I made my radio debut this afternoon. The Wild Geese Players of Seattle read a couple of short excerpts on KBCS from James Joyce's Ulysses, as a foretaste of the readings we're doing next weekend.

This year's reading is of the Nausicaa chapter, wherein Leopold Bloom reposes on a beach to recover from clashing with the Citizen in the previous chapter, and flirts at a distance with young Gerty MacDowell. This is the infamous mas­tur­ba­tion chapter that led to Ulysses being banned for obscenity.

There are two readings.

• Sat, June 16th, 4:30pm,

  Elliott Bay Bookstore, 101 S. Main St, Seattle, WA 98101.

• Sun, June 17th, 6pm,

  Pike Pub and Brewery, 1415 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101.

I will be …continue.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle strike again. This time, we're coun­ter­pos­ing William Butler Yeats against Walt Whitman, the Dueling Poets. We're leading off the evening with some real dueling between fencers from the Academia della Spada.

More details here.

For the last three years, I've been involved with The Wild Geese Players of Seattle, an amateur group that does readings of Irish literature, par­tic­u­lar­ly the works of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Our big event every year is Bloomsday, June 16th, com­mem­o­rat­ing Joyce's Ulysses, which takes place on June 16th, 1904. It's a tale of a Jewish everyman, Leopold Bloom, wandering through Dublin one day, and of the young writer (and Joyce's alter ego), Stephen Dedalus. We're working our way through the book, reading a chapter or two each year. In this, our eighth year, we'll be reading Chapter 11, Sirens, at the Brechemin Auditorium in the School of Music at the University of Washington, …continue.

(Originally posted to Home at EraBlog on Mon, 07 Jul 2003 15:34:22 GMT)

I gave the following speech to Toast­mas­ters on June 25th, 2003, as Speech #4, "Show What You Mean". Clearly, I've reused some material from my earlier post about Bloomsday. I'm also finding that I take longer to deliver a speech to an audience than I do when rehearsing, so I cut some of the material on the day to fit the seven-minute limit.

I've uploaded some photos of the reading to one of my other websites.

BLOOMSDAY

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather..."

So begins James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the most famous, and …continue.

(Originally posted to Home at EraBlog on Wed, 11 Jun 2003 03:54:21 GMT)

I have recently become involved with the upcoming local cel­e­bra­tion of Bloomsday, on June 16th. James Joyce's Ulysses takes place on June 16th, 1904. In Seattle and elsewhere, fans of the book re-enact portions of the book. In Dublin, Joyce has spawned a whole industry: ironic, when you consider how little recog­ni­tion he received there during his lifetime. No doubt, the Joycean industry will go into overdrive next year for the centenary.

The Seattle group has been working its way through the book since 1998. This year, we are reading Chapters 8 and 9, "Lestry­go­ni­ans" and "Scylla and Charybdis". …continue.