A&S Students Form "Bloomsday" group

Six students from the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences recently formed a Bloomsday group that performed some scenes from James Joyce's novel Ulysses. "Bloomsday" falls on June 16, the day on which the events in Joyce's novel took place back in 1904. Gatherings around the world now celebrate this day with Irish music, readings from Ulysses, and other Joycean activities such as biscuit-tin tosses.

Most of the students - Jason Autry, Davin Hall, Seth Hudson, Jennifer Kutzko, Miranda Marshall, and Bridget Smith - are English majors; all are upper-class students or recent graduates within A&S. Under the direction of English professor Wayne Hall, they took some of the internal-monologue scenes from Ulysses and broke the single "voice" in those scenes into multiple voices to illustrate the complexity of the scenes but also to give them greater intelligibility through a more conversational format.

Bloomsday celebrations in Cincinnati have been organized for a number of years now by Philip Thompson, a retired businessman who has taken a variety of literature courses at UC and become a well-informed fan of Joyce's writing. As with this year, Mr. Thompson typically locates his Bloomsday events at Jack Quinn's Irish Pub in Covington. Other performers on the venue this year included UC professors Marlene Miner and Tami Phenix.

Since the event was videotaped by a graduate student in English, Claudia Skutar, if you were unable to attend, you will doubtless be able to catch the movie presentation at major theaters in the near future.