Ep. 134 - Parallax
If both clocks were correct, one would be redundant.
The Ballast House, as seen from O’Connell Bridge, 2023; Note the north-facing clock and the absent timeball
Topics in this episode include the Ballast Office, the timeball, stellar parallax, ships’ navigators and chronometers, the whereabouts of the timeball, the political controversy of Greenwich Mean Time, Dunsink time, Sir Robert Ball and The Story of the Heavens, what the heck parallax actually means, how James Joyce uses the term parallax in Ulysses, being your own solar eclipse, how to make friends and influence astronomers at the Dunsink Observatory, Robert Anton Wilson, Clyde Tombaugh, the epiphanies to be found in common street furniture, Bishop Berkeley’s thoughts on stereoscopic vision, Dedalus and Bloom as a binary star system, the hypostasis of urination, and crossing the streams.
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The Ballast Office, as seen from Westmoreland St., ca. 1900; Note the lowered timeball and east-facing clock
Sir Robert Ball
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Further Reading:
Gilbert, S. (1955). James Joyce’s Ulysses: a study. New York: Vintage Books. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.124373/page/n3/mode/2up
HEUSEL, B. S. (1983). PARALLAX AS A METAPHOR FOR THE STRUCTURE OF “ULYSSES.” Studies in the Novel, 15(2), 135–146. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29532212
Kelly, O. (2017, Oct 4). Dubliners could get their big bronze ‘time ball’ back. The Irish Times. Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/dubliners-could-get-their-big-bronze-time-ball-back-1.3243035
Kenner, H. (1987). Ulysses. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kiczek, J. (2011). Joyce in Transit: The “Double Star” Effect of “Ulysses.” James Joyce Quarterly, 48(2), 291–304. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23342805
Kojima, M. (2005). Leopold Bloom's "metempsychosis" and "parallax" in "Ulysses". Journal of Irish Studies, 20, 21-30. Retrieved February 11, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/44646151
Nicholson, R. (2015). The Ulysses guide: tours through Joyce’s Dublin. Dublin: New Island Books.
Romanoff, A. Lestrygonians-Modernism Lab. Retrieved from https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/lestrygonians/
Schotz, Myra Glazer. (1979). Parallax in Ulysses. Dalhousie Review, 59 (3), 487-499. Retrieved from https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/63086/dalrev_vol59_iss3_pp487_499.pdf?sequence=1
Schwarz, D. (2004). Reading Joyce’s Ulysses. Palgrave Macmillan.
Warner, D. (1998). The Ballast-Office Time Ball and the Subjectivity of Time and Space. James Joyce Quarterly, 35/36, 861–864. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25473962
Timeball photo source: https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000168763