Sunday, September 26, 2021

Tart’s Butt’s Sweeeee Wrong

 [My entry among friends to write a parody of a T.S. Eliot poem: Cf. Prufrock.]

    "Spek, sweete bryd, I noot nat where thou art."
        The Miller's Tale 
 
No, I am not 🎭 Romeo, a πŸ‘… honey-tongued part—
AmπŸ„smallish in size, one that will do
To spend some coin, buy a 🍸drink, say 🍸 two,
To woo some  gal. "We're," teases she, "just chums."
Bad at being "Show πŸ‘Έ me some fun" used—
Hm. Hm.¹ πŸ‘ƒ What smells?—  I start: On her cuteπŸ‘—dress 
Pour I compliments: trite first ...then πŸ‘  lame ...confused ....
To her taste, πŸ‘“ "Nerdily," I'm clueless—
"πŸ’‹Bbye," her chum's brushoff comes. 

I watch porn…I watch porn…
I shall bone a dream girl’s Brazilian-shorn.
Shall I part her tart's li’l butt? Do I dare to rim her πŸ‘ peach?
I shall smear peach flavored lube since she shall have prepped with Fleet™’s
Enema as πŸ‘Έ manic, pixie dream girls πŸ‘Έ teach
A πŸ‘“ nerd like me of sex in rom-… 
    πŸ”Š “Sweeeee...”² πŸ’¨
        Whoa!
“Sniff in πŸ‘ƒ da funk. Lick round πŸ‘… dat gunk, 🎭 Romeo.” ³

No farts funk up my viewing OnlyFans™.
Parfum de merde πŸ’© would skunk my nasty plans.
E. coli scares my dare to rim... 
    πŸ”Š “...eeeee….”⁴ πŸ’¨
        No!
A romcom πŸ‘Έ manic, pixie dream girl’s πŸ’¨ fart— 
Her Waterloo for my li’lπŸ†Bonaparte.


¹ James Joyce, Ulysses, 13.1007.

² Ibidem, 18.908.

³ Cf. Joyce, op. cit. 18.1522-32, "[H]e can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as he[']s there my brown part [...] I[']ll tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump [sic] or lick my shit...."

⁴ Joyce, op. cit. 18.908.

© 2021, Wilson Varga.  All rights reserved. 

Photo of T.S. Eliot: credit Bettmann 

v10 revised 11/14/2021

Monday, June 28, 2021

Bloom’s Idea of Hamlet

 


Motivation

Scholar Ronan Crowley opined via Twitter regarding, “...a note for ‘Ithaca’ that reads ‘LB’s idea of Hamlet.’ It’s crossed in blue, which suggests usage.  Do we also get Bloom’s Hamlet theory in Ulysses?”  

I respond: To appreciate “Bloom’s idea of Hamlet” is to recognize not only Joyce’s misdirection in Ithaca but also Joyce’s Shakespearean allusion via a visual joke in Ithaca. Joyce gives his reader "Bloom's idea of Hamlet," which answers affirmatively the posed usage question of the blue colored note under present scrutiny.

What’s the idea of “idea of”?

As to misdirection firstly, one might be overly swayed by Haine’s language whereby “idea of” connotes “a theory.”             

One ought not be so swayed.  There are seven instances of the phrase “idea of” in Ulysses and only the first two, spoken by Haines, connote “a theory.”  The other instances connote, respectively, “a mental map,” “a practice to be realized,” “an image realized mentally,” “an intention” and  “a practice realized.”

Search results from Joyce's Ulysses Concordance


Misdirection: Scientific and Artistic Temperaments


As to misdirection secondly, Lenehan establishes in Wandering Rocks that (U10.582-3), “There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom.”

U10.578-83 

Nevertheless, in Ithaca, the temperaments of the duumvirate are contrasted, with the reader inferring that Bloom holds a scientific temperament while Stephen’s is artistic.  

U17.559-567

With respect to the play Hamlet, Stephen’s articulated theory in Scylla and Charybdis is biographically grounded and logically argued, as might befit any scientific approach to the question of authorship for the plays attributed to Shakespeare.  It is Bloom’s artistic mind, making punning connections in spite of himself, that phrases such a question as a little ham and bacon joke.  


U16.777-87

From the text Stephen appears as having a scientific approach while Bloom’s approach appears as artistic, a pun: hence, Joyce’s usual misdirection.


One of Two Keys Joyce Disclosed in Scylla and Charybdis

As to Joyce’s visual allusion it is necessary to recognize that pertinent key (there is another key in the episode) to Ulysses that Joyce stated in Scylla and Charybdis, highlighting that key by the first of four instances of the string “Ulysses” throughout the novel. Shakespeare’s characters of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are highlighted as templates for patterns of relationships among major characters Joyce put into Ulysses.  


U9.397-404

It is well known that in Telemachus Joyce highlights for the reader a mapping of the character Stephen Dedalus to the character Prince Hamlet from the play, but he does so in an inverted or contrary way, as one’s shadow is inverted and apart from one’s body:
  • While Prince Hamlet grieved a dead father Stephen grieves his deceased mother.  I submit these are inverted and unalike as a father is not a mother.
  • The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to the prince atop the battlements of Elsinore but the specter of Mary Dedalus appears in Stephen’s nightmare as he sleeps in his quarters of the Martello Tower. Unalike.
  • Prince Hamlet was a student; Stephen is a teacher. Unalike.


James Joyce's room in the James Joyce Tower and Museum

But the stated key directs the reader to (U9.401-2) “look to see when and how the shadow lifts,” that is to examine when and how the pattern is not inverted or not unalike: that the pattern has been lifted, is uninverted, and is alike: e.g., Prince Hamlet donned inky black; Stephen Dedalus wears mourning black. They are thus alike. 

