 There's nothing like something that's random and dumb My ode to Joyce—with apologies to my readers by Trevor Rosen, Editor-in-Chief
As most of you probably know from reading the senseless, self-aggrandizing drivel that I write for this column in each issue, I'm an English major, and as such, I'm taking my senior seminar—on James Joyce. I know what you're all probably thinking—"did you get to read those erotic letters he wrote to his wife?" And the answer to that question is "yes." That's why the class is honors. Anyway, I'm so enamored of Mr. Joyce and his super-clever way of writing things that I thought I'd type my editorial in polite and studied mimicry of his style. Enjoy.
—Pain's o'er the arse of Plantucket's nan-wee time, bringing those chickens 'round the tower of an evening. Parnell would never allow it—but those days are gone just like mamma couldn't get shut of the fever that Janse brought down from Galway.
Tripe. And Flippant Cats coming down to the barn this night in the office. Can't be long with the Cats—the old noise in the joints wakes the neighbors and the old noise isn't good enough, she always said. Hard to be putting all this text to the page without the kinds of nubbery that you can find in Kensington...Lord it'd be nice to plow her… What happened to my thrice-baked french fries from Wendy's? Union frenchfriesies from Wendy's o Wendy's are nothing but sot when you're trying to jeep the page together by nothing more than the sweat of your slow fingers. Todd's gray hat helps him work because his head is cold because he finally shaved that goddamn butt-cut off his head and now the pelo ran away with the clippers and all the cleverness that there was in the now-girdled koph won't keep him warm.
Tonight, there was much of a book-word looking for me to rightly feel like it might've been a mistake for me to ever be in the library in the first place. Now there's a Travesty that's going to be on the boiler plate with the mackerel before long. Todd keeps bringing his fingers up to his nose and smelling them with a vacant look on his face and then looking at Aaron, and Aaron nods nods nods like he knows what the game is and the place too. Buggery and banditry and every kind of arbol that could be found under noon's green sun is down here in the office while we try to make an issue that comes from the heart, dammit, comes from the heart with feeling now, all together. Like magpies that sing, like the orange part of the holy sustenance, it felt ever-so good to be rid of that beastly Jesuit.
—Willy! Jangle the turn-over! Wiley now and fun to boot!
There. If you study this until your eyeballs bleed and your fingernails curl back on themselves grotesquely, and your tongue falls from your head and all your scalp flakes off to reveal your exhausted brain, you'll receive a meaning that is Truly Transcendent. I've told you a story-don't you see it? It's the story of how an issue of the Travesty gets made, with all the tragedies and pitfalls and fun and glory and inter-personal dynamics encoded there above. You won't get it, though, unless you have a doctorate-level familiarity with the plot structure of an East German play that was performed only once—in Murmansk. Also, you'll find that words from a number of languages have been used in order to be extremely clever. You'll also find that I've utilized a cross-language pun involving an imagined psuedo-homonymic relationship with the suffix of one word and a word in Spanish. I'm actually not kidding about that one.
Anyway, this is it—my work for posterity and scholarship. Hope you liked reading it. If you got this far, you can have next week's paycheck—just send an email to my email address, which is (as it has been for many years): trevorrosenjoyceforeverrudeboy69@aol.com. |
