I heard that to read Joyce's Ulysses on a phone wasblasphemous, so I had to do it. 

I get it now--the Irish are the Chicanos of Britain. All themlinguistic shenanigans. I probably wouldn’t have dreamed of the stuff I pulledin High Aztech and Cortez on Jupiter if it wasn’t for good oldJames Joyce. Civilization ain't nothing but colliding, fighting, fuckingstreams of consciousness. Inverting Homer’s Odyssey–inverting the spacefrom outer to inner–is a good way to demonstrate it.

And the obscenity gets shattered with one hot lick for man, onegiant, nasty slurp for literature, as it broke the legal obscenity barrier withhelp of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, andHenry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. 

Why aren’t they included in our celebrations of banned books? DareI mention the Marquis de Sade? Imagine cute teen hipsters wearing FREE DE SADET-shirts . .  .

Ah, my kind of fun.

I finished it in the waiting room while my wife was getting a wisdomtooth yanked. While I drove her home she was still high on the drugs andgrilled me like a stoned lit professor. That was fun too.

Would it also be blasphemous to say that I got into Joyce by way ofscience fiction? Some of you are picking their jaws off the floor, but I’mprobably not the only one, being a New Wave baby, coming of age in the earlySeventies, reading things like Philip José Farmer’s Riders of the PurpleSage and Richard Lupoff’s With the Bentfin Boomer Boys in Little Old NewAlabama in the first two Dangerous Visions volumes. There was alsoBrain W. Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head, Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren,Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy, and probablyothers that I don’t remember. A whole fricking lost subgenre waiting to beunearthed and explored. 

And in a Feliniesque sequence written before Federico was born, Ulyssesactually does get kinda sci-fi:

All you students and academics in need of ideas feel free toplunder. I’m probably not going to do anything with it. I don’t need it. I’m afountain 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 corporateandroid, 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 thatwould be doing something?”

Did he know that we were in Phoenix, Arizona? He might as well beasking for a society dedicated to hunting penguins, mermaids, and/orunicorns. 

Poor fellow. I wonder what happened to him? 

What might he think of these musings?

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