Via this pattern of inversion and similarity (being unalike and being alike), other Ulysses characters map to the dramatis personae from Shakespeare, such as: 
  • King Lear : Simon Dedalus (alike: each has daughters; Lear gives to his elder daughters and slights his youngest, Cordelia; Simon gives his eldest, Dilly, two pennies for milk and a bun, but the other daughters go hungry [but for the nuns’ charity]; unalike: Lear’s youngest Cordelia yet loves her father, but Simon’s youngest, Boody, does not (U.10.292) “—Our father who art not in heaven.”).
  • Othello : Bloom (alike: each is married; unalike: Othello’s Desdemona is innocent of adultery but is murdered while Bloom’s Molly is not innocent yet lives).
  • Troilus and Cressida : Mulvey and Molly (alike: Cressida escaped the fortress town of Troy through the agency of her father thus forsaking Troilus, while Molly left the garrison town at Gibraltar along with her father, Major Tweedy, thus forsaking the promise of a return by her first, Mulvey; unalike: Cressida was unfaithful to Troilus but Molly remains faithful to Mulvey in her imagination, masturbating and coming to her fantasy of them together on Gibraltar, (U18.1610) “Yes,” at the notorious end of her monologue).
  • Pericles Prince of Tyre : the Whore of the Lane (alike: each seemingly lost a daughter and wandered afar from home but later each recognizes that daughter; unalike the prince is Marina’s male parent while the whore is Molly’s female parent, Lunita Laredo [reader, ponder the clue: why had she (U16.714) “begged the chance of his washing”?]). 
There are other named Dublin characters Joyce so mapped (and these are left as further exercises for the reader, e.g., to which characters in Shakespeare do Martha Clifford and Henry Flower map and why?).  


Visual Joke, Yet Another Joycean Exercise for his Reader

To focus again on the play Hamlet mapped to the novel Ulysses, Stephen is to Prince Hamlet as Bloom is to Polonius (alike: older dispensers of hoary, unsolicited advice and father of each of a son and daughter; unalike: Bloom’s daughter lives yet his son died while Polonius’s son lived after his daughter died; Bloom’s father the suicide but daughter Ophelia was the suicide). Recall from the play Act 3, Scene 4, the Closet Scene, wherein the prince confronts his mother, Gertrude, with Polonius hidden behind the arras but upon his presence being perceived, the prince takes sword in hand.
 

                                            
                                           The Murder of Polonius by EugΓ¨ne Delacroix

Joyce, for his visual joke, expects the reader to fill in the narrative blanks. Exiting the rear of 7 Eccles Street, guest Stephen, upon eyeing the jakes under starlight, might have remarked something like “Piss, I need to” euphemised in the text as (U17.1186) “At Stephen's suggestion…” to which host Bloom might have replied, “I too; we’ll piss together” euphemised as (U17.1186) “...at Bloom's instigation” because that jakes accommodates but one. 

U17.1171-90

I speculate that Joyce expects his reader: 
  • to picture Stephen as a Prince Hamlet with Bloom as a Polonius together in the garden outside of the jakes; 
  • to imagine Bloom as dismissing mentally either one's re-entering the house to use the watercloset; and 
  • to recognize that Bloom's brief thought of "watercloset" would have triggered in Bloom’s artistic mind the Closet Scene from the play Hamlet with (U17.1177-81) Molly, invisible behind the lit screen of roller blind, mapping to a Gertrude. 
Shakespeare's scene has been inverted! The female is invisible inside behind the arras-like screen of roller blind while the two males, their sides contiguous, are together outside, their manhoods in hand.



Ulysses for Dummies, 17, Night 

Such a visual joke in episode 17 pairs nicely with another such visual joke in episode 1 (there are others). The Martello Tower is patently phallic; what is ejaculated from a phallus but semen. Where such semen naturally belongs is expressed as (U17.2279) “ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ” of (U1.80) “our great sweet mother” (U1.78) “the snotgreen sea,” represented by the (U1.600) “fortyfoot hole,” into which Mulligan plunges at the conclusion of episode 1. Then and there Mulligan joins other “swimmers” as “sea men,” with Joyce visually punning on “semen” lately come from the phallic tower [pun intended].  

Quod Erat Demonstrandum


“Bloom’s idea of Hamlet” is realized, as per the blue color on the note in question, not as a theory but rather as yet another visual joke left by Joyce as an exercise for his reader: an image realized mentally. Q.E.D.


© 2021 Wilson Varga


Acknowledgments


Search results are taken from Joyce's Ulysses Concordance with that text drawn from gutenberg.org (license) by Andrea Moro, Vanderbilt University, andrea at andreamoro dot net.  See: https://joyceconcordance.andreamoro.net/

Ulysses excepts are screenshots from the Columbia University online, “Ulysses: A marked up version,” annotated by Samuel Schiminovich at http://www.columbia.edu/~fms5/ulys.htm 

James Joyce's room in the James Joyce Tower and Museum is “By myself - Self-photographed,” CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7128053

The Murder of Polonius (1834–43) is by EugΓ¨ne Delacroix and is in the public domain.  More at: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/337350

The single frame representing episode 17 is from “Ulysses for Dummies.”  See:

Monday, December 31, 2018

Ulysses

[My contest entry to write a James Joyce's Dubliners short story entitled Ulysses.]

diethyl ether

        She sat at the desk lightly reading, alert for sounds. Her head was inclined to The Irish Times and in her nostrils was a faint, nauseating odour of diethyl ether. She felt she might be sad.
        Few sounds intruded. No footsteps clacked towards the oaken door on the concrete pavement of Holles street. Beyond a molly cat yowled at a tom's mounting. From the ward a newborn mewled despite a hushabying mother's softly soothing cooing.
        While she sat behind the door she preferred to read. Nightly she would begin with the Times and would continue until dawn reading The Gentlewoman or a novel. This night she had The Murder of Delicia. She had exchanged Paul Clifford unfinished as contrived and quaint. Reading passed the time. Reading lulled her memories she believed. She sat waiting to admit any who arrived in labour beneath what was a waning crescent moon through the open window this spring night. In the Times she read:

HALPIN—June 10 at a private home, Orlaith Innocent, infant daughter of Mr and Mrs J. P. P. Halpin, Cooldrinagh, Vernon Grove, Rathgar.
HENDERSON—June 11 at her residence, 74 Haddington road, Dublin, Margaret, relict of the late Robert Henderson.
HUNTER—June 10 at his residence, 23 Great Charles street, Alfred H. Hunter, youngest son of the late Cuthbert J. Hunter, Esquire, of Belfast. Departed from this sorrowful world and regretted by his sorrowing wife, Marion B. Hunter. 

