Poldy has left the following comment on Beatties Book Blog this morning:

BOOK NEWS AUCKLAND

This coming Monday, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day literature lovers everywhere celebrate James Joyce's comic Irish masterpiece Ulysses.

Acclaimed as one of the greatest modernist novels of last century, Ulysses is set during the hours of one day, June 16, 1904, and records the mock-heroic odyssey round Dublin city of Leopold Bloom, wandering Jew. Cover left is the 1922 edition.

Its frank depiction of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, saw it banned in its author's land of birth, with the Dublin Sunday Express providing afairly typical reaction: "The obscenity of Rabelais is innocent compared with the leprous and scabrous horrors of Joyce's book.

All the secret sewers of vice are canalised in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words."

The market had the last say: a signed first edition will now set you back half-a-million dollars.

Bloomsday will be celebrated in Auckland at the Dogs Bollix pub, corner of Karangahape Rd and Newton Gully.The twenty-fifth anniversary of Bloomsday was celebrated in Parison June 16, 1929 with Joyce and a party taking lunch on the city outskirts followed by a pub crawl back into the centre; somewhere along the way they lost Samuel Beckett.

The fiftieth anniversary was celebrated in Dublin with five Irish literary figures attempting to tour all the Dublin sites mentioned in Ulysses; they got stuck in a pub and never made it.

The world's first Bloomsday celebration of the new millenium was in New Zealand. At one minute past midnight, June 16, 2000, Auckland radio's Planet FM commenced broadcasting a 5-hour recorded reading of Ulysses; the following year a celebratory cabaret became an annual Auckland event.Bloomsday at the Dogs Bollix pub, corner of Karangahape Rd and Newton Gully: starting at 8pm with Dubliner Brian Keegan reading from The Book and with Lin Lorkin, the Jews Brothers band and mezzo-soprano Yuko Takahashiproviding an appropriate musical setting and well-known Auckland actor Michael Keir Morrissey (The Hollow Men) appearing as a variety of dreadful hiberno-Oddysean figures.