Sunday 16 June 2013

I read it, but I didn't really understand it.

I have been greatly troubled since last June, when the Bloomsday festivities finally broke the back of my literary tolerance. The gaudy posturing and tired antics of Joyceans and 'Joyceans' weighed heavily on me, and I was particularly pained by how Flann O'Brien is perennially neglected by these grating literary folk. "Oh, I'm so well read and cultured, yet I don't like O'Brien. I just can't get into him. Now excuse me, while I stuff my face with a fry, sans kidneys, and drink buckets of wine and talk shit for the next few decades."

Well, no more, reader. This year, I'm going to protest Bloomsday with Flann O'Brien readings and playing out of scenes from At Swim-Two-Birds. "But surely The Third Policeman is his masterpiece?", says the literary snot in you, as hardened and green as an emerald. You mean the text he threw into his closet for the rest of his life? The one not set in Dublin, where we expect the festivities to be centred? The one with fewer narrative complexities, a more conventional plot, and an atomic theory that was better presented in (dare I bring it up) The Dalkey Archive? Exactly reader, At Swim-Two-Birds will be the centre of the greatest cultural revolution this country has seen since the Gaelic League. And this time, we won't have wet blankets like W. B. Yeats to stop us. Yes, dear reader, it is time for us true literary people to emerge and take what is rightfully ours. I haven't consumed this much culture to modestly keep my lips sealed about it.

Yes yes yes yes, reader, it will be a-ma-zing, as we re-enact scenes from the sweet nectar of O'Nolan's grapes, where Dermot Trellis is tormented and tortured by his mutinous creations. Trellis will be played by an effigy labeled 'Joycean'. We will then hang, tar, feather, and beat another effigy, who will symbolise those academics who assert that O'Brien had some sort of literary Oedipus Complex about Joyce and wished to enact revenge against him by featuring him in one of his works. It's going to be awesome.


My friends and I will troll Joyceans, by asking them to re-enact the masturbation scene from the Nausicaa chapter in Ulysses. We will easily slip into and subvert conversations about the book, using opaque and grandiloquent platitudes, such as, 'Bloom represents Man at his most heroic and noble, yet in his most disheveled and unassuming guise.' or 'Blooms onanism reveals the prospect of Man's redemption through the embrace of the feminine.' Disheartened, the Joycean zealots will be defenceless against our counter-parade. They will flee when we produce our awesome effigies. It's going to be epic! In the heart of the parade will be me, shooting literary references like arrows through the hearts of uncultured impostors. My rapier-sharp wit will slay the charlatans and entertain anyone who cares to stop and watch the spectacle. Their bodies will be scarred by quotation marks, as I slash them with my intimate knowledge of  Keats, Fitzgerald, Hitchcock, Warhol, Picasso, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Frost, Dickens, Dali, Cervantes, St Paul, Hemingway, Marcus Aurelius, Wittgenstein,  Sartre, Mozart, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Welles, Miller, Woolf, Ibsen, Bach, Camus, Shelleys Percy and Mary, Schopenhauer, Dante, Dickinson, and the Bard of Avon himself. I'll impress passing chicks with my awesome renditions Monty Python sketches, adopting a bombastic and hilarious English accent. My friends and I will interrupt each other with longer and longer sketches, each one more indulgent and context-dependant than the last. No doubt, college students, smelling of sweet curiosity and low-hanging fruit will be charmed by our endeavours and persuaded to partake in experimental, coming-of-age games. The wealth of my worldly acumen, coupled with the breadth of my cultured knowledge, and threesomed with my compelling sales-pitch for experimentation and adventure will give me direct access to their loins via their minds. I will connoisseur the nubile flesh in a grand sexual feast, a masterpiece in a performance art. I'm going to ride the hole off two nineteen-year-olds at the same time.


I have something like this in mind.

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