On June 14, 2009 Throwaway Horse LLC will present its first project, Ulysses “Seen,” at the North American James Joyce Conference in Buffalo, New York. Ulysses “Seen” combines a graphic novelization of James Joyce’s Ulysses with an interactive reader’s guide on the World Wide Web at www.ulyssessseen.com. Comic book artist Rob Berry and Joyce scholar Mike Barsanti conceived of the project as a forum for both the first time reader and the Joyce expert to discuss, explore, and debate a book considered to be both one of the most important books of the 20th century and one of the most difficult. Throwaway Horse LLC has posted the ulyssesseen.com website as a kind of “alpha” web 2.0 project in which visitors can help shape content and direction of the site itself. The project is being presented in serialized form, like the original novel, with the hopes it can be completed in slightly less than the 10 years it took for Joyce to write the novel itself.

The conference presentation is just part of a flurry of activity leading up to June 16th, known the world-over by Joyce fans as “Bloomsday.” Named after the novel’s main character, Leopold Bloom, and marking the day in 1904 on which all of the 800 page novel’s events occurred, Bloomsday is a yearly celebration of all things Joyce. Throwaway Horse LLC has marked the day by re-launching the website on June 1, 2009 with direct linking between the comic book feature and the reader’s guide feature, as well as adding new interactive resources. Throwaway Horse LLC will also be offering a “Tweeter’s Guide” to Ulysses on twitter beginning on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 and running up to Bloomsday, offering descriptions, quotes, and insights into the novel. Throwaway Horse LLC will have a full day of twitter posts on Bloomsday itself.

The North American James Joyce conference is a biannual gathering of Joyceans in which scholarly presentations and papers are exchanged and debated. Throwaway Horse LLC hopes to enlist the participation of the attendees in helping to craft the explicatory resources aiding the fist time readers, but also to help build a scholarly forum for debate and discussion of the novel outside of the strictures of academic publishing. On some level Throwaway Horse LLC is as excited as its users watching the progress and development of a project in new and not always expected ways.