I've been reminded of Joyce lately, custodian, guardian, protector of human mind and language.
Great literature aspires to be common, of the people, grandly non-judgmental, capturing the ways of humanity, not residing within experience of a particular sort set apart as special and exclusive, but speaking for the intelligence belonging to all.

One has the sense, with Ulysses, of he got the whole thing, he got the whole fish and brought it back whole. He got the whole thing. He did try chucking the whole thing in the fire, but his wife snatched it back out of the fire maybe only an outer page or two was lost. The rest of us writers share that feeling of Hemingway's, of having found something wonderful and marvelous out in the experience of the world, but of arriving back at the place where you show things with but a broken crumpled piece of it there in your drunken arms to show. As if to do little but make a case for the fragility of art.

One wonders too if Joyce was able to channel an excess of L-dopa, that neurochemistry happening in the cortex that in excess produces schizophrenia and the schizophrenic tendency to ramble on with meaningless words. Which is not to take away at all one iota of Joyce's accomplishment, as the brain is a balancing act we shoot for on a daily basis as the sun flashes across the sundial in beaten rhythm. That may be what a lot of human beings who write are trying to achieve, a kind of inner innate chemical balance. Some find it in society, like New Yorkers do, shutting people off completely unless they happen to want something someone else might be able to provide in way of material or ego goods or some other form of sustenance. Some exercise. Some write.

Yes, Mr. Joyce, the wonderful problem of being a writer is really not knowing how to turn it off, for there are always words, there is always flow underneath, the flow of thinking. (Hamlet grows weary of them at one point, as if they were driving him to the point of exhaustion, but on he rides, on top of the current again, words, words, words.) The problem is not a lack of words, but, as Ulysses shows us--and it will be one of those great acts of art, like the cave paintings of Lascaux, the creature leaves behind to reveal its humanity--the wonderful excess.

This is why writing classes, which tell us to edit, and chop, and cut, are to prose and the brain's workings, rather like cutting the hind legs off of an animal like a favorite dog or cat or cow. Hemingway twitches in horror at it, and knew it to be like 'killing one's favorite children' to get rid of something, and could only sleep at night knowing of some iceberg effect, that in the reader would still see the missing limb as if it were bumping up against him as he read. And Hemingway had a brain that was full of short clipped telegraphic sentences that meant so much to him, so that he could write, "Nick sat there," let's say, and it was startling, hair-raising and chock full of stuff. He was a deeply sensitive person, I would guess, I mean, just the way his chemistry worked, the way he saw and cared about things. And again, here's a fellow with a huge sense of the wonder of the world, found, say, in the morning in a cafe with the waiter sweeping, and knowing that agonizingly you can only bring back just a little bit of it.

(There can be a kind of insider snootiness in those who preserve a professional life in the so-called writing/literary world? Unfortunately there is no choice for some, that they must be professional writing teachers, and so must set themselves apart as being worthy of the job. Can't really blame 'em. But still, there's attitude. Like you and I can't write a poem just off the tops of our heads, 'not a real poem at least.' Or as Scott Turow was overheard saying, something like 'well, we professionals actually do the work of writing:' off stage suggesting that his efforts are set apart from all the rest of you amateurs, who can only pretend... A certain self-congratulatory vibe within that, as if he were subconsciously defending himself, knowing the pasteurized cheese quality to the plot-driven best seller. But that's me, who pretends at least, or fancies himself, to have a certain democratic belief that writing is 'of, by and for the people.' Yes, I think that's the real reason I came to Washington, out of some belief that a governing system should provide for the writing effort, as it should foster all beneficial things, maybe under the 'support the general welfare' clause. Government has, I hope anyway, been oddly supportive, at least at times, of great writing, giving a Lincoln, a Kennedy, a chance to write and read out loud. Ahh, but that is a particular kind of writing. Still, though, I don't see a great difference between a Lincoln, a Jefferson, and a Kerouac, rather a genetic similarity down to a great portion of the last few tiny DNA strands.)

