BRAINDEAD SOUNDMACHINE (1990-1993) have ripcorded on the music business and now live in a dormant wind tunnel on the Morgan Salt Flats, east of China Lake Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. The facility also features a natural hot spring, a small cafeteria, and a sculpture garden consisting of welded early 70s muscle cars. The wind tunnels  themselves are modified Navy diving bells powered by gas generators and automobile batteries. With mixed results, the former musicians promote their “Nitronic Research Wind Tunnels” as a point of interest for travelers on the way to nearby Death Valley.

BRAINDEAD's lineage can be traced back to the late 60s, when former Strawberry Alarm Clock keyboardist Ikky Shivers performed his rock opera “BRIAN WILSON” in the abandoned warehouse district of downtown Los Angeles. In 1985, after having disappeared for some years into the not entirely unconnected worlds of Japanese pornography and top fuel drag racing, Ikky turned his head in a Hollywood Denny's restaurant and saw that the man next to him was also reading a copy of NO TIME FOR RIMJOBS, the autobiography of Kenji Yoshi, a Japanese crossdresser who holds the unofficial speed record for unlimited top fuel funny cars after hitting 331 mph at Badwater, Utah in front of approximately 34 Jehovah's witnesses, none of whom were accepted as recognized corroboration by the proper sanctioning bodies.

PART ONE:  WE BELIEVED IT THEN AND I BELIEVE IT NOW

“We believed it then

And I believe it now...

This music is a manifestation

Of the rising tide of awareness on the planet.

“This music contributes to a positive environment,

It feels good and it casts a comforting spell

Over everyone who hears it."

“Come Down from the Hill and Make My Baby.”— Dogvillasan, Coyote God from Vietnam

PAT BOONE’S DREAM DEBASED

Reality and I pick up Yoshi in the alley behind Club Mugi — the Japanese transvestite bar at the intersection of Hollywood and Harvard — at 3:30 on a Wednesday afternoon. We are late for a live music television appearance and are totally geezed on cheap marijuana, a thermos of espresso and the fumes blubbering out of my 1961 Oldsmobile Cutlass.

And we are a fashion statement, decked out in borrowed polyester “Nitro Inc.” pit crew uniforms, leather jackets and cowboy hats.

The uniforms are a temporary gift from a Top Fuel team whose p.r. man had seen us — Reality, Ikky and I (aka the Braindead Soundmachine) — around, first while interviewed on a public access show and then as guests in the Top Eliminator Club at the professional drag races. The flak thinks we are rich rock stars. We are neither.

“Hey, aren’t you guys Braindead?”

“Why, yes. We are.”

“Hey! Great to make your acquaintance! I’m Benny Mayer and I do marketing and public relations for Nitro Inc. and seeing as how you guys are famous and drag racing fans and everything, we would love to do some photo opportunities with you guys. Maybe we can get you to endorse us in interviews ... and maybe buy a 55 gallon drum of nitromethane for us, as a little quid pro quo.”

“Umm, we can’t help you with your fuel costs, but we can promote your race team. As a matter of fact, we’re going to be on a music video show this Wednesday. Give us some spare uniforms and we’ll wear them during the interview. Perhaps a proper sponsor will see your logo and want to give involved with Nitro, Inc. and start cutting you checks for your operating expenses.”

We didn’t tell him about Yoshi.

*****

Like a cross dressing Norma Desmond. Yoshi is also attired for performance — “ready for (his) close-up” and television debut — with enough pancake and rouge on his cheeks to start an IHOP franchise.

The broadcast is happening in a little over an hour at a small Orange County studio owned by Pat Boone, located across the street from Disneyland. From Hollywood, we will have to cut some serious drive time in order to make the opening credits, and the freeways are fucked.

The moment should be bottled. Here we are at the Dawn of the Infotainment Age and all of this makes perfect sense: we pick up a Japanese cross dresser at a back alley behind Club Mugi, a transvestite bar whose squalid coordinates are where any manner of debauched and debased degradation and sexual congress transpire every night, and haul the proprietor, enabler and instigator of such degeneration to a humble local cable television studio owned by ‘50s pop-star-cum-religious-nut Pat Boone. All while pretending to sponsor Nitro Inc., a Top Fuel dragster team. Tutti Frutti, Aw-Rootie, indeed.

I drive, Reality takes shotgun and Yoshi rides in the back seat: Two nitro cowboys and their aging geisha quarry of indiscriminate gender. We are late, amped and stuck in traffic, somewhere between the Pai Gow Poker clubs in the Asian parts of East Los Angeles and the Matterhorn at Disneyland and we are laughing. Brake lights glow and glow like a kaleidoscope of bug’s eyes, but we are floating above the bottleneck, imitating angels and on some sort of collective out of body experience.

Reality asks Yoshi if he knows who Little Richard is.

“Oh yes. Very famous in Japan.”

“And Pat Boone?”

“Oh yes. ‘A-Wop-bop-a-roo-rop a-rop-bam-boo’.”

“Exactly. Pat Boone owns the studio we are going to.”

“Oh. I see.”

We continue floating and grinding south, with the demographic and quality of automobiles changing commensurately: There are now fewer Mexican low riders and blacks in hoopties but nearly as many Asians in Honda coupes. More and more upper middle class commuters in bucks up sedans are stuck within a quarter car length of the Cutlass, and are trying to come to terms with its peeling paint, billowing black exhaust and its strange cargo, a couple of grease monkeys and what appears to be an Asian meter maid, taking pulls from a thermos and then laughing maniacally in sync.

“So Yoshi, the interviewers are going to ask you some questions that you may not be able to understand.”

“I see.”

“So if you don’t understand the question, just answer them this way; say, ‘The Salamanders are coming.’”

“‘The Saramanders?’”

“‘Are coming.’”

“‘All com-ing.’”

“Perfect.”

