*Next* by James Hynes; he's a wonderful writer but I'm waiting for his next

When I heard James Hynes had a new book coming out I become as excited as when I'd heard a movie of Lord of the Rings was in the works. Very.

I am a fan of Hynes' The Lecturer's Tale, Publish and Perish and Kings of Infinite Space, three contemporary works of fiction that live in the space between pop and literature--a good place. Hynes' first book, a mystery of sorts set in Ireland, The Wild Colonial Boy, lost me after a few chapters. I'm being honest here.

My fickle heart was won in the beginning of Next (Little Brown and Co.), before being lost. The narrator, Kevin, is on a plane from Ann Arbor to Austin for a job interview. With a wink at Joyce's Ulysses, the book is stream-of-Kevin's-consciousness, from take-off to its ending about six hours later.

Thoughts stream into a former co-worker named McNulty from a record store in the late 70s. McNulty was an old-style doper-philosopher-slacker, working in a shop where a customer could go to a listening booth to hear five versions of a Shostakovich symphony (or the B-52s). Oh, I remember those stores. The McNulty/listening booths, fine with details, won me. Who knows where McNulty is these days--Kevin doesn't, though those memories are rich with humor.

And what happened to all the small bookstores, cafes, records stores which those of us who can remember the 70s miss? Well, we all know what happened. Big chain stores.

Part of Kevin's stream-of-consciousness is a lament for what's lost as in crushed by industry, and what is lost in our sense of safety, crushed by violent industry of airplanes flying into buildings and suicide bombers on trains.

However. Most of Kevin's thoughts center on his women. On the ones who got away and the one he is thinking of leaving. I guess Kevin is a healthy American boy, a 50-year old who is unmarried. His thinking take cracks at the cultural literacy of some of his women, which shows Kevin making wrong choices, his contempt, and is also (I am taking the high road), a shot at the country's continued loss of cultural literacy.

Mostly he thinks about his women's flat stomachs, the size of their calves, the tautness of their arms, their sexual charms. Yes, I am told in countless articles and books that men think mostly about sex. True, not true, Kevin is living testament to that theory. Other than McNulty, he has no particular memory of much besides sex and his women. The obligatory family memory (well told, convincing--Hynes is a good writer), but that's it. Regarding a fellow passenger he follows after they land in Austin:

"She's dwindled in the sunlight from a flesh-and-blood girl, with muscles gliding beneath her skin, her apple tattoo winking over her jeans, to an incorporeal, impressionist squiggle that means Girl, a couple of charcoal lines narrow in the middle and wise at the hips."

Nicely done but after twenty references to her tattoo and hips, well, my interest waned. Actually, I was insulted and bored.

I think about living within a star for eternity, per a passage from Spinoza; of course now about the Gulf; the Freedom Flotilla; unemployment; sex; nieces and nephew; the competitive world of poetry. Kevin thinks about sex and romance. Maybe this is chick lit for men.

By the time I reached page 175 I gave myself permission to skip thirty or so pages to get to the final thirty or so pages. This finale is convincing and much foreshadowed.

James Hynes is a wonderful writer. Next is skillful in many ways but it is not his best book or a book I recommend except to younger men. Hynes' fiction thrives on slightly loser characters encountering the bizarre; no matter how well-drawn or real Kevin is, he is not interesting enough to keep my attention and respect for the entire book.

Eulogy? James Joyce on water. From *Ulysses*

The poet John Krick drew my attention to this passage from the final chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. The above photo is a before picture of the Gulf of Mexico.


What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Poem: European Holy Minimalism

Ah, there’s no friends like the old friends, she said, when all is said and done, no friends that a body can trust.
James Joyce, ‘The Sisters,’ Dubliners

The ocean’s quite clear
and swimable to all shores
we maidens hope to wash
up on

like Ulysses lured by great sex
and new tunes. How pretty to roll
on wet sand firm, for a spell
entrapped.

Ulee was restive; us too.
No Homer blowing wind
in our sails and still we
wander

plotting maps
to wealth and love, claiming talks
with God alter physics
of class

inclination and destiny
and maybe they do and maybe
they will, but think of Ulee’s
many-

callused peds treading
towards Ithaca, ‘Penelope Penelope,’
for ten years after
the war

where Patroclus
got pierced. A long time
to grieve for a friend, ten years?
It’s not.

But odyssey-enough our goals: Baja
for ten days, a new couch, a mate
advanced as our years. The troubles
with banks

bodies demons submerge
and could drown us Europeans
minimalized on shores American
where we

self-start -heal -help,
forgetting we’re holy which
we are. Water nymphs stow our
lately

soggy selves. Linens starched
by the girl and tea cups greet the old friends
not lonelier than anyone longing
for tales

of washed-up heroines tricked
but canny and artists
of the quick-change who
triumph.



From: The Future Is Happy
http://www.amazon.com/Future-Happy-Sarah-Sarai/dp/1935402358

Odysseus Tying Himself to the Mast - Happy Bloom's Day

Yes, Molly Bloom fans.

Yes, devotees of stately plump, etc.

Today, June 16, is Bloom's Day in celebration or commemoration or expression of constant awe for James Joyce's Ulysses, loosely based on The Odyssey. Loosely as in easy as a rent boy. As in blowsy as a whore. And then there are various articles of clothing such as your oldest t-shirt or a gypsy-like blouse purchased fifteen years ago at a yard sale, or a muu muu you're reluctant to pass on. What if you retire early and to a trailer park? Hold onto it.

Loose, but epic. Also epic is my need to exercise self-discipline. To write a short blog every day (I've done good, lately). Work on fiction and poetry every day. Work on work. Jobs. Upkeep. Odysseus tied himself to the mast so he wouldn't be tempted by Sirens. A short-term solution.

The long-term solution is watermelon seed slippery. And so I shall now eat a slice of watermelon and contemplate the seed. And how I trundled from Ulysses to Odysseus without much of an explanation or the self-discipline to write a bridge, a transition. And absolute joy that those women in the upper right-hand corner look a bit like me (stately and plump). Sometimes artists get it right.