Let a Thousand Blooms Flower . . .

Bloomsday 2005, and, by the hair of its chinny-chin-chin, James Joyce's Ulysses is public domain in the United States. Here's Project Gutenberg's edition, free for the asking. Download it, and make your computer read it. At least one of the Apple built-in voices has a vaguely Celtic accent (as befits a MAC OS computer).

You might think it's time to get to work on a spectacular digital edition of this public domain work. You wouldn't be the first to think this. Michael Groden thought so, too. And he secured a lot of support. And a lot of grants. And now, (no) thanks to the Joyce estate, that work, planned for the web, is suspended.

If you were the heirs and assigns responsible for maintaining the reputation of a notoriously difficult-to-read masterpiece, wouldn't you see to it that Leopold Bloom's journey through Dublin was repeated and discussed throughout the World Wide Web. Wouldn't each of these websites, produced at no out-of-pocket cost to you, act as a big billboard saying "buy the book?" Wouldn't you recognize that most readers, by page 623 or so, would tire of reading Joyce's brilliant words on screen and stumble into the local purveyor of codexes?

Wouldn't you?

Say it: yes I said yes I will Yes.