Finally we get to Orange County.

“Aww, the Mattelholn,” Yoshi points to the Happiest Place on Earth.

Walt Disney. Pat Boone. Yoshi. The Braindead Soundmachine is really beginning to hit its stride, I think to myself.

LET THE MOTHERFUCKER BURN

I am in a bar in Hollywood, wearing a t-shirt with a dead rock star’s mug silk-screened on the front. The joint is crowded and incredibly dark, except when the owners sporadically pour Bacardi 151 around the perimeter of the bar and light it on fire. The flames provide enough foot-candles so that I can almost see what I am drinking. The other salient feature of the establishment is that you can buy cocaine from the bartenders. With a credit card.

Some guy in a plain yet stained white t-shirt and leather jacket picks a fight with me because of the iconography on my t-shirt. “What a selfish, self- indulgent prick.”

“Excuse me?”

“That foppish, narcissistic excuse of a human being on your t-shirt.”

“Man, you are an unfeeling asshole. And buy a clean shirt.”

We argue about the artistic and existential merits of the singer’s suicide. I say the timing of his death, on the eve of the band’s premier in America, ratcheted up the band’s cachet and somehow made them eternal. His death was poignant, I say. Like James Dean or something.

The leather jacket is having nothing of it.

“Rock and roll is over. It is cooked. Put a bullet in its doddering corpse — but spare yourself. To snuff yourself under the delusion that you will somehow create this timeless legacy with your music is beyond megalomaniacal.”

He then proceeds to tell me that film and the written word are what are still relevant.  It turns out he is a screenwriter, natch. He tells me the only place for music is as a score for film. I yell back, but my voice and whatever point I am making is drowned out by exhortations from the besotted bar patrons. The bartenders have lit the bar on fire.

The flame dies down.

“So what great cinematic masterpiece are you working on, Mr. Screenwriter?”

“Call me ‘BZ.’ And it is still embryonic. The working title is ‘Zombie Cop.’”

It will take years for either BZ or I to pick up on the irony of a screenwriter trying to inject life into the medium of cinema with a script based on the undead. But for now, we shake hands, BZ nods, gives me a business card and tells me to bring some samples of my music to the Avton Films offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

The bartender douses the bar with rum again and drops a match. I stare into the flame. It is a bluish, fecund green and rather transparent.

“Los Angeles is on fire,” I say.  I am drunk on bourbon, rum fumes and cocaine.

A couple of jailbait white girls are giggling. “We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn,” they bleat.

Soon enough, there will come a time when Los Angeles really is on fire. But then the teenyboppers will not sing.

THE MISSING EYEBROW

1988. A white passenger van travels west across Highway 1 in Canada, between Edmonton and Vancouver. In addition to its cargo of musical instruments, the freight consists of Mr. Odd, an Underground Pop Icon from England, his back up musicians and a technical crew of one, an Irish Hippie Soundman with One Eyebrow.

(It is not like the Soundman has a Slavic unibrow or anything like that. He is actually missing one eyebrow, which has been shaved off by the musicians in Mr. Odd’s band.)

The Missing Eyebrow is reading James Joyce and drinking vodka cut with Orange Crush, mixed directly into the aluminum soda pop can he snagged out of a vending machine.

Mr. Odd notices that Ulysses is actually upside down.

“Oi!  You’re reading Joyce ass over tea kettle, you daft cunt.”

“Emmm. I know. It’s fucking brilliant, isn’t it?”

Mr. Odd rears back like a pile driver and TTHWAACCKKKSS Joyce out of the Soundman’s hand, spilling the vodka and Orange Crush over the van’s interior and fellow passengers.

“Hey! For fuck’s sake,” yell the other musicians as the sickly orange fluid sprays and gushes.

“Fuck off, you fucking Irish Hippie,” Mr. Odd exclamates.

Nonplussed, the Missing Eyebrow picks up the empty Orange Crush can and examines it, holding it upside down and staring at the remaining drops of fluid dribbling out and then gathers up the Joyce, which he pinwheels 180 degrees, so that it reads right side up this time. “Emmm. Got any vodka?” he asks.

No one answers. Jonathan Richman is on the stereo, singing a folk song about double chocolate malteds.

DR. RHYTHM

The first drum machine imported into the United States in any mass quantities is the Dr. Rhythm, an analog device built in the early 1980s. Made in Japan and shipped across the Pacific on a cargo freighter, typically this primitive rhythm box came in the docks where the barrio town of Wilmington meets Long Beach Harbor.

Wilmington.  Or “Wee-mas,” in the pidgin patois of the local gang members and the semi-employed longshoremen. An industrial complex defying the economic recession threatening the very existence of the local shipyards, if it were not for the prodigious dumping of Japanese electronics — such as drum machines — at the docks.

Wilmington is where the future wafts through a choked skyline, and it smells of burning rubber from chemical plants that buttress the coastline. It is all angel dust and tacos. It is a monochromatic tableau of smoke and hard, strident graffiti burning into stucco walls and the bleached out sidewalks that buttress both asphalt and a smog so thick that the harbor winds refuse to blow.

From there, boxes and boxes of Dr. Rhythms are fork lifted onto a tractor trailer, trucked inland up the Alameda Corridor of South Los Angeles, unloaded at a music store in Hollywood and then safely installed behind a glass case. Among its first purchasers is one Ichabod J. Shivers (“Ikky” to his friends), a drummer from Long Beach. Ikky is a tall, lean fellow, whose height, build and rusty skin tone belie his art faggish aesthetics. For a drummer — notoriously the most primeval of musicians —Ikky has an open and progressive mind and sees the beauty in electronics doing the work of a musician. None of this “technology is taking our jobs away” Luddite claptrap from Ikky. A study in duality and harsh contrasts, Ikky is the kind of working man who embraces technology, and purchases a Dr. Rhythm as soon as they come off of the docks; he does so with no trepidation whatsoever, loading ‘er into his Japanese pickup trucks and carting the device back to Wilmington, where his band rehearses.

