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Calypso 0010
I’m thinking back to my question from page 8 here: what is Bloom like in the world? How does he experience the world around him, and what is the relationship between his interior world and the exterior? I think that’s what his wondering about the properties of the color black in relation to heat is all about. (And he is mixing up his terms here, between light and heat and between conducting, refracting and reflecting–it should be “absorbs.”) You could take “interior” to mean both his domestic world and his thoughts, and we could be thinking about how Bloom actually transforms the outside world through his imagination in the coming pages. The smaller panel holding just Bloom and the door to 7 Eccles opening out onto the street, and the long shot down the street leading to St. George’s Church, with its pale warm light and wide-open space, seems to capture the transition from inside to outside nicely. After a lot of discussion, it looks like Rob and Josh settled on how to represent the notes and tones of the bells marking 8:15; I don’t have much of an ear myself, but I think it looks pretty cool arching in the morning sky.
Notice that Bloom is observing that he is wearing black, and thinking about how he feels physically, but he doesn’t explain why he’s wearing black. Later in the morning, he will be attending the funeral of an acquaintance, Paddy Dignam. For now, it might be worth asking why Bloom is thinking about the physical properties of color and heat, rather than the trip to the cemetery at 11 a.m.
Joyce gives us more info about time and how much of it is passing here then he does in the previous Stephen chapters. While the sound of the bells are not written in the novel I made a big decision to add them to the comic so that first-time readers would get a more grounded sense of the exterior world of the novel. It works better with Bloom, who seems quite delighted by the music of the world around him, than it does with Stephen, who seems more taken with the sound of his own voice.
In adding the sound of the bells here we wanted to set up a connection with the last moments of the chapter and the last page of the comic. Mike suggested that the bells of St George’s probably play the Westminster chime pattern, found here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_Quarters
We had a lot of fun trying to determine which vowel sound seems to indicate a higher tonal value; real nerd-wonkery that makes a project like this so much fun.
But I still don’t know for certain if St George’s in Dublin plays that chime pattern. Anyone been hanging around the neighborhood of 7 Eccles Street lately have the answer?
-R