(1) I’M NOBODY! — WHO ARE U ?
MY FRIEND, SLIMY B, READ WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847). Unimpressed, he told me : “she writes like a teenage girl with a thesaurus. . .”
On a frigid, blistering walk, I tried to defend Emily’s honor : arguing lexically complex teenage ardors are rollicking delights, — but Slimy B put the final nail in the coffin of the Brontë Sister Industrial Complex :
“MAN, THESE CLASSICS ARE F*****G ELITIST!”
The “CANON” : a forbidding tower of smartypants smarminess, erected so a smug self-selected elect can turn their nose at hard-working regular folk, — the common readers with their bushy-tailed joys & dog-eared best-sellers. . .
I rub elbows with some of NYC’s “elite” in my job as a boxing coach; — (I’m a punching bag for rich wimps), — and I can assure U : they ain’t cozy in their palatial apartments hooking the whole family up to brain-direct IV-drip James Joyce; in fact, they ain’t f*****g interested in literature AT ALL!
Elitism is about ACCESS.
If U are interested in what a neo-luddite might call : Great Literature, there’s almost NOTHING more accessible for U. . .
All U need is a little f*****g GUSTO and the entertainment-value of these “elitist” works will bloom like roses thru a steaming pile of manure. . .
But obviously, something, not so easily dismissible, rankled Slimy B : — what do we owe a reader?
(2) ARE U NOBODY — TOO ?
IS AMBITION THE PROBLEM?
There are two types of literary ambition : EARTHLY & DIVINE.
I suffer, sinfully, from great pangs of earthly ambition ; — when my first book got reviewed NOWHERE, I didn’t console myself : I am on a divine path, — I was PISSED. Gimme my f*****g remunerative KUDOS! I wanna walk into the literary reading and be the center of attention : — ME!
I AM AMERICAN, MATERIALIST, SCUM.
U convince Urself U are trying to talk to the PEOPLE : really, U are trying to talk to the MARKET. . .
At some point the overwhelming concern becomes :
— — HOW. CAN. I. SELL. MY. BOOK. — —
If U R Lucky, U become a corporate saint like George Saunders : fingers weighed down on every keyboard-clack with financial interest ; knowing Ur next book will occupy its own table at Barnes & Noble with a golden plaque :
“Reading George Saunders makes U a better person!”
. . . but there is DIVINE AMBITION :
“Delight, —top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.”
. . . Milton sets out his intention at the very beginning of Paradise Lost, to pursue,
“things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme. . . and to justify the ways of God to men.”
. . . Giambattista Vico spent his whole life working on New Science (1725), published it himself, edition after edition, to NOTHING, sent it to all his heroes, — SILENCE ; — walked miserable thru the streets of Napoli while the people who he sent copies of his precious book ignored him; went home to his annoyed wife and 12 hungry children : a useless FAILURE ;
wrote in a bitter letter at the end of his life,
“I expect nothing from my native city, except the complete isolation that allows me to work so hard.”
If there is something missing from the contemporary novel, maybe it’s a paucity of DIVINE AMBITION : but it has always been fewfar : — earthly rewards are sensuous & bright, eternity’s only reward is annihilation. . .
Why wouldn’t U chase material success?
(3) DON’T TELL! THEY’D ADVERTISE — U KNOW !
I DIDN’T GROW UP IN NO LITERARY HOUSEHOLD.
My dad was a bookie; my mom was a myriad-hustler who ended up working with kids with disabilities. Neither went to college; both were common readers : — they read 1-10 books a year following their interests.
My dad read books about gambling, the mafia, a few sports biographies; my mom’s taste was more eclectic, encompassed big-time bestsellers like Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) ; — which I keenly remember her reading aloud to me in Rio, movingly, when I was a kid.
Between the two of them, I only know of one “literary novel” : my dad, inexplicably, read a hardcover copy of A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) : — he probably heard it was about a funny fat guy and was sold. . .
Yet they always championed reading as something essential; — my dad would say, as I headed off to school, “there’s gold in them books!” ; the only thing they’d buy for me questionlessly was books, — so initially, a great part of the appeal was having new stuff.
. . . until middle school, my mom would take me out of school for half the year, to go stay in Rio with her parents ; she would get all the work from the teachers in advance, and she would homeschool me ; this schooling became very self-directed : basically, do all the work fast as U can, and U can go play soccer with Ur friends for the rest of the day. . .