FUNNY CARS ON FIRE

Reality and I are mixing a record in an expensive studio. When making a record, Reality is fanatical about creating the proper work surroundings. Without the proper environmental stimulation, the work will suffer, he says. Ergo, the control room is decorated with various talismans and gris gris which Reality reckons will somehow mystically soothe, appease and charm the electrons in the signal path the flows between the performer, his or her instrument, the recording console and the tape machine.

This evening’s mise-en-scène: Centerfold pinups of porn models rubbing their private parts, which drape the front of speaker enclosures. Every time a bass drum hits (POOOMM... POOOMM... POOOMM... POOOMM...) and expands the loudspeaker’s woofer, the bottom half of the photograph moves and gyrates back and forth, giving the illusion that the model is masturbating.

The sexual imagery is not enough for Reality. Beyond appealing to the debased ghost of Venus and maybe Apollo, Reality has arranged for other totems to summon Pan or some other gods I am not familiar with.

Shades of a keg boogie at Aleister Crowley’s pad in some gothic mansion; crosses are mounted upside down throughout the control room. Candles are burning, and wax is dripping. Pictures of funny cars on fire complete the tableau.

Reality feels the funny cars melting are a perfect metaphor for his approach to the recording process, as there is a danger when you drive or redline a machine too far or too hard. The machine will blow up in your face.

Num-E-Num, the second engineer, who is really working as an apprentice and is responsible for gathering the porn mags and hanging most of the artifacts, brings Reality and me some deli sandwiches and asks about the pictures of the race cars.

“Hey, do you guys like Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters?”

Reality and I answer in the affirmative. When we aren’t making music together, we often go to the drag races to get dosed with more noise.

“My dad helps sponsor a couple of Top Fuel dragsters.”

“Really.”

A few weeks later, Num-E-Num takes Reality, Ikky and I to the drag races. We get preferred parking, and access to the corporate suites where deals are struck while drag racers blow up their equipment in the background, on the other side of some tinted glass.

In the suites, everything is first class, including the hospitality. Num-E- Num’s dad is mixing a Bloody Mary and using his pinkie as a swizzle stick. He makes sure everyone has drinks and then takes us outside to meet the dragster drivers he sponsors and some of the crewmembers. We are in the pits and they warm up the engine. It is deafening. Ikky comments that it is a series of perfect square waves, uniformly spread over every cycle in the broadcast spectrum. The pressure waves are pummeling our chest cavities. Num-E-Num’s dad is stirring another Bloody Mary with his pinkie. “YOU FEEL THAT BOY?” he bellows in my ear. I nod in the affirmative. “AT MY AGE, THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES MY DICK HARD.”

JENJEN (LOUISE BROOKS’ BANGS)

1983. She is a dough-eyed post punkette with Louise Brooks’ bangs, Joan Crawford’s eyebrows and an air of no expectations. Every afternoon during the fall of her junior year at Cal State University, JenJen goes to the campus deli and orders an avocado sandwich with alfalfa sprouts on wheat bread.

I make sandwiches behind the counter. The two of us have similar haircuts.

When ordering, she speaks to me in obtuse, diffident riddles sans question marks. Her eyes are Zen koans without the Buddhist subtext of suffering. And, despite my vomit and piss colored food service uniform, she develops a schoolgirl’s crush on me, the Guy in the Smock. I may be one of the few people on campus who understands what she is saying when she bats her eyes. And, likewise, I am intrigued by her rather aphilosophical philosophical bent — not to mention the Louise Brooks’ bangs, but a potential fling goes unrequited, as I am smitten with another piece of eye candy, a Math Major with Purple Hair who orders only coffee from me.

This — ignoring the charms of one for another — is a mistake; I will later come to understand. In this matter of the heart, I had been backing the wrong horse.

THE COYOTE GOD (Myth and Mythology)

1975. Saigon falls and a wave of Vietnamese seek sanctuary from the encroachment of Ho Chi Minh and his Red Chinese Horde; but not just the peasants fleeing from imminent genocide hop on American helicopters and boats.

Joining the exodus is a Man-Dog-Deity even more baffling and perhaps even more brutal than Ho Chi Minh hisself: Dogvillasan, the Coyote God.

Like the South Vietnamese peasants, Dogvillasan bails out of his homeland before dealing with the wrath of some mighty pissed off Maoists.

Dogvillasan, the chameleon Coyote God from Vietnam, born in a land torn by tyranny, and despotic, genocidal turf wars, catches a boat and a helicopter and stowaways to the New Mecca: The City of Garden Grove in Orange County, California. Later, he will start a religion based upon the acquisitioning of distressed real estate and 1-800 numbers.

Dogvillasan. Fable? Allegory? Fascist Oppressor? Master Capitalist? Or some meta-being tapped into the foibles and neuroses of the popular consciousness? Siddhartha for the Infotainment Age? Or an immigrant cum real estate magnate in Orange County?

Yes. He is the x and the y. The yin and the yang.

He is the Son of the Nixon Doctrine, Henry Kissinger and Allan Dulles, with a stated goal for rebuilding America — and, in the 1990s, on Sunday nights he takes human form at a Japanese cross-dresser bar in East Hollywood: Club Mugi.

This line opens the second paragraph of Part III of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have always wanted it to be the first line. The actual first line is just fine by itself, but this line seems to more perfectly capture what Part III will be about – sin and sorrow and fear, failure and shame.

I live in Switzerland so I’ll use the mountains to illustrate my point. Let’s imagine that Catholicism and its brand of spiritual health are the Alps. Stephen was born somewhere in the pre-Alps, not at the valley floor, mind you, but somewhere halfway up with a clear and breathtaking view of those formidable peaks. The mountains are so strong a presence in these kinds of villages that they define everything about your life - your work, your relationships, and even, sometimes, your health. As a child, Stephen spent a lot of his time wondering what it would be like to experience the world from that high up.

