Reading Ulysses in Montana #37
Picking up the phrases that other phases of other matters whimsically deplore, Angie entered the station once more.
Another seven years would pass before another seven years would pass, and the fourteen years would turn into twenty-one and then all that’s left is getting old, growing mold, and reaping what you’ve sold. Were blenders more forgiving, the height of modesty would deter nothing more than a bore at a disco party, doing the quiver with a forgotten liver–living it up till all hours of the most recent special on network teevee.
And yet, there’s more. More fardels to bear, more weary lives to grunt over and sweat through, more dread of undiscovered countries such that Kirk would have no end of extravagant gallivanting in store, even to the end of the third universe from the most local post box, invented by Trollope in concert with Bukowski–a finer pairing never pared before or shared since.
Angie told Kirk to carry on, so he did as he does and he slept to the end of her twenty-one years at the station.
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This is a delightful, dizzying piece—playful, erudite, and unapologetically self-aware. It feels like language letting itself off the leash: Joycean in rhythm, Shakespearean in allusion, and cheerfully anachronistic in its pop-cultural detours. The sentences coil and uncoil with a knowing wink, piling time, age, literature, and absurdity into a single, rolling consciousness that never quite settles—because it isn’t meant to.
I especially loved the way the prose toys with inevitability (“fourteen years would turn into twenty-one”) while undercutting it with humor and surprise, and how the references—from Trollope to Bukowski to Kirk—collapse centuries into one mischievous narrative moment. It reads like a conversation between books on a shelf that have come alive after midnight.
remains….
What a lovely picture.
Gwen.
Thanks, Gwen! 😀
…the same thing as well 😁
“Fardels” makes me think of “contumely.” That’s the word the blank solicits!
lost mail. (Sorry.)
The second graf has a great beat, and by the word “disco,” I was tapping my toes. Thanks so much for this!
Good to hear from you!
🌞 Thank you!
I adored this.
Great website. Interesting blend of content and format.