Happy Bloomsday

As I mentioned the other day here is the Bloomsday episode from my novel; the novel has a new title and cover as above; yes I am the model for the picture which is a self portrait.

Alfredo has been on a sun deck at night looking at the stars; as he is searching for inspiration he hears six gun shots in the distance and tells his friend when he arrives; they chat:

Excerpt from Alfredo Hunter; the Man with the Pen. By Chris Sullivan.

. . .. . . . . . . he said: “Bloomsday is next week. You got anything planned for next Friday?”
“No.”
“I want to go to an Irish theatre group at Fountain and Fairfax. They’re doing some of Ulysses. Do you want to come?”
“Yes” I said.
I knew that people walked around Dublin on each June sixteenth to celebrate Bloomsday and visit all the bars that were mentioned in Ulysses, which took part on that famous day but as with Saint Patrick, it didn’t seem important to me when I lived there but in Los Angeles it was different.
“There’ll be helicopters here soon” but he was wrong.

Chapter 5

Alfredo didn’t like the production at the Bloomsday celebration: I could see that. I liked it as they performed pieces of Ulysses that I knew: one was an excerpt from the Nighttown episode, which made me laugh. I looked towards Alfredo, as I laughed, and his face seemed to be in pain. When one of the girls was doing a monologue a newspaper critic shouted out:
“Speak up Gertie, I can’t hear you!”
I could tell he was a critic as he was sitting with a clipboard on his lap and when he spoke Alfredo gave me strange look. He thought it interesting that we could see up the girl’s frock as she sat doing her monologue and he whispered to me:
“Are we supposed to be seeing next week’s laundry?”
I laughed!
The street lights were out when we left the theatre. Some kind of major electrical outage as it also affected the traffic lights at the junction of Fairfax and Fountain Avenues so we couldn’t even see the hands in front of our faces. Not that we had our hands in front of our faces but if we did we wouldn’t be able to see them. We had to risk life and limb to cross the street.
Alfredo took it as a kind of omen.
“What do you see?”
“What?” I replied.
“The stars! Look up.”
We both looked up and it was a clear night. There were a few cars around and they were too busy trying to cross the Fairfax-Fountain junction to worry about two pedestrians, but Alfredo didn’t take his eyes away from the stars as he crossed Fountain to the north side.
“Look, at that” he said, and he stopped walking. He had spotted something in the sky. Something that affected him emotionally which was in his voice as he almost recited:
“The lights in Los Angeles went out on Bloomsday!”
We looked up the hill towards Sunset and everything was black. Usually, when traffic lights fail in Los Angeles, the red light flashes and the rules of the road change to that of a four-way-stop. I mentioned this to Alfredo:
“That is one of the most telling things about the Americans” he said “or maybe just the Angelinos. In an emergency they click into ‘emergency mode’ – plan ‘B’ - but then, on the other hand, it shows me that they are fucking brainwashed.”
They didn’t do that this night though. Everything was in darkness. I couldn’t really see him, as we walked, so his deep Dublin accented voice seemed to come to me through the darkness.
I had only been in Los Angeles, indeed America, for six months so everything was still new to me but with the eyes of a novice I could see things that the natives probably didn’t see and which I would cease to notice eventually.
“They only use one word for everything “he said. “Did you not notice that gobshite on the door at the theatre?”
I had asked the fella on the door, at the theatre, if there was an interval and the fella didn’t understand me. He was supposed to be an Irish-American but was probably standing as close to Ireland as he had ever been so his word for interval was intermission.
“Oh! Do you mean intermission?” he had said.
This would happen on many occasions as I got to know the language of America realising, eventually, that it was a language made up of words and phrases from the rest of the world and the American Indian languages. Because the majority of the people who used English were American their use of it would influence the rest of the English speaking world and in time would wipe out many languages leaving just one. The one left will be the American English Language with its one word for everything lowest common denominator limited vocabulary language. These thoughts went through my head more often than I wanted them to after Alfredo had pointed them out to me but not on this night; the night of the Bloomsday blackout. My vocabulary was limited enough without having it limited even more.
Alfredo mentioned the Indians as we traced our way along Fountain Avenue in search for his old car.