Slowly, as he grows olders and begins to learn, he begins to climb. Small forays to lower Alpine meadows with his classmates followed later by longer walks on his own along the more interesting trails. The mountains are still frightening, but beginning to feel a bit more comfortable.

I think for anyone born into this kind of landscape, the view up is just as impressive and awe-inspiring as the view down. And as you get higher, as you get closer to the top, the sheer power of the downward slopes starts to take on more significance than the summit.

So quite naturally, in Book III, Stephen starts exploring downward. He stops looking up and starts concentrating on the slippery, rocky slopes and the more rickety trails heading toward the valley floor. Stephen is a strong young man and he takes these paths with long strides and his eyes half-closed. Heading this direction changes everything – you hold yourself differently to keep your balance, the wind comes at your from an another angle, the scenery starts to change. The experience is thrilling in its novelty.

It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires.

Stephens heads down this mountain so fast, there are times he’s nearly in free fall. Things start to feel unfamiliar again and pretty soon, he’s gone further in a direction he didn’t even realize existed. People live quite differently on the valley floor of Stephen’s Catholic mountain and he’s suddenly alone, afraid and ashamed. At this point the mountains rise so high above him they block the sun and clouds have taken away his view of the peak.

The rest of Book III is about Stephen finding the courage to start walking up again. In many ways it is a dreary chapter, filled with long sermons and lengthy fire-and-brimstone reflections as Stephen works toward making a confession. One aspect of his thinking that I enjoyed seeing was his emphasis on human absolution before spiritual. He imagines a scene between himself and Emma, a young girl he has been smitten with for quite some time, which involves him asking her to forgive him for seeing her as a sexual object. Only after he’s worked this out in his mind and listened to a horribly graphic lecture on hell does he feel ready to head toward a priest and confess his time spent with several Dublin prostitutes.

If you’ll excuse the silliness of this extended metaphor, Stephen’s confession acts a bit like a chair-lift. Instead of walking back up the mountain he’s pulled quickly toward the summit on a theological mechanism.

The muddy streets were gay. He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs. In spite of all he had done it. He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy.

I cannot imagine what turn-of-the century Irish Catholicism must have been like to experience as a creative, sensitive child, except that it must have been terribly frightening. Stephen takes everything a step beyond imagination. His body reacts physically to his thoughts as well as to the images in the sermons. This is something that makes the ending of Chapter III very interesting in that Stephen’s movement away from sin only becomes permanent when he takes communion. This physical act – just as sensual as his sin – is finally what transforms him completely.

I think I listened to Lahiri read one of William Trevor's short stories on the New Yorker podcast, but I could be imagining that.  At any rate, I looked up his writing, and now have a book on hold at the library.  What would you recommend to a person fairly unacquainted with Trevor?  Stories or a novel?  Any particular one?

Reading from other writers' shelves is one fantastic way to find new reading material and inspiration, or at least for me it is.  I also searched Mavis Gallant and put one of her books on hold.  The mention of Flannery O'Connor reminded me of her giant Complete Stories on my nightstand that I've neglected for several months.

It's good to remember good writing.

I failed to anticipate the fact that although they snap your arm off as soon as you write in, they send you you what they want to send you without enquiring whether you've actually read that book first.  They sent me a cheery e-mail to announce that my copy of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers was in the post and could I review it asap, please.

I was a bit depressed.  I like D.H. Lawrence.  I enjoyed Lady Chatterley, although only on the second time of reading.  The first time you read Lady Chatterley's Lover can never fail to be disappointing unless you are a nun or someone who has been shut in an attic for thirty years with only back copies of Bunty to read.  I read it for the sex.  The sex was rubbish.  The sex was about as sexy as the sex in that manual; The Joy of Sex, which apart from Lady Chatterley and the Haines Manual for the 1978 Mini Cooper S, is the most unsexy book in the history of books about sex, and cars.  The thing about the Joy of Sex, apart from the most tedious descriptions of sexual activity in the world, descriptions which use the word 'comfortable' and 'kind' and which intersperse such sofa like words with mechanical descriptions such as 'fold flap A firmly into Flap D and hold', is that it has line drawings of two repellent gurning hippies making 'lurve' to demonstrate said origami like manoeuvres.  It is troubling.  It troubled me then.  It troubles me now.

The thing about Lady Chatterley is that Lawrence was too wrapped up in making sex sound mythical and godlike and phallus worshipping to think that what most people would find a turn on is more likely to be found within the sticky pages of back issues of Razzle.  He was turned on by having his women think of him as a deity with a giant, ginger knob.  Everyone else was turned on by nipples like chapel hat pegs and lady gardens.  Unfortunately for Lawrence, never the twain shall meet.

If on the other hand, you read Lady Chatterley's Lover as a fantastic model of the dawning age of modernism, taking in the death of the agrarian way of life and the adoption of the nihilistic, war like, modern age of steam trains, electricity, Swiss Sanatoriums and jazz collections, it's all good stuff.  My favourites of his books are The Rainbow and Women in Love, although I could do without the film of Oliver Reed wrestling in the nude thank you very much.  Again,  too much of the love me, love my giant godhead penis, and not enough chapel hatstands and lady gardens.  Too much of Oliver Reed without stout y-fronts on.