        Departed, Bert’s nigh four months a fortnight, she thought. A prickling resentment irked her: she would never again attend to his baritone recital of coroner testimonies as she had rapt in her sunlit parlour, their teas steaming, the floral fragrance sensible. She would never again tremble taking in his manly scents, rere regardant, her shameless eyes wide seeking his. She would never again brush his coat, his pipe and tobacco lodged within.
        They had not been graced with time enough to marry, but that is what he—what they—had planned for. Bert had been manly, open-hearted and so clever, albeit lacking even a pound of rental income. In the time after they would have established what would certainly have become the flourishing practice of a tony medical practitioner: he would have drawn a handsome fee for his services. She would have furnished the capital. Her father had favoured their future union. He had favoured her plans for Bert’s practice. Her da had not known of, or had he suspected not remarked upon, the other. She knew he knew she knew prophylaxis.

        “Brrhhaaeeeeuukk,” more yowling came from beyond the open window.

        They had been careful. Last August, embarking on the London and North Western Railway steamer at the North Wall quay they had done so separately. Disembarking at Holyhead Refuge Harbour they had done so as a couple. From Holyhead Terminal via the L. & N. W. Ry. coach eastward across Anglesey island, then along the Irish Sea coast to Llandudno junction, then southward through the nigh interminable Vale of Conway to Llanrwst station, and, at last, via hotel omnibus to the Glanrafon, they had travelled as mister and missus. He had strutted seasonably stylish in straw boater and flannel, turnedup trousers, while she had felt herself femininely flattered in Fanning’s kid fitting corset. By day they took the chalybeate waters at the spa, they took the paddle steamer Queen of the Conway downriver to the sea and they took in the Grey Mare’s Tail cascade, among other attractions. By night they took each other with fluid ease. By their first week’s end she knew she could contentedly ever after be taken as Mrs Mastiansky had once to her confided.


        Noiselessness she listened for but heard insignificant sounds as before. She turned the page of the Times. She read:

NURSES: Experienced Nurse, young, Protestant; baby from birth; understands bottle feeding; good references; country or England; wages £18 to £20. E. P. Blackwood's Office, 41 Lower Mount street, Dublin.
LAW: Exper Shorthand Writer desires evening work; fees very moderate; Advertiser has own typewriter (Smith Premium No 2). Address "L 829, Legal" this office.
CLERICAL: Locum Tenens Wanted, August, country; Sunday duty only; £1 per Sunday, rectory & fare. Address "Z 578, Clerical" this office.

        Bert had not fared well. The onset she had remarked at Hallow Eve when his well-cut tweed jacket looked too large on him. He had confided anorexy. He, citing nausea, had diagnosed gastroenteritis. He had treated himself. A fortnight then three passed but by then even his black felt hat failed to fit. In view of symptomatic cachexia and relenting his pride he had assented to her heartfelt plea that he consult a specialist. Subsequently Bert had proposed they be married the next August. He would be cured quickly, he believed, cured from Dwynwen's Well on Anglesey. He’d read of miracles wrought through faith that science would never explain, he had confessed in her lamplit parlour beneath scared, smokeblue eyes, horripilation patent. "MΓ΄n, Mam Cymru, Mona, Mother of Wales," he had recited as if the form of a prayer or of a lover’s plea. His buccal fetor had given mute testimony to his latest episode of emesis. She had doubted but he had believed. Then he went, alone. Lachrymation followed. Yes, the prognosis was right: he died in Wales quickly. His faith had not cured the terminal gastric adenocarcinoma science had diagnosed. The Blessed Dwyn had failed him. The Welsh patroness of lovers had failed them. Thinking how fleeting love had fared but how final death remains made her sadder still.

        Frseeeeeefronnng, a train whistled.

        Still she felt admiration from the male staff. Doctor Dixon she had caught more than once casting sideways for an eyeful as she typed records and he was no old devil. Horne and other medicals too. If she had wanted that, she could have. She felt no need. Her father had provided well for her. He’d furnished her her own house nearby on Holles street, the ancient esquire’s escutcheon as conspicuous in her parlour as in his legal office: or, on a bend gules three martlets argent,


beneath a crest: a demi griffin rampant gules.


The upper floor she sometimes let to unfortunate couples or families of three. She had more than enough provided she let to neither drinkers nor spongers but only to those earning wages and running short only of a spot of sense or of luck or of time. If ever she needed the subsherriff then her father’s partner, Mr Murphy, would file to distrain, gratis for her. The August her mother departed she had not yet seen seventeen. Thereafter, she had known having more than enough. There was only her da and herself.

        She read:

SITUATIONS VACANT: Wanted, smart... 

as bingbing a moth twice binged against the lamp glass, spiraled to the tessellated linoleum, fluttered momentarily, fluttered again and stopped.

        Like that moth and glass she judged she had reached a terminus and fared alike.

        As a child she had imagined herself like that rambling red griffin in her family’s crest.

As a girl she had named her playself Peggy Griffin who reigned as the skippingrope belle up and down St. John’s terrace. Now she might believe the griffin the chrysalis of that moth, which was not rambling red but life-drained pale, as one exsanguinated.

        "Listen here,” intruded from the direction of Merrion square with footsteps andante crescendo and a tenor voice lilting in falsetto, “He kicked me and punched me this morning,” then emphasising in a manly register, “Ka-bang.”
        “And made my poor face such a fright, ow-eee.”
        “Ah ha” and “Good night,” echoed an appreciative two-bloke audience stepping audibly out of step apace.
        Quavered the falsetto, “My eyes he bunged up without warning," and higher, “Scree-eee,” as, crossing Denzille lane, diminuendo, "But I'll tap his claret tonight, she-bang,” that drew barely audible “Ha” and “Right” before the intrusions faded into Holles silence.


