“Crowds are all that's left,” James Joyce muttered to Eugene Jolas.
As Bob Dobbs walked into the studio, Joyce turned to him and whispered, “Television kills telephony in brother's broil.”
Dobbs: “Television? Mr. Baird was with my father last year after the fire at the Crystal Palace. Is the telephone related to television?”
Joyce: “They're both electric forms of communication. Hence, the simultaneity factor.”
Dobbs: “I always thought, when reading Eliot's The Wasteland, it was like eavesdropping on a telephone conversation.”
Joyce: “For such a young man, you say remarkable things. The underlying image that guided me through the book was a telephone party line that everyone had access to. I wonder if the language of my book will predict your life.”
Bob was distracted by a view of a lake through the window. A sign on a building said Banook Canoe Club. B-A-N-O-O-K. Bob looked at it in his mind's eye. Ban...the...book. “Well, television will certainly murder the book!”
“Not my book!” Joyce glared. “When you know the inevitable cycle of technological effects, from speech to television, you can anticipate the problems. It's probably happened before.”
Dobbs: “You mean, like Atlantis?”
Joyce: “Perhaps. Yeats would see it that way, but he didn't think anthropologically--more, psycho-spiritually. He was greatly impressed with the same ideas that influenced Aleister Crowley.”
Dobbs: “There's a man I'd like to meet.”
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