Unfortunately I hated Sons and Lovers and spent six months painfully wading my way through it.  Its basic premise is that every man secretly wants to shag his mum and kill his dad (so Freudian.  So last century) and we must hack our way from the coal face to the art gallery and watch everyone around us die like flies while we show every available lady our wanger in a bid to break free from stultifying, death bringing social convention and become a true artist.  We can only be a true artist when our mum dies of consumption, leaving us free not to feel so guilty every time we flop our knob on the tea table and say: 'Cop a load of that then!' to a load of previously buttoned up ladies with big hats.  If they swoon we can feel free to slap them round the cheeks with penis if so desired.  Sex and a good beating were never too far away from each other in Lawrence's mind, or writing for that matter.  The ladies will be grateful that we have shown them the error of their monogamous, lie back and think of England ways.  They will then make us tea, tell us everything we do is marvellous and turn a blind eye while we shag ourselves stupid in the name of 'artistic genius', and all will be well, until we too, ironically go mental and die of consumption etc, etc, etc...

So, as you can see, I didn't feel that I could write all that on the Penguin site.  On the other hand, I was committed.  I prepared myself for the worst.  I awaited my parcel.  It never came.  I breathed a huge sigh of relief and forgot about it.  I assumed they would never ask me to do anything again, because I had so dismally failed to step up to the mark the first time.  I was wrong.

Last week they sent me a cheery mail which said: 'Hi! Come and review our Penguin Summer Reads.'  I signed up.  They sent me an e-mail.  I expected it to say: 'Dear Katy, No chance you loser.  What happened to Sons and Lovers?  We hate you.  Penguins everywhere shit fish into your hat.  Farewell forever. Mwahhahahhahaha (evil Penguin laugh).'  It did not.

It said: 'Dear Katy, you lucky old sausage you.  Because us literary Penguins love you so much we are sending you a copy of James Joyce's The Dubliners for you to review as part of our Summer Read extravaganza.  Read, inwardly digest and report back asap.  Fishy love, The Penguins.'

Part of me, the part of me that still stands outside the window of the children's party, pressing its tiny nose against the cold glass and wishes it were playing pass the parcel with the other 'included' children, is really pleased that the Penguins still love me.  The other part of me thinks; 'Bugger me! James Joyce.  What a goit...'

How, how, how can anyone think that James Joyce constitutes a 'summer' read?  Marian Keyes is a Summer Read.  Diary of a Nobody, Cold Comfort Farm, Love in a Cold Climate, all summer reads.  James Joyce?  He scores Nul Points on the giant European scoreboard of top Summer reads, even if he is a literary genius.

I'm sorry, but I've waded my way through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I've bought and sold more copies of Ulysses than most people have hot dinners.  It took me nine years of reading the first hundred pages of Ulysses before I could finish it.  Nine years.  People get less for manslaughter.  Now I've got to read the bloody Dubliners.  Still, it could be worse.  A) I could have read it before, and b) It could have been Finnegan's Wake...

I know that people think that James Joyce was a genius.  I sort of get where they're coming from.  His description of kidneys frying in Ulysses always makes me feel physically sick.  It's so well done I can actually smell the hot urine, spitting on the stove.  That's brilliant writing.  It really is.  The thing is, the thing they forget to tell you is that he was a tortured, filthy bastard.  And he likes to share.

There was a bloke at university.  His name was Colin Hanson.  He thought James Joyce was a genius.  He dedicated large swathes of his life to informing everyone of James Joyce's genius (the swathes when he wasn't too drunk to speak that is).  There was something slightly ethereal about Colin.  We used to watch him quite a bit (it was one of our hobbies), not in a stalking kind of way, just in a habitual kind of way.  We worked out that he never actually put one foot in front of the other when he walked, like ordinary people do.  He hovered, rather in the manner of a short, dark dalek with rumpled clothes.  He didn't open his eyes much either.  I think he feared the light.  I always imagined him, hovering over his copy of Ulysses, sucking in the words with his index finger, like a little, literary alien.  I think it was his affinity with James Joyce that allowed him to do that.  I have never been able to hover.  I blame it on my failure to appreciate James Joyce.  Perhaps The Dubliners will turn it all around for me and I will hover back from my holidays in Norfolk in a Colin Hanson type way.  It will all be thanks to the Penguins.

The days have never seemed so long.

Like a true optimist, I'm taking this setback, and deluge of free time, to do a little research and learn about these things that I should know. The Inquisitr has a somewhat thorough article explaining the history of the game that came to be called Scrabble (originally Lexico), and why in the world something invented in 1938 is still under copyright protection. Originally, as the framers of the constitution envisioned it, copyright would encourage creativity. It would force people to come up with new ideas, or improve upon ideas already out there i.e. “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”Copyrights for literary works, fictional characters, and movies were originally set to expire after 56 years. Then things moved into the public domain.

However, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (affectionately known as the Sonny Bono Act, and pejoratively known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act) extended those copyrights for another 20 years. This seems to have been in effort primarily to protect Disney and other corporations with long-running characters who felt there was still money to be made. It is this point the the Inquisitr latched onto "American copyright law has become corrupted from the intent of the founding fathers to promote invention and art, to one that protects special interests without considering the greater good. Scrabble is 70 years old and is not only covered by copyright today, but will be covered by copyright for another 55 years, for no reason other than some well oiled lobbying of America’s so-called leaders." And that really does seem to be the case, although this is not just an American problem. The UK passed a copyright extension act law in 1995 "In 1995, the copyright period in the UK became, as the result of European Union harmonisation, the author's life plus 70 years as opposed to life plus 50."

This led to what have been called "The Joyce Wars." Where the works of James Joyce had previously been in the public domain, the changing of the law pushed their date back to 2011. "The skirmishes, glorified as the "Joyce Wars", over just how definitive was the Gabler 1984 edition of Ulysses obscured the wider commercial intent of estate and publishers (Gabler being innocent in this respect). On the other side of the clashes from Gabler... was John Kidd. His own proposed, even more "definitive", edition of Ulysses to be published by Norton never appeared. This may have been due, at least in part, to the refusal of the Joyce estate to permit publication of unpublished and published material to be used in Kidd's new editorial construct."

