Tupac Shakur has officially replaced Shakespeare in Worchester, MA. Frances Arena made the swap because it’s “popular with the kids.” While this concerns us, we don’t think this is the sign of the apocalypse. That will happen when learning how to construct a cherry bomb replaces a week of chemistry.

Scott Bakker finished The Warrior Prophet, the second book in the Prince of Nothing trilogy, in a year. But not without defending the outline for his PhD dissertation, teaching pop culture and composition, and planning a wedding. He took one day off, but that was to see The Lord of the Rings.

Clearly, we need to finish up our three volume, 6,000 page biography on little-known Ashcan artist George Spackle, defending Mr. Spackle’s legacy and with a sizable portion pointing out the influence of He Came Home Depressed With A Sliced Banana in the Corner of His Mouth on contemporary comics, by the end of the year.

Nelson DeMille has lost a prenup battle with his ex-wife. What does this mean? No doubt more unreadable hack novels into the Costco piles to compensate for Nelson’s financial shortfall. Thank you, Mrs. DeMille.

After all the hoopla, Return of the Reluctant has managed to nab an exclusive excerpt from Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint:

Ben: You can’t be serious.

Jay: Oh yes, I am. I’m going to beat the shit out of the president. I’m going to bite off his earlobes and then pull his teeth out as slowly as possible. But only after I spend hours tickling him, just after I use his sternum as a footstool.

Ben: Isn’t that a bit much?

Jay: No. Not at all. He is President Bush and he is wrong.

Ben: Shouldn’t you spend your time dwelling upon the details of a stapler or contemplating how newspapers are disappearing in libraries? Or why not some nice memoir about John Updike?

Jay: No. You mistake me for a character in another book. The unseen god, whom we will not dare to mention here, for postmodernism is dead, along with irony. Besides, the god wrote those stories in simpler times. Today, in 2004, months before an election, I am Jay, the star of Checkpoint, and I wish to make a loud and resounding point.

Ben: But your god doesn’t even look like Lenny Bruce.

Jay: If Lenny Bruce would have lived longer, he would have lost his hair as quickly as our daddy.

Ben: We’re living in a work of fiction?

Jay: Yes.

Ben: No real threats?

Jay: No, but I dream of hitting the president’s knees with a golf club.

Ben: He’s a bad man, but I think someone could use a hug.

Jay: You just don’t understand. Follow the footnote that leads to the 4,000 word history of the chocolate chip cookie, and you will see all.

For the record, my TCCI is 54%. Teachout’s damn crazy is he thinks he’s going to get us to eat anchovies or give up James Joyce or pomo, let alone deny the kickass Rio Bravo or choose Steely Dan (!) over Elvis Costello.

In response to the TCCI, I present the Reluctant Index. Answer these questions:

• Edible underwear or underworn edibles?
• Trotsky or Guevara?
• Hunter S. Thompson or Dan Rather?
• Punk rock or bubble gum pop?
• Freezing to death or burning to death?
• 69 or 666?
• Being caught letting loose a fart in public or being caught letting loose a belch in public?
• Joe vs. the Volcano: yes or no?

Tally your score by counting left and right answers. Then divide the left score by three without using paper or a calculator. If the final count is more than 0.00005, you’re okay in my book.

Yet another one’s making the rounds. (seen via Scribbling Woman, who also cites where she got it from)
Continue reading →

Newsday: “In the interest of full disclosure, Cox adds, her boss, Choire Sicha, editor of the New York blog www.gawker .com, happens to be Peck’s roommate. That illustrates another problem with the book-reviewing culture: its incestuousness.”

If Choire doesn’t fess up some tales soon, I’ll be really disappointed. Where’s Grambo on this?

The new One Ring Zero album, As Smart As We Are, features lyrics from Margaret Atwood, A.M. Homes, Denis Johnson and Dave Eggers.

