Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed…

–Come up, Kinch.  Come up, you fearful Jesuit…

And thus is introduced young, intense Stephen Dedalus whose day unfolds in counterpoint to and occasionally overlapping that of ad salesman Leopold Bloom in 1904 Dublin — June 16th, to be precise — at the outset of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.  Bloom himself is introduced in the second chapter, making his wife’s breakfast, feeding the cat some milk, stepping out to buy a pork kidney at the butcher’s to cook up back at home.

Bloomsday celebrations have taken place all over the globe for decades– we’ve staged a few ourselves in our modest way, and we’re game to do it again.

We figured the way we would do it this time would be to read bitsof the book, ten minutes a time, at hour intervals throughout the day, starting at 11 a.m.

At the outset, we’ll have a bit of catching up to do, as they seem early risers in summertime Dublin, but catch up we will. Every hour through the day, we’ll open the tome to someplace roughly approximating the time of day and do another ten minutes’ worth.  When we’re closing in on 9 o’clock San Francisco time, we’ll skip & hop through the rest of the book, sample from Molly Bloom’s ample soliloquy, then call it quits for the day.

As it happens, we need to raise a little coin for the shop to catch up with bills that have piled up, so consider this a celebration of James Joyce and also a fundraiser for the business named in half for Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s worthy acolyte and successor. Bring a little dough, if you can spare it, and throw it in the kitty.  We’ll appreciate it greatly if you do.  Mrkgnao…

If you’ve got a favorite bit of Ulysses, feel free to figure out the appropriate hour to read it, and we’ll pleased to hear from you.  Or if you just want to read without preconceptions, we’ll point to a page and set you going.  Or come just to take it in.

Welcome to Bird & Beckett!