Bloomsday in Pittsburgh

Bloomsday is almost here! Below you'll find the schedule of events. You can also find this list on the Bloomsday in Pittsburgh site, via the 2008 Schedule link. We hope to see you there!

BLOOMSDAY IN PITTSBURGH 2008

Twentieth Anniversary Celebration

Monday, June 16

All readings free and open to the public…bring your copy of Ulysses and read along…

9:00 a.m. 1. BLOOMFIELD
Crazy Mocha Cafe, 4525 Liberty Avenue

Bloomsday 2008 begins with the "Lotus Eaters” as Leopold Bloom sets off from Eccles Street to retrieve Martha’s flower-filled love letter, visit the church, tip a race, and visit the baths to lie “naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved...”

10:30 a.m. 2. HOMEWOOD CEMETERY
South Dallas & Aylesboro Avenue, Point Breeze

Reading from "Hades" we'll accompany "poor Paddy Dignam” on his final journey to Glasnevin Cemetery with gossip and memories and dreams of immortality...

12:00 p.m. 3. MURPHY'S TAP ROOM
1106 South Braddock Avenue, Regent Square

Pause with Bloom in "Laestrygonians" as he eats "strips of sandwich, fresh, clean bread" and “Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed..."

2:30 p.m. 4. CARNEGIE LIBRARY OF PITTSBURGH
4400 Forbes Avenue, Oakland

Steer a safe path through "Scylla and Charybdis" with John Eglinton the "Quaker librarian" and
talk of Hamnet Shakespeare and Hamlet's ghost at
the National Library where Dedalus and Bloom pass each other, unnoticed...

4:00 p.m 5. WASHINGTON'S LANDING - EASTERN TIP OF
ISLAND Exit off 31st Bridge, park on left, walk
beyond tennis courts to rocks at island's end

Lured by the sweet song of different “Sirens”,
Bloom and Boylan go their separate ways along the Liffey while from the saloon of the Ormond
Hotel emerges a fugue of music and song and “a
call…long in dying…”

5:30 p.m 6. MULLANEY'S HARP AND FIDDLE
2329 Penn Avenue, Strip District

In "Cyclops" the Citizen and his mangy mongrel
Garryowen wait "for what the sky would drop in the way of drink" and politics, patriotism, religion and Bloom are the targets of his vitriolic verbosity...

7:30 p.m. 7. CITY BOOKS, 1111 East Carson Street,
South Side.

“Eumaeus” Through the gloom and dark of after-
midnight Dublin, Bloom steers a tired but singing
Stephen Dedalus to the cabman’s shelter at Butt
Bridge and on towards Gardiner Street and a safe
haven at No. 7 Eccles Street as their day’s odyssey of winds down, slowly down…

And from her jingling brass bed, Molly Bloom, her
Leopold/Ulysses returned from his wanderings,
draws us into “Penelope”, her ‘amplitudinous curvilinear' stream-of-consciousness soliloquy
with its final, great, life-affirming, ‘Yes.’