#are there nonfiction projects I could become absorbed in?

[whentherewerebicycles]

my little loaf :)) my beloved guy :))))

I finished my rec letters last night and then hung out with my sister and ordered Indian food. got up early this morning and worked quite hard from 6:30-11:30 at work finishing a presentation draft + a round of revisions for this big project we’re wrapping up in the next few weeks. I might do just a little bit more work on it today—I’d like to go through the doc and make a detailed revision to-do list for myself so I have it all in one place—but then I’ll be done for the week.

as I was working on that project this morning I noticed that I was experiencing a deep sense of satisfaction & fulfillment, and it struck me that this will be the first time I’ve completed a big writing project (the kind involving multiple rounds of feedback and revision) since february 2022. I almost have happy tears in my eyes just recalling and re-experiencing the feeling now lol. my creative output has been been mostly stalled for nine months now and I’ve been thinking of that stalledness largely in terms of products—I’m not producing good work, I’m not producing stories or drafts, I’m not even really producing good story concepts. but I think what I really miss and feel the absence of in these creatively fallow periods are the rhythms of writing work itself. there’s something about that cycle of planning, drafting, revising, drafting, revising, drafting, revising that feels intensely good and pleasurable to me—that calm, relaxed yet deeply focused flow state where you are continually assessing your own work and making small purposeful changes and then assessing the changes. I love the work itself and when I am cut off from it, internally or externally, I feel like an important part of myself starts to wither. I know this stalled state isn’t forever (it never is), but I would be so much happier and calmer if I were absorbed in work 😩 but then also who knows—maybe this small little revelation will unlock something for me and help me figure out how to bring writing back into my daily life, even if it’s not in the fiction-writing mode that I’ve been trying to make myself work in.

[midnightkens]

To Know

The first time Natasha has the thought, she’s seven years old.

The dress is stuffy; the collar feels like a weight around her neck and Mama scowls when Natasha reaches up to tug at it. “For God’s sake, bambina,” she sighs. “Can you give it a rest? You can take it off in a few hours. You know what your father will say if he catches you playing with it again.”

At seven years old, Natasha already knows many things. She can create circuit boards, mentally solve equations that send adults running for their calculators. Yes, she knows many things, but the first thing she ever learned? Howard Stark isn’t a good father. As far as she’s concerned, Jarvis is her father. Natasha knows better than to say all of that. Instead she allows her gaze to wander around the room, taking in the sights of all the other girls in dresses and the boys in their suits.

“I wish I could be a boy,” Natasha tells Mama. “They get to wear suits and I have to wear this dumb dress.”

Mama laughs, and Natasha’s heart soars, though she’s not quite sure why her mother is laughing. She doesn’t laugh much, but it’s one of Natasha’s favorite sounds. “Don’t be silly, sweetie,” Mama says, readjusting her hair bow. “You’re such a pretty little lady.”

Pretty little lady. The words leave Natasha feeling nauseous, and for the first time in a long time, she can’t figure out why.

**

At eight and a half years old, Natasha cuts her own hair. It’s short, a mop on her head, and when Mama shrieks that she looks like a boy and what have you done to your beautiful hair? Natasha grins in satisfaction. Jarvis fixes it and gives her a soft smile. Jarvis doesn’t care that Natasha prefers jeans and t-shirts over dresses, doesn’t care that she cut off her long, curly hair. He loves her just as she is.

When he takes her to the full length mirror to take a look, Natasha’s heart flutters happily and she can hardly contain the rush of excitement. Yeah, she thinks. This is right.

**

Natasha gets detention for refusing to wear a skirt when she’s eleven years old. Pants are more comfortable, she insists. The boys get to wear them!

Dad shouts at her over the phone, hisses that she’ll never be a boy. Natasha aches for the ground to swallow her up, drag her down to the endless void where she doesn’t have to be anything. The words rise in her throat, I’m not a girl, I’m not a girl! But they die as quickly as they rise. At eleven years old, Natasha knows many things. She’s in high school at eleven years old, nearly on her way to college coursework. Natasha doesn’t know how she knows this, but it’s the most important fact that resides in her brain.

Natasha Stark is not a girl.

**

Her body is wrong. When her voice should begin to deepen it remains high pitched, a soprano note that Jarvis and Ana gush over and that she wishes desperately did not exist. Her body begins to grow and change in ways that Ana had told her it would, but Natasha had just snorted and not paid attention to any of it. Her body begins to curve and her chest begins to grow and she bleeds. Natasha spends more time locked in her bedroom, absorbed in her robots so that no one can look at her and her horrible body. Her dainty, feminine, wrong body.

Jarvis and Ana whisper about her. They’re worried. Whenever they ask her about it, Natasha comes up with an excuse. I miss Mama and wish she would come home. Dad was being a jerk again.

Rich families are cutthroat. If Natasha doesn’t conform, behave exactly how they all want her to, she’ll be an outcast. She’ll be sent away to one of those horrible camps a girl at school was talking about and Dad would make Jarvis and Ana stop talking to her.

Keeping Jarvis and Ana was almost worth all of the wrongness.

Almost.

**

That same year, Natasha comes across the word transgender in a book she’s reading. It’s not often that she has to look something up. On a Thursday afternoon, after days of contemplation, she makes the trek down to her school’s library. The other students giggle when they spot her, Natasha the freak, and she sneers at them before turning to the card catalog. It takes what feels like hours to find what she’s looking for. LGBT 306.76. She follows the numbers, dives deep into the nonfiction section and frowns. It’s a small section, but she’ll make do. There she spots a book, She's not there : a life in two genders. Natasha pulls it off the shelf, reads about this person who everyone assumes to be a girl but really is a boy. There he defines the word Natasha saw, the word transgender: a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex.

It comes in waves, the realizations and relief and all of it. Everyone around her thinks that Natasha’s a girl, but something inside of her screams wrong! That’s wrong! She’s never had a word for it. And there are more people just like her? Natasha takes the book to a table and reads feverishly, taking notes.

She’ll never be able to do anything about it, but the more she reads, the more Natasha’s convinced of it. She’s transgender. Not wrong or horrible or broken.

Transgender. Natasha has more research to do.

**

She’s thirteen and alone in her room, staring at herself in the mirror. Mama says that she’s turning into a beautiful young woman, albeit not as proper as she would like. The last bit is always said with a tiny smile, so Natasha knows that Mama is joking. Mostly. And dear old Dad? Well, that bastard isn’t even around, so what does he know?

The bruises on her ribs scream in agony, but Natasha swallows down a hiss of pain. Howard isn’t here, but she refuses to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he could break her someday. She may be broken, but at least she has Jarvis and Ana.

Jarvis and Ana, who teach her how to cook. Jarvis and Ana who don’t hit or shout when she burns banana bread and nearly starts a fire, who laugh with her and choose her.

Ana bought her these clothes, these jeans and a black t-shirt that’s just a bit too big on her petite frame and brand new Chuck Taylors. Alone in her bedroom, Natasha pulls her hair back grinning at the sight in front of her. She doesn’t see Natasha, or a pretty little lady or a proper young woman. The image in front of her is young, and a bit too earnest, and dammit, Natasha, why are you crying?

The image in front of her is a boy. He looks about two years younger than her, but she can work with it. Weak, fragile Natasha is gone. In her place stands a boy, an exuberant, funny, genius of a boy. The boy and Natasha reach out; their fingers touch, and Natasha feels more at home than she has since she was eight and a half, her waist-length hair clumps on the floor.

