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Bloomsday Halifax: Nausicaa at Salter

Posted on: 2024-08-09

I'm describing my big Bloomsday Halifax project by writing up what I did for each episode. In this entry, I'm covering Episode 13 of "Ulysses": "Nausicaa".

The first half of the episode is written in the style of a young lady's magazine of the time, with flowery language and hints of romance and passion; a narrative appropriate to the mind of teenaged Gerty MacDowell, enjoying an evening at the beach with her friends. She becomes enraptured with a dark mysterious man nearby and, by leaning back pretending to watch fireworks, flashes her stockings and underwear at him. The second half of the episode, using a more normal narrative voice (at least for Ulysses) reveals that the dark mysterious man is actually Bloom, who watches her go off with her friends and then feels ashamed about enjoying the peepshow.

The episode takes place at Sandymount strand again, near where Stephen wandered in the morning during "Proteus". However, this part of the beach is less for lonely wandering and more for public entertainment and activities. Instead of having another event down at Black Rock Beach near Point Pleasant, I decided that a more appropriately busy and festive location would be the shoreline near the Sands at Salter.

This was one of the most challenging episodes for me to figure out what to do with. Even though well over half the people at Salter on any summer day in 2024 would be showing more skin than Gerty was, even when flashing, the main action still involves a teenage girl exposing herself sexually to an older married man—which is problematic, to say the least. I wanted to reflect the incident somehow but without getting too explicit or disturbing. I'd considered some kind of vintage "garters and bloomers" fashion show, but I wouldn't even know where to start in organizing that sort of thing - and besides it's a very public place popular with families and children, and therefore could have been problematic in so many other ways.

In the end I decided to emphasize the abstract concept of "sneaking a peek" while removing the explicitly sexual nature of the interaction. I went to various dollar stores and party shops and found some cheap blue ribbons and bows, to represent the blue ribbons Gerty uses in her underwear ("She was wearing the blue for luck, hoping against hope"). I stuck the bows in various hidden and awkward places by the water and added instructions in the app to look for them. Participants would have to crane their necks and follow tight angles to get a bit of a glimpse of blue ribbon, sort of like Bloom had to do, but without the lechery.

a blue ribbon bow on the back of a chair on a pier in Halifax

I've enhanced the brightness and saturation around the bows in these pictures so you can have a better chance to see them. That first one was easy. It wasn't quite so easy if you were trying to find it from the grass nearby:

a distant view of a chair with a blue ribbon on it by the water

See if you can find the ribbons in the next few:

an orange foldable bench by the water in Halifax with a bow hidden under it

a ribbon stuck beneath a pier as seen from the low-tide beach below in Halifax

Rushing to the Dollarama on Young Street as soon as they opened and then driving down to Salter to stick bows under benches and piers like some kind of secret agent was the last bit of prep I did on the actual morning of June 16.

Last but not least, the background image was adapted from a picture I had done several years ago for an earlier and less intense version of Bloomsday Halifax. It's based again on one of J. J. Clarke's Dubliner photos and features a stylish young woman twisting to look into the distance—once again implying the main action of the chapter while mostly avoiding the lechery. She even has prominent ribbons.

A mashup of a 1904 woman looking away sitting on a modern colourful bench by the shore in Halifax

This picture is one of the iconic representations of Bloomsday Halifax for me, mashing up two very identifiable aspects of each of the worlds involved. Don't look too closely at her hands though—in the original her right hand is blocked so I had to reconstruct it from scratch, and I was in a hurry–it looks like AI, and maybe it would have looked better if I had used some for that. Oh well, this is another advantage of these images just appearing briefly before getting covered by the content.

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