"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish, ketchup, and Jamaican Pickapeppa sauce the inner organs of beasts and fowls..."

and so do I partaketh also (namely, chopped chicken liver from Citarella, spread thick on Pepperidge Farm Party Rye--you know, those little round slices--au naturel actually, minus the aforementioned condiments) ("wouldn't be surprised if it was that kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical") on this lovely, sunny June 16th, a/k/a Bloomsday, a day where I traditionally masticate (haha) in honour of my favourite novel namely, James Joyce's "Around the World in a Day" Quality Lit (you could say) headtrip known as "Ulysses".

Never 'nuff said about this masterpiece, I remember flying to Italy with my folks once with the UK Penguin paperback edition on my knee (the Bodley Head version--the Godly Head as far as I'm concerned, fie on that suspect German academic so-called revised definitive edition which came out to so much faux hoopla some years back and which Johnny Kidd and his pirates eviscerated so thoroughly upon publication), banjo-like, producing licks of love (John Updike reinstated recently to my pantheon for tearing Houellebecq for his bad verses--or rather, rude animadversion to Joyce--in the NY Review of Books last month) in harmony along with Richard Ellmann's Joyce bio and a Skeleton (at the Feast) key explication/concordance to the text by, uh, can't recall at this precise moment, as mmmmmm I hear a rumble (above and) below (o aye those inner organs of smale fowles maken melodye in mellifluous concordance with my own)...

Which is to say, there was a Time I knew this book "Ulysses" Chapter and Verse as well as my brother knows the Old Testament (sure and bog horror, my face flushed the colour of the cistern Chappelle) (Must get this much ballyhoo-hah'ed Gospel of Judas...or is it "Seth Speaks"? A descent into "the Realm of Chaos and the Underworld" is promised (a not so unfamiliar milieu, come to think of it, in my line of work). (Just kidding--I do not know that Other World).

Anyway methinks I will take a breather from reading Pierre Louys's "The Woman and the Puppet" (the Arthur Symons translation, the literary basis for Von Sternberg/Dietrich's "The Devil Is a Woman" and Bunuel's "That Obscure Object of Desire"), James Hillmann's "A Terrible Love of War", and Andrew Loog Oldham's "2Stoned" (second read-through) (Joe Boyd's "White Bicycles" music biz memoir just out in the UK is a good 'un too), yes I will take a breather as summer is a cummin' in, my birthday's almost upon me again (oy), time to succumb once more to the blandishments of Jimjoyce (not to be confused with Lou Reed's "jimjams"--as in, "all the jimjams in this town"), once more into the breach of Molly, into the fetid mind of The Citizen, time to run again with garyowen (to (Laugh-in the Dark), fly by those nets and dance with Steven D, and ultimately join in for a rousing chorus of "Love's Old Sweet Song"--

yes its time to revisit "Ulysses" (for an apostate goyim, Joyce really got deep into the psyche of ye sensitive Jewish male, certainly as deep as Bellow and Roth (and Mailer, in his non-fiction... not in the guise of Sergius O'Shaunnessy or Steven Rojack))--nearly as deep as Singer...

I do not know that other Word.

xxLove

Gary

ps Was at a classic New York party last night at my old Yale pal Bob "Rocket" Rubin's pad 28 (floors) UP in the art deco arcadium known as the El Dorado on 91st and Central Park West (Bono lives there...so does my guy Josh Feigenbaum). Spectacular views abound all around of the Park, and the sun setting 'oer the Hudson streaming through the ironwrought windows nearly outshone Bob's amazing art collection which festooned the pre-war walls of his expansive lair (a modern art smorgasbord, from Basquiat to Joseph Cornell to Andre Breton).

Bob, epicurean owner of the Bridge Golf Club in Southhampton who was writ large in these here blog pages a year ago recently unloaded Jean Cocteau's old Paris pad near the Comedie Francaise and traded up by purchasing La Maison de Verre, Pierre Chareau's 1920's feverdream of a modernist townhouse right off the Boulevard St. Germain. Party was in honor of Bob's latest acquisition, a scarily detailed sculpture I would have sworn was a tableau vivant created by the artist Charles McGill, a life-size replica of a black "ex-militant" pro golfer whose apocryphal motto is "Why be on the Front Line when you can be on the Front Nine?" (only in New York, kids, only in New York--to find out more about McGill's serious/satiric/provocative work, check this review from Art in America at www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m1248/is_5_89/ai_74439437 - 22k -). The great film director Mario Van Peebles (a big McGill fan) was in attendance, and I am delighted to report that the genius auteur behind the classic film "Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song" is hard at work on a new one called "Ex-Dufus Mother Blues" (exactly). Hip young homeboys Inderbir and Cesare (fellow members of Bob's Columbia Grad School Architecture program--Bob's about to get his Ph.D there) were hanging out and aRude editor-in-chief Ike Ude and his glammed-up entourage (special mention of Ude's beautiful Russian model girlfriend Larissa and Ude's Swedish painter friend) made a spectacular entrance near the party's finis... and then Caroline, Inderbir, Cesare and Caroline's beautiful assistant Bettina cabbed our way back Downtown for supper at Les Deux Gamins, and then it was home to bed, have to bone up tomorrow for a special acoustic instore performance at the grand opening of my pal Fred Perry's Reservoir Music joint in Shokan up near Woodstock, as much as I love New York I rejoyce in the coming and going from it too :-)

"Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to..."

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Posted by Gary Lucas to Gary Lucas at 6/16/2006 02:24:00 PM