Zoom Bloom: Bloomsday in a Time of Coronavirus

James Joyce

It was exactly 50 years ago that I attended my first Bloomsday. At age 22 I had a strong sense of priorities, so I skipped my college graduation in order to wake up early in Dublin on June 16th, ready to trace the routes followed on that day in 1904 by the two protagonists created by James Joyce for his masterpiece, Ulysses.

The year was 1970, but the crowds of scholars I anticipated joining at various Joycean landmarks did not materialize. I wondered if I were the only Joyce enthusiast in Dublin who was celebrating Bloomsday, named in honor of the book’s main character, Leopold Bloom, whose peregrinations, along with those of Stephen Dedalus, are described in the 1922 novel.

Looking back, I would have been safe on that deserted Dublin day from coronavirus, had it then existed. The empty streets of 1970 will be replicated for this year’s Bloomsday, but this time out of necessity rather than neglect. Although there undoubtedly will be more Bloomsday celebrants than in 1970, they will not be strolling, but confined to the Hollywood-Squares-style boxes of Zoom meetings.

According to what I have read, Dublin didn’t officially start honoring Joyce and his literary achievements until the centennial of his birth, in 1982. Resentments lingered over Joyce’s sometimes uncharitable depiction of Dublin and Dubliners, not to mention embarrassment from 1930s obscenity trials in both the US and UK over the novel’s content.

In 1982, however, a slew of international Joyce scholars picked Bloomsday in Dublin for

James Joyce Statue

the date and site of their symposium.  The city, at last deciding to let bygones be bygones, rolled out the red carpet. Dublin never looked back. In 1990 the city even erected a bronze statue of the author holding his walking stick. Ever irreverent, Dubliners dubbed the statue “the prick with a stick.”

In 1996, the James Joyce Centre was established in a 1784 townhouse just down the street from Joyce’s alma mater, Belvedere College. On Bloomsdays past the center has offered Joyceans a number of Ulysses-themed walking tours of Dublin. It also houses exhibits and artifacts, including the actual front door of No. 7 Eccles Street, the address Joyce chose for the fictional home of Leopold Bloom. In 1970 I viewed that exact same door in a pub, The Bailey, where it had been on display since 1967.

A more recent local tribute was in 2003 when the James Joyce Bridge was built across the River Liffey and dedicated on Bloomsday. Better a bridge than a “disappointed bridge,” the term Stephen Dedalus uses in the second chapter of Ulysses to describe a pier.

The first Bloomsday is thought to have occurred in 1924, the 20th anniversary of the day recounted in the novel. In a June 27 letter that year to his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce makes mention of “a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day – 16 June.”

Thirty years later, on the 50th anniversary, a small group of Dublin authors famously attempted to visit all the landmarks mentioned in Ulysses by horse-drawn carriage, the same transportation used by Leopold Bloom on his way to a funeral. Once the group of literati hit the aforementioned Bailey, however, the drinks flowed freely and the tour came to a sudden and sodden halt.

Reading Ulysses at the Rosenbach

Meanwhile, Bloomsday came to be an annual event in locations around the world. In 1992, for example, the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia held its first Bloomsday event. The next year, the street on which it’s located was closed to vehicles for what became a tradition of beginning-to-end outdoor readings of Ulysses by local notables. The Rosenbach bears the distinction of housing the original hand-written manuscript of Ulysses.

Since 1994 there has even been a Bloomsday celebration in the Hungarian town of Szombathely. Why? Joyce described Leopold Bloom as the son of Rudolf Virag (which means bloom in Hungarian), a native of Szombathely. The town repaid the compliment by erecting a bronze statue of Joyce in time for the Bloomsday centennial, 2004.

But this year the celebrations will either take a year off or will bloom in a vast bouquet of Zoom meetings around the globe. In New York City, Symphony Space’s annual staged readings of Ulysses, Bloomsday on Broadway, will go on. Since the event’s beginnings in 1981, this will be the first Virtual Bloomsday on Broadway, and will be shown on YouTube.  Stephen Colbert kicks off the event at 8 a.m. (the time at which events of Ulysses are launched) with a reading of Telemachus, or Chapter One.

Similarly, there will be (mostly free) online events at Dublin’s James Joyce Centre, at the Rosenbach Museum, at the University of Buffalo (which boasts the largest Joyce collection in the world), at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute and in many locations around the world.

My dream for Bloomsday 2020 was to recreate my visit to Dublin of 50 years ago and then

Joyce with Sylvia Beach in Paris, Shakespeare & Co.

to embark on a true Joyce journey across Europe, visiting again the places where Joyce lived and wrote: Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Obviously, I’m now prevented by a pandemic from carrying out my plan.

But in a sense, the online activities I have lined up for June 16th will allow me to out-Bloom Bloom. He spent that day going from place to place, all within the confines of the city. I will spend the day traveling the world, dropping in on one Bloomsday celebration after another, soaking up the festivities, all within the confines of my computer. Who wouldn’t say “Yes” to that?

“Finding David Douglas” film now on YouTube

I’m happy to share a link to “Finding David Douglas,” now on YouTube. I wrote the script for this documentary film, which was initially released in 2012.

