Interactive James Joyce

(with thanks to P.D.Q. Bach)

I’ve heard amazing, wonderful things about the Kindle. Even bibliophiles seem to love Kindle. I think I would love to have one (if Amazon wants to send me a free one, I would love to blog about its fantastic features…hint, hint to Amazon). But what would clinch the Kindle for me is if they had an interactive James Joyce feature. With apologies to my Irish friends, it seems to me that Joyce’s prose, “sound well enough, but don’t actually mean anything.” So, I got this idea of an interactive James Joyce feature. You would call up a book, say A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (APAYM). Then a menu of choices would appear. For example: If you would like to read APAYM where every pronoun actually had an antecedent, press one. If you would like to figure out who the real protagonist is, press two. If you would like to read the novel with a commentary by an impecunious grad student hoping to finish his dissertation, press three. If you would like to read APAYM with every tenth word removed and put together as a short story at the end of the novel, press four. If you would like to read APAYM as Joyce would have written it had he been on anti-psychotic drugs, press five. And finally, if you would rather have APAYM deleted and replaced by Jane Austen’s Persuasion, press six.

Yep, that would do it for me. And I have no doubt that Kindles would sell like hotcakes, especially among undergraduate English majors.