Similar is the situation with the works of Emily Dickinson-- who died in 1886 without publishing anything, but with the idea that her materials could circulate freely as long as she remained the owner of them. "For over forty years now, scholarship on Emily Dickinson has been haunted by the spirit of the "accord," whose elegant precision is covered over by the ubiquitous banality of the permissions statement."

So these debates will likely go on as long as there is enough interest from the public to make money for someone. Admittedly, I don't want people stealing my ideas either, but after I'm long dead-- who cares? Hasbro, the current owners of Scrabble, have chosen to simply shut down Scrabulous rather than negotiate. This seems just petty and mean-spirited, and the only ones hurt are the public. Sure, there's Wordscraper now, but it's just not the same.

Sources:

http://www.inquisitr.com/2010/scrabulous/

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402227&c=1

Horan, Elizabeth, 1956-
Technically Outside the Law: Who Permits, Who Profits, and Why
The Emily Dickinson Journal - Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2001, pp. 34-54 - Article

Carr complains about blogging and bloggers, but his real lament may be for the adulteration of the professional writer’s medium, for the paid writer is accustomed to being compensated a spot in the box, but now has to sit in the general admission seats behind the center field fence with the blue-collar fans.

McLuhan said each new medium fills with the content of the old (e.g. vaudeville > radio > TV), before it develops its own content, and that every technology is an extension of the senses. He thought electronic media an extension of our central nervous system; no wonder we feel wired and jittery sitting at the computer surfing the web. And we prefer our posts short, with a picture or two; for what's a book without pictures and conversations? Go ask Alice.

Blogs are not usually filled with essays. When they are they surely get skimmed by surfer-readers, one of Carr’s complaints; but isn’t that the way we read newspapers (mosaics) and most periodicals (mosaic-hybrid-newspapers)?

Carr claims that internet reading distracts us from linear and deep thinking, thus making us dumb. Linearity and “deep-reading," the ability to read in a straight line for a long time, holding one’s intellectual breath long enough to absorb the view deep down, are capabilities Carr values, but he can’t prove that without them we grow stupid. Moreover, he's filling the new medium with old content, which can only last temporarily, according to McLuhan. 

McLuhan, paraphrasing David Hume, said in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “…there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant” (p. 27). In choosing War and Peace to reason his claim, Carr signifies his value, for why didn’t he choose Finnegans Wake? “In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, ‘The medium is the message’ quite naturally” (p. 28).

It’s not clear that Carr wants people to think as much as he wants them to think like him, not what he thinks, necessarily, but the way he thinks. The issue in controversy asks if the internet is changing the way we think (of course it is), and then asks a question related to the quality of thinking, but a different way of thinking is not automatically a worse way of thinking. The brain adapting yet again is not proven a bad change. Carr's argument, that internet reading is making us stupid, suggests we were smart, but there's unfortunately inadequate evidence to support that claim also. In any event, by the time we can determine if the change was for the better or worse, it’s likely that the written word as we now enjoy it will be a relic or fossil of some earlier culture. We are all strangers to the future.

I used to mix up Portrait of a Lady www.online-literature.com/henry_james/portrait_ladywith Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ A_Portrait_of_the_Artist_as_a_Young_Man- which is odd really because James Joyce's name seems to follow on from Henry James's.  You could have a whole line - Joyce Grenfell followed by - erm - well, anyway, you see what I mean.

I don't think Henry James gets the credit he deserves.  Really, he was a proto-feminist - a lot of his work is really about the invidious position of women and the impossibility of being sincere in your sexuality.   But people just can't stand his sentences.  Here's an example:

"Nothing was less to have been calculated in the business than that it should now be for him as if he and Waymarsh were comparatively quite at one." www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/ titles/ambassadors/about.htm

I've read this sentence countless times, and I still don't know what it means.  Come back Proust, all is forgiven!

Incidentally, the excellent film version of Portrait of a Lady www.imdb.com/title/tt0117364/starring Nicole Kidman makes clear what the text does not.

"Why do you want to be a doctor?

To be honest, I don't quite remember how I answered the question. I remember being earnest at the time, but I look back at my youth and naivete and realize that I really didn't know why at that time. How could I? I was only seventeen. This is not to say that my inner self didn't know the answer. But the real reasons why I became a physician didn't form into my consciousness until several years later.

As I began to realize the real reasons why I had become a physician, I realized that these reasons pervaded every nook and cranny of my life. Not only was I a fixer upper at work, I was also one in my personal life. I attracted people, unconsciously of course, who needed more than they were able to give. Some part of me must have believed that I didn't deserve to be given anything back, otherwise why would I choose these kind of relationships?

It's very difficult to let go of old patterns. To quote James Joyce, Mistakes are the portals of discovery. You do it enough times and you realize that there's a pattern. Some people realize it, more often they don't. I'm lucky that I've realized this in myself and I now strive to be around people who can give and take. Psychologists would call it cognitive behavioral techniques. I call it: I deserve better and walk away. Recently I've had to do this twice, it was difficult. A part of me wanted to go back to the unhealthy situation, but the stronger self knew better.

I'm also learning to listen to that voice of instinct. Somehow I've muted it and it hasn't had such a strong voice. I've been given different sets of advice from caring friends, but there have been times when I realized that their suggestions would not serve me well. My instinct knew better.

If I were to be seventeen again with the knowledge and experience that I have now, my answer to Dr. Sanchez would have been entirely different. I would have replied, "Gnothi seuton", Latin for "Know Thyself". To understand who I am is to know why I became a doctor.

"All right, folks, make it snappy. I have a date in twenty minutes with a chick named Sloane, and she promises there'll be cake. First!"

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was --"

"How long does that sentence go on for? Criminy, learn what a period is. Next!"

"It is a truth universally acknowledged --"

"Yawnola! Start with an explosion. Next!"