Schoolwork & reading became very competitive : I wanted to get the s**t done FAST. . . resulting in my privately pugilistic attitude toward reading. . .
. . . I ended up in the ninnyworld of the Columbia Fiction MFA : — thru EARTHLY AMBITION : I wanted to publish a novel, — . . . wading in such terrestrially boggy waters could prove a deleterious threat to DIVINE ASPIRATIONS. . .
What a tremendously serious way to be talking, huh? Slimy B would think I’m bugging : probably thinks his point is proved. But what if I said I’m simply playing a frivolous game?; the truth is, reading & writing is POINTLESS.
Why am I even wasting my breath?
(4) HOW DREARY TO BE SOMEBODY !
IN COLLEGE I WAS AN AMATEUR BOXER.
I fought 16 times, — mostly at light-heavyweight. My record was 12-4. Sometimes people ask me, “did U make any money?” The answer is obviously F**K NO! U do not make any money as an amateur fighter. All U do is sacrifice pleasant things.
I would hear, from my apartment window at Miami University, droves of my fellow students going out to the bars to party, f**k hot babes, make those famous college memories. . . I’d be looking at the clock waiting to see when it was time to drink my last tiny ration of water for the evening, eat my lone almond for dinner, — cutting weight for a dawncrack van-ride to go fight some neanderthal in the Pennsylvania woods.
Did I like fighting? Honestly, it scared the crap out of me.
When I had a fight looming, I would have nightmares for weeks leading up to it. I would pray for something to happen to get the fight cancelled. I had two awfully pusillanimous incidents.
My sophomore year : it was time for the regional tournament, I was way out of f*****g shape; there was a really tough guy in my bracket from Navy : when the brackets came out and I saw we were matched up in the first round, I emailed Coach, told him I had the flu; — my whole body still shudders from humiliated dread. . .
I should’ve taken my ass-whooping like a man.
The next year went way better for me. I was in the Semi-finals of the National Championship. I had to fight the 3x National Champion from Army, at West Point. The night before I’d watched him knock a guy out so badly he was unconscious in the ring for five minutes and they had to stretcher him off. . .
I could’ve given the dude a good fight, but I spent the night before surrendering in my head; — I woke up and after weigh-ins, had chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast : waving my white-flag in self-destructive resignation. The first round he hit me, — not even close to clean, — I slipped. Fell to a knee. When I got up, the ref asked me if I wanted to continue; I didn’t say anything; he stopped the fight.
I quit without taking any damage because of fear. It was my supreme low-point as a competitor.
My mom was in the crowd yelling, “LET THEM FIGHT!” . . . I was like, “MOM, CHILL!” . . .
I thought about it all summer. My senior year, I was possessed. I would run around town, not listening to anything, repeating my mantra, over and over “I AM THE CHAMPION!” The only thing I wanted in the whole world was to win Nationals.
I went 6-0 and made it to the National Finals. I had to fight a dude from Navy who I’d beaten three weeks before : Biron McNeely. I did everything I could; I thought I won, but the judges gave him a split decision. I cried.
My whole boxing career was literally POINTLESS. I didn’t earn any earthly delights. All I wanted was to win the National Championship, and I failed.
Why would anyone ever do anything?
(5) HOW PUBLIC — LIKE A FROG !
THE MOST EVER-DEVOTED SAINT OF POINTLESSNESS : JAMES JOYCE.
Spent seven years scribbling his usylessly unreadable blue book of Eccles; . . . exiled, doubted, up to his neck in obnoxious penury, — nobody wanted to publish his damn books. . . ; without an eye toward GOD, he would’ve never endured. . .
It paid off : Ulysses was a resounding earthly success; acclaimed in Joyce’s lifetime, now regularly touted as the greatest novel of all time; — its innovations seamlessly integrated into what everyone knows about literature. . . a writer couldn’t dream of so much success. . .
Regular people, generation after generation, read Ulysses and LOVE it.
Overlooked fact about the “CANON” : it is, to a certain extent, defined by the taste of common readers accrued over time; cultural heritage is a democracy, if the only people fostering an artwork are a Shrouded Coterie of Brainiacs, the work will die.
My parents could read Ulysses; — it is readable & FUNNY.
They’d f**k with it if they gave it the requisite attention. They don’t because they don’t want to and I don’t blame them. They’d rather crawl into the warm frictionless womb of Facebook reels. . .
There’s a reason people open their gullets & submit to the firehose gush of CONTENT, — content is extremely explicable. U R there to flush Urself with dopamine; — it might be just as pointless as anything else, but at least there’s no ambiguity w/r/t the purpose.
