. Many Bloomsdays around the world, such as the one in Dublin and the one in Toronto, stage scenes from the book around the city. Usually, they stop at one bar to signify Barney Kiernan's pub and The Cyclops episode. In Brooklyn, the revelers attended six. A bagpipe player started up and led the crowd from one location to the next. There were also several other musicians playing Irish folksongs on the street after the reading. Mannix and I lasted for two bars before he redirected us to a local park. We did have a chance to hear an Irish actor read the opening pages of the book and see Judge Bernie Graham and the DA Joe Hynes read an excerpt from Cyclops. We did not have a beer alas, as Mannix had left his fake ID at home but as Molly says in her monologue: "my belly is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the stout at dinner or am I getting too fond of it."

My first encounter with Bloomsday was when I was eleven in Dublin taking the bus to meet my aunt at Holles Street Hospital the maternity hospital where the fictional Bloom visits the fictional Mrs Purefoy and meets ups with the imaginary Stephen and where my real aunt Mary had a real job as a matron. Coming down to meet me, she had to push through a throng of site seers. What are they here for? I asked. Bloomsday, she said. James Joyce's novel. Americans, mostly. O, I said, marveling at the fact that real people were visiting a fictional character in the hospital and coming all the way from America to do so. Hollis Street is an amazing hospital and it even has an art's budget. One year, it commissioned the playwright Marina Carr to write a play and gave her a stipend and a room in the hospital to do so. The result was the stunning, haunting play, Portia Coughlan which my friend Mercedes staged at Show World a few years ago in its New York premiere.

In Brooklyn, the organizers made note of the fact that the first Bloomsday in Ireland was celebrated in 1954 by Irish writers Patrick Kavanaugh and Flann O'Brien and read a poem by Flann O'Brien. Sylvia Beach organized the first Bloomsday Lunch in Paris in 1929. The day out in Brooklyn was organized by The Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick and they mentioned that they hope to do it again next year which would be grand.

Radio Bloomsday Rundown and Cast List

2010-06-12T03:27:00.000-07:00

Jerry Stiller, Alec Baldwin, Paul Muldoon, Paul Dooley, Bob Odenkirk, Charles Busch, T. Ryder Smith, Aaron Beall, Bob Dishy,Amy Stiller, Judy Graubart, Jaason Simmons, John O'Callaghan, Barbara Vann, Jim Fletcher, Zeroboy, Janet Coleman, David Dozer, Tara Bahna-James, James Kennedy, George Heslin, Mac Barrett, Merideth Finn, Mara McEwin, Emily Mitchell, Nicole Weisner, Marcus Goldhaber, Martha Guenther, Barika Edwards, Rosie Goldensohn and Caraid O'Brien as Molly Bloom perform on Radio Bloomsday Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 on WBAI 99.5 FM and wbai.org.

Artists perform excerpts from James Joyce's Ulysses for Radio Bloomsday on Wednesday June 16th from 7pm to 2am on WBAI 99.5FM in New York City and wbai.org. Radio Bloomsday continues the 32-year WBAI tradition of broadcasting marathon performances of James Joyce's Ulysses every Bloomsday as New York's leading artists gather in the WBAI studio on Wall Street to interpret this classic of modern literature. We recorded actors in Los Angeles and New York for the broadcast with over two dozen artists performing live from WBAI during our the broadcast.

The broadcast opens at 7pm with an invocation to the goddess of Irish poetry as Barbara Vann performs the ninth century Gaelic poem, The Hag of Beare.The first hour focusing on the first four chapters of Ulysses. T. Ryder Smith (left) introduces us to Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus in the Martello Tower. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon performs Stephen Dedalus' inner thoughts as he wrestles with his mind while walking on the beach in the complete Proteus episode. Jerry Stiller reads Bloom's thoughts in Calypso as he makes Molly's breakfast, sits on the toilet and dreams of artistic greatness and reads a letter from his daughter Milly, played by Amy Stiller.

The eight o’clock hour is a mini marathon of Bloom's inner thoughts. James Kennedy as Bloom walking around Dublin, Zeroboy as Bloom at the cemetery, Bob Odenkirk (left) as Bloom imagining childbirth, Jim Fletcher as Bloom mellow on wine, Paul Dooley as Bloom contemplating lunch and T Ryder Smith as Bloom at the end of the Siren's episode.

At 9pm, we debut our new writers segment as poets Merideth Finn and Mac Barrett read from their new work. We return to Ulysses to explore the dozens of literary styles sampled by Joyce throughout the novel (and throughout our broadcast) from Dickensian prose to penny dreadful romances, from Celtic legends to school primers. Alec Baldwin (left) performs in the style of a Celtic legend, Judy Graubart is a psychic conducting a séance, Bob Dishy performs in the style of sentimental gentlemen’s prose. Janet Coleman and David Dozer perform the verbal overture to the Sirens episode. Mara McEwin and Jim Fletcher tackle the medieval prose of Oxen of the Sun. Tara Bahna James performs an original tune composed by Christian Imboden based on the Irish revolutionary song The Night Before Larry was Stretched.

Starting at 10pm, we enter Ulysses in Nighttown as Stephen and Bloom stumble through Dublin’s redlight district in the Circe episode which is written in the form of a play and captures the similarities between artistic creation and drunken revelry. Playwright and female impersonator Charles Busch (left) plays the whore mistress Madame Bella Cohen, T Ryder Smith is the narrator and Aaron Beall is Bloom.

Around 11pm, we turn our sites to Molly Bloom, the singer, the woman, the artist in bed. This three hour segment begins with real life couple John O'Callaghan (Stargate Atlantis, at left) and Jaason Simmons (Baywatch, at left) reciting Lord Byron’s poetry, which Bloom used to woo Molly when they were courting. Alec Baldwin then reads James Joyce's love letters to his wife Nora, the inspiration for Molly Bloom. As always, the evening ends with the complete Molly Bloom monologue, performed by Galway native Caraid O'Brien, as she thinks about her lovers, her husband, her children and her stalled artistic career.

Radio Bloomsday is directed by Caraid O'Brien; and produced by Larry Josephson, Peabody-Award-Winner and President of The Radio Foundation. The Artistic Director is Janet Coleman, host and producer of Cat Radio Cafe and former WBAI Arts Director.

Pitch n Put with Joyce and Beckett

2010-06-10T17:12:00.000-07:00

A little overwhelmed with your Ulysses reading? Watch this hilarious video via www.qualitywaffle.wordpress.com of Joyce and Beckett playing a game of golf.

James Joyce in Paris

2010-06-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

James Joyce and Sylvia Beach at her bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Click the photo to see a video of Joyce walking around Paris.

