Joyce

When The Commitments came out in 1991, I was a 23 year old English grad student obsessed with both James Joyce and soul music (especially Otis Redding and Bobby “Blue” Bland), so you know that Alan Parker’s film (based on Roddy Doyle’s wonderful novel) would be a big hit for me.  I saw it twice in the theater, I believe, and each time I had to pinch myself.  How did they know?  I asked myself.  How did they manage to create a movie just for me?

The thing that struck me at the time about the film (I’m talking the film’s narrative now) was the fact that, at the end, all the characters seemed successful (singing in bands, having girlfriends, so on) except for the two guys who started the band in the first place–the guitarist and bassist.  In the final montage, we see them singing for loose change on the streets of Dublin (they call those guys “buskers” in Ireland).  No fair, I thought then and now.  Those guys deserved better than that.

Well, turns out the happy ending would come for at least one of those two buskers, played by real-life musician Glen Hansard.  He had already started his own band, The Frames, at that point, and after the film that band went on to dominate Irish music for over a decade.  They had some popularity in Europe and America, but it wasn’t until 2007’s film Once that Glen Hansard became known to a truly wide audience when his little film won him an Oscar for Best Song.  He and his co-star in the film, Marketa Irglova, developed the songs for Once (which was directed by former Frames bassist John Carney) and began touring as a duo, calling their collaboration The Swell Season.

I should say, first off, that I absolutely loved Once.  Yes, it’s Irish, so that’s no surprise.  In fact, I’m probably more interested in Ireland now than I was back in the early 1990s when I only had a vague understanding of Joyce and why I liked Joyce.  Now that I have a strong grasp of Joyce and the larger picture of Irish literature and history, and now that I have actually visited Ireland on several occasions and seen Dublin for myself, I can say that my enthusiasm for the country is richer than it ever was back in 1991.  Seeing Glen Hansard walking along O’Connell Street just brings back a ton of wonderful memories.  On top of all that, however, I thought the film was an enormous artistic success, as it’s one of the few musicals to actually take the music part seriously enough to dispense with the stupid dancing and simply show the role that music plays in the lives of musicians who would rather perform for each other than talk.  It’s a film about the development of a close, musical friendship, with the focus on the creative process first and foremost. It’s a great film.  I’ve seen it a dozen times, and I never get tired of it.  It doesn’t help that the music in the film is phenomenal.

Well, a lot of other people liked Once, too, and a lot of people bought the soundtrack and became interested in the duo, especially after it was revealed that they were romantically linked.  So the follow-up was bound to be a big deal, and it certainly is.  It’s called Strict Joy, and it comes in a regular version (just the one disk) or a deluxe edition (with the album, a companion concert CD, and a live concert DVD).  I’ve been listening to the album and concert CDs for the past few days, and I have to say…I like the new album, but I really love the concert CD, and its worth getting the deluxe version just to get that CD.

I always felt The Frames had their moments (“Revelate,” “Lay Me Down,” to name a few), but their albums as a whole seemed weighed down with too many mediocre songs.  The Once soundtrack contained mostly wonderful material, but even that work had its clunkers, too.  I’d say Strict Joy is similar.  There are some incredibly strong songs, such as the opener “Low Rising” (in which Hansard channels his inner Van Morrison better than Van Morrison himself), “In These Arms,” and Irglova’s standout track “I Have Loved You Wrong,” among others.  And while there are no real clunkers here, there are also a number of songs that really don’t grab me for one reason or another.  So I like it, but I’m not overwhelmed by the experience of listening to the music.

But the concert CD is an entirely different story.  True, a lot of the songs in the concert are from Once, along with some standout Frames songs like “Lay Me Down” and “Fitzcarraldo,” so the material itself stands on its own.  But the content here, I think, is less important than the presentation.  Glen Hansard is an incredible singer, and I think this comes through live in a way that really can’t be captured in a studio.  There’s a dynamism, a force, behind his voice when he’s in front of an audience that transforms decent songs like “Say It To Me Know” into epics.  He sings like the world is on fire and only his voice can put out the blaze–it’s a fierce, strong, barely-in-control megaphone that only works when it’s a bit out of tune.  That sort of chaos just doesn’t fit on a conventional studio take, where the tunes are modified and the cracks and grit of a real voice is limited and compressed to better fit to a perfectly-designed score.  And the audience knows it, too; listen to the roar of love that bursts out when the crowd cheers after the opening number; that’s an audience that understands exactly what it has heard.

