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Rick Nichols: At the Rosenbach, food as the stuff of Bloomsday

If you'd dropped by the double-wide townhouse that constitutes the Rosenbach Museum and Library last Wednesday, the crown jewels were on brazen display.

If you'd dropped by the double-wide townhouse that constitutes the Rosenbach Museum and Library last Wednesday, the crown jewels were on brazen display.

The usual maroon sun drapes that shroud the venerable texts were flung aside; the stone, as it were, rolled away.

It was Bloomsday, marking the day (June 16 in 1904, which was a Thursday, by the way) that James Joyce immortalizes in Ulysses, in large part employing images of the foods of workaday Dublin - the scent of pungent meat juices in a rowdy hall, a settling glass of Burgundy, gulls diving for crumbs of Banbury cake.

Indeed, in the understated exhibit room behind the reception desk, you could make out the original words themselves, scratched in Joyce's own hand, centered down the middle of tablet-sized pages.

There's the day's namesake, Leopold Bloom, circling for lunch - spotting barges laden with Guinness bound for England just moments after an underfed Irish girl passes by, her thin dress in tatters.

Here, everyday food and drink - our daily bread - is transubstantiated. It becomes corporeal flesh - fat policemen, indulgent priests, snarling men, hungry girls.

This is the Rosenbach's Big Day. And the theme this year was food's centrality in Joyce's masterwork, and, as coordinator Laura Heffernan put it, the "prismatic" way the author uses it to penetrate the politics and mores of the day.

All hands, including volunteers, were on deck, except for the ones taking a midday break in the basement canteen, feeding on open bags of potato chips, and donated Italian hoagies, sliced in pinwheels and neatly toothpicked.

Outliers were posted at the ends of the block, wielding photocopied maps. Normally on this day, passages from the book are read all afternoon from the marble steps in front of the townhouse at 20th and Delancey Place to a crowd that ebbs and flows on the blocked-off street.

But rain was threatening (though it never made good on the threat), so the whole affair had been moved to the old Trinity Memorial Episcopal Church, 22d and Spruce.

It was good strategy, if you were among the first flight of the 80-some readers, to fortify yourself with lunch, sober bottled water being the only offering at the formidable church.

So a visit to the serve-yourself steam table upstairs at Di Bruno's at 18th and Chestnut fit the bill, its dark-haired Mexican workers presiding over trays of thin-sliced turkey saltimbocca, and tilapia aswim in gooey sweet-potato crema.

By the door, shelves of produce were available, including ripe bananas - especially good for potassium.

They are so prosaic here; in Moscow, on a visit there not many years ago, they were accorded the status of a street trophy.

And in Iraq they'd become so dear that there were reports of Iraqi conscripts stripping Kuwaiti markets bare of them before retreating at the dawn of the first Gulf war.

It has been argued - and sung, in the case of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street - that the history of the world is "who gets eaten and who gets to eat."

On Bloomsday, the soaring words of James Joyce asked the assembled guests to contemplate that proposition anew - at least momentarily, before adjourning for a pint.

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