Postaday for May 1st. Your Life, the Book: From a famous writer or celebrity, to a WordPress.com blogger or someone close to you — who would you like to be your biographer?
James Joyce, mostly because I don’t like him. He’s overrated. He had a good thing going with Dubliners, and then screwed it all up with Ulysses. But he made Bloom the idiot seem epic. Bloom the ordinary, Bloom the pervert.
My life has been a nightmare, just like Circe chapter, except that was Night Town, not nightmare. Doesn’t matter. I never read that damn book. I tried, when I was a grad student in English. I ended up writing a paper about how often the damn book’s been republished. Night town, night mare, and me a pig, slave to his appetites. Another lie. I’m no slave, and the people who offer me up on tarnished platters the pills of my illnesses do so without even knowing who I am.
Nor does Joyce know who I am, the perfect objective biographer, to tell my story and it’s no story at all.
Or maybe Camus: “He fornicated and read the papers.” Or Ford Madox Ford, not because he said “Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.” But because “Ford Madox Ford” in large red letters on the cover of my biography would look really excellent.
No, it has to be Joyce. Here’s how he would write my trip to the 7-11 to get Cokes and frozen burritos:
“A few light coughs from the highway made him turn to the window. He winced: the sun had broken a few clouds. He gazed numbly the cherry blossoms leaves, wilted and scattering, that blanketed the long driveway below him. His stomach whispered him to walk the driveway to the road. Yes, the sunlight would fool him and he’d want for a jacket. Light reflecting off the sparkling asphalt, reflecting off the green painted road sign, the white of the letters, reflecting off the sharp metal perched in the telephone pole nests coasting again the white and blue sky. His stomach indifferent to the light and his shivering arms, wallet in his back pocket fat against this waddle, towards the convenience store, for sugar and grease.”
Okay, no he wouldn’t, not at all. That’s the fun of writing, not knowing what’s going to come out until it’s written. Maybe James Joyce can take overlong to write my biography too, and the fun will be in not knowing what will happen to me until he runs out of ink.