Natasha knows what her name should have been. Mama told her years and years ago, and it felt like it was hers. Anthony. Anthony Edward Stark. “Anthony.” Natasha whispers the name, crossing that line at last. After this there’s no going back. No more Natasha and dresses and bows and heels and skirts. There will only be Anthony and his jeans and t-shirts and sneakers, Anthony and his deep voice and his rightness.

Anthony moves his fingers away from the mirror, lets go of his long hair and the illusion shatters. In front of him stands a girl, a weak, broken girl in boy’s clothing. Who is he thinking? He can’t be Anthony. His mother would never speak to him again; Howard would toss him out on the streets. He’d be all alone. He wouldn’t even have Jarvis and Ana.

He’ll call himself Anthony, he decides. Or maybe even Tony. Anthony’s too posh, too formal, everything Howard loves and all things he hates. Yes, Tony. Tony sounds good, sounds right. He’ll answer to Natasha and wear the frilly dresses and play the part of a nice young woman. The thought sends waves of nausea so fierce that his knees buckle, but Tony can do it. He’s going off to MIT next year. Just one more year and he can be free.

**

Tony doesn’t last a year. Before his fourteenth birthday he’s in jeans and t-shirts, long hair pulled into a ponytail or braid. Howard hates it, tells him he looks like a rat and a slob, but what does he know? Mama’s away on longer and longer trips, which means longer stretches where he doesn’t have to wear those horrible dresses. Everyone still calls him Natasha, and he bites back a snarl and an My fucking name is Tony every time, but he manages. The masculine clothes don’t ease all of it, but they help.

**

MIT is a godsend. For the first time in his life, Tony is free to create his robots, live out from under Howard’s thumb, and finally be himself. The media hounds him, but for the first time in his life Tony doesn’t care. He cuts his hair again and rumors about him being a butch lesbian circulate and he just laughs. If only they knew.

There is just one thing wrong, other than himself. He’s younger than everyone else, smarter and he doesn’t know when to shut up. It’s nothing that Tony isn’t used to. He survived boarding school, and he’ll survive this too.

Then he meets Rhodey.

**

At first, they’re Jim and Natasha. Jim is older than Tony by two years, but they’re in the same year. They share the same general education class, Sociology 101, and they get paired together for a project. They both have single dorms, but two months later, Tony has practically moved into his room.

Jim is now Rhodey, but Tony is still Natasha. He yearns to tell him, stops and starts, the words dying in his throat. In a short amount of time, Tony’s become attached and anyone to whom he attaches himself winds up leaving. Tony’s too loud, too smart, he stays up too late and hyperfocuses on his robots. Rhodey doesn’t care about all of that, but Rhodey will definitely care if Tony tells him I’m not a girl, don’t call me Natasha, please call me Tony. Tony can practically see Rhodey recoil in disgust, shove him away and kick him out of his dorm.

Tony can’t, won’t, risk that.

**

Howard pays for an off campus apartment next year. Tony and Rhodey live in their own apartment, almost in their own little world. Howard doesn’t know that Rhodey’s living with him. Tony had mentioned it, but Howard had just grunted, not even paying attention.

It’s better that way.

**

Tony only binds his chest when Rhodey isn’t home. He knows he’s not supposed to wrap with ace bandages, but he has nothing else and he’s desperate. What he doesn’t count on his Rhodey coming home early, seeing Tony in the living room with nothing but his jeans and an ace bandage binding his breasts.

For a long moment, they just stare at each other, neither speaking. Then Rhodey opens his mouth and Tony bolts, locking his bedroom door behind him.

Goddammit.

**

Tony waits anxiously for a few days, almost begging Rhodey to say something and get the conversation over with, but he never does. Rhodey is good like that. Everyone else thinks Tony is weird, but Rhodey loves him for who he is, not in spite of it as so many people think. That much Tony knows to be true. But if Rhodey knew this about him, then Rhodey wouldn’t love him anymore.

Rhodey is everything. He’s friendship and love, late nights and delirious mornings, comfort and safety, and Tony aches desperately to hold onto him. They sit together in the living room, Rhodey doing homework and Tony fiddling with DUM-E’s arm. Rhodey is calm, but Tony is so tense that he can hardly stand it, and before he knows it the words, “Why won’t you call me a freak?” slip from his mouth. Rhodey looks up at him in surprise and Tony continues. “You walked in on me and you haven’t said a word! Go on! Call me disgusting! Call me a freak! Just get it over with. Dammit, Jim, why can’t you just get it over with and stop stringing me along?”

Rhodey sighs and shoves his textbook away. “I haven’t said anything because I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

“Bullshit,” Tony hisses. “I’m a fucking freak and you know it! Everyone else already thinks it, so go on, have at it. Tell me something I don’t fucking know.”

Rhodey raises an eyebrow. “Are you done?” Tony’s face flushes with rage, but before he can retort, Rhodey’s up and crossing the room, standing right in front of him. “I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think it was a big deal. Nat, you stay up for three days at a time. You leave circuit boards and wires all over and forget to do your laundry. You’re loud and funny and one of the kindest people I know. This? The, what is it called, binding? It’s not even the weirdest or worst thing I’ve caught you doing.”

Tony deflates and stares at his friend for a moment. It’s not often that he’s speechless, and judging by Rhodey’s smirk, he must be thinking the same thing. “I guess you’re right,” he says slowly. “You really don’t think it’s weird?”

“Cross my heart.”

Rhodey doesn’t think he’s weird. Rhodey doesn’t want to toss him away, discard and abandon him like the trash so many other people believe he is. Tony doesn’t deserve Rhodey, doesn’t deserve his kindness, love, or friendship. But with Rhodey, he feels the safest. If Rhodey doesn’t think he’s weird for binding, maybe he won’t care about the other stuff? Tony’s heart hammers in his chest, his palms sweat and he sits on the floor. Rhodey sits across from him, reaches out and squeezes his hand.

“Rhodey, I have to tell you something.”

Rhodey waits patiently while Tony collects himself. Tony’s never said the words out loud before. Saying them feels like the end of a chapter, one more piece of Natasha gone. The idea of saying goodbye to Natasha is exciting, exhilarating, freeing. Tony takes a deep breath and looks into Rhodey’s eyes.

“I’m transgender.”

** Rhodey has questions, of course, he does, but he holds onto Tony tightly as he explains everything. How he never felt like a girl, how he doesn’t know how he knows, but he knows that he’s a boy. He’s a boy and he wants to die every time someone calls him Natasha, how he wants to burn every dress and makeup palette he owns, how he feels like himself in masculine jeans and t-shirts and suits.

And then Rhodey does something that shocks him. It’s a question. A simple one, really.

“What’s your name?”

And for the first time he gets to respond, “My name is Tony.” Everything falls into place, and Tony sighs, leaning into his friend. Rhodey pulls him all the closer and Tony affirms, “My name is Tony.”

“Okay, Tony,” Rhodey says with a wide grin. “It’s nice to meet you.”

**

A few days later, Tony unlocks the door to the apartment and kicks off his shoes. Midterms suck, and he thinks he might actually eat dinner and go to bed early tonight. He stumbles into the kitchen, eyebrows raising curiously at the package on the table. There’s a note on top of the brown wrapping.

Tones,

Sorry if this is weird, but I just wanted to do something for you. I did research and everything says not to bind with ace bandages, so I got this for you. Let me know if it doesn’t fit.

And I know I didn’t say this before, and I should have, but thanks for trusting me.

