Portrait of Another Bitter Bloomsday

Well, yesterday was Bloomsday, as those of you on my MySpace Friends List were made well-aware; and once again I was sitting here in Biloxi instead of walking the streets of Dublin.

I've whined a lot about this in several different places (go back through the archives of this blog, for example, and you'll find any number of different Bloomsday references), but I don't know that I've ever really articulated why going to Bloomsday is so important to me. Maybe now would be a good time to do that.

For starters, Bloomsday (for anyone who isn't familiar with it) is a holiday which celebrates James Joyce's monumental novel, Ulysses. Over 700 pages long, Ulysses documents a single day - June 16th, 1904 - in the lives of its protagonists, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. What's interesting about this "single day" is that it's not very interesting at all. Joyce's characters are not in the midst of any sort of life-altering crises or do-or-die romances. They simply live out the mundane details of an ordinary day.

What makes it so extraordinary - the reason it's regarded in many circles as the best book of the 20th Century - is the language Joyce uses to convey these simple scenes. Page after page is filled with realistic dialogue, small details of everyday life, and, most revolutionary, the unfiltered thoughts of Joyce's characters. The funny thing about thoughts, you know, is that they rarely (if ever) flow in a straight line. When we think, we think of all sorts of different things at once, and things that have no connection to one another get all mixed up.

For example - if you'll indulge me on this - my grandmother's sitting room has a huge bay window hung with white drapes. When the sun shines through it, it looks just like that whitish sunshine in The Neverending Story (the scene where Bastian and Falcor are flying through the clouds.) So every time I walk into my grandmother's sitting room I think of The Neverending Story, and every time I watch The Neverending Story I think of my grandmother's sitting room. Except in my thoughts, the two are not connected at all. And that's what I'm talking about.

If Joyce were writing about this (and I can't do this any justice), he might say something like: Walking into Grandmother's sitting room. The smell of it and that sunshine, whitish. Half expect to see Falcor through those windows give the empress a new name, Grandmother. Bastian in this room head out of the clouds and the drapes. It's the drapes that make it look white like that. Weird boy he was. Nice to have a luck dragon. Or something like that. The two thoughts are wrapped together.

Because of this style, some people find Joyce too dense and difficult and never give his work a second glance. But, for those who enjoy flexing the mental muscle, it's a very rewarding experience. (For the record, not all of Ulysses is written like that. In fact, Joyce uses 17 or 18 different styles throughout the novel. Some of it is very coherent and simple, and there's even one chapter written as a parody on "Sweet Valley High"-type girls books.) The wordplay and mental imagery is truly phenomenal, and what I enjoy most about it is that it's actually about something. It's not just a bunch of words tossed together in random fashion. There was definite, overwhelming method to the madness. It's enviable, really.

My personal introduction to Joyce came somewhere around 1998, when my now ex-uncle Mike recommended that I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Well, I liked the title, and I knew Mike had good taste in literature, so I went ahead and picked it up a couple of days later. Admittedly, I didn't find the story itself all that interesting (it's not really a narrative in the strictest sense of the word), but I was completely fascinated and blown away by Joyce's mastery of style. In the third chapter, for instance, he describes a hellfire sermon being preached at a Catholic boys school; and every time the priest kicks off into an Our Father or a Hail Mary, Joyce writes the entire thing verbatim. He never cuts corners and says "The priest said another Our Father." No, word for word, every time, he goes through it. The more I read, the more it became apparent to me that the protagonist of Joyce's story was bored by all of this...and then I realized how much it made sense. Joyce wasn't trying to describe a sensation, he was trying to create it. In other words, he wanted the reader to become bored as well. What better way to make the point?

This of course was a key moment in the development of my own writing, as it was the first time I realized that the way you present something is just as important as what you're presenting. It gives your writing personality, and, in some cases, it makes it so that the writer and his/her work are inseparable. By the time I finished reading, the whole thing had a strange power over me, and I even wrote a poem - "Eileen Had Long, Thin, Cool White Hands" - based on one of my favorite passages.

A couple of years later I ended up in a Joyce Studies course at Ole Miss, and as anyone who knew me at that time can vouch, I was completely entranced. The class met once a week (Wednesday afternoons) for three hours, and I was always there, always on time, and always the student most involved in classroom discussions. (My professor, Dr.Schirmer, told me I had a reputation within the English department for being a "Joyce nut.") Based on this new obsession of mine, Keith and I did a sketch on the morning show where we had sorority girls attempt to read some of the more difficult passages in Ulysses. Not long after that, I included Joyce as a character in "Do Not Collect $200" and started giving Ulysses as a birthday and Christmas gift to anyone who showed even remote interest...But why? Why does this Irish writer whose style and themes are so different from my own have such a strong appeal? What's the attraction? It's a question I've asked myself on several occasions, and I believe there are two answers.

One, because Joyce's work is truly beautiful. Whatever he's feeling (confusion, love, empathy, amusement) comes across in full force (I'll send a few examples to anyone who wants them.) And secondly - more personally - I just can't help but admire someone who was so willing to give himself over to his work with such dedication and energy.

As someone who's always had aspirations of writing/filmmaking, I've had a tendency my whole life to become discouraged by people who tell me that there's no future in it, that I should find a more realistic goal, and that I should try and make myself more domestic. The simple fact, of course, is that I'm not designed to do any of those things. Anytime I've tried, I've become frustrated and depressed - never able to shake the feeling that I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing. This has led to years of apathy and standstill where, convinced that I can't achieve what I want most, I've chosen to sit idly by and do nothing at all. In short, I'll be the first to admit it, I've wasted a lot of time. (Don't worry, I'm coming out of it.)