David Douglas

David Douglas

My friend from childhood (we met at Girl Scout camp and then were high school classmates), Lois Leonard, invited me to be the writer for her film. She said she always liked my writing and that we shared so many interests, including history, the outdoors and all things Hawaiian.

Lois Leonard (facing camera) and film crew

The last part of the 55-minute film takes place in the Hawaiian Islands, on the islands of ‘Oahu and Hawai’i. David Douglas, a 19th-century botanist-explorer from Scotland, spent time on both islands before his untimely death on Mauna Kea on July 12, 1834. He was just 35.

Douglas was, in fact, the first non-native to climb both Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, the snow-capped volcanoes on Hawai’i Island. He did so for the purpose of collecting native plants, most of which were then unknown to European naturalists.

As he was walking across the lower elevations of Mauna Kea on his way to the town of Hilo, he had a fateful encounter with a wild cattle trapper named Ned Gurney. Many accounts blame Douglas’s death on one of Gurney’s trapped bulls; most of our film crew came to believe that Douglas was murdered by Gurney and his body thrown into the trap, already occupied by an innocent bull.

Bronze plaque from 1934 memorial

Some beautiful scenes were filmed in a grove of Douglas fir trees (imported from the Pacific Northwest) that were planted next to the pyramid-shaped stone memorial that marks the site of Douglas’s death. David Douglas is buried at the Kawaiaha’o Church Cemetery in Honolulu.

Douglas firs and koa trees

I hope you’ll take the time to view the “Finding David Douglas” video so you can appreciate Douglas’s accomplishments as a plant collector. For one thing, the seeds from Douglas fir and spruce trees that he sent home to London resulted in the re-growth of depleted forests in the UK and Europe.

My advice for anyone who wishes to visit the David Douglas Memorial on Mauna Kea: Make the trip in a 4-wheel-drive vehicle. The road is pretty rough. Keep in mind that the hardy Douglas was making the entire trek on foot.

On Assignment: Disneyland!

I’ve been writing for Alaska Beyond, the inflight magazine of Alaska Airlines, for many years. But unlike some airline magazines, Alaska Beyond, which is published by a company that is separate from the airline, rarely sends writers anywhere. I never got sent on an out-of-town assignment.

Breakfast at Disneyland

Until last week.

I couldn’t believe it when the magazine asked me if I would like to go to Disneyland. What a question. Of course! I love Disneyland!

It was fun writing to friends to report, “I’m in Disneyland. Working.”

In fact, I worked so hard during my three days in Disneyland that I gained five pounds. (I dropped them as soon as I returned to my own Spartan lifestyle, that is, no more appetizers before practically every meal, no more desserts after practically every meal, and no more appetizers between every meal.) Very nice people from Disney’s public relations department took me and a small group of journalists through Disneyland and its sister park, Disney California Adventure, as well as the Downtown Disney restaurant and

Millennium Falcon, Docked

shopping district, to check out all that was new or fairly new.

 

The last time I visited Disneyland was in 2015, and in just four years there have been a lot of changes and additions. The one addition generating the most buzz is Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, which opened May 31. I was perhaps the wrong person to report on this new Disneyland attraction; I’m not really up to date on Star Wars movies, books or video games. Some of the character and place names on the Planet Batuu were lost on me.

Still, I could appreciate the effort put into conceiving and then making this desert-like area inhabited by alien creatures of all sorts. Even the creation of the marketplace required that designers do hands-on research in the ancient souks of Marrakesh, Morocco. They managed to capture the exotic feel of centuries-old shopping bazaars I have visited in Turkey and Iran.

The Marketplace

The various droids–some round, some angular–looked and sounded familiar to me. I even got to make my own pint-sized droid and take it home with me after a visit to the Droid Depot. Another workshop allows visitors to make their own lightsabers.

I got another dose of Star Wars when I tried out The VOID, a new addition to Downtown Disney that offers virtual reality encounters with Darth Vader and his Storm Troopers. With

At The VOID

an oculus rift headset in place, and a blaster in hand, I surely did the rebel forces proud. Afterwards, one of my teammates said, “You were so brave!” What can I say? The Force was with me.

A new restaurant that looked very familiar to me was Portland’s own Salt & Straw, which has spread its fantastic gourmet ice cream beyond Oregon’s borders. There was also a fun restaurant called Splitsville that has 20 bowling lanes. I bought an irresistible Mickey/Minnie purse at the World of Disney

Me (on left) with Disney PR peeps

and got inspired to dust off my sewing machine after browsing at the cute Disney Dress Shop.

The Disney Dress Shop

One evening, when our group watched the World of Color— the light, sound and water show next to Pixar Pier in California Adventure–I confess to feeling a bit emotional. Flashed before us, amid the 1200 gushing fountains and the swirling colors, were scenes from the long history of Disney films, accompanied by music from some of my favorites.

It occurred to me that every American alive today, except for those who have lived as hermits, is fondly familiar with much of that music and many of the movie scenes. We all have that in common. It’s like the soundtrack of our nation. On that night, sitting under a full moon and watching the show illuminate the faces of all the viewers, I felt a real bond with Disney lovers from coast to coast.

I doff my hat (Minnie Mouse ears hat, to be exact) to Alaska Beyond for giving me the opportunity to not only enjoy a wonderful experience, but to write about it. Look for my article in the October 2019 issue.