Behind the Scenes: Janet Coleman

2010-06-09T08:36:00.001-07:00

There are many incredible artists involved in our seven hour radio broadcast, actors, singers, producers, writers, journalists and historians. All that we ask is that you devote your life to creating art. A small thing really. Radio Bloomsday: Artists interpret Ulysses.

The amazing Janet Coleman is our artistic director. Her weekly radio broadcasts, Cat Radio Cafe and The Next Hour are a one of a kind wellspring of inspiring information about what it takes to live an artist's life and to create work that influences and inspires the world.

Janet is responsible for bringing Radio Bloomsday to air on WBAI as well as making the broadcast available throughout the Pacifica Network. She also is involved with the artistic content of the program and the casting of the show, inviting extraordinary artists such as Kate Valk, Jim Fletcher, Richard Maxwell, Bob Dishy and Judy Graubart to be part of our broadcast. This year, she has coordinated the addition of Los Angeles actors Paul Dooley and Bob Odenkirk to our ever growing (inter)national broadcast.

Janet is an author and actor. Her publications include The Compass the definitive history of improvisational theatre in America; and (with Al Young) Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs. She is a founding producer of the seminal off-off Broadway's Loft Theatre Workshop. She appeared as Evelyn Lincoln in the film 13 Days, as one of the Believers in Richard Maxwell’s ADS, and as Emily Ann Andrews in David Dozer's long-running radio comedy series, Poisoned Arts. Her articles, stories and reviews have appeared in such publications as Vanity Fair, New York, the Village Voice, Elle, Esquire, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, Fence and Global City Review. She is a Contributing Editor to The Bloomsbury Review .

I interview Janet below:

How did you first get involved in doing cultural programming at WBAI?

I started at WBAI as an actress on my husband (pictured at left with Janet) David Dozer's production comedy series, Poisoned Arts, which began in the late Sixties under the direction of Otis MacClay, his college friend who also still works with Pacifica. When Poisoned Arts returned to the air in the early Nineties, I also got involved in live radio and actually producing radio programs myself. David and I now co-host an arts program called Cat Radio Cafe and since early in the Bush years have produced a program of political satire called CCCP: The Monthly Laughing Nightmare.

When I became WBAI Arts Director in 2004, I needed to fill a 55 minute cultural programming slot and invited artists I admired to host -- people who I knew who could talk eloquently -- alone or with others -- for 55 minutes. Gore Vidal did a number of shows (called The Next Hour) as have Malachy McCourt, Reno, Wally Shawn, Karen Finley, Kate Valk and many others. Kate Valk brought Real People Theater, a high school theater group from Brooklyn who performed a play by Lawrence Fishburne. (These shows are archived and available on the web at www.catradiocafe.com.)

What are you most excited about this year?

We are recording actors in Los Angeles, Paul Dooley (above), Bob Odenkirk and others for the first time this year with the help and good graces of Allen Minsky of KPFK and Brian de Shazor and Mark Torres of The Pacifica Radio Archives -- an extraordinary part of the Pacifica Network. The Pacifica archivers are extremely literate and concerned with preserving Pacifica’s cultural as well as its political tradition. They have a huge archive of reel to reel tape, and decades of recordings yet to retrieve. Among their finds was an unmarked but momentous recording of Tolstoy’s War in Peace made at WBAI in the 1970’s. They restored it and rereleased it on the 30^th anniversary of the broadcast. The original recording was made as a cultural protest to the Vietnam War. Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, actors, intellectuals and public figures all took part. (We were at war again –in Iraq -- during the restoration and people like Ed Asner and Cindy Sheehan were invited to re-record missing passages.) This was one of many literary programs done at WBAI, the crown jewel of which was probably Bloomsday. WBAI started broadcasting readings from the Shakespeare and Company Bookstore and then later the readings at Symphony Space. For several years, the Symphony Space production moved to WNYC. Mark Laiosa was responsible for bringing Bloomsday back to WBAI in 2003, again by broadcasting the Symphony Space show. We continued the remote broadcast until 2008 when we decided to do a broadcast designed specifically for radio as opposed to broadcasting a theatrical performance.

Why Ulysses?

Ulysses is the novel that ushers in the modern age of literary experiment and an authentic literary revolution, turning the notion of the language of the novel upside down while exploring sex, consciousness, imperialism, alienation and art. These days modernism is a religion that seems to have disappeared in the blur of post-modernism. Yet in extending the possibilities of the artistic act, Joyce’s words, ideas and construction in Ulysses still have never been matched.

What other cultural programming have you done?

We put together an online broadcast of HOWL with discussions of its cultural significance for its 50^th anniversary in 2007. Because of the draconian FCC fines for language violations (you can’t broadcast the Seven Dirty Words and more), we were unable to broadcast the show on air, but made it available through our website. We played one of the earliest recordings of Allen Ginsburg reading HOWL. Also, a panel including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the brave and stalwart publisher of HOWL, discussed its amazing publication history, its sudden and enormous fame, its impounding, the impact of the Beat Generation, and the groundbreaking censorship restrictions that were overcome in the courts. Ginsburg reading Howl. You can listen to it at pacifica.org

Soon after his death, we did a show about Norman Mailer and his work. We had recordings of his voice as well as interviews with his wife Norris, his son John Buffalo, his editor Jason Epstein, the filmmaker D.H. Pennebaker, and authors Frank McCourt and Joyce Carol Oates. Rip Torn, Mailer’s dear friend and co-star in Mailer’s film, Maidstone, showed up a day late, and we played his hilarious and sometimes tearful homage to his pal the following week.

Your literary programming seems to have a political component?

Of course. All great literature is political, even if not intentionally. If an artist is capturing the realities of the world, he/she pays attention to the politics and injustices and imbalances in it. We’ve had a lot of literary figures on our show highly sensitive to politics and First Amendment issues like the satirist Paul Krassner. And poets like Lawrence Joseph, Hugh Seidman and D. Nurkse whose work has been very responsive to issues of war and peace – the fundamental concern of the Pacifica Mission. Cat Radio Café, broadcast every Monday at 2pm, is a radio arts salon that supposedly explores the creative bounty of New York, but we had Marilyn Hacker reading her poetry from Paris; and Maxine Kumin, X.J. Kennedy and April Bernard read from New England. Elizabeth Macklin performed her translations of poetry from the Basque language. I am really interested in “disappeared” languages like Basque, Irish, Yiddish which of course in having survived underground, are political by definition. Harold Bloom did a long interview with me on the 125^th anniversary of Leaves of Grass. Bloom is a fan of the jazz artist Charles Mingus (a mighty expansive and Whitmanesque figure himself) and I used Mingus music as a musical coda to Bloom’s brilliant talk. It was an amazing show.

What is the connection between Pacifica radio and the arts?

