Breakfast with Ulysses refers to a series of projects, most centrally one involving experimental poetry, that is, free verse compiled from phrases found on dictionary pages.¹ In addition to the dictionary pages themselves (which I call my Breakfast Book) and their reproductions in print or online, the project series has produced songs, illustrations, and even a daily video series featuring readings of the poems and other essays. (That was in 1991, though today it might be recognized as a video blog.) Allow me to share this introduction to the Oxford poems, written by Marie-Claire:

The Webster and Oxford projects were both abandoned after a spell (as discussed in the Preface), but the Random House project continues, neglected for over six years but resumed for any number of reasons, most immediately because of the current [Fall, 2009] exhibit at the Lilly Library, “The Remarkable Characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” Specifically, the exhibit features an original issue of The Strand (vol. 2, number 8, August, 1891), open to the first pages (pp. 190–191) of the story of “The Red-Headed League.” While boasting a picture of Mr. Jabez Wilson, alas the display does not reveal the crucial details regarding his encyclopedia transcription, namely those in which Wilson reports that he “had written about Abbots and Archery and Armour and Architecture and Attica.”² That, of course, is work similar not only to the Breakfast writing work generally but especially to that of the Oxford project, which systematically exhausted Letter A³ and which simultaneously occasioned the Breakfast video series (and the related piece Wedding Song)—work, like Wilson’s, situated in the encyclopedia, Letter A. Perhaps also contributing to the revival, I found a grocer who sells tea biscuits—a staple when having breakfast with Ulysses!

¹ A note on my use of the Dictionary: Tom Phillips (1980) writes on the origins of his style that he “had played with the ‘cut-up’ technique” of William Burroughs (1965) and came to apply his own “devices” to Mallock’s A Human Document. On Burroughs’ technique, Brian Eno (1986, cited in Tamm, 1995, p. 42) reflects that “sure, ‘cut-ups’ can be fascinating, but it does matter what the input is,” and indeed, regarding his own work, Phillips remarks on the “inexhaustability” of Mallock’s fiction, its vocabulary and range of reference. As discussed in the Preface, it was Phillips’ work that prompted my own, shortly after I received his first edition by mail from England.
 
Though making altered books is popular, I was until recently [August, 2010] unaware of any other treatment of a dictionary. In fact, however, the 1982 altered book col.umns by Doris Cross (not the cookbook author!) involves a dictionary and similar technique, but I have seen only a few pages, and information is scarce. Indeed, the most widely cited discussion of Cross’ work, Karl Kempton’s introduction in Kaldron 16, includes little factual information about the artist. Therefore, in his 2004 dbpq discussion of col.umns, Geof Huth wonders, “Who knows how many books Cross produced or what her full oeuvre is.” Still, Bob Grumman also reviewed the book, and in his 2006 commentary on his Factsheet Five contributions (including a contemporaneous review of Kaldron 16), Grumman offers that “Doris Cross died in her eighties.” He also mentions the 1989 altered dictionary by Crag Hill, but I found little similarity between that work and mine. Admittedly, mine is not an art book like those of Phillips and Cross, but (to quote from the Preface) “I regard as authentic the versions of the poems hand-drawn on the pages”; in mine like theirs, the page is worked in search of something. Thus Cross’ dictionary treatment predates my own, though I consider my original, related work to be also integral to the project.
 
[Cross, D. (1982). col.umns. San Francisco: Trike. (A review of Kaldron 16 in the contemporaneous issue of Umbrella [page 63] lists Trike as located at 77 23^rd Ave., San Francisco, CA 94121, but a Google Maps drive-by viewing of the building shows no sign of the publisher. I even wonder when Kaldron 16 was published: Grumman states, “1991 or 1992,” but the Umbrella issue suggests 1982.)]
[Phillips, T. (1980). Notes on A Humument. Appendix to A Humument. London: Thames and Hudson. (A revised version is available as an online introduction.)]
[Tamm, E. (1995). Brian Eno: His music and the vertical color of sound. New York: Da Capo Press. (The author has made available the 1988 version, in which this quotation appears on page 35.)]

² While recently [Christmas, 2009] conducting a literature review regarding the extent of “sensory imagery” occasioned by various words, I happened across Allan Paivio’s early work, where, in one article, he offers a list of words and their imagery values. You may enjoy the pages listing words beginning with the letter A, linked below. Though not among the words included, I reckon that archery and armour would score higher than architecture.
 
[Paivio, A., Yuille, J. C. & Madigan, S. A. (1968). Concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(1, Pt. 2), 1–25. (Download Appendix, pp. 10–11.)]

³ I anticipate reading the account by author Ammon Shea of his reading through the O.E.D., though he tried to read it properly, which is counter to the manner employed for these projects, of course.
 
[Shea, A. (2008). Reading the OED. New York: Perigree/Penguin. (Visit the publisher’s page.)]