“This is what it was like for the Indians,” he said “This is how dark it was for them. You never see an Indian here and this is their country. The white man came along and fucked them off to oblivion but you know” and he stopped walking again, “can you blame them for not wanting to fight at night? The poor bastards! The poor fuckers kicked out of their land to make way for the settlers. You should read about the trail of tears or, to translate it from the Cherokee, ‘the trail where they cried.”
“Do you speak Cherokee?”
“Don’t be a gobshite.”
“I’ll try and read something about it” I said.
He laughed at this: “You’ll need to read a lot of books by the time I’m finished with you.”
There seemed to be a complete lack of traffic along Fountain Avenue, so our way wasn’t even lit by the headlights of cars. The neighbourhood was not the safest of places to be at that time of night and the thought of being stuck up by somebody with a gun crossed my mind a few times. The lack of cars also made it very quiet, which wasn’t natural for that part of town.
Alfredo’s car seemed to be parked further away than I had imagined and I didn’t know where we were.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked “Do you know where we’re going?”
“Follow me” he said striding forward like the wagon train scout he thought he was.
As he walked ahead we could see in the near distance the glow of a cigarette butt. He started to walk real fast when he saw it, leaving me behind, and when he got closer we could see it was a girl. He slowed down and waited for me and she said “Good night for a party, boys?”
Alfredo gave her a strange look then turned to me and said “Nighttown!”
He giggled as we walked on and said “Did you see the instinct of the survivor? I put space between us. I surrounded the enemy.”
Him and his imagination!
I couldn’t understand why there was so little traffic and when we turned into Ogden Avenue it got even creepier; all the houses with their lights out and a few people standing in the front gardens. There were more trees in Ogden, which made it a lot darker, and some of the people were leaning on the trees or sitting on the tree stumps. They were mumbling to each other, which was strange: normally when Angelinos want to talk they talk out loud and don’t care what time of day or night it is. They laugh out loud, shout and scream, if they feel like it, no matter who is trying to sleep or get some peace. This time it was weird. It was as if some bomb had exploded and we were walking through the aftermath of a holocaust. We walked passed people smoking dope, we could smell it, looking at us as if they were in a dream and we were reality stopping by. But we didn’t stop by we looked and made our way to the car which Alfredo seemed to know the whereabouts of all the time. When we had almost reached Sunset Boulevard we got to the car; clipped to the screen was a parking ticket.
“Fucking place,” Alfredo said as he ripped it from under the wiper, “getting a parking ticket at ten-o-clock at night!”
I looked around at the darkened street “Look over there” he said.
“What?”
“Over there – look at that tree.”
There was a very strange shaped tree on the other side of the street.
“I think it’s a jacaranda tree” he said “but look at the shape. It’s two jays; James Joyce!”
I thought it looked like two esses but he saw two jays.
Three people from the street were standing around it. They had put a couple of candles on the horizontal bits which they frequently used to light whatever it was they were smoking. It seemed to light the tree up.
“If that’s not an omen I don’t know what is. We are in a street named after a poet . . ”
“Who?” I said.
“Ogden Nash.”
“How do you know this wasn’t here before Ogden Nash?” I said.
“I don’t!” he said “but what you don’t know doesn’t mean shite. We are in a street named after a poet, on the night of the Bloomsday blackout and the tree we are looking at is shaped like James Joyce’s initials.”
“Or Sarah Siddons” I said.
“Who?”
“Sarah Siddons: the English actress.”
“What a load of shite – I’m inspired and you talk of an English actress.”
He didn’t say anything he just looked at the tree as if it was the second coming; the people around it looked over at us. One was a woman of around fifty five who was sitting on the kerb; she had black heavily made up eyes, with the mascara running down her face and long black hair and when Alfredo opened his window she looked over at him and said “Farinelli!” When she said this she clenched her open fist as if she was castrating Alfredo.
He laughed as he started the motor.
“What was that about?”
“There’s a movie playing in West LA called Farinelli about a castrato.”
“The trail of tears?”
“Yes” he laughed “it would certainly make your eyes water.”
He got the parking ticket and kissed it then he flung it into the back of the car.
“But I’m inspired” he said “I’m inspired.”
“How come you know so much about Indians?” I asked.
‘You should know. The Indians are like the Irish. Like the Irish before Christianity hit Ireland; in any case I’m a John Ford fan.”