--Rhodey

Tony opens the package and gasps when he sees what’s inside. He’s heard of these, but with Howard snooping through his credit card statements, it’s never been safe enough to buy one. The binder is lighter than he expected, but it feels like he’s touching gold. Tony rushes to his bedroom and puts it on, relieved when it actually fits. Then again, Rhodey knows everything about him. This is no exception. He puts his t-shirt back on, messes with his hair and looks at himself in the mirror. For the first time, he doesn’t see a girl pretending to be a boy. He sees himself, Tony Stark, and tears well dangerously in his eyes as he reaches up to touch his reflection. He’s still not exactly where he wants to be, he won’t be until he turns eighteen and can transition without Howard’s input, but the binder helps ease an ache inside of him, the ache that screams you’re wrong!

Tony doesn’t feel wrong, not with the binder, not with Rhodey calling him Tony and using masculine pronouns. No, for the first time in his entire life, Tony feels just right.

[botanyshitposts]

how did you know you wanted to be a botanist? did you ever consider doing something else?

(I’m going to write this one with proper capitalization because this is gonna be long and it’s easier to read)

Ohhh yeah. Like, to be honest, if I could do ANYTHING with my life I’d probably teach people about plants, write science fiction, or teach about plants through writing science fiction. I feel a lot like a journalist walking through botany conventions and stuff, like I just want to survey everything and learn it all and talk about it, and I’m not sure if I would be good at being like, a Real Plant Scientist, despite having some VERY niche botanical interests that i would absolutely dig deep and go through the literature for (isoetes and isoetes evolution, maize, lichens, carnivorous plants of the very specific nepenthes genus, hornworts, thermogenesis, etc, if you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ve probably seen me Go Off about a ton more). I do consider myself to be an aspiring botanist, but not a researcher looking to produce data and publish. That being said, going into academia isn’t completely out of the realm of possibilities for me.

Right now, I kind of have the pipe dream of trying for a science communication grad program, or a science fiction writing program. As it stands, I’m a biology major with a plant science concentration, I’m going into my junior year of undergrad, and i’m going to declare an english minor this year. I’ve been writing sci-fi since i was 10, and I’m currently in the process of buckling down to try to get something published (on a small scale to start) and increasing my stamina to work on some substantial projects, be it fiction or nonfiction or both. If I want to take writing seriously, I figure I have to start working hard for it now. 

As for like, HOW I got into botany, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about this on here, so I should start by answering a frequent question I get: most botanists stumble into botany. Like, they go down a path with animals or ecology or another biological field, and then accidentally fall in love with them. Not everybody is like, down for botany right in undergrad. Actually, a lot of people don’t think plants are very cool in undergrad. I started learning at 15, and I get asks sometimes that are like ‘I’m 17, am I too old to get into botany?’ like dude RARELY do you see botanists younger than 20 lmao you are NEVER too old for that shit. Plants have the disadvantage of being static beings in the peripheral of our everyday lives until you start paying attention to them (a phenomenon colloquially referred to as ‘plant blindness’ in the botany/horticulture communities), so they tend to get sidelined in K-12 education and are easily overlooked in general. 

I got into botany through an unpaid high school internship program. Fun fact, before all this I was passively thinking about becoming a zoologist, and what a disaster that would have been. I signed up to help out in a local greenhouse and was immediately blasted by how fucked up ornamental plants are. Specifically, I remember a time when my mentor was like, ‘do you want to see what $1,000 worth of plants looks like?’ and of COURSE I wanted to, so he brought me down to the back of the greenhouse. $1,000 worth of seeds turned out to be about 10-15 test tubes and blank white packets in a tupperware container. He took one of the test tubes out; it was filled with bulky, lumpy looking tan seeds. He said each one grew a pot of three different types of lettuce. They were bulky because each one was three separate seeds fused together with a rubbery substance that companies apply to make the seeds easier for robotic potting arms to pick up. It’s wild shit. I was a big fan of Jurassic Park at the time. As you can imagine, my third eye had been absolutely blasted open and I’ve never been the same.

From there I started volunteering in a community greenhouse, then I got obsessed with plants that heat up (thermogenic plants) and ended up teaching myself a ton off of wikipedia and from anything that wasn’t behind a paywall to understand what the hell I was reading about, then got some money from an extended learning program at my school to do a research project with it, and then my extended learning teacher had me submit my research to a science competition, and after that I got chosen to give a presentation at said competition and to be completely honest I completely blacked out for 15 minutes and can only remember crying on stage at the end about how much I loved Eastern Skunk Cabbages (my subject for the project), and THEN I went onto the National competition in San Diego and THAT was wild because in retrospect WOW my project sucked data and hypothesis-wise, and THEN I spent a summer doing manual labor for an industrial maize breeding facility which was wild, and after that I went to college and got invested in lichens and isoetes and all that wild shit and that’s where I am now. Last summer I went to the BSA conference in Manchester and the ICPS conference in California, both of which I liveblogged on here. They were awesome. Like holy shit. 

As for the history of this blog: I started this blog when I was...god, 15 or 16 I think, when I first was going hog wild getting obsessed with plant stuff I absorbed off the internet. My parents and friends got very tired of my infodumping very fast. I’d been a tumblr user for a couple years already, so I made this blog to talk about stuff so I wouldn’t annoy people irl, and now it’s turned into like, wow. This(tm). Which is wild. 

I get a lot of questions too about like, jobs in botany, and how to get further in botany, and I never really know how to answer them because I’m still figuring it out myself. My number one biggest source of botany information, to be completely honest, is asking people, and talking to people in horticulture and botany positions and bugging them with questions (I first learned about isoetes while talking to a couple grad students around a campfire on a BSA fern foray. One was wearing an isoetes convention hat, and they were all kind of struggling to explain them to me when I asked, which of course got me obsessed immediately because when a plant in general is difficult to explain you know it’s some cursed shit. It then took me a semester of college to begin to understand them, and yes, they are just That Cursed and also INCREDIBLY underrepresented and understudied in the literature). 

Idk how to end this but yeah thank you guys for asking me questions and supporting my shitposts and stuff all these years. It’s made me a better science communicator than I could have ever imagined it would make me, and I’m still learning a ton from it. I’m moving back to college tomorrow. I will finish this post with a picture of a hornwort (anthocerotophyta), the slimiest of the cursed lads: 

[datastate]

☆♥️♦️☠️ for monomon!

this got long BWGMDJ sorry!! but ty for asking :]

☆ - happy headcanon

☆ : SHE HAPPY STIMS BY SINGING,,, or humming. she usually defaults to tunes she heard when she was younger or even sometimes a few she’s come up w but usually “never finds the time” to try to properly write out. like sure of course she could build a whole fucking telescope for lurien after hegemol’s gathered the materials she needed but switching over to do this for herself?? she already has like 80 other projects to work on for herself.

