Bloomsday 2025
So it’s 16th June, a very special day in Ireland – especially Dublin – because 16th June 1904 is the date on which the story takes place of Ulysses by James Joyce. Bloomsday – named after the character Leopold Bloom – is an annual celebration not only of all things Joycean but also of Ireland’s wider cultural and literary heritage.
If you haven’t read Ulysses yet then you definitely should. It’s one of the great works of modern literature. And don’t let people put you off by telling you that it’s a difficult read. It’s a long read, that’s for sure -it’s over 900 pages – but the writing is full of colour and energy and it has a real sense of place. It’s a wonderful book. I’ve read it three times now, once as a teenager, once in my thirties, and again last year when I’d reached sixty.
Anyway, here’s an excerpt with an astromomical theme, which seems to me to fit this blog:
With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?
Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.
I’ll also mention that, starting at 8am on RTÉ Radio 1 Extra (but also available at other times on the RTÉ player), you can listen to the classic radio broadcast of Ulysses from 1982.
In the Dark 
June 16, 2025 at 9:49 am
Generalising slightly, I am rereading The Odyssey after six decades – inspired by the recent fine film The Return with Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus/Ulysses, which starts halfway through the Odyssey with him landing on Ithaca anonymously, and proceeding to reclaim what is rightfully his. The director has dumped the Greeek gods to make it a mostly psychological piece.
June 16, 2025 at 9:56 am
Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” was a big influence on Joyce.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
June 16, 2025 at 9:56 am
He says Sirius is 10 light years aways but its only 8.6. Sorry but it looks like his work did not go through rigorous peer review….
June 16, 2025 at 10:24 am
Finnegan’s Wake could have done with a decent copy editor…
June 16, 2025 at 10:58 am
I’m not sure when the current distance was established. Presumably it was a parallax measurement from Hipparcos. I understand than in the 19th century it was generally accepted to be somewhat further. Joyce probably got the number from a late-19th C astronomy book or journal.
June 16, 2025 at 2:20 pm
Perhaps but he should have included a full reference to the book or journal. Another failure of inadequate peer review.
June 16, 2025 at 12:22 pm
Happy Bloomsday! Please see my celebration of Ulysses’ “Dog Star” at https://jamesjoycereadingcircle.com/2025/06/16/n-new-for-bloomsday-2025-a-celebration-of-ulysses-dog-star/
June 17, 2025 at 3:47 am
By the time that Joyce wrote “Ulysses”, accounts of Sirius in the popular press did have distances somewhat more precise than “ten light years.” The book “The Stars: a study of the Universe,” (1901) by Simon Newcomb, listed a parallax of 0.37 arcsec, corresponding to a distance of 8.8 light years. This value was mentioned in a number of articles in other sources, such as “Sirius the Dog Star”, by Arthur Bartlett, in “Popular Astronomy” magazine (1910).
July 26, 2025 at 1:11 pm
Birthday Rememberance of Poor Lucia Joyce, 26 July
10:00 am
Today is the birthday of poor Lucia Joyce (1907) for whose sake her mother is maligned. Perhaps it was her Babbo who lessened her life by discouraging dance, favoring more “respectable” pursuits.
~Don
July 26, 2025 at 5:46 pm
I wrote a little piece about Lucia Joyce here: