I'm describing my big Bloomsday Halifax project by writing up what I did for each episode. In this entry, I'm covering Episode 10 of "Ulysses": "The Wandering Rocks".
The Wandering Rocks episode keeps very much like its namesake: it is full of people wandering. The narrative follows the paths of 20 or so people around Dublin, switching between the different points of view abruptly, and sometimes interleaving them so tightly it is hard to tell who is actually doing what. Near the end of the episode, the Viceroy and his entourage ride through the streets in a carriage, and are reacted to distinctly by each of the characters in the different narrative strands.
This episode is the first one that really got me interested in doing some kind of software adaptation, because the sentence-by-sentence descriptions of activities read (and even look) a lot like an old text-based adventure game. Specifically, it reminded me a lot of Infocom's "Deadline", a murder mystery game where multiple characters move about the house on their own schedule, interacting with the player across both space and time. It also reminded me a bit of the text-based multiplayer MUDs many of my college friends got into in the early 1990s (I mostly avoided those, as I was too busy reading long books like "Ulysses" instead).
One of my original thoughts many years ago was to turn this episode into its own text-based interactive adventure. That never worked out, and it might have been too obscure an idea even for Joyce nerds. My more up to date idea was to have a special interface in the app, or perhaps just on a screen in a special location somewhere downtown, which would write out what the individual participants were doing line by line, at least in terms of arriving at locations and collecting items. For privacy's sake the actual times wouldn't be included, and each participant would be given (or would choose) the persona of one of the dozens of secondary characters in the book. I even considered at some point having a popup appear saying "The Viceroy is riding by - what do you do?" with a prompt to allow participants to respond, and the (curated) responses would go into this activity feed as well.
These all turned out to be too complicated to implement, and there were obviously some tricky privacy and security considerations. Instead, this ended up being one of the episodes without any extra in-app activities or collectible objects. Maybe I'll finally fulfill my original software goals in a future Bloomsday. That said, there was enough to consider in this episode just from the city itself.
I located this episode on Barrington Street and environs in Halifax. This part of town has numerous buildings in a grand 19th century British Empire style that would be at home in either Halifax or Dublin. For example, the neoclassical provincial legislature echoes Dublin's General Post Office:
Not only do these streets look a bit like Dublin, but the names are often the same: Grafton, Sackville, Brunswick, and more. If one squinted one could honestly feel like they were in both places simultaneously–which is the feeling I hoped the whole app would evoke.
For the background picture, I put some pedestrians from J. J. Clarke's collection into a zoomed view of the Barrington and Sackville intersection (taken, appropriately, from the side patio of Durty Nellys).
