I heard that to read Joyce's Ulysses on a phone was blasphemous, so I had to do it.
I get it now--the Irish are the Chicanos of Britain. All them linguistic shenanigans. I probably wouldn’t have dreamed of the stuff I pulled in High Aztech and Cortez on Jupiter if it wasn’t for good old James Joyce. Civilization ain't nothing but colliding, fighting, fucking streams of consciousness. Inverting Homer’s Odyssey–inverting the space from outer to inner–is a good way to demonstrate it.
And the obscenity gets shattered with one hot lick for man, one giant, nasty slurp for literature, as it broke the legal obscenity barrier with help of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
Why aren’t they included in our celebrations of banned books? Dare I mention the Marquis de Sade? Imagine cute teen hipsters wearing FREE DE SADE T-shirts . . .
Ah, my kind of fun.
I finished it in the waiting room while my wife was getting a wisdom tooth yanked. While I drove her home she was still high on the drugs and grilled me like a stoned lit professor. That was fun too.
Would it also be blasphemous to say that I got into Joyce by way of science fiction? Some of you are picking their jaws off the floor, but I’m probably not the only one, being a New Wave baby, coming of age in the early Seventies, reading things like Philip José Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Sage and Richard Lupoff’s With the Bentfin Boomer Boys in Little Old New Alabama in the first two Dangerous Visions volumes. There was also Brain W. Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head, Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy, and probably others that I don’t remember. A whole fricking lost subgenre waiting to be unearthed and explored.
And in a Feliniesque sequence written before Federico was born, Ulysses actually does get kinda sci-fi:
All you students and academics in need of ideas feel free to plunder. I’m probably not going to do anything with it. I don’t need it. I’m a fountain of ideas.
Fountain of ideas. Stream of consciousness . . . Slurp . . . Hmm . . .
Are we blasphemous enough yet?
Back when I was a wage slave for Borders Book Music & Cafe (for you younger folks, it was a big box bookstore, kinda like Barnes & Noble, but more pretension), the phone rang. I answered like a proper corporate android, and a gentleman inquired, “Are you doing anything for Bloomsday?”
“Uh . . . not really,” I answered, knocked back into human mode.
“Harumph. Well, do you know perhaps of a local literary guild that would be doing something?”
Did he know that we were in Phoenix, Arizona? He might as well be asking for a society dedicated to hunting penguins, mermaids, and/or unicorns.
Poor fellow. I wonder what happened to him?
What might he think of these musings?
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