        He hurts her then she pays him off in kind, spiraling down and down until a bad end, she thought: that poor Teresa McCarthy, the beating she got from her husband and her stillborn and then her dying the day next: sad lives end lives. Thinking whatever love the McCarthys had known before gestation had died before delivery kept her sadder still.
        In the Times she read about some evildoing nearly nightly. In her boudoir chest she had secreted Bert’s gifts of Wicklow gold gimmal ring and locket, his portrait in health therein:


...his pipe and other mementos including two clippings pinned together, his last testimony:

CHARGE OF MURDER. Yesterday in South Police Court before Mr Swift, Patrick McCarthy, who was on remand, was charged with wilful murder of his wife Teresa, by having violently assaulted her at their residence in Dawson court, off Stephen street. 

pinned to:

Dr O'Hare, of the Holles street [Maternity] Hospital, stated that the deceased had been brought there in an unconscious condition. On the ninth instant she gave birth there to a child stillborn, and died the following day. A post mortem examination showed that there was an abscess on the membranes of the brain. The assaults described might have set up the abscess. The prisoner was committed for trial at the next commission.

        "Ahggghhh, a Dhia, cuidigh liom," wardleaving, a woman's cry signaled increasing cervical dilation.

        The papers are barren of details, she thought. People cannot help wanting to read about such as the McCarthys. She believed she could weave together Bert’s yarns and the better classes would read a moral, factual account by Doctor Cuthbert Michael O'Hare. "Dead cert," Dixon's sponger might tout through his booser's breath, she thought.  She pondered: people know he died: change the name. She ran through names she preferred and chose for a pen name Doctor Ulysses O Hehir, like Lord Tennyson's who is so clever. With his physician's factual material coupled to her spinning their lurid lives with the departed's trauma by the miscreant's wilful and premeditated injury: the Irish Homestead might be interested by what a physician pens, she thought. An untitled woman's scribbling isn’t worth her efforts to submit, she judged.
        She folded the Times into a neat square and laid it to one side, removed from a drawer a sharpened pencil—a fluke—and a sheet and atop the scratched desktop began to scrawl:

                The man staggered into the kitchen and barked,“What’s for me to eat?”
                “I am going… to cook,” snarled the woman.
                “When? You let that fire die! Streel, I’ll make you smell hell for ill treating me like your starving mongrel.” His fist he

but she halted, disheartened, distressed by the McCarthys. Then she remembered that Miss Mountjoy had arrived later that month.
        She turned the sheet over and without halting scrawled:

                It was the coldest and snowiest February midnight. The snow fell into drifts—except at irregular intervals when a violent gust wound the snow into higher drifts. Along frozen Ely place a weak and weary woman wrapped in a pus-green coat too small and lacking galoshes, although being afoot and at full term, wended solitary destining for the National Maternity Hospital. She stopped twice or thrice along Merrion square north to wipe claret-dark venous blood from the temple of her perniciously anemic pale face, which was discoloured by contusion, to see through the sleet, which was blinding. "I long for Holles street," she shivered. At some length, with chilblains through to the distal phalanges of every extremity, she arrived and on the oaken door bangbang her gloveless forearm banged pittifully. 
                "Who's there?" asked a comforting, womanly voice.
                "My water's broke,” spurted a husky reply. The wind gusted a bitterer cold. 
                "MacWatter’s bloke, who?”
                “O, poor me! Broke! Ahggghhh!”
                “None of your slack-jaw. My patience are exhausted, Miss Brooke O’Pourmee."
                The weak and weary woman was welcomed into warmth by one endowed with comeliness of face and person as drap, amniotic fluid, then drup, urine, dripped onto the linoleum.

        "Ehggghhh."

        She continued to scrawl:

                By dawn she was delivered. Not an hour passed before mother Mountjoy, sighing softly, enjoyed lactation as baby suckled.

        She laid the now blunt pencil to the other side. She felt less sad. She read the sheet. Removing a vulcanized rubber from the drawer she rubbed out "pittifully" and “north.” She rubbed away the residue. Replacing the rubber in her hand with the pencil she amended "west” and "pityfully" into the erasures. Grimacing she lined through the lines of dialogue with a grin. An idea—an insertion “p. v.” following “fluid”—swelled in her, made her nose crinkle but waned.

        Of Mountjoy she remembered having resented that cancer stopped her entertaining her darling ever after with her tale of Mountjoy.

        She turned the sheet over. She started at what had been halted. She replaced pencil and rubber in the drawer, centered the sheet on the scratched desktop, laid the square of the Times thereupon and set both hands on top, palms down. She judged it was not right how she had met death: how to write her story? Her head was inclined unreading to the Times between the backs of her hands. She thought of how she might imagine the threads of the McCarthys’ marital rites and martial fights and of how she had never undertaken weaving such into a colourful fabric—a fabrication. She would unshroud one Paddy’s evildoing: The Murder of Martha she'd call it. A title she had. An exemplar she lacked. If only she might be taught by someone. Eliza Twigg had confided she aids Mr Russell lately.

        "Eeeehhhhgggghhhh," laboured a third wail from the ward above. "God, help me. Don't let me die."

        "Ethel."

        She froze: she had heard that prayer and plea coupled to her Christian name verbatim in her parlour in his voice before, "Alone," concluding "...Don't let me die, Ethel, alone." She felt her heart palpitating.

        "Nurse Callan."

        Her palms pressed the Times flatter. Her time-seeking eyes glanced up for the moon, which had set further beyond the window, in vain. Unsettling sentiments were churning and muddled her thoughts. Nurse Quigley’s contralto was concluding her nigh nightly recital with, "Come up.” She was being summoned to the ward and wails. She glanced down at the linoleum where her moth had not moved.
        “She'll live,” Ethel murmured and literally felt splanchnic tremours of acute remorse. Ethel was sorry.