Pacifica was founded to create a path to resolving conflicts peacefully and what better way to do that than through art and literature. Bringing literature, drama and music to its listeners is written into the Pacifica Mission. It’s startling that Ulysses was declared not obscene in a landmark decision by Judge Woolsey in 1933 and yet on the radio, the most easily accessed public medium, freedom of language is a battle we are still fighting today. To broadcast this indisputable artistic masterpiece in this period of cultural regression, is extremely important.

What was your first experience with Ulysses?

My father first read hunks of it aloud to me from a book about Gertrude Stein and other “obscure” modernist writers. We were living in Brooklyn and guess I was in junior high because I can picture the room we were in while he read. He kept saying of Joyce, “Isn’t this a little too much? This is too obscure, isn’t it?” And I said “No, keep reading, keep reading.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The language was so fanciful, so full of fun. My father was amazing really. He introduced me to Wihelm Reich and biogenetics when I was fifteen.

So the first time you heard you Ulysses it was read aloud to you?

Yes.

Later, when I was 16, I went to school as an undergrad at the University of Michigan. The first year was English composition. Then Shakespeare. And then I took a class on Joyce, Yeats, Eliot and Edwin Muir with the poet Donald Hall. He’d been published and an editor of The Paris Review, but it was his first time teaching. He was an extraordinary teacher. He opened up the book for me. And he was in awe of it too. His TA gave me a C- on my Ulysses paper – explicating one page of the book (my page was 372 from Nausicaa) and I was outraged, because I thought I’d made crucial connections to other themes in the book with practically every word. I brought the paper to Hall, something I never did and he read it and gave me an A. I knew I connected with the book in a way the TA obviously did not. Faugh a ballagh to him.

What is your favorite part of Ulysses?

Whatever I am reading at the moment. I guess Penelope. I really love your Molly Bloom. It is still exciting to hear how completely she owns her own sexuality. Joyce understands that sexuality isn’t only sex it’s personality. Is there another writer who so thoroughly hears the opposite sex?

Who do you hope is listening to the broadcast?

While dropping Radio Bloomsday flyers around NYU, it occurred to me that I hoped that other young peop le would hear, the way I did, this transformative use of language on the radio and, thanks to the luxury of being read to, have a mind-altering aesthetic experience too. Teenagers and people in their early twenties are very open to what’s spectacularly different. They’re tastemakers for a reason: they connect to what’s visceral in art. And so does Joyce.

A Radio Icon, A Ulysses Director

2010-06-09T08:00:00.001-07:00

The third section of our broadcast is devoted to the dozens of literary stylings Joyce employs in Ulysses. In a very funny excerpt, the wonderful actress Judy Graubart inhabites the voice of a New Age American psychic to describe the ghost of Paddy Dignam wafting through the drunken funeral revelers in Barney Kiernan's pub. Dignam's celestial message is to tell his son the location of his missing boot and advise him to get the heels soled. His son poor Patrick Aloysius is destined for the orphanage now that his father is dead.

Two great icons of literary entertainment died this week: Joseph Strick (middle, above with Rip Torn and Henry Miller), who filmed the fist film version of Ulysses and the radio pioneer, writer, actor and producer Himan Brown (left). The Brooklyn born Brown created some of the most popular radio dramas of all time including The Adventures of The Thin Man and Dick Tracy. Joseph Strick also directed Henry Miller's The Tropic of Capricorn.

May they be our spirit guides, our Paddy Dignam's inspiring us with their decades of daring and creative genius as we count down one week to Radio Bloomsday.

"He is gone from mortal haunts: O'Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind."

Radio Bloomsday Podcast

2010-06-08T02:56:00.000-07:00

Listen to Tablet Magazine podcast about Radio Bloomsday
that was made for last year's broadcast.

Molly Bloom

2010-06-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

I wonder was he satisfied with me
one thing I didnt like
his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall
though I laughed
Im not a horse or an ass am I
I suppose he was thinking of his father
I wonder is he awake thinking of me
or dreaming am I in it
who gave him that flower he said he bought
he smelt of some kind of drink not whisky or stout
or perhaps the sweety kind of paste they stick their bills up with
some liqueur Id like to sip
those richlooking green and yellow expensive drinks
those stagedoor johnnies drink
with the opera hats
I tasted once with my finger
dipped out of that American that had the squirrel
talking stamps with father
he had all he could do to keep himself from falling asleep
after the last time
after we took the port and potted meat
it had a fine salty taste yes
because I felt lovely and tired myself
and fell asleep as sound as a top
the moment I popped straight into bed
till that thunder woke me up God be merciful to us
I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish us
when I blessed myself and said a Hail Mary
like those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar
as if the world was coming to an end
and then they come and tell you theres no God
what could you do if it was
running and rushing about
nothing only make an act of contrition

photo of Molly Bloom in bed in Chelsea (Louie Correia)

The Other Monologue in Ulysses: Shut your eyes and see

2010-06-05T07:59:00.000-07:00

James Joyce championed the stream of conscious monologue in modern literature, most famously in the three hour Molly Bloom episode that concludes Ulysses. While Leopold Bloom reveals many of his inner thoughts to us throughout the book, his sexual fetishes, his artistic dreams, his preferences for lunch, he unlike Molly, does not have a chapter to himself. Bloom shares his world with all of Dublin and all her people.

Stephen Dedalus, the school teacher and aspiring poet, does have his own chapter, however: Proteus. In fact, he has a whole book (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). In Ulysses, he wrestles with his intellect while walking alone along Sandymount Strand. Stephen is the most intellectual character in the novel. His frenemy Buck Mulligan says Stephen "proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father." And in fact we hear him do just that in the library in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses, an intellectual tour de force that only the cleverest of actors can perform as Jim Fletcher (left) did for us so wonderfully last year.

Stephen's Jesuit education supplemented by his own literary explorations is as excellent as Joyce's himself. Although he may be young and at times pretentious, there is no question that Dedalus is a truly brilliant man. In Proteus, Stephen examines the senses and what they actually represent, relives his own painful family memories and composes poetry on the beach. He is angry when he thinks of his homelessness, his financial troubles and the fact that no one has recognized his genius. His anger falls away when he follows the thread of an intellectual puzzle or creates an idea, thought or line. I have never heard an actor win the battle with Proteus when attempting this most difficult of monologues in its entirety until this week.

The Pulitzer prize winning poet, Paul Muldoon (left), the literary rockstar that Stephen aspires to be recorded the entire Proteus episode and it was amazing. Unlike in the Penelope episode, there is a little narration in the monologue, requiring, deft and delicate vocal shifts as Stephen moves from a more neutral description to his passionate and frustrated inner most thoughts. Throughout the monologue, Stephen recreates conversations with his drunken insulting useless father, wonders if he has killed his mother by refusing to kneel at her bedside, committed atheist that he is, and reminds himself not to spend what little money he has so quickly. Often the obscure phrases in Proteus fall over the listener like a lapping wave but in this recording Paul manages to fill you up with the hope, the desires, the desperation and the genius of a man on the cusp of greatness with nothing to look forward to but a lifetime of poverty.

