On Bloomsday 2023 – Friday 16 June – I’m giving a reading as part of an interdisciplinary event at Birkbeck University of London entitled ‘From “Monkeys on Typewriters” to “Hallucinating Large Language Models”: What Might “AI” Systems Learn from Engagement with Artists and Writers?’

The event also includes the launch by the Computer Arts Society of a retrospective catalogue of the work of pioneering computer artist Paul Brown.

I’m doing a half-hour set of three short pieces. I’ll kick off with ‘Plain Speaking’, my tribute to Bloomsday co-founder Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien, which is now collected in Nicholas Royle’s Best British Short Stories 2022 (Salt Publishing) of course.

And I’ll end with a reading not from Ulysses, but from Finnegans Wake.

It’s a great thrill to be able to take Bloomsday into the heart of the historic Bloomsbury Group (the Keynes Library is a first floor drawing room looking over Gordon Square in the former home of Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell & John Maynard Keynes) especially given Virginia Woolf’s antipathy to James Joyce.

The event is free, but booking essential. More info and bookings here…

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