Bloom used metempsychosis in a sentence
and Molly decided to have an affair
with a man whose orgasms felt like air,
whose mind thought little but: "Look at those tits!"
Bloom preferred masturbation, peeking quick
at the buttocks of naked statues.
If Bloom were really gay, his achoos
would have been quieter, his dates with Dedalus
more planned out. Bloom withheld tenderness
from Molly as his friend went to prostitutes.
Stephen dreaded water, dogs, thunder, mute
drunks who appeared in his nightmares barfing
green bile, thousands of his dead mother laughing,
caught in a prism of wild repentance.
DD: I’m glad we saved our “Ulysses 2” which is in the “Little Novels Uncollected” section of Caprice. Remember when we envisioned Little Novels as a full-length book and even had that big editor at that big press almost convinced? We were having so much fun poking fun at the canon, at ourselves. Do high school students even read Ulysses anymore? My students at Florida International University all seem to have read To Kill a Mockingbird, but not many have read or even heard of Catcher in the Rye. Perhaps if we were writing Little Novels now, we’d have to include, for better or worse, Harry Potter. In our notes about the initial chapbook, we have a pretty hilarious exchange about the meanings of peak, pique, and peek.
MS: What? No Catcher in the Rye? The only book on our reading list that I thought the nuns couldn’t possibly have read first? Speaking of Harry Potter (which we do often and happily in my family) one of my favorite little novels would have to be “Gulliver’s Travels.” It might be the only one of all our chosen “canon” selections that I wasn’t assigned in high school or college (both Catholic). I wonder why. Anyway, spoofing a satire, fantasizing a fantasy: now that was a hoot! We did Gulliver completely from Cliffs Notes, right? Originally, Cliff’s Notes. Either way, if the nuns ever caught us using them, it was an automatic F. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed writing about Gulliver so much with you—in pink or peacock blue ink, no less. Oh, yeah. And as far as Ulysses is concerned: it makes me laugh to think that we tried to shrink it. And that we could shrink it a million more times and never reach its essence.
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