It is eight in the morning at the Martello tower in Sandycove. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed. Sometimes it greets me with a sentence whose origin and significance I know with the same certainty that I know my name. Waking up, sleepy and displeased, I roll over to see what it has been up to during the night. My relationship with UlyssesReader is intense and, I suspect, typical.
Then it begins again, arranging, in its mechanical way, the tale of a young Dubliner named Stephen Dedalus and an older one named Leopold Bloom, brought together in a hospital, a brothel, a cabmen’s shelter, and, finally, the kitchen of Bloom’s home-on June 16, 1904, “an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents.” When UlyssesReader reaches the end, it presents the novel’s historic signature, “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921,” intact, like a bone fished out of the throat. Characters are dismembered into bellies, breasts, and bottoms. The novel’s eighteen episodes, each contrived according to an elaborate scheme of correspondences-Homeric parallels, hours of the day, organs of the body-are torn asunder. For nine years, UlyssesReader has consumed the novel’s inner parts with relish, only to spit them out at a rate of one tweet every ten minutes. The Twitter account UlyssesReader is what programmers call a “corpus-fed bot.” The corpus on which it feeds is James Joyce’s modernist epic, “ Ulysses,” which was published a hundred years ago this month. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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