        Hm. Hm. Sniffing that faint, nauseating odour she would mutely ever after misformulate as die-ethel-peroxide, she untucked from under her apron belt her handkerchief, perfumed by sweet myrrh with a little jessamine mixed, and bringing it to her nostrils inhaled slowly. She dabbed dry the wetting from her lachrymal ducts. She composed herself. Thinking how she had been put down as the dormouse so Quigley could flutter eyelashes at the new chemist and no mistake made her mad. Not for much longer would she scurry nocturnally through this noisome place, suffering her and Dixon or Horne and the patients. She would go. Another world beyond for herself she doubted not she would hatch, no, parturiate, and momentarily she felt so clever.
        While rising from the desk but before turning to ascend the stairs her sadstill eyes glanced at SITUATIONS VACANT and slyly crinkled slightly reading:

...lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work.



© 2018 Wilson Varga, all rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Credits:
        The rendering of the diethyl ether molecule (Diethyl-ether-3D-balls.png) has been released into the public domain by its author, Benjah-bmm27. 
        The Road and Rail Map of North Wales is excerpted from the London and North Western Railway Tourist Guide to North Wales dated 1909.
        The Callan escutcheon is © Eddie Geoghegan and is reproduced under "fair use" for non-commercial purposes (cf The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales by Sir Bernard Burke, 1884, pages 160 and 744).
        A red griffin rampant appears in the arms of the dukes of Pomerania (cf The Book of Public Arms, 1915, POMERANIA, Province of [Prussia], pages 616-17).
        The section from the 1883 Letts Sns & Co. Plan of the City of Dublin map showing Merrion Square, Denzille Lane, and Holles Street is from the online David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.
        The photograph of Doctor John J. O'Hare is cropped from "Resident Staff at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Dublin" taken in Summer 1902. (See "A floor plan for the Holles Street Hospital" on James Joyce Online Notes, www.jjon.org.  For more on the real-life Doctor O'Hare's life and death see: Downing, Gregory M. "Life Lessons from Untimely Death in James Joyce's Ulysses." Literature and Medicine, vol. 19 no. 2, 2000, pp. 182-204. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lm.2000.0022.)
        The photograph of Nurse Violet Jessop, created by the United Kingdom Government, is in the public domain.
        The 19 February 1904 Irish Times description of the Charge of Murder surrounding the death of Teresa McCarthy is excerpted from Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Don Gifford and Robert Seidman, for the entry labeled U3.181-82 (41:36-37).


═══

        The text above incorporates minor amendments (to punctuation, capitalization, and selected names or to typography due to the limitations of this blogging platform) to the version that was submitted to the James Joyce Quarterly's Ulysses short-story contest on 19 January 2018, which was judged a non-winning entry.







Wednesday, June 14, 2017

The V-2: 19th- & 20th-century automaton

I commend to Pynchonites The Style of Connectedness: Gravity's Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon, by Thomas Moore.  Moore observes that the V-2 fits both the 19th- (fuel burning) and 20th-Century (informational) senses for an automaton.



Moore, The Style of Connectedness, p173

The Style of Connectedness: Gravity's Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Moore
University of Missouri (May 1, 1987)
ISBN-13: 978-0826206251
Link to Google Books

Friday, December 30, 2016

David Cowart and the 17-year gap

David Cowart  in Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History (2012) also mapped Pynchon to Joyce and the 17-year gap with respect to Finnegans Wake, pp 112-113 (Reproduced below under "Fair Use").






Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Cow Country by Adrian Jones Pearson

Cow Country is not only a satire of America in the tradition of Gulliver’s Travels but also an allegory for human life in the tradition of Moby Dick.



As satire, the reader discovers the Cow Eye Community College campus and the surrounding Cow Eye Junction to be populated by individuals who self-identify within binary factions: carnivores versus vegans, old timers vs. new comers, town vs. gown, beer drinkers vs. wine imbibers, tenured faculty vs. students (and adjuncts), faculty vs. administrators, Native Americans vs. settlers’ descendants, men vs. women, domestic truck owners vs. foreign car owners, manual typewriter traditionalists vs. electric typewriter progressives, and on and on. Each Cow Eye resident can and does self-identify as an oppressed member of a minority faction in perpetual conflict with an apparent oppressing majority faction. Thus, CECC and environs stand for America now and throughout its history. (The American flag is described throughout as having a varying number of stars at different points in the narrative that spans a partial academic year: at least 15, 23, 24, 25, 28, 34, 44, 46, 47, 48, and 49 stars at different narrative points.)  Pearson satirizes contemporary America as surely as Swift did the United Kingdom of his time in Gulliver’s Travels.

As allegory, the protagonist – call him “Charlie” – grapples with the fundamental human conflict between the temporal (the unimportant-but-urgent demands of deadlines, separate mortal beings, sex, time) and the eternal (the non-urgent-but-important facets of life, the source of one’s ultimate being, love, timelessness). Melville’s Pequod sets sail on Christmas day on her ultimate and doomed voyage; with allusion to that same event on the Christian calendar Pearson’s Charlie climaxes his tenure at CECC at a Christmas party where his own acts of commission and omission doom his educational administrator/special projects coordinator professional standing.

In Cow Eye the educational administration passages enlighten and entertain readers ignorant of that calling as surely as the whaling passages do in Moby Dick.

Throughout Charlie draws inspiration from the excerpted book within a book, The Anyman’s Guide to Love and the Community College, detritus from his predecessor Special Projects Coordinator who likewise failed at that calling despite her “...Degrees from two Ivy League colleges. A sparkling curriculum vitae. Experience up the ying-yang. Countless awards and commendations. References from the Queen of England and Archduke of Canterbury. You know the type. 

The human desire for love,” according to the Anyman's Guide,is as old as the community college itself…. In fact, love is even older – tracing its lineage back to the days, long before community colleges, when the heart was still an untamed beast like the many undomesticated cows that once roamed the world. These were the days of wandering and wonder, of vast unconquered lands that encouraged diaspora and discovery. For the history of humankind is the history of man’s quelling of his own desires. Or, rather, of their pursuit. Across continents and through time. With a diligence that knows no parallel among other beasts of burden. More than any force of nature, it is love – of self, of family, of god and country, of great ideas – that has been the constant catalyst in the making of the world as it is. Without love there would be no religion. No art. No philosophy. Without love we would not have saints or martyrs or prophets. And of course, without love we would not have community colleges.

