Question: What’s the difference between James Joyce and God? Answer: James Joyce is everywhere; God is everywhere, except in Dublin.

By Elizabeth Grove-White, in Dublin
Special to the National Post  June 12, 2010

Whatever about God, you can’t escape Joyce (1918 photo above) in his native Dublin.
Joyce peers myopically from the walls at Dublin Airport, from shop windows and T-shirts and Joyce-themed pubs and restaurants, from posters and signs and commemorative plaques across the city. There’s a James Joyce Street and a James Joyce Bridge. There’s a Joyce Centre, a James Joyce Museum and a Joyce “House of the Dead” on Usher’s Island, the fictional setting of his most famous short story. In Dublin’s centre there’s a larger-than-life-sized statue of Joyce gazing quizzically at the passing crowds, christened by Dubliners “the prick with the stick.”

And then there’s Bloomsday, a term, incidentally, never used by Joyce. Every June 16, thousands of enthusiasts, Dubliners and visitors alike, many dressed in a mixum-gatherum of ersatz Edwardian outfits, will celebrate Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which unfolded over a single Dublin day, on June 16, 1904. They’ll retrace the characters’ routes around Dublin; they’ll perform, read, sing, eat, drink and generally celebrate that famous day in the life of Dublin’s most famous imaginary citizens.

Joyce didn’t always enjoy such popularity in his native city, a Dublin he once described as “the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.”
The first Bloomsday celebration took place on June 16, 1954, when a small group of Dublin writers and artists hired two old-fashioned horse-drawn carriages to retrace Ulysses’ epic journeys and encounters around Dublin. The pilgrimage ran aground prematurely in clouds of rancor and alcohol, thanks to the many stops for liquid refreshment taken along the way.

“If you look back to 1954, Bloomsday was seen to be the preserve of a group of loons and drinkers, people like Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien, who weren’t considered very respectable people in Ireland by any standard of that time,” says James Quin of Dublin’s Joyce Centre. “Joyce fitted perfectly with them, and they fitted perfectly with Joyce.”

Read more: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/06/12/re-joyce-you-could-also-call-it-st-james-day/#ixzz0r2uUzE00