Ireland launched one of its biggest ever literary shindigs yesterday, with thousands expected on Dublin?s streets for the centenary of Bloomsday ? the day immortalised by James Joyce in his epic novel Ulysses. Scores of Joyceans downed early morning pints of Guinness outside a museum dedicated to the writer and ate a fry-up breakfast in honour of the pork kidney, fried in ?sizzling butter sauce? and sprinkled with pepper, with which the novel?s hero Leopold Bloom begins his momentous day.

Hundreds more headed for a stone watchtower on the coast, where the book opens. There, with Dublin Bay spread before them, they will listen to actors read from Ulysses, regarded by many as the greatest novel in the English language and a landmark in Western art.

Joyce set his entire novel on June 16, 1904 ? the day of his first date with the woman who later became his wife.

While the date has been celebrated by Joyce aficionados for decades, this year?s celebrations are easily the biggest yet.

Bloomsday 100 was launched on February 2 ? Joyce?s birthday ? and brings together around 80 different events, from art exhibitions to concerts to stand-up comedy.

Some 800 academics are in town for a week-long symposium on every imaginable aspect of the writer?s work.

Later on Wednesday, scores of cyclists in Edwardian costume will ride ramshackle bikes along the route walked by Joyce?s fictional characters, and tourists, some in old-fashioned straw hats and striped blazers, will walk Joyce?s city.

The week will end with a black-tie Bloomsday Ball, costing 250 euros ($300) a head, at a swish Dublin hotel.

The party is not confined to Ireland. Organisers say some 40 countries, from South Korea to Norway, are marking Bloomsday.

The town of Szombathely in Hungary is erecting a statue of Joyce in honour of Bloom?s fictional parentage. In the book, Bloom?s father comes from the town.

Tributes are also expected in Italy, Switzerland and France, the three countries where Joyce spent most of his adult life from 1904, when he turned his back on Ireland, until his death in 1941 at the age of 58.

The irony of all this literary activity is that Ulysses is a book in which nothing much happens.

Bloom treads the streets trying to forget his adulterous wife Molly and her lover Blazes Boylan, while Stephen Dedalus, the novel?s other main character, thinks a lot and gets drunk.

But it is Joyce?s audaciously experimental prose and his vast, sympathetic portrayal of humankind going about its daily business which make Ulysses one of the world?s great books.

Published in Paris in 1922, the novel was denounced by the Irish as un-Christian filth, banned in Britain and burned by U.S. censors. Joyce?s British contemporary Virginia Woolf complained that it ?reeled with indecency?.

But Joyce, whose reputation grew as the 20th century progressed, always defended his warts-and-all depiction of Edwardian Dublin.

?If Ulysses isn?t fit to read,? he wrote to his sister in response to the criticism, ?life isn?t fit to live.?

Gideon LONG