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. 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 ...

‘Dubble In It’ was a Roaratorio  based on words taken from all over  Finnegans Wake . Roaratorio is a word borrowed from the Wake by John Cage as the title of his own radio sound art piece, based on the book. Composer Rod Baker and I looked at the theme of the 2008 Bloomsday (‘Joyce and Modernity’) and chose to celebrate the Human Genome and its Progenitors, as we called them. This was the second such oratorio written collaboratively by Baker and me, to be staged by Bloomsday in Melbourne. Some patrons with long memories will be taken back (or even taken aback) to the church in North Melbourne and to Ches Baragwaneth playing the Auditor-General, i.e. Here Comes Everybody Childers. An excellent review of this Oratorio was written by Roz Hames here: https://6fbb0498-09c3-4ba2-8f2a-f86e105c41d2.filesusr.com/ugd/b941fe_1604e6e1038041e58c08e98367152466.pdf  Roz’s review helps give the gist of what’s happening and what happened. This weekend I came across the o...