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Health & Fitness

Following the Route of the Odyssey…via Twitter?

Options for participating in this year's Bloomsday celebration.

For lovers of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses*, the big day is almost here.  Every year on June 16, the day on which the entire novel takes place, Joyce lovers have a chance to hear the work read aloud in celebrations called “Bloomsday.” Theater companies and radio stations read and broadcast the novel from beginning to end, in as close to real time as possible.

This year brings a new version that is right in sync with the times, so to speak.  An enterprising gentleman who calls himself Stephen from Baltimore put out a call several months ago for volunteers to tweet the novel.  Each “tweep”, as he calls them, will volunteer 15 minutes of time, starting around dawn (Dublin time).

As New York Times arts blogger Julie Bloom (no relation to Leopold) describes it, “It’s impossible not to imagine the inherent fun the great English-language experimentalist would find in translating his voluminous ideas onto the 140-character template, or at least the irresistible challenge.”

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And true to the nature of Twitter, folks are tweeting about the project itself.  Stephen posted this update last week:

“One of the unexpected things I’ve enjoyed about this Ulysses Meets Twitter experiment is to see tweets about the project in many different and often attractive languages. I could not always tell what language I was seeing, but it was fun to witness the transformation of familiar words like Ulysses and Twitter into strange new (and sometimes beautiful) forms. And enlightening, too, as a reminder of how different we humans are.”

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More information at 11ysses.wordpress.com.

Meanwhile, for those readers and listeners (myself included) who are still resisting the siren call of the tweet, here are some other opportunities to participate in Bloomsday.

 

*Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. It was first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach in 1922, in Paris.

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