It’s bad enough that the BBC has reported that a compromise bill has been reached in the UK, which will allow parents to “smack their children with moderation.” But apparently Salman Rushdie is one of the people hoping for a total ban on smacking. Rushdie wants to “give children the personal freedom not to be hit.” Rushdie doesn’t seem to have any ideas, however, on how to enforce it.

Local author Michelle Richmond has an excerpt from her new book, Ocean Beach, in the Chronicle.

The Washington Post reports that John Dullaghan has not only tried to live a life similar to Bukowski’s, but managed to create a documentary out of his efforts. The film, entitled To All My Friends, is eight years in the making and about nine thousand tons of cheap red wine in the drinking. Dullaghan, however, didn’t go nearly as far as Barbet Schroeder, who (according to the DVD commentary to Barfly), threatened to cut his hand off if he was not able to make the film.

Melville House has produced several novellas with spicy colors and nifty typography. Do check ’em out. (And, yes, we were bribed. But that had nothing whatsoever to do with the current plug.)

Yes, we’re back, dammit. With a vengeance. Or at least enough unspent passion from last week to proffer some ball-busting posts (we hope). To close up shop on some minor issues:

• Spider-Man 2 is, without a doubt, the finest superhero movie since Tim Burton’s Batman. If you haven’t seen the depressing Fahenheit 9/11 yet, you might want to try Spidey 2 afterwards as a chaser. It’s the kind of movie that not only restores your faith in Hollywood blockbusters, but rejuvenates your faith in humanity. It deserves every penny of the colossal receipts that it’s picked up so far.
• I never thought I’d say this, but the latest issue of McSweeney’s is absolutely incredible. Apart from a stellar design and great paper, the issue is almost devoid of the irony-for-irony’s sake that’s become so nauseating to its detractors. And in fact, guest editor Chris Ware has included some solid underground artists amongst the major comic stars. Particular standouts include Ron Rege‘s “She Sometimes Switched,” a devastating story of a suicide bomber, Chris Ware’s touching “We’ll Sleep in My Own Room,” Richard McGuire’s frequently anthologized “ctrl,” a harrowing offering from Gilbert Hernandez (along with other Love and Rockets setpieces) on racism, and the gloriously juvenile offerings of Joe Matt. If I have any quibble, it’s the relentless plugs for Fantagraphics books. But then as Tom pointed out to me, if Fantagraphics did not exist, it would have to be invented. If you enjoy comics in any way, I highly recommend that you purchase it immediately.
• Stephen King’s latest installment in the Dark Tower series, Song of Susannah (perfectly released for a long weekend of comfort reads), is mostly disappointing. But like any heroin addict, I’ll probably purchase the seventh one. One can only hope that King actually goes to the trouble of explaining details more clearly in the last volume.
• Full-length reviews are in the works for The Coma (graciously sent by Penguin) and Aloft. More details to come.
• I’m hopelessly behind on email. So bear with me the next week.
• Terry has posted a goofy comparative index. We find ourselves torn between the two columns.
• Sarah has an interview with Michael Connelly up.

“No man is an island.” — John Donne

The original context can be found in Meditation XVII: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” I encountered Donne’s maxim regularly. Flipping through textbooks, listening to the stern and sibilant musings of teachers, randomly espying it or hearing it in novels and films. Never learning the whole until later, when I read Donne in my college days. The remainder proved to be just as important as the oft-quoted part. Those who popularized these five words, more enduring than any hep catchphrase germinating from the tube and polluting the fine fiber of conversation, had latched onto the “no man” part, implying personal responsibility if you dared to live the sheltered and solitary life. If you went at it alone, you were doomed, preceded with the dreaded “no,” which suggested a null or invalid existence. Then there was the island part. Was this a majestic oasis or a barren isle with merely a solitary tree providing coconut sustenance? When I first heard the phrase, I imagined a yin-yang symbol, the kind I saw recurrently on Town & Country surfboards. Perhaps the dot in the middle, whether jet or pure, was the island that Donne spoke of. Perhaps the answer was up to each individual. Touche.

Logically, if no man was an island, then no island was a man. Or if no man was an island, if no man, then island, or if not an island, then no man.