The fellow who wrote about the foul excess of memoirs out there in the book market recently in the Sunday New York Times Book Review is barking up the right tree. To me, to my eyes, he is saying that some people write books about--at least they themselves think so--a particular set of experiences, like having an autistic sibling for instance. They have some notion that this particular experiences entitles them with a right to share... along with certain sense of self-importance , no? Such a writer has got it wrong. It's not some grand event that gives one a right to be a writer. Being human, that is what gives one a right to be a writer. The creature will walk down a street, and it's the reflections, the meanings and shades of relevant things he or she brings out, maybe imposes upon them a little bit, it's the thoughts that make a book and make a book readable. You don't have to go to the moon. You could just go to Dublin. And Joyce says it himself, that in the particulars of Dublin there is the universal, no, the Universal, and all the cities in all the world.

Okay, maybe a certain kind of writer admits some kind of bias. And I admit, I wrote one of those books, one of those books that someone could look at and say, 'hmm, looks like another one of those memoirs about a perfectly unremarkable experience, and on top of that, delusion!' If that's all a particular sort of reader would see in it, fine, that's just the way that particular reader is. But I didn't write what I wrote out of some notion the plot was terribly important. All I wanted to capture was the thinking, the thoughts of the creature as he goes about some little time at college. It really has very little to do with, I would argue, that which we would traditionally call plot, very little to do with the particulars. The particulars are only weird occurrences, just markings of the fiber of the universe like the fibers and grain pattern in wood or meat, just strange semi-random but in a certain light meaningful events, as Buddha poetically says it's all a dream anyway. The focus in on the observations a person may make. A book should portray a success of interpreting things in a way that is fresh, unique, maybe even illogical to the circumstances. Like Quixote, who fails to see things logically, but who succeeds in getting us to see things a bit differently. Yes, maybe there are worse things than siding with the failures of life.

Okay, sure, sure, there's a girl in it. There are his teachers, the usual mix of things that happen in a certain time of life we are lucky if we are able to get in the first place, etc., etc.. There's a kid, the central character, who likes the girl, who is in some way trying to be a good student, but in some ways, I don't know... has the unique and uncannily perfect ability to mess things up? I dunno. I'm sure I'm not the only writer who absolutely cringes at having to write a little statement for the sake of the back dust cover, about what the whole thing is about. Ugh.

"Now this song is nearly over. We may never find out what it means," Shane MacGowan economically pens the line in a song called "Rainy Night in Soho." A perfect line. A line with an awareness of Joyce, who, as Mr. MacGowan points out in "A Drink With Shane MacGowan," a very fine book, had a fine tenor singing voice.

Any book these days, maybe mine as much or moreso as any, stands to teeter off the edge into perfect oblivion, a memoir of a perfectly boring subject, one more upon the scrap heap of vastly forgettable memoirs (and-why-not-tell-us-about-something-actually-useful-and-applicable-and-interesting-and-a propos of the times, like-memoirs-of-Cairo-and-my-life-as-secret-bartender-of-the-Islamic-Brotherhood. Huh? Not this stupid shit about some mucky daft college kid going on about his woe-is-me difficulties as he goes on a stroll through the happy pastures full of opportunities and nubile college girls and endless supplies of beer. Go out into the real world, kid, and then tell me your story, you little fop. Ehh, not so easy, is it, you spoiled little prick who thinks he's got something grand and important to contribute to Literature.)

But there is Ulysses. And the genre of the bildungsroman of an artist, as Joyce took and ran with, with his Stephen, his hero, on into attempting one of the great works of the Twentieth Century, a time blessed with modernism a person of our times might feel envious of. C'est la vie.

Yup, a writer goes out there and tries to drag back a piece of something he found grand and whole and remarkable, worthy and significant. And all he brings back, can bring back, is, well, a mortal version. Hemingway would never let on The Old Man and the Sea had a parallel to a writing life. Maybe it says something about him that he would never admit that, as if he simply preferred to maintain a simply clear 'fuck off' message to communicate to all 'critics' and leave it at that. Or maybe he was saying, I am a writer, without even to have to think about it, with there being never any possibility of his being otherwise. Yes, it would have been for him like spelling out one of those very tedious 'here's what this is about, plot, etc.' statements for a back cover of a long and wonderful work of written art.

Well, (shrug), it's kind of like Ulysses, that story, the Greeks called it The Odyssey. What does it mean? Who knows. Maybe it doesn't mean anything.