It is often said that enough monkeys typing for a sufficient period of time will produce the works of William Shakespeare. I sometimes wonder if they would produce the work of James Joyce first.

People have then gone on to compare these monkeys to bloggers and noted that the work of the blogosphere is nothing like to work of Shakespeare. However, if you look closely enough, you might be able to find hints of Joyce.

It has been over twenty years since I lived on a sailboat in the Hudson River next to New York City and read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I don’t remember the details all that well, but one part has stayed with me. It was Judge Woolsey’s ruling on lifting the ban on Ulysses. There was this wonderful section that goes:

Joyce has attempted -- it seems to me, with astonishing success -- to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions.

Ever since reading that, I have pondered the plastic palimpsest. These days, I’ve wondered about it in online writing, in the political blogs, and in the blogs that I find on a typical day wandering around, not Dublin, but the Blogosphere.

My cyberwanderings have shifted over the years. For a while, I primarily used BlogExplosion and related sites as a means of strolling from one blog to the next. Then, there was a period when I followed the recent readers as enumerated by sites like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog. Now, when an interesting tweet shows up on Twitter, I follow the link. I still use these sites from time to time, but currently my wanderings are directed most substantially by EntreCard.

I look at sites of people who have dropped cards on me. I look at the most popular sites; those that are most popular overall, and those that are most popular in categories that interest me. I look the sites of the most prolific droppers; those who have dropped many cards on me, as well as those that have dropped many cards on others who list their top droppers. I look at sites where I am running, or have recently run advertisements, paying particular attention to those sites where my advertisements have been most successful. I look at sites that have chosen to run ads on my blog. From all of these sites, I follow the advertisements to other sites and before I know it, I have visited my daily allotment of three hundred sites.

All of this forms a plastic palimpsest which I would love to capture. June 16th is Bloomsday, the day that Leopold Bloom wandered the city of Dublin. Can I capture any of my fleeting impressions and weave them into an interesting story? Perhaps not of Odyssean or Joycean stature, but interesting nonetheless?

It is already Bloomsday in Ireland as well as much of the EntreCard world. For me, Bloomsday doesn’t technically start for an hour, and then there are the long hours of the night, so I shall sleep and see what I can write in the morning.