It is said that for a thing to exist it must live side by side with its opposite. Day cannot be day without night. Nor can the flow exist without the ebb. In this way there can be no joy without despair. No enlightenment without ignorance. And no passage of time without the final resolution of death. But before there was a community college there could be none of this – nothing at all but a very dark void. And then came God and the universe that He created which in turn begat time and space, such that over the many billions of years and the many billions of miles, the lineage of learning came down from its timeless ancestors:



From God came the universe and from the universe came time and space. And from all of this came the community college where love itself is nurtured just as the sky nurtures the stars in her embrace. For surely there can be no truer love than the love of learning. The teaching of an idea requires the transfer of knowledge from one mind to the next, just as the birth of a child requires the transfer of seed from one mammal to another. This is why, among institutions of the world, the community college is the cradle of all that love aspires to be, and it is why, among lovers of the world, its faculty are a chosen people. And for this reason, the community college has always been, and will always be, the breeding ground for love. Its eternal source. The place it always returns to and whence it always comes. For to know the world in its entirety is to know, in a very small way, your local community college. And vice versa.

Does not the author of The Anyman’s Guide wax poetic upon her subject as Ishmael does upon the whale and the sea?

Cow Country came to wide attention  when Art Winslow of Harpers opined “Did Thomas Pynchon publish a novel under the pseudonym Adrian Jones Pearson?” (See the September 9, 2015,The Fiction Atop the Fiction, by Art Winslow | Harper's Magazine via @Harpers https://harpers.org/2015/09/the-fiction-atop-the-fiction/).

It is true that Ruger firearms appear in the novels of Pearson and Pynchon --"a Ruger Blackhawk in thirty carbine” and "a Ruger .38" in the former and ".44 Magnum, a Ruger Blackhawk" in the latter (Inhernet Vice, pg. 250) -- however, that coincidence alone is insufficient to conclude the former to be a penname for the latter. (See a YouTube video demonstration of the Ruger Blackhawk 30 Carbine here 06:02 mm:ss.)  That coincidence is not “specific evidence if one were searching for a smoking gun (‘closure’) linking Pearson and Pynchon” (Winslow, 21st paragraph). [Note 1]

Cow Country by Adrian Jones Pearson is thoroughly enjoyable as a work of art itself. One need not have any acquaintance with novels by Pynchon to be entertained, enlightened, and motivated by Pearson’s, which I recommend.
___
A note about editions:  For about two-thirds of the novel’s text I listened to the Audible version that credits Therese Plummer and LJ Ganser, and I endorse their performances. (Hear a sample of the Audible version on the Amazon site here.)


Cow Country Paperback – April 8, 2015 (Above graphics and excerpts from this edition.)
by Adrian Jones Pearson
Paperback: 540 pages
Publisher: Cow Eye Press (April 8, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 099091500X
ISBN-13: 978-0990915003

Audible Audio Edition
Listening Length: 20 hours and 50 minutes
Program Type: Audiobook
Version: Unabridged
Publisher: Audible Studios
Audible.com Release Date: February 9, 2016
Whispersync for Voice: Ready
Language: English
ASIN: B01AO5H4HW

Note:
  1. It is true that a prose master may write in a variety of styles (cf Pynchon’s novels Mason & Dixon and Against The Day where the Pynchon-brand literary style from, say, Gravity’s Rainbow is eschewed for other styles). That is to say that it is feasible that Pynchon could have masked himself and could have adopted the style of a Pynchonian derivative if he so chose, but being merely possible does not render something actually so. The two literary styles in Cow Country – the novel itself and The Anyman’s Guide within that novel -- demonstrate that Pearson has mastered writing in multiple styles, a skill necessary to any novelist since Joyce’s Ulysses to be counted a member of the novelists' guild, IMHO.


Saturday, July 2, 2016

Time Rose Pynchon


Q: Could this be a photograph of Thomas Pynchon (hereinafter: Mr P )?

A: Prolly not. Prolly just what it is purported to be: a photograph of Albano Ballerini, Brooklyn-based chef, photographer, and actor  [Note 1].




Q: Why would one think that to be a picture of Mr P?
A: Because he is credited in the role of “Lorentz Mulino, a little-known filmmaker" in a short film (02:24 mm:ss), Ulysses, The Animated Film, recently (2016) "made available to the public" that documents an uncompleted production of an animated Ulysses, the 1922 novel by James Joyce, of Dublin, Ireland, on 16 June 1904.  That short film was the funniest thing I saw Bloomsday, June 16th. The Twitterverse of Joyceans alerted me to this film.

Q: Why would anyone think that Mr. Albano Ballerini may be Mr P as Mr P is notoriously known to avoid being photographed?

A: Because this animated Ulysses, or that short film about the uncompleted production, stands to the work of Mr P as the three known schemata stand to Ulysses [Note 2]. Joyce gave a schema to his publisher, Sylvia Beach, and to his friends Stuart Gilbert and Carlo Linati.

In my opinion, the world would not think so highly of Ulysses were it not for Gilbert’s effort with James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study that gave the public his schema showing the parallels in Joyce to Homer’s Odyssey.  Similarly, the help that Sylvia Beach gave to scholar Joseph Campbell at Shakespeare and Company [Note 3] changed Campbell’s life, empowering him to tell about similar parallels Joyce made to Ovid, to Dante, and to other myth makers, throughout his fictions. Without such help the public may have dismissed Joyce as too arcane, too abstract, too Irish, too scatological, or too unrewarding for the non-academic.
It is my hypothesis, seeing Ulysses, The Animated Film that the fictions of Mr P stand in relation to the that of James Joyce as Joyce's own fictions so stand in relation to the fictions of Dante. Joyce built his fictions upon a framework of Dante, according to Joseph Campbell [Note 4]. I assert: Mr P built his fictions similarly atop an architecture that Mr P took from Joyce.

Q: How is this so?