But his singing voice is only part of it. Hansard is also a storyteller, like a lot of musicians.  And like a lot of musicians, he is very comfortable telling little stories before the songs.  Some of the stories are funny (like the one about the kid buying the grave for his girlfriend), and some are truly bizarre (about the “ghostbuster” couple who talk to the souls of 500-year-old children), but the stories all lead to a brief explanation of what each song is about emotionally and the messages that he, as the songwriter, sought to convey when composing it.  That’s different.  Musicians are generally fearful of prose; they want their music to speak for itself.  They’ll tell a story about the song’s origin, but they won’t usually follow it up by stating “this song means x” because that declarative statement limits the power of the song.

Rather than cheapening the songs (by telling us how to listen to them), however, Hansard provides an emotional framework that helps direct our understanding of the songs.  Think of Sister Wendy describing a painting at the Louvre; we can see the painting without her, but she draws attention to details we might overlook, allowing us to seen and appreciate the work in a whole new light.  Hansard does the same thing; we can enjoy his songs without the introductions, but those introductions draw our ears and our minds to ideas and to emotions that make the experience of listening to these songs that much more meaningful.

Here’s an example.  Before the song “That Low,” he tells a funny story about his last visit to Milwaukee (where the concert took place) and then says,

This song is about an idea that you’re in a rut, maybe in a relationship, and you’ve got each other but it’s not great.  The song is about the idea that this one person has to go and walk a new road, and this song was written from the perspective of the person who realizes that they’re about to be left.  It’s for a good reason.  It’s like a double-edged sword.  It ups the ante for you and makes you go, “Okay, what am I doing?”  So this is about the whole idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, and if somebody has to go walk their way then it kind of forces you to think about yourself.  The whole idea of this song is “thread the light, walk the light, speak the light, seek the light, crave the light, brave the light.” The whole idea is “be in the light” because if you’re in the dark, then it’s no use to you.

Songs, like poems, often need a frame of reference before they can be fully understood.  Before I heard his introduction, I thought “This Low” was a sad song about a couple breaking up.  Of course, I didn’t really pay too much attention to the song when I first heard it on The Swell Season’s debut (which came out before Once).  Once I heard Hansard’s introduction to this song, however, I was forced to consider the “light” part and what it meant in the context of the breakup, and I realized that, yes, it’s a sad song about a breakup, but it’s more than that.  The idea he’s conveying here (which is conveyed musically better than it is conveyed lyrically) is the sudden realization that a part of a person’s life has just ended but that this is as much a moment of possibility as it is a moment of despair.  That is, she’s gone, which means that what happens next has yet to be written.  The “shine a light” part is the speaker’s mind opening up to explore the possibilities that have suddenly emerged (rather than retreating into the darkness of despair and sadness).  It’s a beautiful song and a beautiful idea, and Hasnard’s introduction allowed me to better understand and appreciate it.

He does something similar to this with many of the songs, but he’s not alone.  Irglova also introduces several songs, providing her own take on those she has penned.  Sorry I haven’t mentioned her much here, but her role in this group is definitely a secondary one to Hansard; she performs a few songs here, and she shines whenever she sings, but he seems to be the focus of the group, and he’s the one directing things and arranging things and singing most things.  But when she shines, she shines brightly–and in a similar way to Hansard.  Her voice warbles and hems around just like his.  It’s not a powerful voice, but it’s an equally passionate one.  Heck, there’s enough grain in those two voices to fill several beaches.

In all, Strict Joy is good, but the concert CD is a wonderful document of the true power of this musical duo.  So if you’re going to get this, get the deluxe edition.

Update (10/2): The CD version of the deluxe edition doesn’t contain the entire concert, so if you want to hear all the cool stories and stuff from that concert, buy the deluxe edition on iTunes.

I’ve always enjoyed carrying a book around with me everywhere I go.  It’s something I picked up when I was younger, after reading Zorba the Greek and watching the movie of the same name.  Both have a main character who is an intellectual.  The intellectual carries a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy with him everywhere he goes.  Zorba, the anti-intellectual, mocks the intellectual for carrying the book, declaring that not everything can be learned from books (or something like that–it’s been ages since I read the novel, so the details are sketchy).  And while I’m sure Zorba had a point, I was more interested in the idea of a man carrying a copy of Dante with him everywhere he went.  That was cool.

