Two devotees of "Ulysses" have adapted its 10th chapter to Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per post. Called "Wandering Rocks," the chapter is especially well-suited to Twitter because it follows 19 Dubliners going about their daily business.
For three years now, Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech professor, and friend Ian McCarthy, a product manager at LinkedIn, have commemorated "Bloomsday" on Twitter on June 16. That date in 1904 is when the entirety of "Ulysses" takes place, chronicling the experiences of a man named Leopold Bloom.
Bogost says using Twitter "for literary performance art might help shift perspectives on the service" and get people to use it for more than self-centered musings. "Perhaps in so doing, we can shift people's interest in social media technologies from egomania and immediacy toward deliberation and cultural reflection," Bogost wrote in an e-mail from Australia.
Bogost and McCarthy have dubbed their performance "Twittering Rocks," a play on the chapter's title that could also mean Twittering is awesome. They have registered 54 of the novel's key characters as Twitter users, and Bogost built a software program that tweets their first-person utterances at the correct moments in the chapter.
"The result is a complex web of timed interactions between many characters," he said, "precisely the effect Joyce was aiming for in the novel."
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