Bloomsday in Pittsburgh

BLOOMSDAY IN PITTSBURGH 2009
Twenty-first annual celebration
Tuesday, June 16

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

1. 9:00 a.m. BLOOMFIELD, Crazy Mocha Cafe, 4525 Liberty Avenue
   We begin with Telemachos as “Stately plump Buck Mulligan” ascends the stairs of the Martello Tower in Sandycove, looks out over the “snotgreen sea”, and the events of Bloomsday are set in motion…
2. 10:30 a.m. 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...
3. 12:00 p.m. 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..."
4. 2:30 p.m. 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...
5. 4:00 p.m 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…”
6. 5:30 p.m 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. 8:00 p.m. CITY BOOKS, 1111 East Carson Street, South Side.
   Nausicaa takes us to Sandymount Strand and Gerty McDowell’s dreams of love with the dark stranger and the fireworks ignite both Bloom and Gerty and the Summer sky…

   And finally, 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 to bring Bloomsday to a close with its final, great, life-affirming, “Yes.”