I’ve always considered books to be magical objects.  They invent new worlds, and they change our current world.  Growing up, books (along with albums and, later, CDs) captivated me like nothing else could (until the Internet came around).  It’s no wonder I became an English major, huh?  Besides, the United States is filled with Zorbas who look down on reading and thinking as though they were diseases from another planet (but minus the celebration of life that makes Zorba such a compelling character).  If nothing else, I wanted my life to embody a rejection of the anti-intellectualism that I see on an everyday basis in my country.  Carrying a book around with me was a silent embodiment of that rejection.

I understand this now, as a 40 year old, but at first, when I was 18 and reading Zorba, I just thought that carrying a book around was cool.  I even found a nice, old copy of Dante in a rare books store and started carrying it around too, though I eventually gave up on it when I realized (after actually reading the book) that the translation I had purchased was pretty dreadful.  I moved on to Maupassant, then to Flaubert, Kafka, Joyce, Deleuze and Guattari, Fredrich Kittler, Philip K. Dick, and so on.  I’ve had a lot of books in my hands and in my backpacks, to be sure.  But while the books have changed, the initial inspiration, the initial impetus for putting a book in my bag when I go out, has not.  I want to be cool, and I want to set myself apart from those around me.

So what’s the latest book in my bag?  Well, there are three, actually.  One is a notebook with ideas for a story I’m writing (though the notebook itself is pretty awesome because my wife gave it to me and because the cover is from The Book of Kells).  Another is Haunted Weather, David Toop’s interesting account of experimental music from the past 25 years or so (which I purchased in Dublin because it wasn’t available at the time in the US).  And the third?  It’s the one you see at the beginning of this post: Jonsi & Alex’s Riceboy Sleeps.

Jónsi Birgisson & Alex Sommers are partners and collaborators.  Both in groups of their own (Jonsi in Sigur Ros, of course, and Alex in Parachutes, an interesting band whose music sounds an awful lot like Sigur Ros), they have been collaborating on a few artistic projects over the last few years.  Their first release was a tiny book of abstract drawings called Riceboy Sleeps.  I picked one up last year at the Sigur Ros show in San Diego.  It’s beautiful but a bit hard to figure out, like all good art.  There are no words, just pictures and drawings that have aged and withered through the decades.  Sepia tones wash through it all, and there’s a hint of Xerox residue there as well.  It’s a document of decay and memory, if it’s anything at all.  One picture is of a little girl walking through a grassy field, but the photo is dim from age and there are scribbles and thumbprints on the corners.  Another shows a drawing of a bird with another drawing of a girl inside the bird.  A third shows a decaying wall with some indecipherable text and a drawing of a boy. It is, in short, the illustrative book equivalent of Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children or William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops.  It’s like a journal by some unknown artist that has been locked away in a closet for 100 years only to be rescued out of obscurity by Jonsi and Alex.  Or something like that.

I enjoy this book.  It has a magic to it that I have a very difficult time putting into words.  It’s not making any sort of statement, and it doesn’t even really evoke any specific image or impression about the past or about memory.  But it is engaging, enveloping me as I turn from page to page, picking apart each photo or drawing or random scribble.  I have no idea what the work is trying to express, but I get it all the same.

And that takes me to  Jonsi & Alex’s new album, Riceboy Sleeps.  The deluxe edition of this album (which I did buy–I’m such a Sigur Ros whore) contains extra music, a coloring book, crayons, and the Riceboy Sleeps book.  So, obviously, there’s meant to be a connection between the book and the music, apart from the title.  And, to be sure, the music itself is, like the book, hard to figure out.  I have read some negative reviews of this album, and most say the same thing: it sounds like the boring parts of Sigur Ros.  So anyone hoping for big guitar sweeps and more Jonsi ethereal vocals will be disappointed by Riceboy Sleeps.  But complaining about what isn’t in a work of music is like complaining about the absence of sound in a silent film.  Forget about what isn’t there.  Focus on what IS there.

