Dear Navigator

Welcome on board of the Counterblast!

It is powered by the most powerful kind of energy ever made available to mankind: imagination.

You will be the captain of it and we are going to sail the sea of electricity as Ulysses did back in the Homer days and Joyce did in the 20's emulating Homer.

This ship has a very special design. It has a flight engineer that is very peculiar, because he developed his own set of maps and orienting devices to explore the sea of electricity. This flight engineer is Marshall McLuhan, that recently, last June 21, 2011 was to be 100 years old, if he were alive. McLuhan devised an unique and original form of writing his texts, to explain his ideas, that is generally known as mosaic style, that will be also used in this trip but, since McLuhan shared with Joyce a taste for obscurity, we will do this with some use of standard procedures to make ourselves understood preferably in the least difficult way. McLuhan held that under this sea of electricity, if you "came down to earth" at the bottom of it, there was "The Gutenberg Galaxy" that provided support to its existence and in one of these peculiar things of imagination, his notions about eletricity were a sort of revelation of a negative picture laid there. The revelation, according to him, is obtainned by the extensions of our senses that, in another peculiar things of imagination, is one of the many dimensions electricity has. Since the Counterblast can also be turned in to a submarine and a tunnel boring machine we can discover how all that took place.

This ship can travel as it looks like, what will become handy if we want to have a feeling what was like in Homer days. It can also travels as any kind of ship and obviously it can also travel in time, what will be also very useful, for instance, if we want to be in Dublin in June 16, 1904.

Since it moves instantly, distance and time, which is really a variable of such, is no problem. We can go anywhere, anytime, any moment.

As matter of fact, McLuhan foresaw all of it some 30 years before it took the shape we are so familiar with.

Even tough we can take a trip literally anywhere, we decide to head to one of the most difficult ones to go to: Ulysses of James Joyce. This decision had a very simple reason: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Using methods, tools, thinking models, amplifying devices that McLuhan saw so clearly, we will be able to understand and enjoy what Joyce devised. In doing so, we will also acquire a new perspective on literature, as good, as large and as importante as Joyce did. This is a bold statement but is about time somebody do it. Conceptual ideas about literature (and about media) tend to become unscrutable, arcane, cryptic, deep, enigmatic, impenetrable, mysterious, mystic, occult, uncanny. McLuhan, on the other hand, has the gift of making things of communication, including literature accessible, clear, nonambiguous, obvious, plain, unambiguous, unequivocal. And those who consider that that he lacked the scientific evidence to support his claims, are those who like things unnscrutable. James Joyce was a very complicated fellow and even until today there is not quite an agreement on what exactly he really meant. Under McLuhan we can come to exactly what he meant. One of the reasons of this trip is exactly that: to judge by ourselves what Joyce meant, without going to the chores and troubles of removing the obstacles that Joyce took the care to put at the entrance gate of his world.

And give Marshall McLuhan his due respect recognizing him for what he is: one of the greatest literary minds ever existed!

Ulysses will be a case study under McLuhan scrutiny style and the most consecrated and usual forms of understanding Joyce's works. So we can compare. This trip has also an agenda of placing McLuhan on top at the Olympus of the foremost minds that are behind creations that nowadays are generally placed under the label literature. As you might imagine, this Olympus of demi gods are not inhabited only by authors, but are also inhabited by persons that some way or somehow had something of importance or relevance to do with this kind of endeavour. McLuhan, although an author himself, has a very special place in bringing to the comprehension of us mediocre mortals, what happens in the obscure process of going through a creation of literature such as Ulysses of James Joyce under the new possibilities that the computer has brought us.

He has a unique line or reasoning because he give us all the details of how literature become the way it is and outlines all the new ways that is going to shape it, i.e., is shaping it right now.

Since we do not have the gift of an encyclopedic mind as Joyce and McLuhan had, we will rely heavily in this wonder of technology, the computer, that will enable us to follow them without trouble.

Last but not least! In these days of globalization, we belong to a group of societies that speak different languages, but intellectually share a lot in common. Specially due to the historical fact that America, and I mean all three of them, has a lot of influence from Europe. I hope it will not hurt anybody's feelings, but for our purposes, we will stick to the following languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian, French an German, if for no other reason, they share a very interesting story about the translation (or editing) of James Joyce.

When completed, since this is a research project, In other words, you can travel this trip in any of these languages and for the moment, it is shown only limitedly to see how it will work.

Please, don't forget

Good luck!

Please help yourself to the departure gate.