‘Maybe Freemasons aren’t devil worshipping lesbians’

   

Richard Brookhiser is an author and historian I have followed since his days long ago at National Review. And literally following today—on Twitter. Saturday, Freemasonry came up in conversation among some of his acquaintances, and you can appreciate how that word stands out, so I couldn’t help but notice. And then I saw strange comments.

Anyway, the tweeting about Freemasonry mentioned the appearance last Thursday of author John Dickie on The Rest Is History, a podcast I’m very pleased to have found. Dickie wrote the popular The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World. (I haven’t read it yet.)

It’s a fun interview. If you’ve been around a long time, you might not find it particularly informative, but I think it’s a fair discussion—with some humor too. (Ergo the title of this edition of The Magpie Mason. And catch the mentions of cricket.) Actually, I learned something about the Cathars.

     

‘The downfall of the Freemasons’

    

From Elon Musk a few minutes ago:

The replies are even better.

I guess a Twitter user fee is coming.

     

     

‘Bloomsday to go a Twitter on Thursday’

    

It deserves more attention in Freemasonry, but James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is the story of a man named Leopold Bloom, who happens to be a Freemason. The story is famous, albeit not widely loved, in literature because its plot is patterned after Homer’s Odyssey, the author uses unknown vocabulary and stream-of-consciousness narrative, and the novel was banned and burned for allegedly being obscene until a court decision rendered the novel safe for American readers.

But it is newsworthy this week because all the action in the story takes place on June 16, 1904, known in literary circles as Bloomsday, and this Thursday – Bloomsday 2011 – the entire text of the novel is supposed to be Tweeted on Twitter. I say supposed to be because I don’t know who will text the novel’s approximately 265,000 words, divided into that medium’s 140-characters-per-message format, or why.