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road --"

"I don't handle kid stuff. Next!"

"While the present century was in its teens --"

"Don't touch YA, either. Man, this batch is the pits. NEXT!"

"This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve."

"If I want resolution I'll hire a graphics designer. Next!"

"Now, what I want is Facts."

"Weren't you in here before? What I want now is a bourbon sour, and none of those frou-frou maraschino cherries. Next!"

"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up."

"Oh, how very clever – no, not the sentence; the fact that my ex-wife is hiring starving writers so she can twist the knife a little more! Tell her if I hear one more word about that yacht, I'm delivering it in a matchbox. All right, last pitch. This had better be good."

"It was a dark and stormy night -- "

"Whoa Nellie! That's brilliant! Get Random House on the phone! If this doesn't get a seven-figure floor bid, I'll eat my hat!"

Narcissism can be defined as an excessive amount of love and admiration toward oneself but in a psychological context it has a more specific meaning. It refers to a psychological condition characterised by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.

Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead” fits this label. He’s in his mid-40s, a teacher and a journalist, happily married with children. He’s well-regarded as a teacher and a journalist and is his aunts’ favourite nephew who is to give the after-dinner speech at their annual Misses Morkan’s dance party. But he’s also preoccupied with what other people think of him and appears a bit bewildered by his own emotions and his effect on people. He appears too wrapped up in himself and whether or not he is highly regarded and so is unable to empathise with others. He is over-familiar with Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, and she takes offence. Dancing with a fellow teacher, Molly Ivors, he’s perplexed that she teases him about being a “West Briton” (an Irishman who looks to Britain rather than his native Ireland). She’s effectively accusing him of not being sufficiently Irish and not taking take enough pride in all things Irish but he comes away from the encounter irritated and perplexed.

His marriage to Gretta is a happy one up to a point but the party provides an example of the miscommunications between them. When Molly Ivors invites him to holiday with them in Galway (perhaps to make up for the teasing), he says he’s going cycling in Europe instead. Gretta is delighted by the idea of going to Galway but Gabriel says coldly that she can go alone if she likes.

Later on the cab drive home and back at their hotel he longs for intimacy with Gretta but she’s full of regret for her first love, of whom she was reminded when one of the guests sang “The Lass of Aughrim”. He feels slighted and sees “himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught sight of in the mirror”.

However, in a moment of epiphany (which Joyce is famous for), Gabriel appears to be able to transcend some of his own narcissism to empathise with Gretta and to feel some of the sorrow that she experiences. After Gretta has cried herself to sleep Gabriel is left wondering about the living and the dead. He looks out at the snow which “was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furley was buried .... he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe, and falling faintly, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”.

Bill Tucker, who includes this story in his “How People Change”, identifies narcissism as the central issue of the story.

Narcissism is the central issue in the psychological treatment of many patients, usually but not necessarily men, coming in mid-life to treatment for long-standing problems in love or work, sometimes accompanied by specific physiological symptoms. Like Gabriel, such men are unaware of their insensitivity to emotional issues and find themselves genuinely bewildered by the intensely negative responses they continually evoke. Like him they tend to be overly sensitive to slights and to indulge in constant monitoring of how they are perceived, with what we might incautiously compare to a teenager’s degree of self-consciousness. Gabriel is warmly regarded, but he does not feel connected to any of the other guests.

I wondered what a client like Gabriel Conroy might be like on the couch. In some ways he would be an ideal patient – intelligent, articulate, insightful and observant. He would classify as a high-functioning neurotic. Narcissistic patients tend to drone on at length about minor things (a bit like a blog!) but he is also observant enough to be able to apply insights to his own relationships and could make good use of therapy to connect with a rich, inner emotional life.

Born from the Kasbahs of Turkey. Smokey, mysterious and beautiful with the ability to take your breath away.

Recipe

2 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove chopped
1 green pepper diced
1 onion diced
1 dried red chilli
1 tsp caraway seeds
500g passata
tin of plum tomatoes
salt and pepper
500cl vegetable stock

Directions
Heat the oil and add the chopped garlic, the caraway seeds and crumble the dried chilli, heat till fragrant.  Add the onion and green pepper and cook for 10 mins or until till soft .  Add the tin of tomatoes and the lentils stir for 2 mins.  Add the passata and the vegetable stock. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 40 mins. To serve, you could add some grated cheese or/and some finely chopped fresh parsley

Health benefits
Lentils are so good for keeping you full for a long time as well as cleaning out your insides with all that fibre.

Canned tomatoes contain lycopene. Lycopene is an antioxidant and has cancer-preventing properties, these cancers now include colorectal, prostate, breast, endometrial, lung, and pancreatic cancers. Prevention of heart disease has been shown to be another antioxidant role played by lycopene.

Did You know...
In one of the short stories in Dubliners by James Joyce, a character eats caraway seeds to mask the alcohol on his breath.

I get why everybody makes a fuss about Ulysses, what with all of its maddening and spectacular qualities, and with James Joyce’s shameless (and, to me, satisfying) arrogance about his own work. But I’ve never really gotten why people find this funny, dirty novel so hard to read.

I’ve picked up -- and put down -- The Corrections, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, various books by Paul Auster, Middlesex (even though I loved The Virgin Suicides), The Shipping News, Tipping the Velvet, Memoirs of a Geisha, She’s Come Undone and Cold Mountain. I couldn’t get into them, even by cheating and flipping through to sections later in the book that might be more interesting. They seemed like slogs. They may well be great books. Everyone says so. I just can’t get into them or through them. So it’s not like I’m a reader with epic stamina. It’s not an issue of length, either, although it always seems less horrible to slog through a book you’re not that into when it’s nice and slim. Maybe reading Ulysses is like meditating? (Meaning, if it’s easy, you’re doing it wrong.) I don’t understand every reference in Ulysses, but then, I don’t understand every reference in most novels I’ve enjoyed reading. Certainly Ulysses is a novel the way New York (more than Dublin) is a city -- it’s different every time you visit it.

