BLOOMSDAY (a term Joyce himself did not employ) was invented in 1954, the 50th anniversary, when the novelist Flann O’Brien and the writer and magazine editor John Ryan organized what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the ”Ulysses” route. Accounts of the venture are given by Ryan in his book of reminiscences, ”Remembering How We Stood” — renamed by Dublin wits ”Remembering How We Staggered” — and in ”No Laughing Matter,” a biography of O’Brien by the poet Anthony Cronin, who was one of the pilgrims. Cronin’s downbeat version of the ‘’structured and, in a way, humorless” event is probably the more accurate one. The tour began at the architect Michael Scott’s house beside the Martello tower in Sandycove, where the effects of the drink that Scott had laid on caused a scuffle between O’Brien and the poet Patrick Kavanagh. As might be expected, matters went downhill from there, and the pilgrimage was abandoned halfway through, when the weary Lestrygonians succumbed to inebriation and rancor at the Bailey pub in the city center.
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