Musically, it is a lot like the “boring” parts of Sigur Ros, but since I’m someone who actually likes that side of the band, I see that as a strength and not a weakness.  The band is known for its big, swelling, orchestral pieces (like”Popplagið” and “Hoppípolla”).  But there’s a repetition of form evident in those works, as their songs often (too often, if you ask me) start off slow and build, over time, into a giant wall of big, beautiful noise that crashes over and around the listener.  It’s great; it’s epochal stuff.  But it’s a formula, and I sensed that on their last album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust part of that formula was growing rather stale (which is why so many people prefer songs like “Gobbledigook” over the big numbers like “Festival”).

But there’s always been another, quieter side to Sigur Ros, and that side is all about atmospherics, ambiance, and silence.  Listen to a typical Sigur Ros album (like Takk…) and the big, booming moments stand out.  But surrounding those big moments are tons of little moments, moments when the music ebbs and flows along in all sorts of interesting an inventive ways.  It’s that element of their music that traditional music critics dismiss as so much art school noodling–as if that’s a bad thing, as if atmospheric music that lives and breathes but doesn’t necessary result in an orgasmic release is pointless (as if art needs a point).   And while it’s true that atmospheric, abstract moments can be every bit as formulaic as anything else (hence, New Age), this side of Sigur Ros generally manages to avoid those cliches, in part because the members are incredibly good musicians able to create something interesting and unique out any instrument, both physical and computer-based.

Riceboy Sleeps, created by two very good musicians, exists in this “pointless” realm of musical experimentation.  There’s remarkably varied collection of sounds here, from traditional piano and strings to processed samples of who knows what to (yes) Jonsi’s voice (though as a floating, decaying sample buried in the mix, not standing in the forefront) to Chris Watson-like field recordings.  All of these blend together to create an odd, hazy tension between running and standing still.

Listening to a track like “Stokkseyri,” which begins with chittering string lines that seem to stretch on for ungodly lengths (longer than a string player can possibly play one note, at any rate), I feel this tension in my legs, and it reminds me of those moments late at night when I’m in bed and my body is telling me to sleep but my mind keeps thinking about what I need to do the next day.  At this moment, I feel stretched out.  My legs twitch and I can’t stay still.  It’s painful, in a way, and that pain continues until the body wins out and my mind shuts down.  The music here, a combination of very long (and often beautiful) notes coupled with random bits of noise and digital decay, completely overtake me when I listen.  I get sucked in because the music begins and then keeps beginning, stretching out and out with no end in sight–until, at last, there’s a quiet ebbing.  The music slows, and then it ends.  It’s a “formula” in the sense that each work here contains the same tension followed by more tension followed, eventually, by a half-hearted release.  Or, to put it another way, the music begins, it builds and grows, and then it dies or falls asleep (as in “Riceboy” sleeps).

A lot of music fans will hate this album.  That’s fine.  Musical taste is quite personal, and I’ve long ago given up trying to change people’s minds.  But I think they will hate this work because it doesn’t seem to have any direct referent, no focal point or conclusion that ties everything together.  However, I think it does have that referent.  It’s Riceboy Sleeps, the book.  Listen to this music while studying the decaying, dying objects found in the book.  Take “Daniell in the Sea.”  It contains an angelic choir (which is probably Jonsi and Alex themselves, though I could be wrong) humming nothing until they are overwhelmed by a wash of digital waves.  Then look at the sepia-toned, slowly dissolving photograph of the little girl in a field with big trees in the background, all fading away slowly and not so gracefully.  There’s a direct connection here: photographs and journals grow old and die just like sounds grow, build, and disappear.  It’s life, of course, but the two works seem to be fascinated by those last few moments of life, the final traces of memory as they float through a journal or bounce around in errant corners of a child’s mind.

This is definitely not Post Rock or whatever Sigur Ros’s music is called.  It’s far closer to the experimental work of someone like William Basinski or Jim Haynes (whose work Sever touches on similar decaying themes) or Peter Wright or The Caretaker or any one of a number of musicians experimenting with rendering into musical form the very real concepts of death and decay.  Riceboy Sleeps is prettier than those works, but it’s also not as complete a work of art as something as monumental as The Disintegration Loops.  Then again, Jonsi & Alex are rock musicians first, experimental artists second; by contrast, someone like The Caretaker has spent a decade imagining and perfecting his own world of memory and decay.  So perhaps it’s not the best work Jonsi has ever created (that would be ( )).  But it’s a great side-project, a great experiment into bringing an aesthetic idea to life both visually and sonically, and a great addition to any Sigur Ros fan’s catalog.

