We’re all pretty excited about the new interface for the comic and annotations around here and we’ve been looking for a way to spread the word about it to Joyce fans new and familiar in these next couple of weeks before Bloomsday. Well we finally decided on the coolest, or at least most-up-to-date method of letting people know “what you are doing”…Twitter.
There’s been a lot of novels presented in bite-sized, well sip-sized I suppose, bits of content through Twitter and I have to admit that I think it’s a useful tool for opening up discussions in a small circle of friends. Good, like a book club reading, for getting people interested in looking deeper. But I have some serious doubts about whether its a good way to read ULYSSES.
So we decided to look into that.
It’s not. But it might be a good way to get people to try.
In setting up the comic I’ve been making numerous notes on the basic actions, events and themes that I would need to emphasize in various scenes to make the things clearer for first timer readers. Its been a bit of work, but we’ve managed to turn that into a “Tweet-readers’ Guide” to the novel, a kind of “what’s going on” for people trying to get a better sense of the thing from a first time read.
We’ll be tweeting two or three chapters a day of this guide in the week leading up to Bloomsday (June 9th to the 15th) for a few hours each day and it will include links to this site and others providing people with visual cues and some wikipedia connections. First time reader or just boning up so you can wear a boater hat with pride on the 16th, well, this might help.
We’ll also do much shorter and pretty damned funny series of tweets on Bloomsday reminding Joyce followers just what Mr Bloom was doing when in all its earthy detail. I’m sure you can all imagine how much fun we’re having with that.
-Rob
Well, a slight change in plans….
Sorry, guys, but we seem to be having some trouble with our automation system for Twitter. While this shouldn’t effect our Bloomsday Tweets at all, it greatly limits the amount of content we’ll be able to do for the “Tweeters’ Guide’ since most all of it will be manual (and by that I’m saying it means “me sitting for hours in front of a computer each day…”).
So the Tweeters’ Guide will begin on Tuesday, June 9th, as planned, but will only run through chapter 9 on Friday, June 12th. After that, I’ll be heading to the North American James Joyce Conference in Buffalo. Deep in academia and, as one might expect, fairly off the twitter grid.
We’re making plans to resume the Tweeters’ Guide after Bloomsday, but no date has been set for this yet as, frankly, I expect to sleeping and hung-over for a week following Molly’s speech.
-Rob