The Proteus monologue, one poet playing another, Paul Muldoon wrestling with James Joyce, will be broadcast around 7.15 at the top of Radio Bloomsday on Wednesday, June 16th on 99.5FM in NYC and wbai.org

The beginning of Proteus:
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno.Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Bloomsdays around the world

2010-06-04T18:21:00.000-07:00

I think of Bloomsday as a literary Christmas. I love the idea that people are celebrating the birth of modern literature the world over. In addition to Radio Bloomsday, our 7 hour national radio broadcast on the Pacifica Radio Network, there are many other wonderful Bloomsday events happening on June 16th across America and throughout the world.

In New York City alone, several bars are hosting readings:

The Ulysses bar on Pearl Street begins their festivities at 11.30am as local authors read from the book. They are celebrating their 7th Bloomsday.

At Solas bar in the East Village, Tablet Magazine hosts a Bloomsday devoted to the Jewish themes in Ulysses and includes an excerpt of the book that I translated into Yiddish for the Bloomsday centennial performed by the New Yiddish Rep.

Symphony Space on the Upper West Side celebrates their 29th anniversary focusing on the books parallels to Homer's Odyssey.

The International Center for Photography hosts an exhibit of art work inspired by Ulysses made by students from their class Visualizing Ulysses.

The Irish American Bar Association celebrates with readings at the Irish Consulate on Fifth Avenue beginning at 6pm.

Bloomsday in Brooklyn observes the day on Saturday, June 12th beginning at the Black Sheep Pub.

The most famous worldwide celebration of the book takes place every year for a week in Dublin at the James Jo yce center and at venues throughout the city.

Another much admired event, Toronto's Bloomsday run for 25 years by actress Mary Durkan has a day long celebration that includes a full costumed performance on the beach.

In Philadelphia, the Rosenbach Museum and Library which is home to many Joyce manuscripts holds event from 12 to 7pm.

On the west coast, The Wild Geese Theater in Seattle is holding a reading of the Circe episode of Ulysses beginning at 7pm.

In Los Angeles, The Celtic Arts Center has a performance on June 13th and on June 16th The Hammer Museum has a performance.

For a list of 31 other Bloomsday Celebrations in Oslo, Brussels, Buenos Aires and more visit the website of The James Joyce Centre.

The Blooms: A Family of Artists

2010-06-03T05:23:00.000-07:00

The more I peck through the layers of Ulysses, the more I see it as a meditation on the artistic process. Unlike other writers, Joyce continually hurls his reader out of the flow of his narrative by endlessly switching styles from stream of consciousness to Elizabethan prose from play form to Catholic Catechism forcing the reader to re-examine his technique and re-enter his prose again and again. Each of his three main characters - Leopold, Stephen and Molly is an artist contemplating the artistic process. Stephen, a new teacher and recent college graduate, composes poetry on the beach, frustrated that the world has yet to recognize his genius. Molly, the sometime singer, performs occasionally, as little as once a year, preparing and yearning and dreaming in bed about her next moment onstage. Bloom continually switches his day job, dreams of writing sketches, short stories, and operas for Molly. Bloom's daughter Milly, a photographer's assistant, is a young artist starting out on her career.

On Tuesday, the legendary actor Jerry Stiller recorded the thoughts of Leopold Bloom from the Calypso episode of Ulysses. In this segment which takes place in the morning, Bloom reads a letter from his daughter Milly, eats his breakfast, and goes to the outhouse where he contemplates his chances of making money off of his writing. People often forget Bloom's artistic yearnings and see him as an everyman but Bloom is as unique a character as ever appeared in print, as eccentric perhaps as Joyce, himself. Jerry's decades of experience creating an artistic life brought a knowing poignancy to Bloom's hopes and the session flew by as he inhabited the mind of Bloom.

Jerry's daughter Amy Stiller, an actress I have loved since I saw her perform Off Broadway in Anne Meara's excellent play Down the Garden Paths read Milly's letter to her father. Last year, Amy read the words of Virginia Woolf criticizing Ulysses. Amy's mother, Anne Meara did a recording for Radio Bloomsday a few years ago when she read the words of Gertie, the woman Bloom fantasizes about on the beach. Anne is one of the few actresses who has performed the complete Molly Bloom. She also appeared as one of the prostitutes in that famous Zero Mostel production of Ulysses in Nighttown in 1958.

Like the Blooms, the Stiller's are an extraordinary artistic family. Jerry and Amy laid down a beautiful recording that you will really enjoy when you listen to it around 8pm on Bloomsday, Wednesday, June 16, 2010. Artists interpret Ulysses, a book about the artistic process in an attempt to uncover the truth about what it means to live an artistic life, to create art that influences generations.

Ulysses on Film

2010-06-01T18:51:00.000-07:00

We had an amazing day in the studio today recording some incredible actors but more on that tomorrow as I have to actually get some work done as opposed to writing about getting some work done which is a clever new addictive form of procrastination. All the kids are doing it.

Meanwhile, here is a clip from the 1967 film version of Ulysses focusing on that sexpot Stephen Dedalus. Nunc es bibendum.

Our Postcard - Molly Bloom in bed

2010-05-27T18:53:00.000-07:00

For you New York locals, we have started papering the town with our Radio Bloomsday 2010 postcards and many people have asked about the images. Molly Bloom photographed by Louie Correia adorns the front and back of the card. We built a set in my bedroom, covering two sides of the wall with several 6 foot sheets of white butcher paper, then pasting on several layers of the New York Post, before adding a layer of gesso, to create the idea of a book. We then used charcoal to draw lines and handwrite two pages from Molly Bloom's monologue beginning with the word flagellate. Finally, we painted over the charcoal with black acrylic paint and a square brush. Our photographer, Louie Correia, a gifted graduate of FIT and a descendant of several generations of Portuguese Circus performers, came over for about 4 hours and took approximately 400 images with a digital camera of Molly Bloom at different stages of her day in bed.

Our aim is to present Molly Bloom as if she has just been hurled from the pages of a giant copy of Ulysses. Art in motion. Literature in progress. On the front color side, it is daylight and she is rehearsing with Blazes Boylan just after they make love around 4 oclock in the afternoon. On the backside, she is alone in bed in the wee hours of the morning waiting for Bloom to come home. Molly Bloom, the singer, the artist, working and living and eating and loving all day long in bed. Bed as the female power center of the home. Bed as canvas. Bed as work station. Bed as concert hall. Bed as the stage for life. Bed, bed, bed.