Take a look!

I don't want to be a bore
But this ebook and this one too, should not be for sale in Ireland for another 3 years at least, yet they are. I know, I just bought one from the Apple Apps Store

Considering a new paperback edition of Ulysses is available for about £7.50 and Portrait Of The Artist for a measly £2.50 on The Book Depository, I'd say 79 cent each is a massive bargain.

The copyright on Joyce's works has lapsed in the US if I'm not mistaken (or at least if Wikipedia is not mistaken) but not here or in the UK. I'll be Apple never anticipated a territorial issue with iPhone Apps?

The Joyce estate will no doubt be onto this one quick, in the meantime, download away. Hopefully this post will not be prescient if the ebooks are eventually withdrawn.

Mildly amused
Eoin

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

Next to this is a joke written by a friend, which turns this list into a snappy, silly rhyme.

Stephen Dedalus is my name,

Ireland is my nation.

Clongowes is my dwellingplace,

And heaven my expectation

 Stephen, still sitting in class, reads these lines backwards and makes the observation that altered in this way, they lose their poetry. And then right after, this:

Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he only could think of God.

Portrait is very much about Joyce, a narrative reconstruction of his memories which translate into his version of how he became a writer. Which is why I love that first part and that he sees how the lines, once changed, lose their poetry. A simple enough reflection but one which shows he was already thinking about the importance of arrangement with respect to language. More importantly, this thought leads him to immediately consider his place in the universe, the size and shape of things beyond and outside him. These two observations, stacked the way they are, seem such huge clues to the kind of artist Stephen will become. The questioning of one’s place, of the size of the world beyond the self, all underwritten by a focus on a kind of aesthetic harmony.

And then Stephen hits the God wall. He knows his thoughts are huge and that it’s pretty exciting, even extraordinary, to have these kinds of big thoughts. But he can’t get past the idea that only God has the right to such thinking. So he stops his big thoughts and the passage ends with his amused considerations of what God is called in other languages. This entire passage takes up less than half the page and yet so much of the novel’s theme is laid out. It's wonderfully done.

I've forced this short on many of my friends and ended up in cafe's with coffee (ok, tea. I don't drink coffee) discussing the more easily missed symbolism that is common enough if you read a lot of Joyce. Even the walk on characters have a very clear role in the heavy picture of things. 

Did I mention it neared perfection.

It basically tells the story of Gabriel Conroy spending an evening at a house party thrown by two spinster, piano teaching aunts and their odd collection of friends. The evening turns into Gabriel's own personal firewalk.

Of course, the academics say in a different way:  "The Dead" is a story about "man's withdrawal into the circle of his own egotism" (Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World)

Surprisingly, this story carried personal weight for me as well. Graduating from college, I had a lovely coffee (tea) with one of THOSE professors - you know the ones. Older than the ivy clinging to the side of the dean's center and just as brilliant. The one that when he asks you for coffee, you'd turn down dinner at the white house to go.

The conversation turned down a frightening path when he asked me what my greatest fear was.  Being a Short writer, I replied that it was to be Poe: Brilliant at shorts and sucking at the novel. . .yes, I said sucking. We referred to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym  as the original 'read it and weep' ....

The good doctor turned to me and said, "Ms. Quinlan, I believe you can do anything you set your mind to even half-heartedly. My biggest fear for you is that you will be Molly Ivers."

I have never been quite so stunned in my life. At that age, in that competitive environment, it never dawned on my to fear personal outcomes instead of academic or professional. It saddened me that (in this era) we can still as women educate ourselves out of the marriage pool.

So, read the short HERE and let me know, was Gabriel trapped by his own ego? Did Molly lose her femininity through education? Was Gretta truly never in love with him or did he only come second or gain her love eventually? Did the catholics treat Mr. Brown differently? AND, most importantly - what does it mean?

I know, I know. A horribly broad question. But with Joyce and his focus for that collection of shorts and his view of Ireland, family and life, it really is the most important place to begin.

Clique aqui para saber os detalhes sobre o curso Viagens e Deslocamentos pela Literatura com Ricardo Lísias. De 21 a 24 de Julho.

Centro Universitário Maria Antônia: Rua Maria Antônia, 294. Tel.: 32557182 (ramal 32/33)

Por Darlene Carvalho

Any of these is possible, but my bet would be that if you asked him where you might learn a great deal about the publishing world, he would have said, "Right here," meaning the bookstore. For there is a wealth of information available if you look in the right places.

First, you would want to say to yourself that you are no longer a potential customer but instead working on a research mission. Wander around, tiny notebook and pencil in hand, and take a look at the bestseller tables. There you may learn what books are selling, who wrote them, who published them, and what they are all about. Jot down a few thoughts, perhaps a title or two in the genre that interests you since you may want to check out that book from the local library since books are two damn expensive to buy.

Next, head for the magazine and newspaper rack. Pick up the Thursday edition of USA Today and turn to the book page where all the bestsellers are listed. Do the same with the New York Times Book Review. Then find Publisher's Weekly, Poets and Writers, Writer's Digest and other publications with the latest news about the publishing industry. Scan the articles, the ads, and the reviews. It is amazing what you may learn in an hour or two.

Before you leave, check the shelves for books like the one you are writing. Read the book jacket copy, the author bio, and perhaps a bit of the Prologue or first chapter. Gain a sense of the storytelling strategy, the word usage, the way the author weaves together his or her characters. Once again, take notes so that you may reference them later.

Hemingwaywantabes, the world of publishing is right there before you, and best of all, unless you buy a book, it is free. You'll be fascinated with what you learn, and if Ernest isn't there, take a look around and see if his ghost might be.