Happy Bloomsday!

Today is Bloomsday! Remember last year when I blogged about Bloomsday? No? Well read that entry here.
I'm happy to report that my Ulysses book group, whittled down to a lean, mean, group of three, finished about 70 percent of the book. We drove an hour south today to have lunch with the James Joyce Society of Sarasota.
We ate, then watched actors read a scene from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Then there was a scene that imagined Joyce having a conversation with one of his contemporaries. Then there was a trivia quiz.
It was fairly modest affair, J. said it was smaller than it had been in years past. But we still had a lot of fun and enjoyed our lit-geeky selves.
We are going to finish Ulysses then try to read Proust. I'll have to research to see if there is a date associated with Proust for us to celebrate. Somehow I doubt it.
And on a final note, The New Yorker this week published an article about the great lengths James Joyce's grandson has gone to to protect his copyright. Read it here, quick, before it disappears into their archive. The grandson seems a bit intense, but in a way that strikes me as very Irish, at least as it's portrayed in Ulysses. Read the article and decide for yourself.