Not a Thought of Damnation.(Bloomsday celebration in Dublin, Ireland)(Brief Article)

Oh, I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand.

He said, How's dear ould Ireland and how does she stand?

It's a question you asked over 200 years ago, Napper, but I'll tell you how Ireland stands in the year 2001. There was a time well into the 20th century when Irish writers looked over their shoulders for fear of the church, the censor and a tyrannical priggishness. The likes of James Joyce and Sean O'Casey escaped to the Continent and England, respectively. Others were vilified and simply driven from town and country: Brinsley MacNamara, John McGahern, Edna O'Brien. It was almost a mark of honor to have your work banned, and most Irish writers were so honored.

But all is changed in Ireland: Mother Church is going through an agonizing reappraisal, the Irish censor hardly knows what to do with his idleness and priggishness is as rare as chastity.

If you'd been in Dublin on June 16 this year, you might have observed people parading through the streets in garb more appropriate to the year 1904. Many a tourist wondered if he/she had gone into a time warp- -but there was an explanation, and the explanation is that Dublin has caught on.

June 16, as you know, is Bloomsday, the day on which Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, wandered the city and had adventures while Stephen Dedalus, young intellectual and artist in his 20s, wandered and adventured, too. James Joyce tells the story in "Ulysses," and if you have a few years to spare, you'll drift slowly into that day in Dublin, 1904. Wave goodbye to family and friends, for you may never emerge again.

So because of "Ulysses," Dublin, for a day, celebrates a book that many promise to read as soon as the kids are grown. The Joyce industry in Dublin burgeoned after New York joined the celebration more than 25 years ago. At the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on upper Broadway (which has since closed) the owners invited people in to read "Ulysses," start to finish. Then Isaiah Sheffer invited various actors and literary types to read the book at Symphony Space, again on upper Broadway, which is a high IQ plateau. Of course, word of what the Yanks were up to drifted across the Atlantic. There was always that little tension between Dubliners who know their Joyce, for Jaysus' sake, didn't they live and breathe the air, didn't they walk the streets, and the Yank professors--what the hell did they know with their unreadable disquisitions that would drive you to drink?