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Chris Kennedy

Arts

The Rosenbach’s Joyce Celebration Goes Virtual Again With a New Film

Every year all around the world on June 16, fans of James Joyce’s landmark novel Ulysses celebrate Bloomsday, the day on which the author’s 1904 novel takes place. On that particular day, The Rosenbach, an iconic Philadelphia museum and library on Delancey Place, hosts live readings of the novel, among many other events. It’s a tradition spanning 25 years. However, the pandemic threw a wrench in The Rosenbach’s live activities.

“The Bloomsday Festival planning has to start in January to get everything in place for June,” says Ed Pettit, a program manager at The Rosenbach. “And there was no way to tell in January how open everything would be. So we figured we would just go all-virtual again this year.”

This is the second year in a row that the Bloomsday Festival goes online—a change of pace for an outdoor street festival that typically attracts around 2,000 people. In addition to celebrating on the web, The Rosenbach offers yet another twist for its 2021 celebration.

June 16, 2021 by Chris Kennedy

News

Remembering the 40th Anniversary of the Hunger Strike

On October 3, the Philadelphia Irish Community will commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, the culmination of a protest carried out by Irish republican prisoners after the British government withdrew their status as prisoners of war. By that point, The Troubles in Northern Ireland had taken its toll on the population and as hunger strikers began to die in 1981, it provoked even more outrage.

October 3 marks the end of the hunger strike. It had gone on for five months. In all, 10 men died in the process, beginning with Bobby Sands on May 5. Within two years after the end of the hunger strike, all five of the prisoners’ demands were implemented.

The Good Friday peace agreement in 1998 brought relative calm to Northern Ireland, but there are still plenty of people who want to keep the memory of the hunger strikers alive in America today.

One of those is Bob Dougherty, whose interest in the Irish republican struggle began when he was a young man.

June 11, 2021 by Chris Kennedy

Arts

Pour a Pint and Drink in Joyce’s “Ulysses”

Next year James Joyce’s iconic novel Ulysses will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of its publication. It is a book that is notoriously difficult to read for some. Currently, artist and educator Robert Berry is gearing up to teach an 18-week course on the novel called “A Pint of Ulysses.” The name is derived from the fact that each class comes out to be about the same price as a pint of Guinness.

“We intentionally made it just a very low cost, like 180 bucks for 18 weeks, and made it sort of the price of a couple of pints,” Berry says.

Anyone interested in taking the course can expect to hear from a wide range of guests.

“We want to extend that talk that we have in conversations in the classroom, out to a broader audience of people who are wondering about this book, but haven’t taken the class,” Berry says. “And to do that, I know a network of Joyce scholars and people who put on Bloomsday events, and just what I like to refer to as Joyce-heads, all over the world. And so I’ll have them in, in conversation with me in the class every Thursday.”

May 21, 2021 by Chris Kennedy

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