♥ - family headcanon

♥ : HMM ok. tbh i feel like she (loosely) considers most of the uomas n oomas her family, but if we were to go into specific Related Family, tbh i never really thought Much of it? all i really know monomon really began as no one special, and the only reason she’s got a mask is because she put herself forth with ideas and unn was like well, if you’re interested in helping rebuild your people on my land i (tentatively) trust you. she somewhat took on what role their own god left behind after receiving her mask, doing her best to preserve her people and the history of the areas around. (specifically hallownest bc people there r the main ones who offer to stay at the archive n help her out)

as for found family i really do think she considers quirrel, ze’mer, lurien n maybe unn(? if she’s willing? unn kind of becomes a mentor for her) as her closest friends!!! probably eventually herrah n hornet too, tho that’s cut off too soon by the dreamer project :[

♦ - quirks/hobbies headcanon

♦ : for some reason the first thing i thought of when looking at this prompt is that she’d love dramatically retelling the bug equivalent of shakespeare, filling all the roles herself. this is not the only answer i’ll give but i feel as if it’s a thought i should share.

wrt hobbies, monomon really enjoys just... reading. or listening to someone else recount stories. she gets caught up in it, she’s like. the embodiment of that one post “time to absorb stimuli in a neurotypical way today / step one failed” BGHDSJ,, she just loves absorbing information, going thru new stories (fictional or not, tho she prefers nonfiction), and finding new viewpoints and ideas and it’s just all really interesting to her, getting to hear all of these different interpretations of the life they share (especially if she’s familiar with who the person is and what they dealt with in the past, how that influenced their view of the world)

☠ - angry/violent headcanon

☠ : i think she only gets angry when people dismiss her w/o even offering Any evidence for why they take a contrary stance to her. she’s completely fine having differing opinions and takes on things! she likes learning as much as most others in the archive, enjoys friendlier debates on things, and is fine w changing her views if she’s missed or misread info! it’s good so long as the other isn’t, you know, being a shitty person.

i’m gonna use tpk as an example bc he’s the most obvious one that i can think of atm: once he reveals the full scale of his plan, she will propose the "hollow” vessel that he ‘built’ isn’t actually hollow on the basis it clearly has a consciousness. he will deny this and once more iterate his vessel plan, you know, the one that Can Not Fail. she will try to bend for him because she respects him enough, saying, yes, i understand this is the only plan we’ve got that has a plausible solution, however i want to change it and find an actually hollow vessel so we aren’t forcing a person into this and we aren’t dooming our kingdom! he pretends to acknowledge her, only to dismiss her criticism and reiterate what ‘life’ she sees in it is simply the void’s mindless, longing effect, that it adapts out of his order and manipulation alone. she dares him to tell her what proof he has that the void itself isn’t alive. he loops his explanations again, refusing to acknowledge what facts she brings. she realizes it’s a hopeless endeavor, and chooses something more cutting, something she gathered from her time examining him (his desperation for this plan to work, if he’s so certain in flat out denying what she proposes) and the “vessel”: affirmation that she knows this vessel, whatever it is he’s taken and twisted, because it’s definitely not “just a construct” as he’s tried to excuse, has suffered enough.

she accepts the other’s stubbornness and outright refusal to even consider her point n she’s like hey well i’m good at figuring people out well enough to say fuck you, listen to me, i know what i’m talking about and if i’ve somehow missed something then you should tell me instead of acting like i’ve got the entire picture wrong.

if this is with someone that isn’t, you know, the literal god-king, and is just someone at the archive or whatever, she’ll probably just be like “well good luck finding another place because we won’t tolerate you / these types of views here.”

[writingalongtheway]

A Work In Progress

Whenever I am asked to describe myself on a social media platform, I saw I am a work in progress. As a child I longed to be an adult because I thought adults were finished products, a complete package. I was such a worrier as a child and teen I thought adults lived carefree lives. I know what a misconception of adult life. In college I took an eye-opening class that changed my perception of life, the Creative Process. It continues to be enlightening, but then my naivety, lack of experience and personal angst kept me from seeing the joy in that process. However as the years moved on much of what I learned in that single class has stayed with me and moved me forward. I learned that it was a process or a journey that continued. I learned to enjoy the journey and not try to speed through it. I am proud to be a lifetime learner, keeping an open mind to learn new things, even if the learning is hard. Even if I fail at first I have learned it is ok and to try.

I am a painter. My pieces are not great but some hit the mark and some miss it. My mom was an excellent painter in oils, I learned I could follow my own path with art and painting. While still respecting her art and choices. She gave the love for art and I have learned to embrace that love. It took me a long time to try to paint. I learned that art can be achieved in a variety of ways. Exploring different art and artists has become a passion for me. I so enjoy discovering new paintings, new ways to create, while loving the masters and reading about their lives and struggles. I so enjoy painting, The ongoing journey to create and put on canvas what is in my head. A work in progress Lucie Brownson artist painter.

I am a terrible quilter, I have a hard time sewing a straight line even with a super sewing machine. I have not quilted in a while, but I plan to pick it up again. I enjoy looking at quilts and reading patterns. I have made a few quilts that have turned out ok some not so ok two need serious repair.

Quilting / sewing does not come easy for me under no circumstances I even have a problem cutting straight and accurately. However, once I get started I am love the project. I think my reluctance to begin a quilt is partially the absence of my dear Steinunn. How I loved sharing quilting with Steinunn. I miss her, but that is another story. Now she was a master quilter and her talent with a needle was awesome. Work in progress quilter, that is me.

Writing now that is scary. I enjoy writing but putting it out there is scary. I learned that with writing so much must be right, must make sense and for nonfiction right. This is an ongoing process. I try to write every day in the journal and read each day.

William Faulkner said

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window. " And read I do all genres it is part of the process for me.

Now it is more important than ever to be that work in progress, Never stop striving.......

I have embraced art and there is another part of me that is a work in progress the part of me that wants to be a better person wife and mother. A better Catholic and Christian, kinder person. I think that will also have to be part of a different essay

[drdemonprince]

I spent years doing a lot of really personal, confessional, navel-gazey writing, and I don’t do that so much anymore. I can’t tell if it’s because I’ve run out of things to say about myself, because so much of that writing had to do with processing trauma and sorting out my gender, or if I’ve stopped because I find being self-absorbed morally unacceptable now. I used to write comedy, as well. After Trump got elected, it rapidly became hard to give a shit about that stuff anymore. Writing gruesome poop jokes had been a fun and social diversion, but the joy in that dried up so quickly after the world felt more dire. Of course it was always dire. But I stopped feeling like I could be so selfish and small-potatoes in my pursuits and feel good about it. 

I worry that I’ve ceased writing so much for a separate reason entirely: that I’ve become lazy, and pathetic, and foggy headed. That I’ve lost all the passion and brilliance I once had, that my world is shrinking, drawing in upon itself, and I am becoming a lonesome unproductive unconnected nothing, like I was in my darkest days of graduate school. Every time I experience a decline in productivity of any sort I wonder about that. I always fear that I am on the verge of a great decline from which I will never recover. That I’m giving into my baser, childish instincts and that I will pay for my slothfulness and lack of initiative.

To be honest, it’s also about money and practicality. After the election I got very interested in stockpiling money. More than ever before. And I was always an over-saver. It seemed like the world might collapse a little bit, and that I’d be left desperate if I didn’t plan accordingly. Schools might close. Health insurance might become prohibitively expensive at a time when I need it. Anything of value that I bought, like a house or a condo, might rapidly depreciate in price while the world destabilized. All I could do was work very hard and funnel as much into savings as possible. But that left very little time for lounging around in coffee shops, writing personal nonfiction. 

Maybe fiction and essays were just a diversion that I needed during a particularly lonely time in my life. Maybe they gave me a means of self-reflection that I needed when my depression and trauma symptoms and gender dysphoria were too overpowering for me to see clearly. And now that I have some grasp of them, and of myself, I don’t need them anymore. Maybe I’ve just gotten out of the habit because I was too busy for quite a while. Perhaps it’s just hard to listen to your inner voice and be precious when you’re fretting that the world is crumbling down and you’re filled with as much rage as sorrow. 

