Happy Bloomsday 2021!
0. Prolegomenon, or Why me?
Today is Bloomsday, the centrepiece of a five-day festival in Dublin and online celebrating the day in 1904 on which the events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses unfold, which is the day Joyce first formally went out with Nora Barnacle. Their story is brilliantly told in the best book I’ve read this year, Nuala O’Connor‘s Nora: A Love Story of Nora Barnacle and James Joyce (New Island Books, 2021).
Several years ago, I wrote a post about Bloomsday for a blawg carnival called Blawg Review; sadly, the review is now defunct; but I thought I might revisit and update the post. Just like Oh Brother, Where art Thou?, the novel loosely parallels Homer’s Odyssey, and the original blogpost very very loosely paralleled Joyce’s Ulysses (or at least his chapter headings), to introduce some interesting contemporary legal stories. I will keep the sub-Joycean introductions, to introduce some current legal stories, and I have fixed broken links in the text that I have retained.…