Since 2007, Ian McCarthy and I have performed an act we call Twittering Rocks on June 16. It’s a day otherwise known as Bloomsday, the day on which the events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses take place.
Our rendition focuses on the central chapter of the book, Wandering Rocks, in which many of the novel’s characters encounter each other as they pass through Dublin simultaneously.
I’ve just learned about a similar project, 11ysses, whose organizers hope to retell the entirety of Ulysses this Bloomsday, on the Twitter account @11ysses.
They’re not going to read the literal words directly onto Twitter, which would take too long anyway. Instead, they’ll be sort of distributed reperformance. Here’s the plan in @11ysses’s own words:
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.
Read more about it here.
It’s an interesting and ambitious attempt to adapt the novel onto Twitter. I’m not surprised to see more attempts at such a feat… after all, the fragmentary nature of Ulysses, along with its association with a single day of the year, makes it a perfect match for digital adaptation onto the platform.
That said, I’m still partial to our Twittering Rocks approach, since it takes the simultaneity and disjuncture that felt so unusual during modernism, and weaves it together with a one of the many platforms that silently and seamlessly perform that experience for millions.