I just hope I’m leading a meaningful life. I do my daily activism, I go to protests, I volunteer my time and skills, trying maximize the distinct potential for good that I possess. Or I try to. I work every day, for my various jobs, but I don’t work that terribly hard. It doesn’t feel terribly hard, anyway. I have some creative projects but they’re not quite as social and lively as they have been at other times in my life. I never feel like I’m doing enough. I’m either too stressed to take care of my creative and social lives, or I’m too depressed and slow-moving to deserve to live. That’s how it feels. Both ways of being feel pathetic. I hope I’m using my time well enough. I hope I do something fantastic soon. I only seem to feel confident and worthwhile when I’m doing something Big, like that Trigger Warning essay. 

[5questions]

BEN TANZER

Bio:  Ben is the author of the just released book Be Cool – a memoir (sort of), among others. He also oversees the lifestyle empire This Blog Will Change Your Life (changeyourlifethiswill.com) and frequently speaks on the topics of messaging, framing, social media, blogging, fiction, essay writing and independent publishing. He can be found online at tanzerben.com.

What writing or other projects are you working on currently?

Given that my current efforts to overthrow the government are going slow, and the mid-term elections are still a couple of years away, I have been working on a follow-up to my novel Orphans titled Foundlings, which shifts from the point of view of the male protagonist to that of his wife. It's a road novel and a rumination on family, story and the act of moving from dystopia to utopia. I've been working on a novel about memory as well. It traces a relationship over several decades and the impact of that relationship on both the married couple at the center of the story, as well as their daughter. I'm also continuing to expand the offerings at This Blog Will Change Your Life, my ongoing and quasi cultural lifestyle empire, which has long hosted a Zine, podcast and book riffings, but is now launching a handbook series and T-shirt business too. If any or all of that works, or someone merely sends me a large sum of money, you can also look forward to a jeans line, perfume, doughnut shop, taco stand and Gin distillery.

Your recent memoir Be Cool, along with some of your past work, has a heavy sense of setting. New York State  and the City of Chicago are too of the settings that come to mind. I think setting is one of the most important elements in fiction. What do you think? How you see the Midwest as different than the Northeast? What’s similar?

Whether I'm writing fiction or nonfiction, I tend to start with a sliver of something, an idea, a conversation, a mood, or impulse. As I expand and mold that into an actual piece, I start to visualize the spaces where the story is unfolding and as I write I suck up whatever details I see in my head. In terms of the Midwest and Northeast, which are the places I have spent much of my life living in, my experience is that the small towns and urban centers have more in common with their respective small towns and urban centers than not, regardless of region. There are always unique qualities, food, industry, religion, sometimes, and music, but political leanings, and hobbies, day to day life, how people fall in love, how they fight, communicate, and don't, and how the towns look in terms of stores and plazas and gas stations, it's all very similar, something I think we saw more clearly in the recent election, though what all that means, continues to be misunderstood.

Your writing has a very detailed sense of memory and also a  playful sense of humor. Who are writers you like for their humor writing? What about writers who focus on delving into memories deeply?

I'm fascinated with memory, how we tell our stories, how they change, and how other people remember things. Among my friends and family I'm known as someone who remembers everything, and yet, I am also routinely told that stories which I know to be fact, I remember incorrectly or have embellished beyond anything recognized as truth. I am also fascinated by, and value, humor, always have, though in fiction, I never consciously try to ensure a piece has humor, and in essay writing I always do, consciously trying to balance humor and pain, sometimes sentence by sentence even as I'm editing. In one way, my earliest influence in terms of thinking about writing and essay and humor, was David Sedaris, but my first, and ongoing, influence, is Jim Carroll, and The Basketball Diaries in particular, a book that can be both shockingly sordid and depressing, but is also quite funny and electric and everything I aspire to be on the page. More recently, and possibly my biggest influence in crafting my previous essay collection Lost in Space, is the writing of Sam Irby and her collection MEATY. I would also include Megan Stielstra, Wendy C. Ortiz and Scott McClanahan in this mix, because I know they have influenced me with their love of word, truth telling and verve. I wouldn't want to leave out more random influences, however, or things that surely have had some impact, for example, watching Richard Pryor in Live on the Sunset Strip, the Mr. Natural comix that floated around my house when I was kid, listening to Steve Martin's comedy album A Wild and Crazy Guy, MAD magazine, Animal House, the Beastie Boys and the RAMONES. They're all influences as well, though when, why and how they've played a role, is not always clear to me.

What's your day-to-day life like? Do you like it?

To be clear, I'm terribly boring. I have spent much of my adult life working 9-5, worrying about retirement plans, vacation time and health insurance. I have two children who I make sandwiches for on most mornings and I have been married for twenty years. That said, I get to write nearly every day, the children are beautiful, when not calling me a hypocrite or reminding me that no one reads my books, I still laugh with my wife, I meet really cool people, do readings, and podcasts, and so much of it is so very good, lovely even. But do I actually like it? Most of the time, yes, though I am contractually obligated to say that. I do mean it though, it's just that, maybe not quite being 9-5 would be nice. Say 10-4. And being able to run and write every morning to start the day because that window would actually exist to do so would be cool. Also, time to drink and surf - and no, I don't know how to surf, it's fantasy, but all of this is at the moment - and tacos, every afternoon. I might also enjoy being counted on just a little less to always know where band-aids are, which will happen eventually, the house being empty more often, which may never happen and living near the beach. I want all of those things, and maybe, somehow, I will figure that out, and when I do, I want to believe that I will like a lot.

A lot of artists and writers have had calls to action or predictions that art/literature in America will change greatly in this new era after the recent election of Trump. Could you or do you see your own work changing? I saw that you recently attended the Women’s March in Chicago with your son.

The work will change because we will change because the world has changed and because while it will not always be conscious, our work will reflect what's happening around us. So, will my work change? I'm sure it will. I won't try to write in anyway that is any more political unless I'm asked to, but I'm sure bullies and liars will certainly become more prominent characters in my work. I have already been thinking of a thing where I can see characters like those creeping-in. Will I become more political regardless though? Fuck yes. I already was, but clearly not enough. I went to marches and I made donations, but I wasn't in it, or absorbed by it, and I'm going to try and figure out how I can be. One thing for sure, and this may be minor, is that I want to focus more on what's being said and calling that out. Words matter. Facts matter. Science matters. And when there are lies, and untruths, and alternative facts being treated as actual facts, people have to draw attention to that in the same way we have to call out bullying, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic and racist behavior when we encounter it. We can't sit by and wait for someone else to do something, because when we do, we get this, and this is fucking terrible. You also get me becoming very preachy and I do apologize for that.

[bouncingtigger10]

New Post has been published on The Bouncing Tigger Reads

New Post has been published on http://www.tiggerreviews.com/animals-and-farms-whats-not-to-like-the-author-explains/

Animals and Farms - what's not to like? The author explains

Questions for Authors:

How long do you think about a topic before deciding to write about it? Do you have a set of notes or a note book where you write down topics that appeal before making a decision as to which topic this time?