So again I think of James Joyce, and how devoted he was to the craft. Never one to be discouraged, he would take 10 years to write a single novel (17 years for Finnegans Wake), and once asked his wife Nora to have an extra-marital affair so he could accurately write about it. I don't know that I'd ever want to get that carried away with it, but it would be nice to be that bold. To just say "fuck 'em all" and write a handful of masterpieces.

It would also be nice to go to Bloomsday, just to pay my respects...and to meet others who've been as moved by Joyce's work as I have.

Wow, I can't believe I said some of this stuff out loud.
"Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?"

I Heart My Friends, Vol.1: Keith

What can I really say about my good buddy Keith, a.k.a. Keef?
Well, I guess I could start by saying that he and I became friends during our junior year of high school, right around the time when I was discovering Quentin Tarantino and deciding that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was actually made aware of Keith's existence during my sophomore year, but only because I was friends with an ex-girlfriend of his who would often tell me how "abusive" he was. When he and I finally crossed each other's paths, though, we really hit it off, and it took me a while to realize he was that Keith. But by then we'd already found enough common ground for me to not really care how "abusive" he may have been. (To clear the record, the word "abusive" was a bit of an exaggeration on his ex's part. As Keith put it to me, "I was never abusive. I had to sit on my hands a few times, but I never actually hit her."..."Well, we've all been there," I said.)
In the early days, Keith and I spent a great deal of time driving around, listening to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and scouting out locations for a movie we were going to make called, "Pass the Salt, I'm Going to Utah" (yes, I was writing scripts even then.) The movie never materialized of course, but that's okay. The planning stages gave Keith and I a lot of quality hanging-out time, and our friendship was really solidified when he and I buddied up for our high school drama competition. Looking back, I think that was where the overriding dynamic of our friendship was really established.
Hanging out together at Drama Fest, Keith and I realized that his natural sense of salesmanship (I don't think there's anyone who knows Keith who wouldn't agree that he's a very natural, full-of-shit politician) and my sense of humor could serve both of us very well. For example, we'd start talking with various groups of people, and Keith would eventually say something to the effect of, "Well, you know, J can do an awesome impression of Helen Keller..." and then I'd end up acting it out. In effect, Keith became my promoter; and now that I think about it, I can't think of a single time when he and I have been hanging out in a group of people when we hasn't ultimately ended up asking me to do a performance of some kind. (The first time I ever did karaoke, for example, was at Keith's suggestion.) Similarly, Keith has never become involved with anything that he hasn't managed to work me into. I'm very appreciative of that, and I think Keith and I have stayed true to something we once told each other: we're not just friends, we're also fans of one another.

One of my favorite Keith memories from that early era came when I started dating the infamous Monica (i.e. "the girl that dumped me on my birthday.") One day I sat Monica down and tried to talk to her about the unique relationship I share with my dear friend Crystalynn, a.k.a. "Cryssie". Now, in those days as some of you may remember, my close friends were distinguished from my acquaintances based on whether or not they knew about Crystalynn. So, it was a pretty big step for me in a relationship, and when I told Keith about it I very proudly said, "Well, I sat Monica down and explained 'the C word' to her today" (meaning I'd told her about Cryssie.) Keith, almost in a panic, replied by saying, "Holy shit! You called her a cunt?!"...Such is the secret of Keith's charm.
Of all my friends, I don't believe there's a single one who more closely shares my particular approach to life. Despite the obvious differences in our personal interests, Keith and I share an odd mix of Conservative politics and liberal social attitudes. We're "South Park Republicans," as we like to say (for more on South Park Republicans, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_Republican)
This similarity in politics allowed us a very unified vision when we got to Ole Miss and started hosting "The Keith and J Show." A lot of morning radio shows, you see, like to have a straight man and a funny guy, or maybe two people who are totally opposite from one another. Keith and I were more like two roads to the same destination. As a result, the show was never in conflict with itself. Everyone else, however, was fair game. At the same time Keith and I were standing up for Ole Miss' time-honored traditions, we were also taking a lot of piss and vinegar out of everything that needed to be made fun of: Sorority girls. Independents. Coffee shop intellectuals. Cute couples. The Middle East. Fat chicks. The student body government. An apartment complex in Oxford that looked like the Ewok Village...You name it, we took aim. And it was great. (What I'm most proud of about "The Keith and J Show" is that it didn't permit a listener to be mediocre. People loved it or hated it, and that's the only way to live.)

Once our radio days had come to an end, Keith bought an independent newspaper and started The New Standard. Naturally, he came through for his old buddy J., and gave me my very own vanity column, "A Day With J" (that's where the title of this blog comes from.) After a nice 2-year run, The New Standard was discontinued and Keith began helping with the development of Y'all Magazine (http://www.yall.com/) Be sure to check them out.
Yes, Friends; Promoter and Performer; Radio co-hosts; Author and Editor. Keith and I have done it all, and there's a lot more I could say. 2006 marks a full decade of friendship between the two of us, and I for one am looking forward to the future. Keith celebrated his 27th birthday on June 9th, so here's wishing him a very happy birthday and many more. Here's to you, Nuts. You know I love ya, buddy.
**For more info on Keith, check out: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=43099494&MyToken=ea55963f-908e-4b29-ae73-3ce219a4e159 (P.S. If you check out his MySpace pics, you'll see that Keith's got the same one posted like 15 times. That's proof-positive that he's a computer-illiterate moron.)**