So Leopold Bloom used Twitter, at least in the theoretical sense. The stream-of-consciousness thoughts that are sent out to us in the page of Joyce’s Ulysses contain the same fast-paced, random gems of wisdom and obsession and banality as the typical tweet.

Paltry funeral: coach and three carriages.  It’s all the same.  Pallbearers, gold reins, requiem mass, firing a volley.  Pomp of death. (Joyce 83)

Granted, not all of Bloom’s thoughts would fit in a 140-character message (though the one above does perfectly at 135). But the syntax Bloom uses–very short, choppy sentences, lots of punctuation–is quite suitable to the Twitterverse. Yes, some of the sentences are connected to one another, but there’s enough jumping from one topic to another (or one strain of a topic to another strain of a topic) to make it quite easy to cut up those streams into smaller bites.  [Moreover, as the word "twitterverse" suggests,the need for compressed language in tweets has led to the creation of many "portmanteau" words, the dominant characteristic of Joyce's other great novel, Finnegans Wake.  But that's a different post.]

Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.  Memories beset his brooding brain.  Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament.  A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening.  Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children’s shirts. (Joyce 9)

Unlike Bloom, Stephen Dedalus’s streams (like the one above) are often precise analyses of observed events or epistemological conundrums.  The one above, early in the novel, contains Stephen’s thoughts as he remembers back to his mother on his deathbed.  His thoughts attempt to analyze her own mind in the final moments of life.  Now, a reader doesn’t necessarily need to know this context in order to understand and appreciate the ideas.  And even if the context were necessary (as it is on many occasions in Joyce’s novel), the thoughts would still make “sense” in the Twitterverse, for Tweeters often throw in random, decontextualized thoughts for public consumption.  Some get it and some don’t, but the “getting” isn’t as important as the sending.  Further, the syntax of twitter is evident in Stephen’s streams.  Again, they are short, fragmented sentences mostly.  But the paragraph above (and most other Stephenstreams) could not be Tweets for one important reason:  the ideas are too complex to fit into 140 characters.  Cutting the above paragraph into three wouldn’t work.  It’s all one idea.

Sense of smell must be stronger too.  Smell on all sides, bunched together.  Each street different smell.  Each person too.  Then the spring, the summer: smells.  Tastes?  They say you can’t taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head.  Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure. (Joyce 149)

Bloom, on the other hand, never stays on one subject for very long–or, if he does, he includes enough randomness into the stream to allow a long one (like the one above) to be broken up nicely into many parts, like this:

Sense of smell must be stronger too.  Smell on all sides, bunched together.  Each street different smell.  Each person too.

Then the spring, the summer: smells.  Tastes?

They say you can’t taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head.  Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure.

So there are really three ideas in the sentence, and I’ve gone ahead and broken up those ideas into tweets.  The first talks about blind people and their enhanced sense of smell, as you can probably already guess (though you’d be forgiven if you thought he was referring to animals).  The second follows from the first (smelling things differently at different times of the year), but even here, all by itself, it does make sense (though, granted, not as much sense as the two together).  The final really is a nugget all on its own, needing no context or explanation, and it is a perfect example of a Bloom tweet.  If Bloom did have a Twitter account, I’m guessing he wouldn’t have written up the first two posts but he would have no trouble sending out the third to the world to read.  In fact, just to test out my theory, I “tweeted” it myself just to see how it fit into the larger stream of messages.  Does it fit?  You tell me.  Here are some random tweets sent out around the same time I sent Bloom’s:

As their mouths succombed to desire, he ripped off her corset!  “Whoa Stableboy!” she moaned.  “My garments are more costly than yours.”

“Shouldn’t all gremlins die of dehydration?” The great comedy mind of Ben Schwartz.

steak coming on.