Q.E.D.: If examined literally, and discounting the Talking Kipwich Islands in the South Pacific (little regarded by oceanographers and cartographers alike), an island could not be a man. They were simply two different entities: one composed of sand and sputtering above sea level, sometimes with rabid castaways (i.e., men) writing HELP messages in the sand (often in vain, followed by tears and/or insanity); the other, the homo sapien (male and female, mind you; we live in the 21st century), a bipedal creature known to his head too much for occasionally magnificent and frequently foolish purposes.

Metaphorically and logically, however, no island was a man. Thus, the state of being an island implied something outside the realm of man’s knowledge and existence. Or his everday life.

The question my fourteen year old self had, however, was whether or not I was an island.

Seventh grade, poor, severe personality problems, unresolved trauma from natural father. Confined to room. For the best really. Several mistakes. Frequent bursts of tears. A period that exists largely as a expanse of duvatene, a handkerchief just before the execution squad. Except I did not die. I was shot several times, but, like Rasputin, I would not die. Years later, I would find myself living and refuse to hate the people who put me there.

Abdication of responsibility. Yes, don’t fix him, let him rot and sort out his own problems. Pretending, disguising the deep hurt. A Samsung black-and-white television set for company that only received the local PBS station. Comics too. Strips, not comic books. Working out a system to reclaim the neighbors’ back issue newspapers and being kept sane by Bloom County and MAD Magazine. Ripping shreds of wallpaper to see what was beneath and finding train patterns. (What would you do?) I liked trains. Too much, it turned out. Welts from a belt, from the second man my mother married. He threw me out of the house with only a threadbare blue blanket for company. I shivered in a car shelter on a cold night in an apartment complex for hours before trying to sneak back to the house, only to be smacked in the face by this man with the mustache and the horrible rage. Just like Dad No. 1. Somehow, I was let back in. My mother looked the other way.

But I would be let out of my bedroom jail for school and to go to the library. They tried to turn me into an island before I was a man. But in the library, oh, I found friends. Books, glorious books. Whatever they had. They even let me work the microfilm machine and I’d dig up articles on this Reagan guy, whose smile I did not trust. Doonesbury, Erma Bombeck, James Thurber, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, rereading the obligatory Judy Blume and Mary Rodgers, strange compilations of pop culture and fads, even politics and history. There was pleasure in the books, but the pain was so overwhelming that I could not concentrate on the books for several years in high school. But I returned. Defiantly. And never looked back.

The library demonstrated that I was not an island. I was a piece of its multi-floored continent and I’d get a smile of encouragement from the librarians. This might be one reason I find librarians so sexy.

They could tell me otherwise. But with the books and the records and the photocopies of articles I’d hide up my T-shirt (thanks to the one librarian who saw this young and able scholar and slid dimes across the counter, no questions asked), and the movie ads I’d cut and tape to the walls, I knew that there was an identity which extended beyond the shabby trappings. Just an undiscovered country. Like Freedonia.

I lived to tell the tale. That’s the part that matters.

He went through the same treatment. A troubled personality. Relentless verbal abuse. And the sad part is that I was an accomplice. But my stepbrother (Marriage No. 3) still found solace in me, even when we nicknamed him “Nyuck Nyuck.” We rallied around a NES, zapping bad guys and defeating minibosses. Sometimes, we’d team up and we’d get along. Strange how a side-scroller could forge a bond. Stranger still was how much time we devoted to beating a game.

It didn’t last. Near the end, he was relegated to a tent purchased from an army surplus store in the backyard. My mother was afraid of him. Or, more specifically, like me, she wouldn’t give him the chance. That was the real reason he was sent away.

But he ended up joining the Army. In the days when military involvement and casualties were unthinkable. Turned out to be a decent guy with a constant smile on his face. Ended up being Soldier of the Year. He forgave us all. Well before I was able to confront my own personal demons. I was proud of him. Today, this man, who found solace in a system when his family refused to give him help, now finds himself about to be shipped to Iraq. His wife’s expecting. And it scares the bejesus out of me. I don’t want him to end up dead. I don’t want him to die for something stupid.