Let us know if you see the postcards and tell us where! Or send us your address and we will mail you one old school. Special thanks to Raphaele Shirley, Bobby of Bibberbox and Olivia Beall for their advice and expertise.

Radio Bloomsday Cast 2010

2010-05-27T18:29:00.001-07:00

We've have been working around the clock here at Radio Bloomsday central (aka Molly Bloom's bed) to put together a really exciting cast of artists ready to throw down some vocal acrobatics on the 16th of June. In addition to Charles Busch, T. Ryder Smith and Aaron Beall who prerecorded for us earlier in the week, we have a dozen New York super talents ready to enter the ring. Barbara Vann of the Medicine Show Theater, who performed Finnegans Wake for us last year, will open the show this year and invoke the goddess of literature with a recitation of the famous Irish poem The Hag of Beare circa 800 BC.

The first hour of the program will focus on Stephen Dedalus with the Pulitizer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon performing Proteus. Speaking of poets, we are introducing a new segment in this year's broadcast devoted to new writers reading their own work. Poets Merideth Finn and Mac Barrett, both seasoned Bloomsday performers will read from their new work.

Alec Baldwin, Jerry Stiller, Amy Stiller, Bob Dishy, Judy Graubart, Anna Goodman-Herrick, Brian O'Doherty, Jim Fletcher, Kate Valk, James Kennedy, Mara McEwin, Tara Bahna James, Janet Coleman, David Dozer, Richard Maxwell and Tory Vasquez will be performing this year. We are working on a Los Angeles contingent of performers to join us from the Left Coast via ISDN. More on that as it develops.

Now I must return to the script. More on Molly in the morning...

Ulysses in Downtown

2010-05-25T17:09:00.000-07:00

Every year, we pre-record some excerpts of Radio Bloomsday to make it easier to switch between segments during our seven hour live broadcast. Today we recorded a thirty minute piece from the Circe episode of Ulysses with three legendary downtown artists : Charles Busch(above), T. Ryder Smith and Aaron Beall.

Joyce bends together several realities throughout the drug fueled orgy that is Circe. Bella turns into Bello, a man, and in turn turns Bloom into Ruby Cohen, awhore/scullery maid. Chock full of scatological references, Circe is one of the most controversial episodes in the book. Zero Mostel starred as Leopold Bloom in one of the most successful adaptations of Ulysses which focused almost completely on the Circe episode. That play, Ulysses in Nighttown, was nominated for several Tony Awards on Broadway in 1974. T Ryder mentioned that that production which he attended was one of his favorite theatrical memories of all time.

Circe is written in the form of a play, as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom drunkenly wander through Dublin's Red light district. We recorded the section where Bloom explores his perverse sexual fantasies under the tutelage of whoremistress Madame Bella Cohen. The playwright and performer and novelist Charles Busch essayed the role of Bella and brought a disarming sweetness to the character of this famous sadist that was devastating and unique. Charles' new play The Divine Sister opens at Soho Rep this September. The chameleon T. Ryder Smith who is presently playing Hitler, Ronald Regan and Queen Elizabeth (pictured above) in Sara Ruhl's Passion Play read the narration and hilariously about a half dozen other roles. Aaron Beall (below with Molly), the founder of Nada and the New York International Fringe Festival played a stripped down and exposed, quintessentially New York Bloom.

Below is a short excerpt from Circe, as Bella/Bello chastises Bloom. Tune in on Wednesday, June 16th around 10pm to hear these superstars perform the entire piece.

BELLO: (Savagely) The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old. You're in for it this time! I'll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life.

(His forehead veins swollen, his face congested)

I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a bottle of Guinness's porter.

(He belches)

And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler's Gazette. Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you.

(He twists her arm. Bloom squeals, turning turtle.)

BLOOM: Don't be cruel, nurse! Don't!

Ulysses in Hypertext

2010-05-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons that readers find Ulysses daunting is because of the many obscure Irish, Hellenic, Catholic and literary references throughout the text. With the advent of the internet, dozens of websites devoted to decoding the book became available online. In many ways, Ulysses is the perfect test case for literary hypertext. Jorn Barger of robotwisdom.com has been experimenting with the many layers of an online Ulysses for over a decade. His site is an invaluable resource for new and seasoned readers. You can read his notes on episode 1 here.

Recently, a new website devoted to Ulysses as an online literary experience launched at ulyssesulysses.com and it is wonderful. Roll the mouse over a highlighted reference or vocabulary word and an instant explanation appears. No more thumbing through Ulysses annotated or googling Latin phrases. A work in progress by Amanda Visconti, the first two episodes are available now. A perfect place for new readers to start.

Giorgio Joyce: Behold the Boy!

2010-05-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

Nora Barnacle, Giorgio and Lucia Joyce in Zurich, 1918 while James Joyce was writing Ulysses.

Joyce often used his family for inspiration. Nora was the inspiration for Leopold's adulterous wife Molly Bloom. Joyce pestered her while he was writing Ulysses to have an affair so that he would know what it felt like to be a cuckold. Nora refused.

When asked by a reporter what made her different from Molly, Nora replied, "She was fatter."

Lucia was a major inspiration for both Finnegans Wake and the character of Milly in Ulysses. There is no corresponding character for Giorgio in Ulysses. Leopold and Molly's son Rudy died in infancy in the novel and is the reason the couple have not had sex in ten years.

Giorgio Joyce was born in 1905 in Switzerland just around the time his grandfather died in Dublin. Joyce's father was the model for Simon Dedalus, Stephen's alcoholic, wastrel of a father in Ulysses.

Joyce wrote the poem Ecce Puer (Behold the boy) when his son was a newborn.

Ecce Puer

Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

How to throw a Bloomsday Party

2010-05-21T04:37:00.000-07:00

To put together your own Bloomsday celebration, all you need is a copy of Ulysses, an internet connection or a radio. Some drinks and snacks mentioned in the book are also a nice touch if you are inviting friends: Beer, burgundy, tea, brown bread, gorgonzola cheese, for instance. At 7pm EST, you turn on the radio and listen to wbai 99.5FM or go online to wbai.org.

You can also pass around your copy of Ulysses to your guests or choose selections for them to read and print them out and let them each in turn read aloud from the book. Edwardian dress is optional but always encouraged, long dresses and bowler hats and nightgowns are welcome. Bloomsday is a day for people who love the book to share it with people who have never read it, to help new readers find their way in to a challenging, inspiring, rewarding and for some life changing literary experience.

The first Bloomsday celebration was a lunch organized by Joyce's publisher Sylvia Beach in Paris, 1929. The first Irish Bloomsday took place in 1954 as the great Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh and novelist Flan O'Brien visited some of the places mentioned in Ulysses and read from the novel. Traditionally, Bloomsday starts at breakfast time with a nice Irish fry and ends drunkenly at 2ish in the morning. Take just five minutes to think of the book and listen to or read a few paragraphs and you have taken part in a worldwide literary celebration.

