Driftless Books: Celebrate Bloomsday June 16 at The Midwest Center for Slow Media

Driftless Books

518 Walnut Street

Viroqua, WI 54665

608-638-BOOK

Driftless Books will be hosting an all-day Bloomsday celebration Wednesday, June 16, featuring a 12-hour reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses at its new location in Viroqua. Attendees are invited to join in this marathon. Refreshments will include Irish favorites such as Guinness Stout, potato soup and perhaps mutton kidneys.

Bloomsday commemorates the life of Irish writer James Joyce, and relives the events of Ulysses, a masterwork of modernist literature. In Ulysses, Joyce uses the structure of the Homeric Odyssey as a contrast to the lives of Dublin’s working class. The entire 732-page work takes place during Dublin’s “dailiest day possible,” Thursday, 16 June 1904. The name “Bloomsday” is derived from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses.

The bleak lives of the Dublin working class in Ulysses form a stark contrast to the heroic Odyssey and Joyce’s frank realism was too avant-garde for the cultural police of the day. From the first installment in 1918, censorship issues dogged Ulysses, eventually forcing a halt to its serialization in 1920. Copies of The Little Review were confiscated and editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were convicted in New York of publishing obscenity.

Ulysses was subsequently banned in the U.S. until 1933, but copies often trickled in clandestinely, as its suppression and subsequent publicity assured a wider demand for what was originally a relatively obscure avant-garde text.

Driftless Books moved to its current location this spring after surviving tornadoes and floods in its original location in Viola, Wisconsin. The book dealer’s stock of nearly a quarter of a million new, used and rare titles is now open to the public in the Forgotten Works Warehouse, 518 Walnut Street, formerly the tobacco district of Viroqua, Wisconsin. Along with Driftless Books, The Forgotten Works Warehouse tenants include Tim Foss (multi-instrumentalist and proprietor of Foss Piano Service), Mike Koppa (picture framer, collage artist, and proprietor of The Heavy Duty Press) and John and Virginia Goeke (local farmers and owners of Artos Bakery). Together they create The Midwest Center for Slow Media, where intentional, carefully crafted and homespun media are celebrated, encouraged and revered.

The bookstore is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and Noon to 4 p.m. on Sundays. Driftless Books may be found on Facebook and is also online at driftlessbooks.com .