The great irony is that the Army provided him with the ineluctable proof that he was not an island, that his life mattered, and that his existence involved decency and honor. But the Viagra-hardened big boys have decided that these men, individually, are islands. To be kept away from public consumption, to be disregarded, to be dishonored, to be ordered to do god knows what.

He could turn out to be just another fresh face or another statistic. An inconsequential mark on an unseen blotter.

I don’t want to feel angry, but if my stepbrother goes down, then there will be hell to pay. I’ll become outright seditious. I’ll call upon everyone to pay attention to that clause in the Declaration of Independence that everyone so conveniently overlooked the other day:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (emphasis added)

I don’t feel safe and I’m sure as hell not happy about my stepbrother. But there’s one thing I do know: No man is a goddam island.

To the foolish fop who dared to defend my honor at Maud’s, let it be known that I am a proud crank, a consummate dunce, and run such a fever that neither a team of doctors nor infinite cases of quinine can stop me from babbling like a raving loon. There’s no honor denying these silly misinterpretations. I get enough of the jejune (nod to Birnbaum) PC shit when I visit Berkeley. So please: I urge all able Reluctant readers to flurry epithets posthaste!

Back to my temporary Bastille.

Exhibit: Kirn’s review of David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion.

Number of words in review: 1,399.
Number of words quoted from book in review: 186
Percentage of quoted excerpts as part of review: 13%
Approximate fair use percentage under dispute in the infamous Gerald Ford/Nation dust-up: 13.3%
Number of times “anxious” or “anxiety” is mentioned: 2.
Number of parenthetical asides: 6
Number of onerous Tom Swify adverbs (not counting quotes): 17
Number of prefix-laden non-words: 7 (“maladapts,” “decontextualized,” “hyperfocused,” “microtextures,” “superbrain,””hyperarticulate,” “overstimulated”)
The Pain Reliver Commercial Homage Award: “Data-dazed. Cybernetic. Overstimulated.”

Back to hiatus.

Due to life circumstances, we’re pretty much done here until the 4th. We’re also still behind on our email. So apologies to all on that score. We’ll get back to all of you when the DSL kicks in at the new place. (In fact, we’ve already started on the replies.) In the meantime, check out this latest John Barth interview and feel free to visit some of the fine folks on the left.

[UPDATE: And before I poof away completely for a week or so, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Terry’s self-reflective essay on living day(s) with nothing to do, an existential state that the Reluctant hungers for, but that seems a far off day to dream about.]

[ANOTHER UPDATE: Since people apparently want to know, my take on Fahrenheit 9/11 is this: It doesn’t present a solution. If you’ve been following the news, it doesn’t present much in the way of new information. The marine recruiters are creepy. The singular trooper governing Oregon is sad. It makes great satirical use of found footage, but if it’s meant to serve as agitprop, then why doesn’t the film have the conviction to lobby for Kerry? I found the story of the conservative Democrat who lost her son to be heartbreaking, but I felt as if this interesting side story was lost within Moore’s deliberate pandering. Three stars. Joe Bob says check it out, regardless.]

…but Maud’s story is up at Swink.

Wired: “The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people do not have a constitutional right to refuse to tell police their names. The 5-4 decision frees the government to arrest and punish people who won’t cooperate by revealing their identity.”

The Guardian: “Detainees held in Afghanistan by American troops have been routinely tortured and humiliated as part of the interrogation process, in the same way as those in Iraq, a Guardian investigation has found. Five detainees have died in custody, three of them in suspicious circumstances, and survivors have told stories of beatings, strippings, hoodings and sleep deprivation.”

In light of moving and all, I wasn’t able to attend the California Book Awards. But now I’m regretting it. Jeff points out that the awards ceremony turned nasty:

“His view is that art is elitist. He’s wrong.”