I would really like to rock this look at #nerdprom2 tonight.  http://tr.im/p588

http://twitpic.com/7tffi – I thought it would be good to buy a copy of the North County Times (San Diego) before I met with their Editor …

They say you can’t taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure.

spent all night at hospital,got 40 stitches, finally left at 5am this morning, have $100 prescription and my arms HURT from all the shots

아아 @.@ 이래가지구서야 음주모바일 트윗 하겠어요 ^^;;; 술마시고 천지인 타자는 힘들어요 -_-;;;

Okay, two of those had URL links, which isn’t fair, and one is in Korean (I think), but you get the idea.  Yes, Bloom’s idle thoughts make just as much sense as everyone else’s.

that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if that pork I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the head I couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night (Joyce 628)

And Molly?  Earlier I said that Molly Bloom would HATE Twitter.  The more I think about it, however, the more I am not so sure.  Yes, her sentences in the final section of Ulysses are each several pages long, but that’s largely a lack of punctuation.  Within each sentence are unpunctuated sentences and as much randomness as you’d find in Bloom’s thoughts or any Twitterer’s thoughts.  Take the above, which can be broken down like this:

that was a relief

wherever you be let your wind go free

who knows if that pork I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the head I couldnt smell anything off it

Im sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue

I hope that lamp is not smoking

fill my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night

In some ways, all Joyce did with Molly’s streams was remove the punctuation and put them into one chapter.  Otherwise, they are just like any other tweets you’d find floating around (minus the tinyurls, of course).  In some ways, the randomness of Molly is far more intense and more intuitive than Leopold’s–and in this way, makes Molly the true “twitter elite” of her day.

In the end, though, why is any of this important?  Yes, stream-of-consciousness in Joyce’s great novel fits into the mechanisms of the Twitter world (with varying degrees of success)

Joyce’s novel is loved today (and was revolutionary when it came out) in part because he was able to find a way to render into language the randomness and complexity of human minds as they go about their daily business.  Twitter brings this same concept to the masses by allowing anyone to post their random thoughts at will.  Granted, there’s a lot of self-censorship that goes into a Twitter post: people editing their stray thoughts down to those that would be best suited to a general audience.  But there certainly was plenty of censorship on Joyce’s part when he wrote the book (otherwise, it would have taken only a day, rather than a decade, to write).  Twitter and Ulysses also share in common things like advertising, references to pop culture, jokes, random stories, flame wars, hallucinations, parody, eyewitness events, and anything else you’ll find in the everyday conversations of human beings.  In the end, then, that’s what matters: that just as Joyce’s novel is a snapshot of the lives of Dubliners on a June day in 1904, so too is Twitter a snapshot of how individuals (both famous and unknown) live and breathe and think and work in our own time.

Photo of my copy of Joyce's Ulysses, opened to page 45

Yes, Bloom was indeed a product of social networking.  Here, verbatim, are Leopold Bloom’s “tweets” from page 45 of James Joyce’s Ulysses:

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right.  She didn’t like her plate full.  Right.

Cup of tea soon.  Good.  Mouth dry.

Just how she stalks over my writingtable.  Prr.  Scratch my head.  Prr.

Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes.

They call them stupid.  They understand what we say better than we understand them.  She understands all she wants to.

Vindictive too.  Cruel.  Her nature.

Curious mice never squeal.  Seem to like it.  Wonder what I look like to her.  Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

[One note: Yes, I cheated on the last three; they're part of the same stream, but I figured Lbloom (or whatever his handle would have been) would have cut it up into three tweets as well.]

Joyce playing piano

I’m working on the assumption that Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses was the inspiration for Twitter (if not in reality at least in theory). Read Ulysses, read the stream of consciousness rambles that Bloom spews out in that novel, and you’ll notice that his thought are short and compact yet very complex–just like twitter messages.

Tweets, as they are called, are limited to 140 characters in length. Why 140? This is the explanation at the Twitter website:

It also just so happens that 140 characters is the perfect length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters per message. We reserve 20 characters for people’s names, and the other 140 are all yours!

Bloom’s thoughts seem to follow along these rules. Bloom was also really into the latest technologies of his time and would, no doubt, be a regular rambler on twitter if he were walking around Dublin circa 2009 (a regular Stephen Fry or Ashton Kutcher). So it makes sense to see Bloom as a big twitter fan.

I’ll say more about this once I go back into my copy of Ulysses and dig around for good “tweets.” Who knows–perhaps there’s an essay here.

Final thought: Molly Bloom, unlike Leopold, would HATE Twitter. She’d need her own blog.