There’s been no set time-frame for thinking through novel ideas. Once an idea seems to have legs, I set up a “fermenting file,” which will collect odd bits of research (90 percent of it never used) and random notes to myself. My initial idea may change dramatically even before I start writing, as well as during the writing process. I’ve published four novels now (and am currently working sporadically on two at the same time) and with every one, I start out knowing how the novel should begin and how it should end. So far, that certainty has not changed. It’s that large space in the middle that gets tricky. After the first few chapters, I inevitably get stuck. This is probably because my novels are so character-driven and the characters start having minds of their own and taking me places I didn’t anticipate going. If I let them talk to me, without my losing control completely, the workflow changes halfway through the novel. At that mystical halfway point, I suddenly know how to get to that previously envisioned final chapter. Suddenly, I’m able to chart out six or seven chapters at a time. The main challenge then becomes keeping up with the flow. I may still get stuck occasionally, but nowhere near as profoundly or frequently as in the first half of the writing process.

How long does it take to research a topic before you write? And for this book?

The research time frame varies with every book. My first two books were non-fiction, ghostwritten with a deadline and overall subject area someone else proposed. That was a much more structured process than for fiction writing. With both of those non-fiction projects, I had six months to deliver the draft. In both cases, I spent four of those months researching and two months writing. Although there was some spillover, the research and writing phases were largely segregated.

With fiction, there’s much less compartmentalization. Reinventing Hillwilla required the least amount of research time of any of my books. Even though I wrote it as a standalone, it is, after all, the third in a series, with the same venue and same principal characters. So those characters were well-developed by the time Chapter 1 ended up on paper. Nevertheless, there were lots of facts I had to check — for example, about the legal system, about the exotic locales Tanner visits, etc. And before I plunked Clara in the middle of Wellesley College, I trekked up to Massachusetts and chatted with students to get a better sense of the current campus culture. That way I had something firmer than memories of my own college years, and I learned about some key changes in campus venues and dormitory life.

One final comment about research… My most valuable research tool is bald observation. A favorite pastime is to park myself, solo, in a restaurant, in a region that will be the venue for part of a novel. Then I shamelessly eavesdrop on conversations at nearby tables. I’ll make mental notes of vocabulary choices, pronunciation, phrasing. At one point, I overheard a local speak about the need to “ponder” something before finding the solution to a problem. That verb struck me as downright eloquent, uniquely West Virginian. And you’ll hear it coming out of Ben Buckhalter’s mouth.

What is your favourite genre?

My favorite genre? Hmmm, depends on my mood. I’ve certainly had my cop-shop whodunit phase, cozy mystery phase, family saga phase, biography/autobiography phase and period novel phase. Literary novels are a constant, however. Especially those involving flawed, complicated characters with dark pasts. Not surprisingly, those are the kind of novels I want to write, too.

If you recommend a living author – who would it be? A dead author?

Recommendation of a living author? When it comes to wordsmithing chops, the first name that pops up is Alexander McCall Smith, author of the Botswana lady detective agency series and the Scotland Street series (my favorite), among many, many others. That man can string words together so eloquently, combining both economy of language and lyrical flow, he just makes my jaw drop. He also has a talent for delicately tweaking certain social trends, without coming across as preachy.

As for dead authors, oy, so many. If I focus on economy of language, John Cheever and Emily Dickinson come to mind. Both could pack so much into so few words, in very different ways. Both had an appealingly dark sense of irony, too. Writers who stretched my brain — but made that painful effort worthwhile — include such greats as Shakespeare, Goethe, Rilke, Eliot. I’m sure I’m forgetting others who had a major influence on me.

Have you ever tried to imitate another author’s style? And if so, why?

No, I’ve never tried to imitate another writer’s style. But I’m sure I’ve subconsciously absorbed elements from other authors. Perhaps because I spent most of my professional life as a nonfiction ghostwriter, it’s really important for me to speak in my own (unique, I hope) voice as a novelist.

Do you have any pets?

Do I have pets? Is accounting boring? The numbers are down to a precious few these days: one soft-eyed English setter who looks a lot like Ralph (but was born years after Ralph); one English cocker spaniel with the swagger of a rhinoceros and a great sense of irony; and one gray barn cat who has staff.

If so, what are they?

Over the years, my life has been blessed by llamas; a string of English setters, one Old English Sheepdog (hmmm, there seems to be a pattern here of English-bred dogs), one mutt; one ginormous Newfoundland; a bunch of rescue and feral cats; a series of fancy long-haired cats (Himalayan and Birman); one Peruvian guinea pig (whom I named Fash, short for Fascist Pig); and two parakeets, who got me through the terrible five-year era when my childhood family was dogless.

Do they help you write?

Yes, my pets help me write. I can’t remember how many dog-walks have freed up writer’s block. Mainly, my animal companions have safeguarded my sanity, which fiction-writing constantly undermines.

Do you want to add a photo of them to this Q&A?

If you’re interested in pictures, you need look no further than the cover of Reinventing Hillwilla. My current setter Finnegan ably stepped up to portray the spectral Ralph. But, yes, I had to bribe him with treats.

Author Details:

Melanie Forde is a veteran writer, ghosting in diverse formats—from academic white papers to advertising copy. Under her own name, she has published numerous features and commentaries about the natural world, as well as the first two novels in the Hillwilla trilogy (Hillwillaand On the Hillwilla Road). She lives in Hillsboro, West Virginia.

Connect with Melanie:

Website:  https://bit.ly/2Aokmfm 

Facebook: https://bit.ly/2LLPOsj

Goodreads: https://bit.ly/2Vnr2TS 

Twitter: https://bit.ly/2C0dJjA 

Purchase Reinventing Hillwilla on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2QkqLgH 

[jerusalism]

Amital Stern interviewed by Geula Geurts

GG: In your lyric essay FOREIGN BODY EAR you write: “My presence as an actual foreign body in the city, not born or raised here, nor having ever managed to put down any roots.”

Being bilingual, do you sometimes feel not only foreign to Jerusalem, but foreign to yourself? How does this present itself in your writing? Do you express yourself better in English or in Hebrew creatively?

AS: When I moved to Israel at age seventeen, it was clear to me I wouldn’t be able to write creatively in Hebrew. But writing in English felt out of place too. It felt irrelevant, so I didn’t write at all. You can say this alienated me from my creative self for a while. Then later, after I took an acting class and wrote a monologue in Hebrew, I realized that was something I can do.

GG: Because your Hebrew speech was becoming controlled.

AS: Yes. Hebrew dialog became safer for me, so theatrical writing, and later screenwriting in Hebrew became safe and even natural at a certain point. I realized this is a form I can use in Hebrew. It allowed me to play with spoken Hebrew on paper.

GG: But your prose, your lyric nonfiction is written in English.

AS: I’m not sure if to call English my mother tongue, but it still is the strongest and most creative vehicle of my prosaic expression.

GG: Does your background in screenwriting influence your lyric nonfiction, your prose?

AS: At a certain point I felt that the strict set of rules of screenwriting was stifling my creative voice. Writing for film is something I will return to, but I did feel a deep need to break free from the rules of that form. I’m not sure what to call the genre of my prose, but it’s definitely hybrid animal. It combines many aspects: cultures, language, myth, academic nonfiction, memoir, fiction and even theater. I felt a strong desire to combine all these aspects of my life into my writing life.  Actually, my “Mifletzet” series of lyric essays is driven by the idea to create a play about the female monster that is Jerusalem. I’m writing the essays to figure out what such a play will look like, whether it’s a play I could write and perform. This is one of the things driving me in the series.

GG: That’s exactly what you do in the end of the piece “I feel like vomiting the mother.” You force the reader to imagine this play with you. So perhaps it’s a new genre all together. We can call it meta-theatrical lyric essay!

AS: Ha! I guess it really is hard to define.