At this, one San Francisco author stormed out, causing a slight breeze. (Word spread quickly that she is a friend of King’s, and they are both members of the all-author rock band, the Rock-Bottom Remainders.)

King Wenclas has responded to the criticisms hurled his way. He writes (in the first of two comments):

Well, I’m going to defend my organization and myself. It’s called free expression. There is nothing wrong with debate. It’s healthy for literature. Before the ULA arrived on the scene there was too little of it.

The truth is that literature is marginalized in this culture, because for much of its recent history it’s been the property of stuffy professors genteely drinking tea in faculty rooms. (The tea to keep the enervated creatures from nodding off.) Contention is healthy– even when it’s over-the-top, the way the ULA does it. A little noise might remind the general culture that literature isn’t completely dead.

At the same time we’ve done way more than anybody else to expose genuine corruption in the literary world, while everyone else has preferred to remain quiet. Or does anyone believe that Mr. Moody, mentioned on this thread, who lives on Fishers Island, really should be receiving so many financial grants? We circulated our Protest about that to 300 literary people and not one would sign it. (40 zinesters did.) What does that tell you?

Are we really picking on him? We, a rag-tag group of zine writers, and he sitting at the center of many of the major centers of cultural power (PEN, Young Lions, NEA, major magazines, etc.)

My point about Peck is that in his review about Moody he ignored any main issues, giving readers smoke without the fire. And yes, the ULA has been effective in circulating our message (including numerous write-ups in Page Six) so that Peck (who taught at the New School at the time we were making noise; a school where much of the writing faculty are Moody’s friends) and Sven Birkerts could hardly not be aware of us, and the contention we generated.

I don’t think this is a difficult issue to understand. Birkerts writes an essay about contention in the literary world. Much of said contention was raised by the ULA. (Why The Believer covered us in one of their early articles– and put it at the front of the issue. Then later ASKED us to submit a letter to them to continue the matter.) Dave Eggers and Jon Franzen were certainly aware of us; witness February’s Amazon fiasco. It’s not a case where someone is inventing the telephone in America while someone is inventing it in France. In this case the telephone was already invented and operating, coming through loud and clear.

Either Sven Birkerts intentionally left us out of the story, or he’s clueless about what’s happening in the lit world. That’s all.

Am I too vociferous in making these remarks? Should I soften them, water them down, so they’re acceptable to the Princess-and-the-Pea denizens of the literary world? Should we return to before, “where never is heard, a discouraging word”?

I don’t think so.

First off, I thank Wenclas for his fairly civil response (at least with the first comment), which is always a good place to start when having a discussion.

Certainly, I can agree with the sentiment that quality literature is often outside the grasp of the commonweal. The question is whether getting in everyone’s faces about the problem is the right way to elicit awareness. We’re talking books here, after all, not foreign policy. I have a significant problem with where the ULA’s crosshairs are targeted. Rick Moody may very well be an overrated writer or “the worst writer of his generation,” but it’s the industry that publishes his books. It’s the educational system that determines literary standards and, as a result, has a formidable influence in forging literary tastes. Factor in teachers tied to mandatory reading lists of dead white guys, dingbat mandatory standards, and inner city school libraries reduced to ancient crumbling texts housed in asbestos-laden cinder blocks, and you have an atmosphere that’s about as nuturing to reading as a certified massage therapist bluntly pummeling his client with a gunrack between rubs. Consider, for example, the case of Philadelphia, a state where federal funding has not been allocated to school libraries since 1976. Or, for that matter, how Tennessee’s blurry state guidelines have allowed school libraries to remain out-of-date and far from eclectic.