James Joyce, Bloomsday and Shakespeare.

It's going to be Bloomsday this week – June 16th – and on Bloomsday I think I'll put up here on the blog the 'Bloomsday' episode from my novel Alfredo Hunter; the Man With the Pen.

Of course I have changed the title of my novel from The Storyteller and on Amazon.com you can see excerpts from it under the former title. In fact on Google they have the whole novel somewhere in their library of all books ever written – or whatever it's called.

Bloomsday is taken from the novel Ulysses which takes part in the day of June 16th 1904 and the leading character therein Leopold Bloom – not Leo Bloom from The Producers by the way.

James Joyce set Ulysses on June 16th 1904 because that was the day he met the love of his life Nora Barnacle; well he did not actually meet her on that day but it was the day they first walked out; it was the day she did a small sexual favour for him which might have affected his mind; he thought if she can do that for me on the first day she would do it for anybody. It wasn't necessarily true, of course – what do I know? - but it led to bouts of jealousy and anxiety from the genius Jim which would upset Nora.

They left Dublin soon after and never returned to live there again – everything he wrote about Ireland he wrote from abroad. At one time they lived in London where they married – some time during the 1930s.

There is a lot of James Joyce in my novel; number one the leading character writes a play about him, there are various references to Ulysses and the prologue is actually a pastiche of his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. That novel starts off with 'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocaw coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy called baby tuckoo . . .' and my novel starts off with 'Once upon a time and a long time ago it was in the city of Dublin in the land of Ireland there was a man with a pen' – and then there are other phrases I use in the prologue; Joyce talks of the world being 'a great ball surrounded by clouds' and I use that phrase adding 'as the great man once said' and he also uses the phrase a 'greasy leather ball' which I also use to denote, as he did in the novel, the way some boys from the past were forced at school into sport and I remember at school trying to head that greasy leather ball they call a football.

But even though James Joyce is a subject of my novel I don't think I am influenced by him at all. I know every writer, especially the Irish ones, feels James Joyce looking over their shoulder as they write but I am more influenced by Charles Dickens, if anybody, or even William Shakespeare. Now that might sound as if I am comparing myself to Shakespeare and Dickens but nothing could be further from the truth.

I can't remember ever learning anything at school; I never did any work at school I didn't have to and the only subjects I liked had to have a story to it – like stories from the bible; the English Literature was non existent unless you want to count Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) being passed from pupil to pupil to read out loud in schoolboy monotones and turning into Seven Pillows of Sleep for me!

So I didn't do English Literature till years later after I'd read lots of books and even been to drama school – I was a mature student studying D.H. Lawrence (surprising what one letter makes), William Golding and First World War Poetry by a teacher who loved the subject.

At drama school I was reading and trying to perform Shakespeare when I hardly knew English!! Of course I was in a lot of trouble as I hadn't heard of any of the plays or even the characters and the only way I could even understand it was by sorting out his use of parenthesis and semi colons; without sorting those out I would have been up the creak without a paddle.

I eventually did Shakespeare professionally although not as much as I would have liked to; I earned a lot of money once doing a Shakespeare play for the BBC, even though it was a small part, and when I first came over here I 'workshopped' Richard III playing Richard which went very well – I guess some of the training must have gone in.

When I write I bear in mind Shakespeare's use of the English language – again I am not comparing myself to the greatest genius that has ever lived or the two greatest novelists in the English language but I would recommend anybody who wants to write to follow them as opposed to Dan Brown.

So remember on Wednesday that it is Bloomsday; there will, more than likely, be something on near you, if you look for it, and if you are in Dublin go on the walking tour if you can; go to Mulligan's Pub in Poolbeg Street and drink a pint of the best Guinness in the world and then come back and read my blog about my two leading characters celebrating Bloomsday in Los Angeles which was based on a true incident in 1995.