How Jewish is Ulysses?

2010-05-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

Much has been of the fact that James Joyce chose to make Leopold Bloom, the lead character in Ulysses, Jewish. Bloom's father is a Hungarian Jew who immigrated to Ireland. Bloom's mother is Irish. While according to Jewish law Bloom would not be considered Jewish, he is certainly looked upon as other by the Irish community in which he lives. While Ireland was a safe place for Jews to live in the early 1900's, Joyce highlights several moments of anti-semitism in the book. In episode two, the school teacher Mr Deasy tells Stephen Dedalus that: "England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation's decay." At the end of The Cyclops episode of Ulysses, the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin at Bloom's head and threatens to crucify him after Bloom says: "Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God."

By making Bloom Jewish, Joyce was able to create a connection between this very Irish tale and communities the world over. Additionally, Bloom's Jewishness underlines his outsider status in Ireland something that Joyce himself felt keenly as artist in self-exile in Europe. In many ways both Bloom and Dedalus are stands in for Joyce. Bloom as the older man trying to provide for his family with his unreliable income and Stephen as a young artist attempting to make his mark on a people and a society not yet ready to listen to him.

There is some discussion that perhaps it is Molly Bloom and not Leopold who is Jewish. The background of Molly's mother, Lunita Laredo, is unknown and there are intimations throughout her monologue that she was an outsider of somesort, a gypsy, an artist or perhaps a Jew. One of the most memorable Jewish characters in all of Irish literature, is of course the whoremistress Madame Bella Cohen who appears in The Circe episode and is the subject of Bloom's filthy sexual fantasies. For Radio Bloomsday 2010, Charles Busch performs the role of Bella Cohen, Aaron Beall is Bloom and T. Ryder Smith is the narrator.

The twentieth century Jewish community in Ireland was very prominent with two Jewish mayors and several Jewish ministers of parliament coming from a community of fewer than 2000 people. The first Jewish mayor of Dublin, Douglas Briscoe is pictured above. Irish historian Cormac O'Grada has written a very informative book about the Jewish community in Ireland at the time entitled Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce. More recently, a film Shalom Ireland which you can preview at the link discusses the Jewish community in Ireland today.

Although Ulysses has been translated into several languages including Hebrew, there has never been a Yiddish translation of the book. For Bloomsday, 2005, I translated a few paragraphs between Bloom and his old girlfriend Mrs. Denis Breen aka Josie Powell which you can read here -

-- O, Mr Bloom, how do you do?
OT, REB BLOOM, VOS MAKT IR?
-- O, how do you do, Mrs Breen?
NU, VOS HERT ZIKH, FRAU BREEN?
-- No use complaining. How is Molly those times? Haven't seen her for ages.
FAR VOS ZOL IHK KVETSHN? UN VI GAYT MOLLY AF YEDN TEG? ICH HOB A LANGE TSAYT ZI NISHT GEZEN.
-- In the pink, Mr Bloom said gaily, Milly has a position down in Mullingar, you know.
IN BESTN GEZUNT HOT REB BLOOM GEZOGT MIT FRAYD. MILLY HOT A JOB IN MULLINGAR, DOKH.
-- Go away! Isn't that grand for her?
NISHT EMES! DOS IZ ZAYER GUT FAR IR, NISHT VOR?
-- Yes, in a photographer's there. Getting on like a house on fire. How are all your charges?
YAU, BAY A FOTOGRAFER DORTN. S’IZ VI SHABES ALE VOKH. VI GAYT DI KINDER?
-- All on the baker's list, Mrs Breen said.
K’HOB NAKHES HOT FRAU BREEN GEZOGT
How many has she? No other in sight.
VIFL HOT ZI? KAYN ANDERE ZAY IHK NISHT
-- You're in black, I see. You have no...?
IR TUT AN SHVARTZE KLAYDER, ZAY ICH, IR HOT NISHT GEHAT KAYN -
-- No, Mr Bloom said. I have just come from a funeral.
NAYN, HOT MR BLOOM GEZOGT, ICH BIN YEZT TSURIK GEKUMEN OF A LAVAYA
Going to crop up all day, I foresee. Who's dead, when and what did he die of? Turn up like a bad penny.
S’VET ARAYNKHAPN ALE TOG, IKH ZAY, VER IZ TOIT, VEN UN FUN VOS IZ ER GESHTORBN, SVET ARAYN KHAPN VI CHOLERIA
-- O dear me, Mrs Breen said. I hope it wasn't any near relation.
OY VAY IZ MIR, FRAU BREEN HOT GEZOGT, IKH HOF AZ S’IZ NISHT GEVEN KAYN KROVIM
May as well get her sympathy.
A BISL MITLAYD, FAR VOS NIT?
-- Dignam, Mr Bloom said. An old friend of mine. He died quite suddenly, poor fellow. Heart trouble, I believe. Funeral was this morning.
DIGNAM HOT REB BLOOM GEZOGT, AN ALTE FRAYNT MAYN. ER IZ GESHTORBN ZAYER PLUTZLING, NEBEKH. TSUROS MITN HARTS MAYN IKH. DI LAVAYA IZ GEVEN IN DER FREE.
Your funeral's tomorrow
While you're coming through the rye.
Diddlediddle dumdum
Diddlediddle...

DAYN LAVAYA IS MORGN
VEN DU KUMST DURCHN RYE
YADADIE DIE DIE
YADADEE DEE DEE

-- Sad to lose the old friends, Mrs Breen's womaneyes said melancholily.
S’IZ ZAJER TROIERK VEN DI ALTE KHAVERIM GAEYN, FRAU BREENS OIGN HAT MIT TROIER GEZOGT
Now that's quite enough about that. Just quietly: husband.
GENUG SHOIN. SHA STIL – IR MAN.
-- And your lord and master?
UN IR GRAF UN BALABUS?
Mrs Breen turned up her two large eyes. Hasn't lost them anyhow.
FRAU BREEN HOT AB GEDRAYT IR ZVAI GROISE OIGN. ZI HOBN ZAY NISHT GELOZT, MIRTSHASHEM
-- O, don't be talking! she said. He's a caution to rattlesnakes. He's in there now with his lawbooks finding out the law of libel. He has me heartscalded. Wait till I show you.
OY! SHA, ZI HOT GEZOGT. A DYBUK IZ ARAYN IN IM. ER HAK MIKH A TCHAINIK. ER IZ ARAYN DORTN MITN TALMUD ZUKNDIK A DAVAR TOIRA VEGN LOSHN-HORE, IKH’LL ES AKYH BAVIZN.

