Dear Mike and Chelsea,

I know we were supposed to go to that Indian restaurant I’ve been wanting to go to for a long time. It was my idea and I love curry way more than the next guy but I bailed because I had something to do for work. Instead of doing something I had to do for work I got stoned and wandered into Adobe Books which as you know is like a fifteen second walk from my apartment. Typical. I don’t know what I was doing there. I had to go to the library to scan some shit but my brain was on fire and I think gravity was involved. I think I thought of something vague like maybe I’ll buy a Padgett Powell novel. I remembered reading from one once at this place this one here which one I got lost in for a few minutes, it was like reading a crossword puzzle themed (sort of) whiskey, women & dogs.

There was a blur of books as I entered the store saying Hello at the guy at the counter the blur of books continued so I stopped in front of two no three copies of Ulysses, a book I must have put off reading for as long as I can remember. I remember seeing that photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses when I was young lending the impression it was sexy as hell. I think I was afraid of the book. I thought I didn’t have time. Too many other books. Need to concentrate to read it, etc. And I just got tired of that. I thought of making a webcast where a guy goes and buys all the copies he can find and burns them because. As long as I can remember is like when I was thirteen years old. I remember reading Joyce, vaguely. So thirteen years. That’s how long I can remember. I bought the best copy of the three, and a Penguin printing of The Big Rock Candy Mountain. I think I just bought the Stegner so the Joyce would seem less apparent. I was in fact hiding Ulysses behind Big Rock Candy Mountain, I didn’t want the guy at the counter to think Oh hey look at this guy here this choad here he’s buying Joyce who does this guy think he is this candycane here who does he think he is reading Joyce and holy shit haha he’s probably going to put this thing in a closet somewhere where it will burn in fifteen years with the rest of his half-assed endeavors like the rest of these fucks in this lousy fucking town. The guy at the counter looks at the book then eyes me up and down and asks if it’s my first time. I say yes. It is. I tell him I read Portrait of the Artist as a young man and that Joyce is something of a thing for me somewhere stuck in my head feeling like it’s waiting to spread out like a pinwheel that I can’t quite put my finger on. Other than that I read “The Dead” last Christmas and I pry in on Finnegans Wake from time to time but it’s like a rave in there. He says I know what you mean or something. He holds the book. He seems wise and he seems to remember a lot. But maybe that’s what he wants me to think. Maybe he was drunk. He handed me the book. It’s a weird book, he said.

Since I didn’t make any New Year resolutions I decided to take this as some sort of a sign. But in order to spare you the series of upper-eye dart-time roll-motion swing-vision that would surely come of such a thing, I’ll just link to the blog I started ten minutes ago. Also there is this twitter. Oh boy. Anyway I will leave poops there periodically as I read this rag like a sponge.

Sorry. Why am I such an asshole? Why don’t you move to the mission? Gawd dammit I’m hungry for some curry!

Sincerely,

If you would like to read again, or (I’m hoping) for the first time, an excerpt from the penultimate chapter “Ithaca” in Ulysses, wherein Stephen (of A Portrait of an artist as a young man) escorts a drunken Leopold Bloom home, click after the break.

Bloom has just ran the faucet to heat up water in a kettle so that Stephen can wash his hands. Of the origin of that water:

From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of 2400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial plant cost of 5 pounds per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of relieving tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at Eustace bridge, upper Leeson street, though from prolonged summer drouth and daily supply of 12 1/2 million gallons the water had fallen below the sill of the overflow weir for which reason the borough surveyor and waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C. E., on the instructions of the waterworks committee had prohibited the use of municipal water for purposes other than those of consumption (envisaging the possibility of recourse being had to the impotable water of the Grand and Royal canals as in 1893) particularly as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding their ration of 15 gallons per day per pauper supplied through a 6 inch meter, had been convicted of a wastage of 20,000 gallons per night by a reading of their meter on the affirmation of the law agent of the corporation, Mr Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the detriment of another section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers, solvent, sound.

Of Bloom’s admiration for water:

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

There’s probably something annoying and redundant about some guy in 2009 talkin’ on a literature blog about how Ulysses changed his life, but here we are: after reading Ulysses, every trite minutiae of my days seemed veiled in an empathetic sheen, like, even though [my] life still sucked, at least it sucked while quivering in its own beauty — that we are empowered to edit our perception on things, and that our petty micro is philosophically macro. Joyce taught me (D.F. Wallace does this too) that the heart and mind can be friends, and just now and then, such good friends they are. Thank you, James.