Today is Bloomsday, when James Joyce fans worldwide celebrate the day on which he set his groundbreaking novel Ulysses.
It is a novel often compared to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which is also set on a single day in June, and which Woolf wrote after reading Ulysses.
Such a comparison appeared today in the online version of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and it got me to thinking. Was Woolf setting up a subtle pun when she began her novel set in June with the famous line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”?
After all, Joyce’s main character is Leopold Bloom, and in the first sentence of the novel, Woolf’s main character mentions flowers — aka blooms — and asserts that she will acquire them independently, without help from anyone else.
Just a thought.
Now here is another: Apple has lifted its censorship of the Ulysses Seen iPad app just in time for Bloomsday celebrations. Apple, it seems, censored the app of the graphic novel, which is a takeoff on Joyce’s, because it included partial nudity.
Today Apple saw the error of its prudish ways and permitted distribution of the original version of the popular comic. At the same time, it gave the go-ahead to an app of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I don’t what problem Apple found with that one.
Oh, and read this interview on Maitresse in honor of the day as well. Thanks to Anne Fernald of Fernham for the tip.
Happy Bloomsday 2010. Read more about Woolf and Joyce.
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Happy Bloomsday to you too! Not sure about how much Joyce leaked into Mrs. Dalloway. Apparently Woolf really hated Ulysses when she and Leonard read it for possible publication. One of her biographers commented that, reading the ms., she felt that “her very own pen had been seized from her hands so that someone might scrawl the word ‘fuck’ on the seat of a privy.”
[…] Today is Bloomsday, when James Joyce fans worldwide celebrate the day on which he set his groundbreaking novel Ulysses. It is a novel often compared to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which is also set on a single day in June, and which Woolf wrote after reading Ulysses. Such a comparison appeared today in the online version of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and it got me to thinking. Was Woolf setting up a subtle pun when she began her novel se … Read More […]