READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   Like Martin Johnston, the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is concerned as much with the Bloomsday going on in his main character’s head, as in any objective account of the day’s actual activities. We reach page 214 of ‘Dublinesque’ before finding a description of a public reading of Ulysses happening in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar, Dublin. The novel is being read in sequence by a succession of politicians, celebrities, authors, academics, punters, and chancers, in much the same fashion as readings were made at Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne, going back at least to the 1980s. The main character, Samuel Riba, is a jaded publisher of ex...

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June. Email correspondence with Frances Devlin Glass (FDG) informed some of the discussion here. Some of her remarks are included in the paper.   The story of ‘South of Broad’ by Pat Conroy opens on 16 th of June 1969 in Charleston, South Carolina. It is the day the narrator, Leopold Bloom King, learns that his brother, Stephen Dedalus King, has inexplicably committed suicide. The reasons for this act are one of the dramatic threads that keep a tight hold on the reader for the next 20 years and 600 plus pages. Here is Leo, Leopold Bloom King’s apologia for his childhood:   Of all the elements of my childhood that rang a false note, I was the only kid in the ...