The unilateral assumption here is that authors are to blame for this predicament. But that’s only part of the problem. Without even scratching the surface, one would have to uproot the whole of American life to (a) promote reading in a way that doesn’t bore the pants off the next generation, (b) encourage the current generations to develop their own literary sensibilities, and (c) maintain a publishing equilibrium whereby “real” literature (still, a curiously nebulous definition from the ULA) is published hand-in-hand with tales from the privileged. The idealist in me would like to believe there are answers to these problems, but any pragmatic-minded person can agree that they certainly won’t be had overnight. Perhaps if ideas and solutions were bandied about with the confrontational hijinks, the 300 literary figures might have signed the petition. (In sifting through the ULA’s site, I was unable to find any copy of this purported petition or even an detailed platform of the ULA’s position, save through the four general points seen on the main page. Even the Black Panthers had a platform. Call me crazy, but it seems very counter-productive for any movement to disrupt without having a clear-cut set of goals and an agenda available for the people whom it wishes to convert. What we do find, however, is a bunch of hoodlums flipping us the bird.)

And while the publishing industry certainly is problematic, without specific examples, the “genuine corruption in the literary world” sounds like one of Nixon’s paranoid fantasy, particularly since it comes graced with the implication that the ULA represent the only group of rabble-rousers. Has Wenclas not observed some of the stuff that the literary blogs have uncovered in the past few months? Ron and Mark questioning the Book Babes’ limited definitions of publishing on CSPAN? The Zoo Press scandal uncovered by Laila? The Academy of Art student expulsion scandal reported here and at Neil Gaiman’s? Au contraire, Wenclas. There are more than enough people who care about literature out there, many with the same goals and feelings, all putting in the work that the New York Times Book Review should be committing their considerable resources to. The difference is that they aren’t out there demonizing their targets. They’re collecting information and trying to report it as fairly and accurately as possible.

Furthermore, as I suggested in my previous post, ideas are far from exclusive. Any professional writer knows this. It’s about how one articulates and argues the idea. That’s what’s going to create the impression in the reader’s mind. But to insist that a writer is “clueless” because he decides to ignore the opinions of others, let alone fail to recognize all 6,000 takes on the same idea in a 2,000 word essay, is unreasonable and baseless. A critic like Birkets prioritizes what s/he deems the most valuable offerings of the bunch.

And if literature is the territory of the rich and should be damned accordingly, then where do we place the noble gesture of Jonathan Saffran-Foer, who announced on these pages that he had given back his award back to PEN? By almost any assessment, that’s a magnificent gesture — one overlooked by the ULA, despite the fact that the ULA’s very antics may have helped in some small way to make authors aware of the disparity between the starving novelist barely getting by and the bestseller making a fortune.

Again, as I said in my previous post, I’m not completely damning the ULA. I’m just offering some possibilities why the ULA may not be getting the press it desires. Personally, I find it infinitely tragic that the ULA’s basic message (which I agree with) is dwarfed by its inability to articulate, its frequent Manichean damnations of writers, and its recurrent incivility.

In a bid to avoid the real purpose of this blog, we decided to catch the wave and try harder to cater to our readers. While we decided what it was you wanted, figuring out what good things to bring into your mailbox and calculating what you might be interested in buying, we felt sort of hollow giving into this commercial impulse. Therefore, we leave others to maintain the subterfuge.

In Florida, Jeb Bush has unveiled a program called Read Together Florida, essentially a statewide version of Oprah’s Book Club. The first book chosen was Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The Golden Gate Gazette reports that early meetings at the Collier County Public Library had people discussing the storyline.

Christopher Hitchens has posted a longass essay tearing Fahrenheit 9/11 to shreds. I have no comments one way or the other. The wholesale dissection of the film either way before its release leaves me with a bitter aftertaste.

AP: “While it’s long been part of the culture of the romance-novel business to accept unsolicited proposals, some publishers are making the process easier. News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers, for instance, accepts e-mail pitches on its romance Web site — and gets a mind-numbing 10,000 online queries annually. ‘We’re starting to get them from other countries, sometimes in broken English,’ says Morrow/Avon Executive Editor Carrie Feron. E-queries have arrived from Italy, eastern Europe and Asia. At least a few top editors are frankly irked. Diana Baroni, an executive editor at Time Warner’s Warner Books imprint, says she deletes e-mail queries as soon as they arrive. ‘I don’t know how they get my e-mail address, but I’m getting so many I don’t respond.'” (via Book Ninja)

TMFTML has obtained first serial rights for My Life, which has a curious Faulkner ring to it.

