I'm describing my big Bloomsday Halifax project by writing up what I did for each episode. In this entry, I'm covering Episode 14 of "Ulysses": "Oxen of the Sun".
In this episode a group of young and rowdy medical students and doctors gather in the Dublin Maternity Hospital for an evening meal of fish soup and beer, while a friend of Bloom's is in her third day of labour nearby. The narrative voice starts with ritualistic latinate chanting ("Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.") and works through much of the history of the English language, spoofing various authors and writing styles. At the end, the group heads out for a pub crawl and the language devolves into shouting and semi-comprehensible slang ("Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes. Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up! Pflaap! Tally ho. You not come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!").
The obvious setting for the Maternity Hospital would be the IWK Health Centre off University street, the descendent of the Grace Maternity Hospital, where many older Nova Scotians (including me) were born. However, it's an active medical facility, and when I was scouting it out in the spring it was still requiring masking at all times indoors, and the main atrium space was undergoing renovations. While maybe the episode could be reflected by getting a tuna sandwich from the Subway or a chowder from the Tim's, it didn't feel like random visitors would be appropriate or welcome.
It would be better to have some kind of proper venue for food and drink. It's not like we didn't have several of those already. However, it was still important to have some kind of connection to the chapter. The clincher for me ended up being the opening lines: "Deshil Holles Eamus" - the Maternity Hospital is on Dublin's Holles street, which is almost the same as Halifax's Hollis street - and I'm partial to a place not too far from the other venues: The Brown Hound. The Brown Hound's downtown location is in the back basement area of a grand old building on Hollis street, with a patio overlooking the back of Keith's Brewery. Appropriate for this episode, the downtown Brown Hound has a special all-summer seafood menu, featuring chowder and many other fish-related dishes.
If I was up for organizing a scheduled event here, the Hound has a side room just for the kinds of carrying-on that happen in the episode, and then everyone could go to the bar in the main space and do rounds of Jameson or whatever felt appropriate for the end-of-episode crawl. However I'm not much of an events organizer, so I made some suggestions in the app, but also provided my final printed collectible item:
In the episode, Malachi Mulligan ("stately, plump Buck Mulligan" from the start of the novel) describes a new venture he's working on: an island fertility retreat where he would (ahem) "offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he take a penny for his pains." So far his plan has only made it to having business cards printed up. So I decided to get some pop-out business card stock from Staples and make a few dozen replicas of these cards.
It was fun to research what business cards would have looked like in 1904. Some basic research showed that there was an ebullient use of multiple types of fonts—often a different typeface for each line of the card, often mixing regular and italic text with every word. It's tricky to find appropriate styles for this era, as it's squeezed between the Victorian styles popular for things like wanted posters in Westerns, and the more streamlined and industrialized styles of Art Deco. I found a fun decorative font with exuberant capitals called Jackal and then used Bodoni italics for the rest, one line in all caps and the other in mixed-case. This would have been a rush small-batch print job at the time so it isn't too elaborate, but I think Buck Mulligan would have very much enjoyed the curly capital Ms in this font.
Like with the other venues, I didn't try explaining the project too much to the busy events coordinator, just saying I'm doing a sort of a scavenger hunt and people might come by and ask for a card and maybe order some seafood. Some of the serving staff found the project exciting though.
Finally for the background picture, I made the oxen reference more literal and mashed up an actual cow coming out of the side special events room, like the participants would do if I had organized something proper.
I kind of like the dramatic lighting, though I had to add in the shadows by hand.