How to Read Ulysses

2010-05-19T04:07:00.001-07:00

One of the greatest barriers to reading James Joyce's Ulysses is the way the book is published, small print, crammed together with no white space. There are many free online versions of the text that you can copy into a word document print in larger font with spaces between the lines or read on your screen and all of sudden the book is infinitely more accessible. Listening to other people read the book aloud is always helpful or you could try reading episodes aloud to yourself, your child, your friend, your cat.

There are several guides which can be helpful to get your footing and familiarize yourself with the plot, the most popular being Ulysses Annotated which explains most of the obscure references in the book and Harry Blamires' The Bloomsday Book which gives a plot summary for each episode. You can also google this information. In fact, Ulysses is ideal for an online reading experience.

That said, you don't have to start at the beginning. You might, like this photo of Marilyn above, prefer to start at the end and read the Penelope episode which is Molly Bloom's monologue as she lies alone in bed in the middle of the night. Here is Molly unpunctuated thoughts on servants of which at present she has none:

"its his fault of course having the two of us slaving here instead of getting in a woman long ago am I ever going to have a proper servant again of course then shed see him coming Id have to let her know or shed revenge it arent they a nuisance that old Mrs Fleming you have to be walking round after her putting the things into her hands sneezing and farting into the pots well of course shes old she cant help it a good job I found that rotten old smelly dishcloth that got lost behind the dresser I knew there was something and opened the area window to let out the smell."

Stephen Dedalus's monologue and philosophical musings in Proteus, episode 3, is somewhat more difficult to read. It begins with that beautiful famous phrase "Ineluctable modality of the visible:" which he then explains as "at least that if no more, thought through my eyes." Stephen is the most intellectual of all of the characters in Ulysses, with a brain and an education most like his creator James Joyce. The passages in which he appears require the fiercest concentration but when you unlock them, when you finally follow as "he proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father" the experience is exhilarating.

Stephen consumes the first three chapters of the novel, so if you find them difficult, you might also like to start with Episode 4 when we first meet Bloom eating his breakfast: "Mr Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls."

Many readers enjoy Circe, episode 15, which takes place in Nighttown, Dublin's Red Light District. It is written in play form through the drunken eyes of its protagonists, Bloom and Stephen and is full of prostitutes, beggars, Bloom's filthy fantasies and Stephen's ghosts. Feel free to skip around and often when you feel lost it is because Joyce has shifted literary mediums and you haven't realized it yet. Unlike most writers who seek to put their readers in a dream state and keep them there, Joyce is consistently throwing us out of his own narrative. He wants us to keep up him with him or go home.

Personally, I am a lazy reader. I like to crack a book's spine, dunk it in the bath and consume it quickly while supine. It still takes me awhile to find my way into Ulysses chapter by chapter despite dramatizing this book for the better part of a decade. When you read Joyce, he cracks your spine, dunks you in the bath and consumes you quickly. Don't give up, don't think him pretentious and impenetrable. Dig and he will be revealed, sentence by sentence. You will be rewarded by stepping deeper and deeper into the mind of a brilliant man who lived his artistic life fearlessly.

Lucia Joyce

2010-05-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

Thousands of books have been written about James Joyce's life and art and the connection between the two. One of my favorite books to come out of the prolific industry of Joyce scholarship is Carol Loeb Shloss's book on his daughter Lucia entitled Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake.

Lucia was born in 1907 in the pauper's ward of a Swiss maternity hospital, the second of Joyce and Nora Barnacle's two children. Her first language was Italian.

Clearly the inheritor of her father's artistry, Lucia was a modern dancer, a writer and an artist. She had a brief relationship with Samuel Beckett when he was her father's secretary. She wrote a novel which her family burned along with most of her correspondence.

Lucia inspired the character of Milly, Leopold Bloom's daughter in Ulysses and more importantly Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake. Her father was her protector and she was his inspiration. He felt that she understood what he was doing with Finnegans Wake more than anyone else and in fact was attempting to capture her way of thinking and speech.

In Ulysses, Bloom sends his daughter away to photography camp because he knows his wife his having an affair. Milly writes to her father but not to her Mother, Molly. Here is Milly's letter -

Dearest Papli,
Thanks ever so much for the lovely birthday present. It suits me splendid. Everyone says I'm quite the belle in my new tam. I got mummy's lovely box of creams and am writing. They are lovely. I am getting on swimming in the photo business now. Mr Coghlan took one of me and Mrs. Will send when developed. We did great biz yesterday. Fair day and all the beef to the heels were in. We are going to lough Owel on Monday with a few friends to make a scrap picnic. Give my love to mummy and to yourself a big kiss and thanks. I hear them at the piano downstairs. There is to be a concert in the Greville Arms on Saturday. There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his cousins or something are big swells and he sings Boylan's (I was on the pop of writing Blazes Boylan's) song about those seaside girls. Tell him silly Milly sends my best respects. I must now close with fondest love
Milly
P.S. Excuse bad writing am in hurry. Byby.
M.

After Joyce died in 1941, her mother and brother had Lucia committed into a mental institution where she spent the rest of her life. She died in 1982. The extent of her mental illness, if she was mentally ill at all, is unknown, although she had been institutionalized for short periods previously. She had a volatile relationship with her mother who did not know how to encourage Lucia's artistic temperament and abilities the way her father did. Throughout her monologue in Ulysses, Molly Bloom (the stand in for Nora Barnacle) references to the many ways in which her adolescent daughter in all her budding beauty is beginning to annoy her: "I told her over and over again not to leave knives crossed like that because she has nobody to command her as she said herself well if he doesnt correct her faith I will that was the last time she turned on the teartap"

Lucia's brother Giorgio also attempted to commit his wife Helen, an American heiress, into a mental institution but her family protected her and they got a divorce instead.In many ways, Lucia's fate after her father's death is reminiscent of Sebastian Barry's beautiful and harrowing novel The Secret Scripture. Barry's novel dramatizes the life of a 100 year old woman and her wrongful decades long incarceration in a lunatic asylum in the West of Ireland. Like Loeb Shloss's biography of Lucia Joyce, The Secret Scripture reveals how society in recent history dealt with vulnerable but independent minded women with artistic sensibilities that they could not control.

What is Ulysses about?

2010-05-17T04:20:00.000-07:00

James Joyce's Ulysses is a stylistically epic novel about a single day in Dublin, Ireland in 1904. Joyce experiments with every known literary style throughout this novel from Irish legends to children's primers from Dickensian prose to penny dreadful romance novels. In structure, Joyce mimics the heroic Greek tale of Odysseus. Each of the 18 chapters has a corresponding episode in the tale of Odysseus but Joyce's hero is Leopold Bloom, a middle class Irishman whose wife is having an affair. The story takes place on June 16, 1904 and covers the entirety of Leopold Bloom's day in Dublin from the frying of his morning breakfast to his drunken stumble into bed with a goodnight kiss to his wife's bottom.

