" ...and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Re:Joyce – It’s Bloomsday

Bloomsday is a commemoration observed annually on June 16th to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce and relive the events in his novel Ulysses.

What’s the big deal? In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

This seminal work chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904.

James Joyce

This year the celebration is extra special because the 16^th falls on a Thursday as it does in the novel. Joyce chose the date because his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle happened on that day.

Bet you haven’t read Ulysses. I confess haven’t – at least not all the way through.

It’s not an easy read. Divided into eighteen episodes Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, and allusions, as well as its rich characterizations and broad humor, made the book a highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon.

If you’d like to attempt it now, you can connect to variant digital versions by way of Amazon or whatever or try the freebie at The Gutenberg Project.

Or, if you’d like to have it read to you, many live events are being produced around the world. For folks in my neighborhood a good introduction might be the marathon reading at Manhattan's Symphony Space event which features over 100 actors and all 18 of the novel’s episodes. Public Radio station WNYC 93.9 FM will begin to stream it live on at 8 P.M. More information can be found HERE.

For fun, and for an un-Irish ear almost as difficult as reading the books itself, there’s a rare recording a James Joyce himself reading a chunk HERE.

Caution: Ulysses contains language and concepts that may not be suitable for younger listeners.

It also contains approximately 265,000 words and by some counts uses a lexicon of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses).

James Joyce
by Brian Whelan

So it occurred to me: If the book’s main character, Leopold Bloom, lived in our digital age, would he have a Twitter account and would he have “tweeted” the story – at 140 characters per tweet – as it was experienced?

If so, the opening tweet would have been …

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was …”

Oops! That’s 133 characters with no spaces. Adding the next word – “sustained” – puts us over the limit at 142. So maybe tweeting Ulysses it’s not such a great idea.

Or maybe it is. In digging around for this post I discovered that a guy named Steve Cole had the “Twitter” thought as well and –

Took action.

Ulysses meets Twitter 2011. Cole asked social networkers to tweet James Joyce’s epic novel in excerpts of 140 characters at a time over a 24-hour period. Cole launched a blog and Twitter account to announce the experiment in January.

Twitter users can wake up and fall asleep to these excerpts by following @11ysses.

Since I gave you the opening 140+/- characters I suppose I should close with a right-sized 51-character (before that the story-supporting "concept" gets a bit too provocative for this blog) closing segment from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy that marks the end of Bloom’s day and Joyce’s book.

Here ‘tis:

“… yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Saying  “Yes” to re-Joycing this Bloomsday.

Geoff Steck
Chief Catalyst
Alexander Publishing & Marketing

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