GG: Who are your mentors in these forms? Which writers inspire your own writing?

AS: When I started to combine different aspects into prosaic writing, I became interested in reading more hybrid forms. One writer I’m influenced by is Dodie Bellamy, a New Narrative writer from San Francisco. Also, experimental theater I was exposed to is very hybrid. I was always a child who read a lot, so when I was young, Modernists like James Joyce, T.S Eliot and Virginia Woolf spoke to me. Their writing is essentially hybrid, that’s what they’re doing. Lidia Yuknavitch, who created the space for the Mifletzet column, is a giant of the hybrid form, in her own writing and as a facilitator who helps writers allow themselves to experiment. I also grew up very religious, so I was often exposed to biblical literature, midrash, rabbinical commentary. There are so many levels of storytelling when it comes to Jewish literature. There is a lot of intertextuality, so  through absorbing this at a young age, I learned to combine different forms of texts.

GG: That’s fascinating. I guess the Bible really is hybrid. There are parts of mythology, and sections with lists of laws.

AS: Yes, and even songs, and poetry. It’s wild.

GG: It’s an understatement to say that you are heavily obsessed with the notion of Jerusalem as a female character, a female monster. Do you think good writing needs to be driven by obsession? Is obsession itself monstrous? Is writing monstrous? In what way are you monstrous?

AS: Well, yes, in a sense I do feel like a monster. So often women are described as objects of both desire and disgust. These two opposing aspects are what make us monstrous. I want to know if this marriage between desire and disgust is possible to live with. As a woman, I’m trying to get to my own understanding of this. Of course I’m driven by obsession. I want to know everything about it, so my writing is drawing from research, personal experience, myth and imagination. It’s turning into a monster itself.

GG: You write about Jerusalem appearing in biblical mythology as a wife, virgin, widow and whore. You question whether the actual women living in Jerusalem become objects of these mythic projections. Do you write and research to find a certain answer, or are you driven by something beyond?

AS: I’m definitely driven by something more than a search for an academic answer. Perhaps I’m looking to purge myself from these myths through my writing. The myths themselves are monsters that claim the individual woman. I feel a deep need to write my own myth, to set myself, as a woman, free from the existing myths and see what else exists.

GG: You write: “MY LIFE HAD STOOD – A LOADED GUN: wrote Emily Dickinson. Maybe life holds so much possibility, still. Maybe my warm gun is this pen.” So, would you call yourself a literary activist?

AS: I think my writing started as subconscious “feminism.” I didn’t realize that what I was doing was feminist. It came about naturally. Lately, I try to push myself to be clearer about what I’m trying to say and express, instead of keeping my intentions vague. In my nature, I don’t like demonstrations, but there are a lot of issues that bother me. My writing is a way for me to discuss these issues with myself, and with the reader.

GG: I’ve noticed you have a small online presence. You don’t have a Facebook account. Could you say “hiding” is a part of your writing self, too?

AS: Not being on Facebook is a very conscious decision. I deleted my account two years ago. This is very much connected to my writing life, to create a vacuum for myself to write. I also started feeling physically ill about social media. It’s like an alternative world. I remembered my life before, and it was fine. I decided to leave the alternative world online, also as an experiment. I wondered if people would still know me, whether I’d still exist for them if I exited that realm. I know there’s a price that I pay, when it comes to keeping up with contacts and professional presence online. But I do think my writing, and my face to face relationships, are enriched by this choice.

GG: You’re working on your first novel now.

AS: Yes. I’d say it’s also a hybrid monster, but it has a dramatic structure, a narrative arc. There are a lot of different voices: supernatural, mystical. It’s an exciting and scary endeavor, and I feel strongly about writing it.

GG: I look forward to reading it! And of course hearing you read your work on February sixth.

AS: Thank you. So do I!

-----------------------------------

This interview was conducted in preparation for the Jerusalism event, Selfless Promotion, hosted at the Art Cube’s Artists’ Studios, on February 6th.

[ojamesy]

“Art and Life, Nature and Culture, Ulysses” by CHERYL HERR

Visiting Ireland, the same reader may become convinced that the narrative must be understood in context; it is a book about a writer's vexed relationship to a land plagued with poverty, dominated by an oppressive foreign government, and hostile to its own prophets. Later, our reader may tire of travel or politics and turn to aesthetics. By his new lights, Ulysses becomes a multiply reflexive work; style is the subject as well as the medium of this meta-fiction. Or the work may turn forward another of its prismatic faces and lure him into a study of metaphysics, theosophy, epistemology, psychoanalysis, or syntax. In contrast, the philosophical and psychological colors may fade along with the technical and archetypal, casting into relief the personal dimension of the work. Hence, it may dawn on our representative reader that Ulysses is really about the effort to return home and the difficulties of getting there, or it may seem that the novel centers on whether Bloom, at day's end, will go upstairs and join his unfaithful Penelope in bed.

But I do not want to be misunderstood as merely voicing the platitude that Ulysses is a great and various fiction that grows with the reader. Rather than view Joyce's first epic as being about the topics and ideas traditionally put forward as explaining or unlocking the work, it seems more enlightening altogether to view such material as the stuff through which Joyce posed his challenge to the received relationship of art and life. Without a doubt, that confrontation is in Ulysses raised to a power higher than is characteristic of any other work canonized in most American colleges and universities. The challenge emerges from the fact that the narrative is a masterpiece of semiotic pseudo-comprehensiveness; it is a model of cultural processes and materials. And it is the nature of this model, what it encompasses and what it marginalizes or excludes, that occupies me when I consider not this or that aspect of Ulysses but the work as a tenuous and vexing whole. Certainly, a margin—in addition to being a popular spot in critical discourse today—is the appropriate area for examination when studying the whole, not least because it defines a dialectical relationship between what is inside and what is regarded as external. As I read it, Ulysses calls into being a boundary that it challenges in order to reveal the formulaic nature of both life and art—and to evoke something not contained by the specific formulae it repeats. That "something" I will later label, in echo of Fredric Jameson's work, the "cultural unconscious" of Ulysses; it is the complex nostalgia that the work's probing of both mind and society centers on.

But first, to underscore the peculiar relationship of ars and vita that Ulysses explores, I must recur to a day not long ago that I spent in the National Library of Ireland. While doing some research into Irish censorship, I ran across an open letter written in 1885 by a Mr. Frederick J. Gregg to the Dublin University Review. Mr. Gregg claimed to have overheard an attendant at the National Library tell a reader "that Walt Whitman's poems had been suppressed." Gregg asked about this matter and was informed that the librarian, William Archer, had in fact banned or withheld the volume from circulation. Gregg then proceeded to defend Leaves of Grass as a great book, which he found, despite the objections of some critics, not "indelicate." In fact, he calculated that only eighty of its 9,000 lines could be considered objectionable.2 In a letter of response printed the following month, Archer denied having suppressed Whitman,but what caught my eye in this controversy was the cited address of the open-minded Gregg: 6, Eccles Street, Dublin. Delighted at the possibility that Gregg was Leopold Bloom's next-door neighbor, I was playfully pulled at once in two directions. First, I wanted to check Thorn's Directory to see how long Mr. Gregg had resided on Eccles Street; was he there in 1903 when the Blooms "moved in"?3 At the same time, I thought of the ironies of Stephen Dedalus's disappointing conversation with the intelligentsia at the National Library. Whether or not Archer's defense was any more accurate than Gregg's accusation, it is woefully appropriate that after having his place at the Tower usurped by Haines, Stephen should find no better reception in the library than was apparently accorded to Whitman. In another corner of my mind, I wondered in which room of the current library the conversation of Stephen, Mulligan, A.E., Eglinton, Best, and company "took place." Clearly, there are problems involved in such speculation, not the least of which is punctuation; are double quotation marks (like those I've used above) the appropriate markers for verbs that refer to the projected-as-real actions of Joyce's characters? A similar difficulty plagued Richard Best, who, having been absorbed into the world of Ulysses, felt that he had to defend his status as a nonfictional person.4 He had to fight against the quotation marks that forever surrounded his name once it was used in Ulysses.

