At the butt-crack of dawn, I hoofed it down Palm Canyon Drive to beat the crowd at the Schultzbucks coffee dispensary. This was a “Reserve Roastery” where java sommeliers elegantly poured foamy masterpieces too resplendent to slurp. I ordered a drip.
I snagged a sun-scorched table outside and hid from humanity behind my book, Hugh Kenner’s “Ulysses.” Yep, the good professor title-jacked Joyce’s novel for his own 182-page critical analysis of said novel. Cute one, Hugh.
I gulped my scalded bean water and bushwhacked through Kenner’s riff on the Circe episode. The Nighttown episode, for all you Nabokovian Homerphobics.
Circe is a Surrealist wet nightmare. It makes The Rocky Horror Picture Show look like Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. The border between Leopold Bloom’s imagination and the cobblestone reality of a Dublin whorehouse collapses. The exterior world and sadomasochistic fantasies comingle into a mutating vortex of lunacy. Everything shifts and twists: space, time, Bloom’s gender. The scene undergoes impossible transformations like a werewolf snared inside a time machine repeatedly jumping back and forth between moonrise and sunrise. Ulysses’ 15th episode is physically impossible, intellectually indiscernible, and emotionally damaging. You will be triggered.
Circe is also the funniest section of the funniest novel ever written. If Circe were a stand-alone novella, stage play, comic book, what have you, it would still be the funniest work of art in the Western Canon. Hands down.
“Ulysses?” somebody mumbled.
Huh? Was that in my ears or my head? Did one of these aproned criminals micro-dose my coffee?
“Ulysses!” the voice clamored.
I knew wrestling with Joyce’s midnight episode in the morning was a mistake. I grasped for my bearings. I was still outside Schultzbucks Reserve. The desert sun still cooked my table. The space/time continuum held. But terror replaced confusion. There was a serious possibility I’d have to endure a social interaction.
“Ulysses!”
Oh, Hell.
An adult male human stared down upon me.
He’d previously halted in front of the dispensary doors and kicked off a conversation with someone behind him who, to my eyes, did not exist. This little self-chat ran the gauntlet of polite debate, grueling interrogation, screaming match, and veered dangerously close to physical altercation. His wide gaze ping-ponged between my book and me.
“Ulysses!”
Thanks again, Hugh.
The debate champion scanned the yokels in horse-eyed
awe, as if to ask, ‘Are you fools seeing what I’m seeing?’ The urge to flee overwhelmed.
He declared, “They ought to make this man mayor!”
Oh, no, no, no, no!
I did not want to be Lord Mayor of Palm Springs. Unlike Leopold the First, I had no desire to be “the undoubted emperor-president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this realm.”
I had to nip this before I was swept up into the arc of history. His impressive debate tactics echoed in my mind. I hesitated.
My campaign strategist announced, “He’s got to be better than that lady we have in there now!”
Oh, no he doesn’t!
Bloom’s beloved Bloomites turned on him after a few short pages. He was pilloried, pantomime stoned, sjamboked, defiled by ownerless dogs, and set ablaze by the Dublin Fire Brigade. I was frozen with fear. Time disappeared. My fate, sealed.
My campaign strategist slumped, disillusioned by the utter lack of civic engagement by his fellow citizens. His head shook wearily. His rebellion perished.
“Ulysses. God damn.”
He marched toward the flashing ‘Don’t Walk’ sign and out into the middle of the street oblivious to the screeching tires and blaring horns.
I chugged my charred coffee. I swore never to read Circe or about Circe in the light of day again. I grabbed a refill. My terror of holding public office and being flame-broiled alive slowly subsided.
I should have offered the man a seat. He was articulate, literate, and obviously qualified to run an American political campaign. What’s the worst that could’ve happened besides contracting rabies?
It seemed worth the risk.
