Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Happy Bloomsday

To celebrate James Joyce and all things Joycean (TM), Dublin will be swarming with happy tourists celebrating...oops, sorry, but Charlie H. died and there's all that funeral business to attend to. A bit of rain on the Joyce Parade come Friday the 16th. The funeral mass has been set for Friday morning, which may put a damper on the traditional kidney breakfast.

Perhaps some hardy souls, determined fans of James Joyce (TM), will dress up like Leopold Bloom and Molly and Stephen Dedalus and pay a call at the different locations that featured in Ulysses(TM). There will be many who will lament the loss of so many of those places, victims of the Celtic Tiger and the changes wrought by a global economy. Joyce's Dublin is no more, to the sorrow of his fans. Welcome to the world of progress. Cities are malleable; cities change their faces, spread out and up, leaving behind a few traces of the past.

Given Stephen James Joyce's proclivity for suing those who threaten to infringe the grandfather's copyright, one should move about with caution, or take along the solicitor and a barrister or two. We can assume that the Irish government took all available legal advice before reopening the James Joyce Cultural Centre on Monday.

Senator David Norris, who was present at the grand re-opening, expressed his great disappointment over the cancellation of the planned Friday morning festivities at the Cultural Centre. A noted Joycean (TM) scholar, he said:
"I would have maintained the centre open and I would have had a minute's silence in respect for Charlie Haughey and I'm perfectly certain that Mr Haughey would not have cancelled it himself."

Not to be defeated, Mr. Norris promises to dress up in his Bloom-style paraphernalia, head over to the centre which will be open for coffee, and recite a few choice bits of Joyce.

Not to throw even more water on the poor man, but, before he quotes from Joyce (TM), well, should he run it by Stephen James Joyce first? The Exchequer's bulging with a hefty balance, but still, why tempt fate and a possible lawsuit?

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