What better way to celebrate "Ulysses" and the genius of James Joyce than with a party. And what better day than June 16, when the novel takes place. And who better to lend his name to the festivities than the book's protagonist, Leopold Bloom. Edward Sorel joins the jamboree and captures the spirit of Bloomsday in his own inimitable words and drawings

Two years ago, I surprised my friends, who know me as a man who likes to stay home, by impulsively leaving for Dublin to be part of the Bloomsday 100 celebrations. I surprised even myself, since I'm not Irish and never got very far into Ulysses. What intrigued me was the idea of an entire city paying homage to a writer whom few of the inhabitants have ever read. Judging by the endless events that were planned to celebrate James Joyce, it looked as if Catholic Ireland were going to elevate the unrepentant blasphemer into some kind of secular saint. The ironies had been too rich to pass up, and I'm glad I didn't. The experience has stayed with me. So vividly, in fact, that I recently found myself drawing—both from memory and from my photographs—some of the things I saw there.

Bloomsday 100 was created with help from various organizations that are part of what is referred to as "the Joyce industry"—including the Bloomsday Symposium. In case you know as little about the symposium as I did, here's the scoop. In 1967, a small group of academics devoted to James Joyce decided to meet in Dublin to share their thoughts on various aspects of Ulysses. Because the events in the novel take place on June 16, 1904, they chose that day for their conference. An announcement was placed in the James Joyce Quarterly, and much to their surprise, eighty scholars and translators showed up. Thus was born the Bloomsday Symposium—named, of course, for the book's protagonist, Leopold Bloom.

The event got a cool reception in the Dublin newspapers. One columnist claimed that "lecture upon lecture about commas and semicolons were delivered by men who otherwise seemed reasonably sensible." A writer in the Irish Times declared, "I've never met a bigger collection of phonies in my life." But the academics had a good time, and with help from Morris Beja, a young Joyce scholar, the James Joyce Foundation was formed. Before long, June 16 became the occasion for daylong readings of the novel in cities throughout the world, and scholars could be found in Dublin or Zurich or Trieste or anyplace where the Great Man once set foot, analyzing, parsing, and dissecting the book that had launched a thousand Ph.D.'s.

This obsession with Ulysses would not have surprised its author. Indeed, he planned it that way. An unabashed self-promoter, Joyce recognized the importance of scholarship if his book was to be placed in the canon of world literature for generations to come. "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles," he wrote to a translator of Ulysses, "that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." How well Joyce succeeded was proved by the nine hundred scholars from forty countries who showed up in Dublin to celebrate Bloomsday 100, and the thousands more who enjoyed the street theater, museum exhibits, film screenings, concerts, son et lumière shows, and, of course, the city's famous pub life.