Bloomsday in Melbourne went to new extremes in 2017, in short, the nose. Here is my review of the main show for the journal Tintean. Many photographs of James Joyce show the author with his nose in the air. This mannerism is interpreted as otherworldliness, or arrogance, or as a symptom of his manifold eye afflictions, though who is to say Joyce is not simply avoiding the down draught of the photographer’s noxious fart? Ulysses is famously an exposition and celebration of the five senses. Rarely in literature had the sensory, sensual nature of all human experience been given such constant immediacy in a novel. The sight, sound, feel, and taste of Dublin is worded up on every page. But of all the precious five, smell is the most challenging to turn effectively into words. How to transform a list of smells into theatre requires in-depth knowledge of the Ur-Text, or perhaps that’s the Ewww-Text. This was the challenge set for the Bloomsday in Melbourne committee ...