What are your plans for Bloomsday? Over on Twitter, they're urging us to eat "ghastly things for breakfast". I'm not sure I can be tempted to start the day with "the inner organs of beasts and fowls ... thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes", but I could easily be persuaded into a pint later on. "I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click." It might only be ten o'clock but I'm thirsty already - yes, I said yes, I will, yes.
Of course, the best place to be would be Dublin, where people are dressing up and following in Leopold Bloom's footsteps around the city, taking part in readings, tours and the eating of offal. If you're lucky enough to be there, the James Joyce centre has a full listing of events. In Philadelphia, the Rosenbach museum and library – home of the Ulysses manuscript – is holding a special exhibition and a series of readings, but there's loads going on all around the world, from Sydney to Austria to Lisbon. I do feel for Mark Folse, trying to organise a get-together in New Orleans on Facebook and not getting very far with it... "I'm not catching an undercurrent of excitement here. If I end up on a soapbox on Frenchman Street reading to the crowd, be sure to stop by and bring me a beer," he writes. I'd be there, Mark, if I wasn't in London.
The twittering classes – "the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter"? – are trying to get the #bloomsday tag into Twitter's trending topics; smatterings of quotes – "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit"; "Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed" – are intermingling with plans for the day and pledges to actually read the book. At Throwaway Horse, they've been twittering the events of the entire novel over the last week in preparation for the launch of their Ulysses comic – it looks great.
Whatever you're doing, have a wonderful Bloomsday, and please share your plans and your favourite quotes with us here.
