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Bloomsday Halifax: Scylla and Charybdis at the Central Library

Posted on: 2024-07-15

I'm describing my big Bloomsday Halifax project by writing up what I did for each episode. In this entry, I'm covering Episode 9 of "Ulysses": "Scylla and Charybdis".

In this episode, Stephen Dedalus delivers a lecture on Shakespeare and Hamlet to some literary colleagues at the National Library, while Leopold Bloom looks up old newspapers in a nearby room. The text is full of literary allusions and rhetorical devices. The themes mentioned in the dialogue often cross over into the narrative voice as well, making for some clever if cheeky humour.

The National Library is a notable building in Dublin, and the obvious parallel in Halifax would be the grand Halifax Central Library on Spring Garden road. I decided that this would be the one opportunity for a live performance in this edition of Bloomsday: I would deliver Stephen's lecture, where "he proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father" accompanied by Keynote slides, like a modern presentation. I've been doing a fair number of presentations recently, so I know my way around Keynote–and it was a fun change of pace to use someone else's text, no matter how dense.

A Keynote screen showing a picture of Anne Hathaway and notes from a lecture about Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway

The idea was to give the lecture verbatim, but have the slides be a bit of a meta-commentary on the text, which seemed very appropriate for "Ulysses". I mostly just ran with the gag that the lecture talks a lot about Shakespeare's older wife Ann Hathaway while my slides all referred to screen actress Anne Hathaway. Stephen's argument that it was a loveless marriage founded on the older woman seducing the younger man fit perfectly with the current discourse about The Idea of You.

After a morning of rushing about between different locations, I decided to set up in the library for much of the afternoon. I noted the times in the app and invited participants to drop by to say hi, get technical support, share thoughts about the day, or last but not least maybe hear the lecture. I figured I would give the lecture any time there was enough willing people in the room.

In the end, I only did it once, to an audience of four. The lecture is like Stephen Dedalus himself, overly dense with references and in the end a little tiresome. Hopefully the slides were entertaining at least! When he finishes, someone asks him if he believes everything he said, and he wanly replies, "no".

I had also hoped to have a thematically appropriate display of books, especially the volume referenced in one of my favourite bits of language from the book:

— Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one, shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.
He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.
Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

Alas, I couldn't find such a Variorum edition, but I was able to bring my collected Shakespeare and my nice Folio hardcover of Ulysses if anybody wanted to look at them.

In the end, the room at the library turned out to be a nice rest stop for a number of the participants on a sunny warm afternoon. It was good to talk with them and hear about their experiences with the various locations and hand-outs. The day seemed to be going better for everyone than I had expected.

Last but not least I used another picture from J. J. Clarke's collection, of a scholar at the Dublin library, to mash up with a shot of our modern Halifax library.

a photo mashup of a 1900s scholar in the 2024 Halifax Central Library

(Just don't look at the feet).

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