Bloom is a turn of the century half Jewish Irish Bohemian with artistic inclinations, presently making a living selling newspaper advertisements. His wife Molly, a semi-professional singer is having an affair with her singing partner Blazes Boylan. His daughter Milly is away at photography camp. He knows his wife has a meeting with her lover that day so he stays away from the house all day and night. Molly and Bloom haven't slept together in ten years since their infant son Rudy died but he has a famously high libido and as a young man styled himself after Lord Byron.

Bloom's day starts by attending his friend, Paddy Dignam's funeral, he then runs around trying to get some work done, stops by the newspaper office, meets a few acquaintances along the way, sends a letter to his pen pal lover, has lunch, farts, is thrown out of a pub by the Citizen an anti-Semitic Irish nationalist, visits a friend's wife at the maternity hospital where he finally meets up with Stephen Dedalus, a young penniless poet with big ambitions and the third major character in the novel.

Stephen Dedalus actually opens Ulysses and in fact the first three chapters are devoted to him. The reading public first meets Stephen as the hero of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Ulysses, Stephen is a few years older. His mother recently died and as an atheist, he famously refused to pray at her deathbed. A recent graduate of University, he is attempting to establish himself as a writer. At present he is a school teacher and lives with his friend Buck Mulligan at the Martello Tower by the sea. The novel opens at the Tower and the first chapter ends with Stephen deciding not to live there so annoyed is he by his friend Mulligan and their houseguest Haines, a Brit obsessed with Irish culture. In chapter two, we see Stephen at school with his student and with an anti-semitic older teacher who asks his help in publishing a letter. Chapter Three is a monologue devoted entirely to Stephen. He and Molly are the only two characters to have a full chapter devoted to their stream of conscious thoughts.

Bloom is a father figure to Stephen. Stephen's own father, a gifted tenor, is an unemployed drunk responsible for the family's penury. They visit many of the same spots during the day, the newspaper, the beach, the streets of Dublin narrowly missing each other until they both find themselves at Holles Street Maternity Hospital in the evening. Together they get drunk and wander very late in the night into Nighttown, Dublin's red light district and into the whore house of Madame Bella Cohen. The episode is written through the drunken eyes of its two male leads.

Eventually, Bloom and Stephen make their way to Bloom's house, stopping to piss on the road together, but Stephen refuses Bloom's offer of shelter and heads out into the night as Bloom crawls into bed with Molly. The chapter describing the end of Bloom's day is written in question and answer format mimicking a Catholic Catechism. The final chapter is Molly's 8 sentence 3 hour monologue about her day, her life, her love for Bloom.

James Joyce

2010-05-14T04:10:00.001-07:00

James Joyce (1882-1941) is a Dublin born writer who spent most of his career in exile in Western Europe. He had a beautiful singing voice and at first dreamed of being a professional singer. Full of musical references, much of his writing has a lyrical quality and is often infinitely more enjoyable to say nothing of understandable when it is read aloud. After Joyce placed only second in a University singing competition where the celebrated Irish tenor John McCormack placed first, he abandoned his dreams of singing and decided instead to change the face of literature with his writing. Above all he was an artist who from the very first was shooting for all the marbles, aiming for his place in literary history whatever the cost to himself and his financial well being.

Joyce was born the oldest of ten surviving children on February 2, 1882 into a poor but educated family in Dublin, Ireland. His alcoholic father was frequently jobless; his mother, an accomplished pianist obsessed by the Roman Catholic Church. He was educated by the Jesuits at Belvedere College in North Dublin and later graduated from University College Dublin. One of his first publications was an essay about the dramatist Ibsen.

Joyce fled Ireland in 1904 with his longtime companion, a Galway chamber maid named Nora Barnacle with whom he had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. They only married in 1931 when their children were adults for legal reasons. He never made much money throughout his career, and his children were born in the poverty ward of the Trieste hospital. His brother Stanislaus joined the family in Switzerland for sometime so that he could get a job and help support them. The above photo is taken in Paris of Joyce with his publisher Sylvia Beach at her bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Beach did what she could to help support the family financially. When they had money, they spent it on life's small pleasures, good food and wine and clothes.

Joyce's first publication was a book of poems, Chamber Music (1907) which WB Yeats encouraged him in pursuing. His first collection of short stories The Dead (1914) was followed by his novel of artistic awakening, A Portrait of an Artists as a Young Man (1916). Ulysses was first published in 1922 when it was critically lauded and then burned and banned in America. Throughout his life, Joyce struggled with his eyesight, eventually going nearly blind. Finnegans Wake appeared in 1931 and was infinitely more experimental than Ulysses. To Joyce's great disappointment, it did not receive the critical acclaim that his previous novel did. After fleeing Paris during World War II, Joyce died in Switzerland on January 13, 1941.

What is Bloomsday?

2010-05-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

Bloomsday is a literary holiday. It is celebrated each year on June 16th commemorating the day that James Joyce's epic novel, Ulysses, takes place - on June 16th, 1904. Joyce chose this date for his novel in honor of the first time he went out walking with his future wife, Galway girl, Nora Barnacle the inspiration for the character of Molly Bloom.

Ulysses is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Certainly, it popularized the stream of conscious monologue within literary texts. James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1882. He spent most of his writing life in exile in Paris and Zurich where he died in 1941.

On Bloomsday every year, actors, writers and readers of all sorts get together and read Ulysses aloud. These celebrations take place onstage, in the street, in private homes, on the beach and in our case, broadcast live on the radio from 7pm to 2am on WBAI, 99.5FM or wbai.org anywhere in the world.

One of the most famous chapters in Ulysses is the final Penelope episode or the Molly Bloom monologue which takes place as Molly is lying in bed, thinking about her day, her lovers, her life. Consisting of eight very long run on sentences without punction, Molly Boom's solilquoy is a sexy, powerful, magical piece that takes 3 hours to perform. Caraid O'Brien will be performing the entire Molly Bloom monologue this year beginning at 11pm.

In the photo above, the actress Marilyn Monroe reads Molly Bloom's thoughts from Ulysses.

Radio Bloomsday 2010

2010-05-12T15:40:00.000-07:00

Radio Bloomsday will be broadcast live on WBAI 99.5FM on Wednesday night June 16, 2010 from 7pm until 2am. You can listen anywhere on the world at www.wbai.org. Artists will perform selections from James Joyce's Ulysses as well as other works of world literature related to the book through spoken and song.

Radio Bloomsday is made possible, in part, by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. A great nation deserves great art.

Radio Bloomsday 2010

2010-05-11T07:27:00.000-07:00