A: Campbell provides the mapping from Dante to Joyce or how “Joyce imitates Dante.” Campbell maps Dante’s La Vita Nuova to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dante’s Inferno to Ulysses, Dante’s Purgatorio to Finnegans Wake, and Campbell notes that Joyce did not live to complete that mapping via a final, simple, clear fiction that Campbell mapped to Dante’s Paradiso. (See Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce pg. 15.)

Q: How does that relate to Mr P?
A: Ulysses is a gigantic labyrinth, but at least two keys for orienting the reader to that labyrinth are found within; it is self-referential.
Ulysses is filled with keys: crossed keys in advertisements, musical keys, the quays on the river Liffey, a male gate key inserted into a female lock [Note 5].  The protagonists in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, are keyless as they wander through Dublin 16 June 1904.  If a reader of Ulysses discovers the two self-referential keys, then that reader could traverse Joyce's labyrinth and the fun for that reader has begun, in my humble opinion [Note 6].  Such is my own interest as an amateur scholar of Joyce.

A key from Joyce to Mr P is the gap: the 17-year gap that exists in the published fictions of each. With Joyce, 17 years elapsed between the publication of Ulysses, the major fiction upon his reputation rests, and the publication of Finnegans Wake (hereinafter, “The Wake”). With Mr P, 17 years elapsed between the publication of Gravity's Rainbow, the major fiction upon which his reputation rests, and his next, Vineland. Coincidence?  If one maps Ulysses to Gravity's Rainbow, each followed by a 17-year gap, then, one maps the next four of Mr P's fictions to The Wake, which consists of four parts. Working backwards, the earlier fictions by Mr P map to the earlier fictions of Joyce. The first, V., maps to Joyce’s Dubliners; the second, The Crying of Lot 49, maps to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A-and the latest, Bleeding Edge, maps to that simple, clear fiction that Joyce did not live to write, according to Campbell.  See, the 17-year gap keys the map! [Note 11.]

Q: So what?

A: An Artist creates Art.  It is what she does: The artist cannot help but to create art.

It would have not been keeping with the times for Mr P to have made a tabular schema (“See: you start with GR that maps to U, then Vineland maps to…” [as shown above]), a banal thing, as Joyce did, with inconsistencies among the three schemata.

No, as an artist Mr P had to create a schema that is a work of art in itself: Thus, the short film Ulysses, The Animated Film and its supporting website is each a work of art: Alone and together that pair forms a schema/schemata given the world by Mr P.

Q: So you contend that Mr P cast himself in the role of Lorentz Mulino, the visionary behind the failed project?

A: Might have. Might have not only cast himself, he nailed it: accent, costume, facial expressions: he brought his A-game to that filming, friend. Filming: Mr P subjecting himself to film!  Get it?

Note too, who wrote Ulysses, The Animated Film (credits):  The website ambiguously credits “Stephen”?  The surfer assumes that “Stephen” refers to the previously credited “Mr. Crowe” but that ambiguity is the very essence of Joyce and Mr P: Nothing may refer solely to a single person, place, or  thing; rather each must always refer to as many different, layered, persons, places, or things as possible: each layering having a consistent, internal logic. To the Joycean “Stephen” is the name of the artist.

Q:  You have lost me. What are you saying?

A:  Right: Let’s not digress into the multi-layered fictions of Joyce and Mr P: That is for another time.
Q: Why would Mr P, who has succeeded in not being photographed since his naval service, now allow himself to be photographed?
A:  The failed project, his total vision: That no one got his entire body of fictions may be an answer. That is, it’s time for this show to be over; it’s time to fold this long con that has been played continuously since 1963 (or 1961, depending upon whether the copyright date or the publication date be the important date): The marks never caught on to the grift, *rubbing finger aside the nose*.  
Is a joke a joke if no one gets it?  So it’s time for the Big Reveal, ladies and gentlemen.
Does one go out silently skipping spritely to death, whispering, “No one got my joke, my vision, my achievement: I have out-Joyced Joycesotto voce? Does one rather try to make it easy on them, toss them a little schema or two, the blueprint of the architecture (maybe ensure that the fictions don’t stop being read so that the widow, the spawn, and any future descendants continue to enjoy regular royalty payments until the whole mess goes into the public domain and Project Gutenberg makes available, for free, self-referential e-editions for research by any amateur)?
Maybe there are other reasons too: Pure speculation but the man did turn 79 on May 8, 2016:
The man is not unintelligent (IQ purported to be around 190: a one in a billion intellect: not too many of them around): he's cognizant of mortality: The man may enjoy some small amount of satisfaction, before shuffling off his mortal coil, to seeing his work better understood: Not as a collection of eight assorted novels (infinite in scope), but rather as one, well-conceived body of fiction, conceived after Joyce, just as Joyce conceived his body of fiction after Dante: integrated. 
By unmasking himself as Albano Ballerini Mr P may be stating that if he were to be awarded any future accolades -- for example the Nobel Prize for Literature -- that he will show up: It has been conjectured that no sane Nobel committee would award Mr P that prize to risk embarrassment, demeaning what that prize represents to the world, should he not show up [Note 8].
It may give Mr P some comfort to know that, after he turns to dust, scholars will have fertile plots to till, to conjecture what he did or did not intend, to speculate on dirty jokes as yet unrecognized: Jokes that have to be imagined with the mind as an architecture is imagined by the architect [see Note 7, again].  This is what Joyce wanted; this may be what Mr P insures by unmasking himself.
Then again, maybe the joke, the grift, continues:  This Mr. Albano Ballerini appears as the unmasked Mr P.  I leave it to forensic facial authentication experts to compare the physiognomies of Messrs Ballerini and P for authenticity.  I leave it to forensic vocal authentication experts to compare the vocal characteristics of Messrs Ballerini and P for authenticity.  Those are not my forte (nor my piano, either); I look for puns and patterns in literature; it is my pastime. If Mr P has unmasked himself then the Nobel committee has less risk clearly. A-and any award committee has got to see, appreciating the schemata, that not only for the fictions the man deserves an award (axiomatic) but also for the performance art by which those fictions have been conceived, gestated, and delivered, placenta and all: this short film, Ulysses, The Animated Film and website, being placenta and umbilical to the Pynchon-branded body of fictions:
Think about it: The man modeled his life on Joyce: The 17-year gap: could any other have been silent for 17 years before delivering the next installment?  That wait: the stuff genius does! The four fictions mapped to The Wake: genius does that!
The man adopted Joyce’s own tactics: silence, exile, cunning:
Silence: He has not granted interviews.  
Exile: He has lived in plain sight among us, as Albano Ballerini or under other identities: Who will ever know?
Cunning: He appeared on The Simpsons with a bag over his head: Genius! On Twitter the account @ThomasPynchon has never tweeted. Some have conjectured that Mr P, under many anonymous accounts, is tweeting all the time: Should Mr P ever own up to any other accounts, it might be seen that he has never NOT been tweeting. (This is not without precedent:  Ben Franklin did much the same in Poor Richard's Almanack.)
So, to summarize my tedious answer: Mr P has out-Joyced Joyce.  His contemporary, Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) when interviewed in 1976 replied “In a sense we [writers] are all post-Wake [Finnegans Wake] writers and it's Joyce, and only Joyce, who casts a long terrifying shadow…” [Note 9].  I contend: By a body of fiction Mr P did more than Joyce; in that he out-Joyced Joyce.  With the performance art, he has further out-Joyced Joyce. Finally with what he may be doing in social media, he may have replicated in real life that which he fictionalized in Bleeding Edge: Joyce fabricated his real families' lives into his art; Mr P may be making his art into real life on social media:  It is eff’ing beautiful, man: That is how I see it.

