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Drones, cannons, and guns are a far cry from silence, exile, and cunning, but that’s what you’ll find aboard the Irish Naval Service’s new “offshore patrol vessel,” the Long Eireannach James Joyce.  The 300-foot vessel is equipped with twin diesel engines, cannons and machine guns of every size, orbiter drones, and mini-submarines.  It has been commissioned to pair with the L. E. Samuel Beckett, a nearly identical ship, to patrol 158,000 square miles of Ireland’s “exclusive economic zone” extending West into the Atlantic and East toward Great Britain.  Although Leopold Bloom likely would have been fascinated by such details, it still seems odd that Joyce’s name is now attached to a piece of military equipment used to secure national boundaries.  Popular Science has more details on the ship’s equipage and technology.

As part of a project that began 30 years ago, called The Complete Ulysses, The Radio Foundation, Inc. is releasing a full recording of Ulysses.  Each chapter will be read by a notable actress or actor, including Alec Baldwin, John Lithgow, Jerry Stiller, Garrison Keillor, Anne Meara, Wallace Shawn, Bob Dishy, Anne Enright, Bob Odenkirk, poet Paul Muldoon, and Caraid O’Brien as Molly Bloom.  Audio files of the readings will be available in a variety of formats, and when all episodes are complete, they will be available as a set on compact disk.  The Complete Ulysses has its roots in several radio broadcast marathon readings beginning in 1981 and will total around 30 hours of reading.  For a more complete history of the project and to access the recordings, follow this link.

Joyce is among the foremost pioneers of the English language.  Vanity Fair has generated a quiz to compare Joyce’s work with a more recent language innovator, Sarah Palin.  Follow this link to take the quiz and see if you can differentiate the Irish modernist’s writing from the former Alaskan governor’s

After nearly a century of artistic activity, prolific sculptor, Milton Hebald, passed away on January 5, 2015 at an assisted living facility in West Hollywood.  Hebald was the artist who created the famous sculpture of Joyce thinking and holding a book at his grave in Zurich, Switzerland.  He was also the artist behind a number of public sculptures primarily in New York and Los Angeles, including the 12 Signs of the Zodiac sculpture that hung in the John F. Kennedy Airport and “Olympiade ‘84”, which depicts three women running outside the Stuart Ketchum Downtown YMCA in Los Angeles.   Follow this link for a more complete account of Hebald’s life and work.

A home in Dublin Joyce is thought to have lived in during his childhood has been listed for €500,000. The home is located at Number 17 Richmond Street North, of North Circular Road in Dublin. The house façade is red brick like so many of the homes he describes in his work and features three bedrooms, two reception rooms, and additional living, kitchen, and sleeping space. In the back, it features a garden, working area, and alley access. It has more recently been used as a boarding house, but the listing agent feels it could function as a single family home. Either way, the home, if Joyce did live there, serves as an interesting example of the types of domestic spaces Joyce envisioned when writing. Follow this link for more information.

A new Joyce app is another in a recent string of Joyce-related digital toys and tools. The app, called “He licked thick word soup,” allows users to physically manipulate chunks of text. The app wants to make the experience of Ulysses more tactile by requiring readers to move strings of text around with their fingers on a touch screen phone or tablet. The app consists of four increasingly difficult episodes. By the end of the process, the user will have untangled as many as 100 sentences from throughout Ulysses.The designer Ariel Malka, from Tel Aviv, chose Ulysses for his project because the novel represents a unique reading experience and because Joyce consciously filled it with puzzles. His app forces users to slow down and engage with the work by making them “literally wrestle” with the strings of text. “He licked thick word soup” is available from both Android and iOS app stores. Read more about the app here and here.