jAMES JOYCE: BLOOMSDAY.

Today is Bloomsday – June 16^th. It's celebrated, as it was the day James Joyce met the woman of his life in Dublin and he wrote Ulysses and set it on that particualr day in Dublin.

I wrote this in 2010 and I will read it first and edit for the date:

It's Bloomsday today – June 16th – and on Bloomsday I think I'll put up here on the blog the 'Bloomsday' episode from my novel Alfredo Hunter; the Man With the Pen.
Of course I have changed the title of my novel from The Storyteller and on Amazon.com you can see excerpts from it under the former title. In fact on Google they have the whole novel somewhere in their library of all books ever written – or whatever it's called.
Bloomsday is taken from the novel Ulysses which takes part in the day of June 16th 1904 and the leading character therein Leopold Bloom – not Leo Bloom from The Producers by the way.

James Joyce set Ulysses on June 16th 1904 because that was the day he met the love of his life Nora Barnacle; well he did not actually meet her on that day but it was the day they first walked out; it was the day she did a small sexual favour for him which might have affected his mind; he thought if she can do that for me on the first day she would do it for anybody. It wasn't necessarily true, of course – what do I know? - but it led to bouts of jealousy and anxiety from the genius Jim which would upset Nora.
They left Dublin soon after and never returned to live there again – everything he wrote about Ireland he wrote from abroad. At one time they lived in London where they married – some time during the 1930s.
There is a lot of James Joyce in my novel; number one the leading character writes a play about him, there are various references to Ulysses and the prologue is actually a pastiche of his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. That novel starts off with 'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocaw coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy called baby tuckoo . . .' and my novel starts off with 'Once upon a time and a long time ago it was in the city of Dublin in the land of Ireland there was a man with a pen' – and then there are other phrases I use in the prologue; Joyce talks of the world being 'a great ball surrounded by clouds' and I use that phrase adding 'as the great man once said' and he also uses the phrase a 'greasy leather ball' which I also use to denote, as he did in the novel, the way some boys from the past were forced at school into sport and I remember at school trying to head that greasy leather ball they call a football.
But even though James Joyce is a subject of my novel I don't think I am influenced by him at all. I know every writer, especially the Irish ones, feels James Joyce looking over their shoulder as they write but I am more influenced by Charles Dickens, if anybody, or even William Shakespeare. Now that might sound as if I am comparing myself to Shakespeare and Dickens but nothing could be further from the truth.
I can't remember ever learning anything at school; I never did any work at school I didn't have to and the only subjects I liked had to have a story to it – like stories from the bible; the English Literature was non existent unless you want to count Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) being passed from pupil to pupil to read out loud in schoolboy monotones and turning into Seven Pillows of Sleep for me!
So I didn't do English Literature till years later after I'd read lots of books and even been to drama school – I was a mature student studying D.H. Lawrence (surprising what one letter makes), William Golding and First World War Poetry by a teacher who loved the subject.
At drama school I was reading and trying to perform Shakespeare when I hardly knew English!! Of course I was in a lot of trouble as I hadn't heard of any of the plays or even the characters and the only way I could even understand it was by sorting out his use of parenthesis and semi colons; without sorting those out I would have been up the creak without a paddle.
I eventually did Shakespeare professionally although not as much as I would have liked to; I earned a lot of money once doing a Shakespeare play for the BBC, even though it was a small part, and when I first came over here I 'workshopped' Richard III playing Richard which went very well – I guess some of the training must have gone in.
When I write I bear in mind Shakespeare's use of the English language – again I am not comparing myself to the greatest genius that has ever lived or the two greatest novelists in the English language, but I would recommend anybody who wants to write to follow them as opposed to Dan Brown.
So remember it is Bloomsday; there will, more than likely, be something on near you, if you look for it, and if you are in Dublin go on the walking tour if you can; go to Mulligan's Pub in Poolbeg Street and drink a pint of the best Guinness in the world and then come back and read my blog about my two leading characters celebrating Bloomsday in Los Angeles which was based on a true incident in 1995.

CHRIS SULLIVAN. LOS ANGELES 2010.