Upon finishing Philip Sicker's delightful book Ulysses, Film, and Visual Culture, the reader is left with the image of a dark stage full of illuminated optical devices. It looks like a sorcerer's workshop or like a museum of popular amusements. Mutoscopes, cameras, stereoscopes, zoetropes, magic lanterns, microscopes, and telescopes are displayed on shelves and tables. Someone inspects each device in turn, a man who can hardly see in the customary sense of the word, whose domicile is among the glorious and trivial corridors of human idiosyncrasy. Is this a stage? A screen? Everything is a dynamic palimpsest, the effect of double—triple, quadruple—exposure, unembarrassed by metamorphosis and noncommittal about its ontological affiliation. “Goldhaired” girls twirl around him as morning, noon, and twilight hours, their gestures carving out a most spacious day. June 16, 1904. Tormented by thorny thoughts, a young man contemplates the dioramic view from the Martello tower—both a...

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