Bloomsday

I forgot today to celebrate the anniversary of Bloomsday, 16th June 1904 on Saturday. It was celebrated in Sydney and in Melbourne. A lifetime ambition of mine is to celebrate in Dublin. Another is to read Finnegan's Wake with a pleasure and understanding.

My earlier posts on JJ have not aged nor improved – here and here.

In digging around and trying to find some celebratory and new to say I came across this old post by John Quiggin on the attitudes of Joyce’s family to intellectual property. In particular Joyce’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, apparently didn’t want free recitations of his grandfather's work in Dublin.

This insistence is unfortunate but it can be at least understood if you realize the terrible poverty that JJ lived in for decades while writing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The poverty must have been hard on his kids. It obviously was for daughter Lucia who, after a fling with Samuel Beckitt, went mad. You can read of this in Carol Shloss’s, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake.

Joyce was a great writer but a poor husband and dad!