I'm intrigued and delighted by Cnet's spot of this new app, "He liked thick word soup", which allows the user to manipulate and "literally wrestle" with the text of Ulysses. Look: it's so pretty.
"Some apps claim to increase your reading speed. We propose precisely the opposite: How about reading Ulysses … with your fingers?" writes Tel Aviv-based designer and programmer Ariel Malka on his website, Chronotext, which documents "a growing collection of software experiments exploring the relation between text, space and time". (I am not sure quite what that means but I want to know more.)
"Through four episodes of increasing difficulty, your challenge is to wrestle with the text of James Joyce's monumental work, both mentally and physically," says Malka. "By the end of your odyssey, you will have read up to four pages and 100 sentences chosen from throughout the novel. Your fingers' dexterity will have increased by an exponential factor, and your point of view on modernist literature and experimental apps will have changed forever."
You can see what happens in Malka's video, if you don't want to try it out for yourself, but do. It's strangely addictive, as you untangle sentences – "from the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow … " etc – and match them with a line from the book.
Malka chose Ulysses for his experiment, he writes, because it is "not intended to provide an ordinary reading experience" – James Joyce himself said that he'd "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries".
I'm not entirely sure – other than exploring the relation between text, space and time, of course – of the purpose of this app, but I like it, and so does Cnet. "The idea, Malka hopes, is that people will become mesmerised by the slowness of the experience and solving the puzzles. There's certainly a satisfying zen quality to it, from unravelling the threads to the slurping sound of the words being reabsorbed," writes Michelle Starr.
It's a novel way of marking 16 June, anyway, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the Chronotext site, to see where Malka's explorations take him next.
