Bloomsday Challenge: Day Ten

June 10^{: “}Bloomusalem”

This necklace is inspired by a passage from “Circe”:

BLOOM

My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future.

Though my version of “Bloomusalem” does not look anything like “a colossal edifice, with crystal roof, built in the shape of a huge pork kidney,” it does relay the idea of a new community blossoming (U 484). Sorry for the pun—I think this passage echoes Bloom’s walk to Dlugacz’s Butcher Shop in “Calypso” when he sees the advertisements for “Zion” and wanders through a Waste-Landian space. Rather than a grey world surrounded by corpses and death, in “Circe” there is a birth of a new homeland even if it’s only imagined. This phrase has always stuck with me and I have finally actualized it!

Only 7 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Nine

Notebook Series

More photography, though these pictures are digitally altered to include an image of Joyce (and not so much a "rendering" of what is already "sensible matter."). I was thinking of the line following Molly's final "Yes" in "Penelope": "Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921." I wanted to create something different--and notebooks seemed perfect.




Only 8 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Eight

"Busted Abode!"

I questioned whether or not to take a photograph--as Joyce did not consider photography to be art: "A photograph is a disposition of sensible matter and may be so disposed for an aesthetic end but it is not a human disposition of sensible matter. Therefore it is not a work of art" (CW 146). I can see the validity in this argument--as it is the camera that ultimately does the "rendering" when the flash goes off and captures the image. I am reminded, however, of something I heard in a lecture by artist, Thomas Allen, that photography is not just about taking the picture as it is making it.


Though I did little staging (or making) here, I like the simplicity and the irony of this photo. "What is Home Without Plumtree's Potted Meat. Incomplete. With it an Abode of Bliss..."--the cracked pot to me is very much like the "cracked lookingglass" in "Telemachus" because it narrates a brokenness larger than the objects themselves. The broken pot echoes the growing distance between Molly and Bloom as she engages in an affair with Blazes. It also represents the brokenness of their family--with Milly gone and their son Rudy, dead.

I was not expecting an aesthetic dilemma today but I am rather glad I did. It gave me a lot to ponder for the next few challenges. Only 9 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Seven

Buttons!

I have never made buttons before so this sure was a challenge! Once I got the hang of it though it was hard to stop. I used a “Badge-a-Mint” button maker (mixed results with this hand-machine—often it will work and other times it would not). My Joyce buttons borrow heavily from well-known photos of Joyce & Nora as well as incorporating more of the 1961 American edition of Ulysses. The background imagery is from a recycled Anthropologie catalog.

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Six

“The Hours” Necklace

I sketched the initial design for this necklace about a year ago and it has been a work-in-progress ever since. I had to find the right watch faces—particularly one large enough to hold the names of the Dubliners who inhabit the pages of “Wandering Rocks.”

Lucky for me I finally came across the perfect pocketwatch face! “The Hours” is my favorite creation thus far (and you must pardon my Woolf-humor here). Each episode is represented by its own individual watch face with its corresponding time in Ulysses. For a detailed description of each episode’s time, see Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Like my post, two days previous, I used a word or short phrase to represent (and hopefully encapsulate) each episode. A list of episodes and their representative words/phrases is below:

Telemachus: “Stately Plump”

Nestor: “history is a nightmare”

Proteus: “ineluctable modality of the visible”

Calypso: “faintly scented urine”

Lotus-Eaters: “flowers of idleness”

Hades: “Poor Paddy!”

Aeolus: “DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN”

Lestroygonians: “U.P.:up”

Scylla & Charybdis: “The one about Hamlet”

Wandering Rocks: I used the shortest version of each Dubliner’s name: Conmee, Kelleher, Sailor, Katey, Boody, Boylan, Artifoni, Stephen, Dunne, Lambert, Lenehan, Flynn, Bloom, Dilly, Simon, Kernan, Cowley, Cunningham, Mulligan, Dignam, and cavalcade. I also added “Dublin” as I think that Dublin is the main character of this episode.

Sirens: “Jingle. Bloo”

Cyclops: “the citizen”

Nausicca: “O!”

Oxen of the Sun: “wombfruit”

Circe: “ashplant”

Eumaeus: “cabman’s shelter”

Ithaca: “womb weary”

Penelope: “yes”—there are 3 watch faces devoted to Molly’s recurring “yeses” in the episode.

11 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Five

Steampunk Joyce Pocketwatch

Another Joyce inspired creation involving time! I wanted to make something Steampunk at least once during this challenge. I was given this gold pocketwatch by a fan at the Alliday Everyday Craft Show last year. It has a wonderful texture to it. I took it apart and used one of the internal cogs to adorn the chain. I used the metal clock spring too.

On the inside of the pocketwatch are three layers. On the bottom layer is a circular scrap from the 1961 American edition of Ulysses that I have been using. The clock spring makes up the next later and on the glass face there is a tiny cartoon image of Joyce walking.

“—16 June 1904” appears on the facing inside cover of the pocketwatch. A whimsical deconstructed timepiece!

12 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Four

"Ulysses Clock"

There is so much creativity this year leading up to Bloomsday—I think in part because of the “Ulysses Meets Twitter 2011” experiment. Tweeting Ulysses got me thinking about how to represent an episode in 140 characters or less. I thought about how to condense the episodes even further—if I had to pick one line, word, or phrase from each episode which stood out as the most recognizable?

All of these thoughts lead me to creating a “Ulysses Clock.” The episodes are in order—for example, “Telemachus” is the first episode and represents 1:00. After episode 12, there is an overlap.

While not as intricate as my previous pieces, it’s a fun piece. I have limited abilities and knowledge of clock-making though this Craftzine video was certainly helpful (I recommend it to those of you who try this): http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/09/how-to_make_your_own_clock.html.

Here’s a list of the “times”:

1:00 (Telemachus & Nausicca): “snotgreen sea” & “O!”

2:00 (Nestor & Oxen of the Sun): “history” & “wombfruit”

3:00 (Proteus & Circe): “dogsbody” & “ashplant”

4:00 (Calypso & Eumaeus): “Metempsychosis” & “cabman’s shelter”

5:00 (Lotus-Eaters & Ithaca): “Pear’s Soap” & “When?”

6:00 (Hades & Penelope): “Poor Dignam” & “yes”

7:00 (Aeolus): “IMPROMPTU”

8:00 (Lestroygonians): “U.P.:up”

9:00 (Scylla & Charybdis): “The one about Hamlet”

10:00 (Wandering Rocks): “Father Conmee”

11:00 (Sirens): “Jingle. Bloo”

12:00 (Cyclops): “the citizen”

I'd like to note that the times I have listed are not the times when these episodes occur. I felt that there would be more overlap and the clock would be harder to read. So instead of "Telemachus" representing 8:00, the episode represents 1:00 as it is the first episode of Ulysses.

13 days till Bloomsday!