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<\/a><\/p>\n\nLarry Kirwan, of Black 47, who’s been to every Bloomsday celebration at this venue since its inception (and I was at the first one as well!). Kirwan always reads the Gertie passage. It’s a hoot. He said, by way of introduction, “I am the world’s foremost male interpreter of Gertie.” <\/p>\n
\n \nThe table where Therese and I sat, my book on the right, hers on the left. She is my Bloomsday buddy! We’ve gone to this event, we think, three times now? Four? <\/p>\n \n \nI did not catch this man’s name but he brought down the house. Or, the alley. He recited – nay, acted the shit out of<\/i> – the Citizen’s confrontation with Leopold Bloom – from memory<\/i>. And he didn’t just recite. He became<\/i> all of these different characters, and you could really feel how that interaction escalated into something vicious and ugly in a flash. At one point, he, as the Citizen, was chanting over and over, “SINN FEIN SINN FEIN SINN FEIN”, followed by some more bellowing about “ISRAEL” and Therese and I cracked up at what that must have sounded like a couple blocks away to people who didn’t know what was going on. Some rabid political rally. He got a standing ovation. It was extraordinary. <\/p>\n \n \nA song.<\/p>\n \n \nWhere we were. And at the bar at the far end of the alley was a group of people, a crowd, watching the World Cup and occasionally ROARING into sound. It was exciting, a great counterpoint.<\/p>\n \n \nEven the trashcans are nerdy.<\/p>\n \n \nHad a wonderful time with Therese, got to read a bit from the Scylla and Charybdis section, had a blast listening to the other readers and singers, and met some new nice people, in particular Jonathan and Satish. There was a funny moment between the four of us having to do with the infamous big “dot” in Ulysses<\/i>, and Therese and I have different versions of the book, mine with the nice big dot, and hers with the dot too small. Satish had looked at both of our books and pointed at mine, “I like that one because the dot is big.” Only Ulysses<\/i> fans would even know what he was talking about. I flipped to the page to find the dot. Satish gestured at Therese’s copy – “I had that copy but I didn’t like it because the dot was too small.”<\/p>\n We all nodded, agreeing. Then, the best button of the moment was Therese opening her copy to the “dot” page to show how she had made the dot larger herself, coloring it in to a bigger size. I’m still laughing\/crying about the beauty of the moment: it was one of those moments where you feel, you know, that you can totally be yourself. Nobody was like, “You people are insane” or “Get a life” or “Who cares what size the dot is?” or “What’s Bloomsday?” <\/p>\n These may be people I hadn’t met before, but they are people I know<\/i>. You see the same faces year to year. You say, “Hi, how’ve you been!” It’s relaxed, it’s humorous, it’s occasionally quite moving. It’s one of my favorite days in New York. I also attended the Symphony Space celebration one year, an all-day event, and it was very interesting but a little bit more formal, and I did tell Jonathan that by the time Fionnula Flanagan took the stage at 1 in the morning to start Molly Bloom, I felt like I had been “waterboarded all day.” I prefer the one at the Ulysses bar down in the financial district, sitting at picnic tables in an alley, food, drink, a microphone, lots of people singing, lots of talkback, a great warm crazy little community. I’ve been going for 10 years now. It’s wonderful. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Emcee Colum McCann kept things running smoothly, no small feat with the amount of readers participating, Guinness in hand. Larry Kirwan, of Black 47, who’s been to every Bloomsday celebration at this venue since its inception (and I was at … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n