Monday, May 20, 2013
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Media / Arts / Science & Technology / Books Joyce's Ulysses: There's a tweet for that
Posted by Bill Forman on Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 5:02 PM
But what Ulysses devotees may not realize is that this landmark work, which some of us have spent years trying to get through, will appear in a variety of forms on Twitter tomorrow.
As far as I can tell, no one out there has announced plans to celebrate Bloomsday by tweeting the entire 265,000-word novel in sequential 140-character installments, which I'm guessing would do for Twitter's servers what Lady Gaga recently did for Amazon's.
But I do know of two potentially interesting Twitter commemorations that microblog-inclined Joyce fans can check out.
The first comes via Frank Delaney, the Irish author whose Joyce obsession has led to what's turning out to be a life-long podcast devoted to analyzing Ulysses sentence-by-sentence. Delaney has issued a Bloomsday challenge, inviting followers to summarize the entire novel in a single tweet. For search purposes, participants are asked to include the hashtag #FDBloomsday, and Delaney will award prizes to his favorite three.
Those who prefer a slightly more detailed approach can try @11ysses, which will be tweeting CliffsNotes-style summaries of each section, described as follows:
The @11ysses Twitter account is the stage for this "tweading" of Ulysses. The Bloomsday tweaders are you, anyone in the world who would like to volunteer to take a section of the novel and condense/congeal/cajole it into a string of 4-6 tweets that will be broadcast as a quick burst on @11ysses. "Bloomsday bursts" will be posted every quarter hour starting at 8 o'clock in the morning (Dublin time) on 16 June and continue for the next 24 hours.
Here's hoping the copyright-fixated Joyce estate doesn't figure out a way to sue everyone involved ...
