Bloomsday — Seattle 2019
The Wild Geese Players of Seattle will present a staged reading of Chapter 10, “Wandering Rocks”, adapted from the 1922 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
We have read from Ulysses every Bloomsday since 1998. After concluding Ulysses in 2013, we started afresh five years ago. This year, we’re reading Chapter 10, “Wandering Rocks”.
We’ll be reading excerpts from the chapter at Folio on Friday, June 14th, and the entire chapter at the Seattle Central Library on Sunday, June 16th.
Chapter 10: Wandering Rocks
The Wandering Rocks chapter is the only chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses with a brief, passing structural relationship to Homer. In Homer, Circe warns Ulysses to avoid the Wandering Rocks because they were dangerous for sea navigation. It is really taken from Jason and the Argonauts’ story of their perilous sea journey back to Corinth with the Golden Fleece.
Joyce was reputed to have used a compass, ruler, set square, map, and a timepiece when he was constructing this episode. Here we are first fully introduced to the Dublin of the early twentieth century, a city that the book would eventually immortalize. Neither Stephen Dedalus nor Leopold Bloom dominates the chapter. It is Joyce’s “woman-city”—Dublin—that becomes the essence of the story.
This is the central chapter of Joyce’s book, offered in 19 scenes, with the first functioning as a classic prologue and the nineteenth as an epilogue. The Wandering Rocks serves as a bridge between the two halves of the book and a miniature of the whole.
In true Joyce style, he used to play a board game called Labyrinth with his daughter Lucia. What we are witnessing is that labyrinth transported to the streets of Dublin. The characters of the city pass the mid-afternoon hour of 3–4pm. Their comings and goings become framed between the primary journeys of Church and State. The ambling Father Conmee represents the Roman Catholic Church, and the cavalcade of the Governor-General of Ireland, the Earl of Dudley, represents the British State. The chapter is quite cinematic in its visual presentation. Its conclusion is a city crowded with people walking, talking, running and singing!
Bloomsday Event at Folio, June 14th, 2019
6:00–8:00pm on Friday, June 14th, 2019,
Folio Seattle,
93 Pike St #307,
Seattle, WA 98101
Directions to Folio in the Pike Place Market.
Folio Seattle presents a talk about Joyce and Ulysses by Roger Berger and the Wild Geese reading excerpts from the “Wandering Rocks” chapter.
Please RSVP to the Facebook event.
Bloomsday Reading at the Seattle Central Library, June 16th, 2019
2:00–4:00pm on Sunday, June 16th, 2019,
The Seattle Central Library,
Microsoft Auditorium, Level 1,
1000 Fourth Ave,
Seattle, WA 98104
Map.
We will read the entire “Wandering Rocks” chapter at the Library.
Donations towards costs of posters and props are welcome. Please arrive before 2:00pm to find a seat. The reading will take about two hours.
Please RSVP to the Facebook event.
Poster
We encourage you to download Irene Calvo’s Wandering Rocks poster (PDF, 600KB) and post it around town.
Press Release
This is our twenty-second year of Bloomsday readings. (Press Release).
Commentary on Wandering Rocks
- Text of Chapter 10
- The Joyce Project: Wandering Rocks
- Ulysses Guide
- Kennesaw Guide
- Cliff Notes
- Sparknotes
- The Joyce Portal
- The Sheila Variations
- Joyce Images
- Paul Debraski
- Shmoop Summary and Analysis
- Groden Notes
- Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook: Suzette Henke — “Hades”: The Hibernian Underworld, “Aelous” and “Wandering Rocks”: The World as Machine
- The Modern Word
- James Joyce’s Ulysses: Where It’s Always June 16, 1904 and Wandering Rocks II
- RTÉ 25-hour broadcast of Ulysses (history)
Other Wild Geese Events
See our archives for details of our previous readings.