Schema for Ulysses

To mark Bloomsday 2020 (or Zoomsday as it has widely become known due to Corona Lockdown circumstances this year) I’ve decided to publish Joyce’s 1921 schema for the novel (largely for my own convenient reference).

Title	Scene	Hour	Organ	Colour	Symbol	Art	Techniq-ue
1 Telemac-hus	The Tower (Sandycove)	8am	–	White & gold	Heir	Theology	Narrative (young)
2 Nestor	The School	10am	–	Brown	Horse	History	Catechism (personal)
3 Proteus	The Strand (Sandymount strand)	11am	–	Green	Tide	Philology	Monologue (male)
4 Calypso	The House (Eccles St)	8am	Kidney	Orange	Nymph	Economics	Narrative (mature)
5 Lotus Eaters	The Bath	10am	Genitals	–	Eucharist	Botany & chemistry	Narcissism
6 Hades	The Graveyard (Glasnevin)	11am	Heart	White & black	Caretaker	Religion	Incubism
7 Aeolus	The Newspaper	12 noon	Lungs	Red	Editor	Rhetoric	Enthymemic
8 Lestrygo-nians	The Lunch	1pm	Oesophagus	–	Constables	Architecture	Peristaltic
9 Scylla & Chary-bdis	The Library (National Library)	2pm	Brain	–	Stratford & London	Literature	Dialectic
10 Wanderi-ng Rocks	The Streets	3pm	Blood	–	Citizens	Mechanics	Labyrinth
11 Sirens	The Concert Room (Ormond Hotel)	4pm	Ear	(Gold & Bronze)	Barmaids	Music	Fuga per canonem
12 Cyclops	The Tavern	5pm	Muscle	–	Fenian	Politics	Gigantism
13 Nausica-a	The Rocks (Sandymount strand)	8pm	Eye, nose	Grey & blue	Virgin	Painting	Tumescence / detumescence
14 Oxen of the Sun	The Hospital (Holles St)	10pm	Womb	White	Mothers	Medicine	Embryonic development
15 Circe	The Brothel	12am	Locomotor apparatus	–	Whore	Magic	Hallucination
16 Eumaeu-s	The Shelter	1am	Nerves	–	Sailors	Navigation	Narrative (old)
17 Ithaca	The House (Eccles St)	2am	Skeleton	–	Comets	Science	Catechism (impersonal)
18 Penelop-e	The Bed (Eccles St)	–	Flesh	–	Earth	–	Monologue (female)

We had a three hour reading session on Zoom at sundown with a reading from each chapter, we being the Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar of the University of London/Senate House. I read a section from Ithaca in which our protagonists, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, have a piss out back of the latter’s house after a night on the town.

I re-started my third reading of the book today to mark the occasion. My plan is to keep reading it on an endless cycle until I drop into the black hole myself.

Then they follow: dropping into a hole one after the other.

[Hades]

A big chunk of my Ulysses library

When coffee & convenience were the mothers of invention: the roots of the Webcam

Having spent a large chunk of the last three weeks on Zoom (shares up 30%), Skype and the like, whilst drinking lashings of coffee, it is interesting to reflect on the device that has made this all possible and its humble origins in my alma mater, Cambridge.

The inspiration for the world’s first webcam came from a coffee pot next to the Trojan Room in the old Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University. In 1991 the computer scientists working there rigged up an early form of webcam (in greyscale) so those further from the room could monitor the level of coffee in the pot and stop missing out on the black stuff. At first it was an internal system running at a low frame rate but after a while (Nov 1993) someone thought to connect it to the World Wide Web and it became something of an early internet star (the web equivalent of a silent movie star). People from round the globe checked out the coffee levels in the lab. Because they were on different time zones a lamp was introduced to cover the evening and night.

XCoffee was the client software written by QSF

The coffee pot was retired after a decade in 2001 (it was actually the fourth or fifth) and bought by a German magazine (Der Spiegel) at auction for a bit over three grand.

The original programmers were Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky. Daniel Gordon and Martin Johnson connected it to the WWW. Here is QSF’s account, beautifully titled ‘When convenience was the mother of invention’.

The way this humble invention has transformed our lives in the last month is as astonishing as the rest of this surreality. I have used my (flakey) webcam in these weeks to join my mum on her 80th birthday; participate in a seminar on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; help deliver a documentary-making workshop over three days (that were supposed to be in Copenhagen); last night, hang out with some friends, associates and strangers/new friends whilst sprawled on my bed in the semi-darkness; have a meeting which opened with a live song; start writing a book with a close colleague; work with some filmmakers in Prague and L.A. and Thailand; have our regular book group meeting (online for the first time). So big up to Quentin, Paul, Daniel and Martin – and Cambridge. And coffee.

The last shot: a hand switching off the server

P.S. For a great book on coffee and creativity, whilst you’ve got all this time on your hands, try Patti Smith’s M Train.

“In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.”

World of Zoom 3

It’s exactly a week since my second reflections on online conferencing which was exactly a week from my first reflections on online conferencing. This only slightly less weird week this morning brought the best Zoom background of the Lockdown from my colleague Simon Goodman at Showem Entertainment, with whom I made Naked & Invisible and In Your Face

The other Zoom highlights included, after nagging from me, shifting the long-standing Charles Peake Ulysses Seminar from Senate House, University of London to online (for the first time). Also having our first ever online book group after 20 years IRL.

The distinctive thing about this session was that we didn’t discuss a book. We were supposed to be talking about A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke but our host for the evening is down with… yes, you guessed it, Corvid19. We didn’t want him to miss the discussion of the book he had chosen (it only comes round about once every two yaers that you get to choose) so we just chewed the fat about life, love and the universe – and the plague.

World of Zoom 2

It’s exactly a week since my first reflections on online conferencing. This weird week finished with my first video conference where one of the colleagues started us off with a specially composed song… (thanks Chris)

Also I came across this video during the week which, in a fairly amusing way, nails many of the pitfalls of this way of working

 

World of Zoom

Well, that was a weird week. I spent three whole days in online conference calls. I’d used Zoom once before. I’d never used Microsoft Teams.

However the week finished on a high note – our monthly Finnegans Wake research seminar at Senate House, University of London was shifted online this evening. Led by Prof. Finn Fordham of Royal Holloway, University of London, our motley crew wrestled with the clunkiness of MS Team to enjoy two hours together drilling down through the layers of the Wake and its various manuscripts and versions. Spending 20 minutes arguing the toss over the word “be” was a comforting contrast to the macro chaos beyond our virtual room.

“the massproduct of teamwork” suddenly took on a new dimension given that Teams was the software making this human contact and continuity possible.

The three days leading up to this evening was spent on Zoom (wish I had shares in them – and how did they nick ahead of Skype so effectively?). Zoom is a well designed software but the difference between what the workshop would have been like IRL and how it is in an online video conference is stark. Very intense and relentless in a way that is not the case face to face. I was working as a mentor on Documentary Campus Masterclass  – we were supposed to be in Copenhagen, parallel to CPH:Dox Film Festival (cancelled). I did the same workshop in the same city last year so I have a direct comparison.

The most creative use of the software was by two Czech filmmakers I’m working with – Vit & Tomas. They transported themselves and us, using the software facilities, high into the mountains…

[photo: Esther van Messel]

The gap between the experience of these sorts of softwares and the experience of being in a room with fellow humans is an interesting one which tells us much about how we actually communicate and how we create – which is not a flat experience but a rounded and fluid one. Something to keep observing over the next days and weeks…