Miguel Cohen, brother of Randy “Ethicist” Cohen, has expressed a desire to come back to Return of the Reluctant. After several rounds of therapy, he confessed considerable guilt to me in an email about the Unethicist column. He was ashamed that his offerings weren’t literary. He was bothered by the fact that he had to compete with his brother. More importantly, he offered me five bucks.

Inspired by the recent Ulysses blog and the Bloomsbury anniversary, Miguel has decided to offer his interpretation of what it all means. So long as Mr. Cohen’s funds remain liquid, we here at Return of the Reluctant will reprint Mr. Cohen’s annotations in installments.

CHAPTER ONE: TELEMACHUS

TEXT: Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

— Introibo ad altare Dei.

MIGUEL: The thing that confuses me here is that this guy Buck is stately and plump. If Buck Mulligan echoes an elder statesman, I ask you, outside of Kucinich, have you ever seen a thin politician? Isn’t this a redundancy? And if he came from the stairhead, did he pop some chick’s maidenhead? How the fuck does one come from a stairhead? I know there’s a lot of dirty jokes in this book, but apparently this Joyce guy couldn’t keep his cock in his pants. He’s coming down with a bowl of lather, dig? He let loose in a bowl. So this Joyce cat has to get down and dirty from the very first sentence! My kind of guy. And what kind of asshole wears a yellow dressinggown? What’s restricting this Buck guy? The fact that he’s stately and plump? When’s he going to put on his girdle? And is Joyce implying that Buck’s cock-a-doodle-doo is exposed? Naughty pederast, I think.

And Latin? Frickin’ Latin? How can anyone say something in Latin before their cup of coffee? Of course, if he’s choked the chicken, then, fuckin’ hell, he’s probably wouldn’t need it anyway.

Anyway, this “Introibo ad altare Dei” nonsense means “I will go into the altar of God.” It’s the beginning of a Latin mass. Presumably, this bowl of lather is his offering for God. Half a life force. Dead sticky sperm. Or something. All I know is that this man always has Kleenex in hand.

TEXT: Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

— Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

MIGUEL: So is “halted” an emotion or did this Buck guy halt? What the hell’s stopping him? And why would you peer down and call up? That’s bad for acoustics! Unless, of course, he’s about to hock a loogey on this poor Kinch mofo. So that’s two references to bodily fluids and we’re only three paragraphs in!

And then we have more “coming” forward. Yeah, right, Joyce. That and mounting the round gunrest. Well, we all know what that means. He’s being an asshole again with that jesuit thing.

Now we have more cross stuff. As if the mirror and the razor weren’t enough, he’s establishing the holy venue. Gurgling when Mr. “Kinch” Dedalus is coming in? Bad form. Does this guy have a hangover? I’ve never known a guy to do this when he wanks himself silly. And this guy has a horse face too? And isn’t hair by its very definition “untonsured”? What the fuck, Joyce? So Buck has a tonsure and Dedalus does not?

TEXT: Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

— Back to barracks! he said sternly.

He added in a preacher’s tone:

— For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

MIGUEL: Peep marshmallows? Yeah, pretty instant, I think. Best to cover the bowl there, Buck, before ol’ Kinchie discovers the tight mess you’ve made. Been there before with brother Randy back in the day. Back to barracks? So that’s where it happens. So this is what Catholicism does to folks. I’ve seen it happen too many times. This Catholic girl I was seeing back in Boston wanted me to feed her a communion wafer every time, just after she screamed. You know how expensive those wafers are? $15.99 for a box of those motherfuckers! And I was already spending a lot of bread on the condoms.

So if Buck’s speaking in a preacher’s tone, he’s not a preacher, right? The genuine Christine instead of Christ? White corupscles? Okay, cat’s out of the bag. You’re a sick cat, James. I’m blowing this joint. And not the way you’re thinking.