Life is an inaudible ribbet : — why waste our time on activities we can’t even explain?! Which is why U hear : Reading the empathetic books du jour make U a better person :-). . .
Ulysses is easy to justify in this way : — the book rewards attention; — U will be entertained, U will feel smart for getting to the end; U can post it on Ur Instagram for awed back-pats; — it is a book that beckons the earthly reader.
What do we make of a book of pure DIVINE AMBITION?
(6) TO TELL ONE’S NAME : THE LIVELONG JUNE
FINNEGANS WAKE (1939) IS A PROBLEM.
Why would someone spend 17 years writing increasingly more elaborate puns in huge letters with crayon, seeding a deep-forest of obfuscated meaning, splayed out on their bed, as their eyes fail, their family falls apart, and every fan turns their back on them?
HG Wells read an excerpt of what was then called Work-in-Progress, sent Joyce a letter in 1928,
“You have turned your back on common men — on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence. What is the result? Vast riddles. Do I get much pleasure from this work? No.
So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?”
What’s ironic about this extremely fair question : Finnegans Wake is actually about the common man : a good old Dublin fellow named Humphrey (known as HCE) who runs a pub and has a family. He is also, simultaneously, every man in history,
“In all fortitudinous ajaxious rowdinoisy tenuacity, the hen and crusader everintermutuomergent. . .”
And the trouble begins : What the literal f**k is this guy up to!? Most books are trying to communicate to U ; Finnegans Wake ain’t talking to U!
Look at the quote : we know it’s about HCE b/c the first letters in “hen”, “crusader” and “everintermutuomergent” are “hce” ; if we wanna look even closer, what do the first letters in “fortitudinous ajaxious rowdinoisy tenuacity” spell out. . . : FART!
Finnegans Wake is the MOST accessible book : it doesn’t need anything from U. It is completely & utterly ITSELF : a monument independent of U. . .
Open to the first page, start reading, “riverrun past Eve and Adam’s” : let the words wash over U as sonorous NONSENSE ; books trying to communicate create a division b/t U and The Thing, — here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics.
U can stop, amused & interested, or U can keep pushing, a deranged detective, to unfurl the hermetically rank b******t,
“as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia. . .”
What does it mean that Joyce spent 17 years toiling on a literature-wrecking, life-destroying, nacht-book because he thought it was FUN?
(7) TO AN ADMIRING BOG !
IN 2023, I SPENT 9 MONTHS READING FINNEGANS WAKE.
I wanted to be the toughest guy who ever read Finnegans Wake; turns out, I wasn’t even close : Gene Tunney beat Jack Dempsey twice and said,
“I met Joyce once. He was blind then. I can understand Ulysses, but not Finnegans Wake, which I have read three or four times.”
Tunney dominated me, but still I persisted, reading a mastigable single page outloud per day, with the fisticuffle fervor I used to bring to the heavy bag, — enflamed by the private repetitive struggle. . . eventually the friction abated : I completely succumbed,
“It was a long, very long, a dark, very dark, an allburt unend, scarce endurable, and we could add mostly quite various and somenwhat stumble-tumbling night.”
Finnegans Wake was released in 1939 to plenty of fanfare; — Joyce was on the cover of Time magazine! Some Time readers weren’t crazy about Joyce’s piece of s**t,
“It appears to me that it is high time such literary excrement be branded for what it is and relegated to the oblivion it deserves.”
Joyce already thought of his work as a piece of garbage : that metaphor is in the book : FW takes the form of a stained letter pecked up by a hen named Belinda at the dump,
“a cold fowl behaviourising strangely on that fatal midden or chip factory or comicalbottomed copsjute (dump for short). . . what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper."
Joyce died not even two years after Finnegans Wake was released : on January 13, 1941 ; he was heartbroken at the incomprehension, — especially the anger of its reception. . .
Everything U will ever do is FUTILE& POINTLESS : U can confront those facts with morose resignation, or U can allow it to free U ; striving for something mad, failprone, foolish allows us to bring a little divinity into our futile tasks. . .
Joyce teaches us to imbue our NOTHING with the sunny light of SOMETHING; — devote Urself completely to something utterly worthless, and maybe, it’ll turn out to mean something. . .
Like his wife Nora, — the commonest of readers, — said, “what’s all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book.”
HAPPY BDAY JAMES JOYCE.