Q: What would inspire Mr P to arrange his eight literary works so?

A: Scholars may never know. Maybe Joyce told Nabokov what he, Joyce, had done regarding Dante, and Nabokov told student Pynchon (hereinafter “Student P”). Maybe Student P heard Joseph Campbell lecture at The Cooper Union; Campbell may have learnt from the Sylvia Beach: one might think Joyce explained his schema to Beach, who explained it to Campbell.

But mostly I like to think that Student P figured it out for himself.  Maybe he saw some unpublished materials while at Cornell; or not. I speculate: Student P deduced what Joyce did regarding Dante. Student P may have appreciated Joyce’s scholarship on Dante, on Shakespeare, and on Homer. With such a deduction I speculate Student P of having made the fictional- and life-imitating plan I attribute to Mr P.

Do you see? He had to remain masked in 1973; unmasking then would have ruined the entire plan [see Note 8 again].

Q: Why haven't academic scholars of Mr P noted this before?

A: Maybe one has. If so, I am unaware of it. I've not noticed much crossover between those who study Joyce and those who study Pynchon. On the Twitter accounts I follow there is not much crossover, at least.

Q: Is this just an elaborate hoax?

A: If so, it is neither the first time nor the last time someone has fooled me. I am easily fooled.  

However, it is damned funny.  Think about it:  Some hoaxer(s) went to a lot of effort and expense in producing Ulysses, The Animated Film and its website for the enjoyment of the Twitterverse of Joyceans.  That is a good prank! If it's a hoax I don’t know, and frankly, don’t give a damn. If that is not Mr P acting the role of Lorentz Mulino then he could have underwritten the hoax, rich as he is likely to be.

Q: Have you a conclusion?

A: What Joseph Campbell wrote in the his conclusion to A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake about Joyce and Joyce’s art is applicable to America's native son.  Read it [Note 10]. Both geniuses of fiction; both deeply concerned with the plight of humanity; both espousing love as an answer to that plight; both leading us to see The Light but with the greatest of humor.  

If Mr P has unmasked himself in Ulysses, The Animated Film and www.ulyssesthefilm.com, then he has himself, not I.

If not, then Mr P does not want to be unmasked. I have argued my case for his having prolly unmasked, but I am no academic scholar; I am an amateur.
Notes and links:
1. ["Nothin' Personal: Interview With Albano Ballerini, A Man of Many Talents" Removed due to broken link, 2019]. See instead (2019): ALBANO BALLERINI Photographer, Chef, and Consultant in Brooklyn, New York. See too: LinkedIn: "Albano Ballerini, Co-owner and Executive Chef at The Classon".
2. See the Linati schema for Ulysses and see the Gilbert schema for Ulysses and see the schema given by Joyce to his publisher, Sylvia Beach, in James Joyce, The Poetry of Conscience: A Study of Ulysses (1961).
3. Campbell, Joseph; and Edmund L. Epstein, Ph.D (editor): Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce, page 14.
4. Ibidem, Joyce’s Dantean Model, pgs. 14-17.
5. It helps to know that the Coat of Arms of the Pope of the Holy Roman Catholic Church includes two keys crossed, the keys of Saints Peter and Paul. Joyce was fond of remarking that the Holy Roman Catholic Church was founded on a pun (“Thou are Peter").  Since Jesus used the pun then it ought to be good enough for him, Joyce, to use.
6. According to me, the two keys are U9.400-24 ["—If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear...loved the mother?"] and U9.1171-4 ["Everyman His Own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in three orgasms)"].
7. A Joycean joke in Ulysses is that the river Liffey maps to the human female vagina, the the natural female organ: “EIACULATIO SEMINIS INTER VAS NATURALE MULIERIS," U10.168 (223:31), were one to align a map of Dublin with a cross section of the human female anatomy.
8. Professor Irwin Corey video on YouTube (auf Deutsch, natΓΌrlich).
9. Joyce Carol Oates, The Art of Fiction No. 72, Interviewed by Robert Phillips [the quotation cited is (November 2019) behind a paywall].
10. Campbell, Joseph, "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake," pg. 360.




11. A biographically based mapping from Joyce to Pynchon has been noted before in 2009. See Pynchon & Joyce: What's similar and what's not/: Cowart's "Attenuated Postmodernism" by Kai Frederik Lorentzen. [Appendied July 2021.]
Copyright © 2016, 2019, Wilson Varga.  All rights reserved. [Links updated November 2019 and May 2021 and other minor edits including the addition of selected graphics (under "fair use") and Note 10.]