CONTEMPLATING ULYSSES--See Quizz Post
The revelation that I am ULYSSES-the novel by JAMES JOYCE, not the Latinized ODYSSEUS-according to a quiz currently circulating on several blogs aggregated in UUPDATES-came as a mild shock. I hadn’t thought of the book in years.
But I was immediately transported to an episode of my misspent youth.
It was sometime in the early ‘70’s, an Easter weekend, I recall. Chicago was in the grips of a monumental ice storm. A consultation of meteorological history and a table fixing the dates of that gypsy holiday would firmly fix the date. 1970 or ’71 would be my guess.
We slip-slided-literally since ice thickly coated the streets and sidewalks-over to Penny’s second floor apartment somewhere south of Armitage Avenue between Old Town and Halstead Street. The “we” were young WOBBLIES and anarchists. The mission was to read aloud from ULYSSES while sipping BUSHMILL’S IRISH WHISKEY and ingesting some very powerful purple acid. We had a little grass as well, just to keep the edge off.
It was probably Kathleen’s idea. She was our leading enthusiast for Irish culture. She knew the great old songs, played a small, dark MARTIN guitar, could beat a bodhrán, and blow a penny whistle in a pinch. Or it may have been Penny. She was quite literary. It may even have been my doing, hatched over too many beers at JOHNNY WIESE’S saloon on Lincoln Avenue.
I am a little unclear as to all of the participants. Young Dean, recently arrived from Portland was there. I can’t imagine that Leslie and Mary-exocentric even in our circles-songwriter/singer/cat lady/lesbian/anarchists, missed the occasion. I am sure there were others.
We settled into the living room and began to drink, toke and read as the acid began its work. I can’t remember if we tried to start at the beginning or someplace else like MOLLY BLOOM’S soliloquy.
After a while, I remember watching Penny’s window as if it were a movie screen. The window stretched nearly the width of the room, which itself took up the whole front of the second story of the frame two-flat. It was no more than two or three feet high. Laying on the floor, I could see nothing but the three bare poplars, heavy with ice, sway in the wind against a slate sky in time to the rhythms of Joycean nonsense.
I am ULYSSES? Indeed