From our Summer 2016 issue, “Finnegan Joyce” is Ron Kolm‘s funny & raunchy riff on the late great James Joyce.
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HELLO, HELLO, JAMES JOYCE HERE, but briefly, yes, the voice, yes, I know it doesn’t sound so very good, no, the voice does not fare well here in the dead zone — 0, and I used to be a tenor, such a beautiful tenor that they told me, more than once, yes, that I could have been a contender but don’t take my word for it, listen to the record, do they still have records?– it was a Finnegans Wake rap sort of thing, yes, as you can see I try to keep up — should have used more bass, a little sampling, be ok on the boombox then — but I’m pulling your leg, as if a shade could pull anything — because, now that I’m dead, I don’t have to protect the image I worked so hard to create — I’m finally free, I tell you — though I still rejoice at the number of academics who toil in its shadow — who till the field I manured so well — the me they think they know is a construct, only part of the story — James Joyce as Jesuit — James Joyce the aesthete — going slowly blind — grinding out the great creations in the face of insurmountable odds; misunderstanding, penury, censorship, the lovely chains of Ireland past and always present but, shit, what else could I do? — I was as trapped by the iron logic of my own work as any Joycean scholar — forget modernism, the fetter that bound me and, yes, broke me, was the notion of progress — I started small, a few poems, then moved on to short stories, well-crafted they were, too, and finally graduated, with my Portrait, to the novel — all well and good – I was on an upwards trending line on the graph of life, steadily ascending, and seeing the sense and shape of my literary output I made the big jump, the quantum leap, to ur-novel, the novel as encyclopedia, and the result was, of course, Ulysses — but that particular jump from the novel we all know and love to the thinner atmosphere of ‘Great Book’ is a tricky one, because where do you go from there?
FLAPPERHOUSE 