At this point in the history of Ulysses criticism, it is not necessary to document in detail the curious effect that the novel creates from its reference to an overwhelming number of details from the real Dublin. Nor need we linger long over the book's own oblique comments upon its narrative practice. It may be sufficient to note that Scylla and Charybdis, the episode in which Stephen devotes extensive theoretical ingenuity to elaborating his theory that Shakespeare wrote his life into his art, begins with words that comically highlight the literary uses of life:

Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:

—And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister. A great poet on a great brother poet. A hestitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.

He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.

A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a noiseless beck.

—Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful ineffec- tual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.

Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. (U, 9.1-12)

The librarian measures art by its echoing of "real life," but his words and actions as Ulysses presents them echo the works he has read and are narrated to us in a self-consciously artificial style. In the brief passage quoted above, we find not only that the librarian's romantic notion of literary truth relies on Goethe but also that the texture of his "life" blends phrases from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius Ceasar, and the Essays in Criticism: Second Series of Matthew Arnold.5Clearly figuring the process by which texts make our reality, Joyce continually quotes both other works and his own, extending the reflexive gesture of his fiction to include all of the life that the tradition ofWestern fiction has created.

The significance of Joyce's varied and insistent mingling of art and life is not exhausted when we merely cite his idiosyncratic attachment in the narrative to the facts of his experience of Dublin. At least two aspects of Ulysses come to mind as germane to our understanding of this narrative practice. The first is Joyce's well-advertised narrative "innovation" in Ulysses—one that attracted much of the initial attention to the text. I refer to Joyce's use of the interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness techniques. A second relevant matter is the rough adherence of the book's design to the encyclopedic schemata that Joyce circulated to Carlo Linati, Stuart Gilbert, and Herbert Gorman. I want to discuss here the persistence with which Ulysses looks and moves in both directions—interior and schematic—at once. With its attention to the supposed workings of the mind and the revelation of the inner identity of Western man, the stream-of-consciousness technique appeals to our sense of what is natural—to the life, particularly the unconscious life, that we seem to share. With its attention to many of the categories by which the Westen world knows itself, this schematic book directs us toward a concept of culture, toward the domain of art. Life and art, nature and culture—on these grand dichotomies Ulysses is constructed, and to the exploration of these oppositions as such the fiction is dedicated. From this process of assertion and challenge, which describes what Ulysses does at its margins, comes, I believe, the force of the narrative for a surprisingly diverse community of readers.

Stream of Consciousness: "Nature It Is" (U, 18.1563)?

Arthur Power tells us of an intriguing conversation in which Joyce maintained that Ulysses explored parts of the psyche that had never before been treated in fiction; "the modern theme," Joyce argued, "is the subterranean forces, those hidden tides which govern everything and run humanity counter to the apparent flood: those poisonous subtleties which envelop the soul, the ascending fumes of sex."6 The means of this revelation have long been discussed,7 the techniques employed by Joyce including third-person narration attuned to the speech mannerisms and thought patterns of the character under attention, direct dialogue, interior monologue, and seeming transcription of thoughts in sentence or fragmentform. There's no question that Joyce's approximation of the flow of consciousness, although dependent on at least fragments of words, represents a significant experimental attempt to portray the movements of the mind; hence, quite early in the presentations of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly, the narrative begins to employ this crucial modernist technique. By the fourth page of the book, we find ourselves eased from narration per se into Stephen's first fully presented thought, "As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too" (U, 1.136-37). Elegaic, measured, rhetorical—these few comments introduce us to Stephen's mind and set the tone for much of his moody selfassessment on 16 June 1904. Similarly, by the eleventh line of Calypso, the episode in which we meet Leopold Bloom, we find fragments of directly "reported" thought punctuating the third-person narration:

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. (U, 4.11-14)

Likewise, from the first word of Penelope, Molly may be regarded as speaking, or rather thinking, her mind.

In one sense, then, Ulysses constantly and with ever-greater fervor moves us close to life not only by signaling about certain word-units, "These are an individual's most personal thoughts," but also by directing those thoughts toward a wide range of topics, including many subjects obviously unsuitable for polite conversation in Joyce's Dublin. For instance, Bloom recalls his love-making with Molly on Howth and ponders Milly's budding sexuality; he thinks that he might masturbate in the bath; he considers Gerty's serviceable underwear. Stephen rejects both the corpse-chewing God of his imagination and the ghost of his mother; he broods over his social usurpation by medicine man and conqueror; he probes the mysteries of sex and birth. Molly thinks of Boylan, Bloom, Mulvey, Stephen, Rudy, Milly, and a host of other people; she appreciates her soft thighs and firm breasts; she remembers with joy various sexual experiences; she declares her belief in her own powers of seduction. Ulysses asks us to view these passages as reporting the kinds of things that most real people think even if they do not always say them, and readers generally go along with the game, many of them marveling, as Carl Jung did, at Joyce's psychological acumen. That is, the narrative asks for our tacit agreement that the art of Ulysses mirrors life.But in addition, we are asked to agree that life is like art, that our own thoughts emerge just as spontaneously as those of Joyce's characters not out of a void of preverbal desire but out of the Active discourses and received ideas among and through which we live. Consider Stephen as he walks along Sandymount Strand: freed from friends and foes alike, he occupies himself with speculations on God, fatherhood, consubstantiality, aesthetics, sensation, women, language, library slips, and his own rotting teeth. Although Nestor ends with the supposed comment of a supposed omniscient narrator ("On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins" "U, 2.448-49"), Proteus begins by confronting us immediately with the language of Stephen's thoughts: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read …" (U, 3.1-2). The entire first paragraph presents part of Stephen's somber witty meditation on vision, knowledge, and the reality of the external world. From these thoughts, we learn that the young Dubliner, supposed by Homeric design to be in search of his father / Father, is wondering how he'll know him if he meets him, with the emphasis on how. The process of knowing and the perils of that process occupy Stephen's interior experience as he defines for himself the bottom line of cognitive possibility ("at least that if no more, thought through my eyes") and accepts the challenge of living as he sees it (not to be able to say with Mr Deasy "/paid my way" "U, 2.251" but to read the "Signatures of all things"). Stephen's thoughts here, as Weldon Thornton, John Killham, Hugh Kenner, and others have documented,8 are mainly derived from philosophic or mystic masters like Aristotle, Aquinas, and Boehme. 

The precision and inventiveness with which Stephen weaves together bits and pieces from their texts are his own, of course, but it is the implied presence of such texts that structures his thinking.Possibly Stephen's awareness of the claustrophic hovering of Western cultural tradition both outside and within his mind accounts in part for his nostalgic search for a non-received language of gesture. As he drunkenly describes the project to Lynch in Circe, he wants to transcend derivation from intermediary texts and to speak the "structural rhythm" of things. To create or use such a "universal language" would be to find "the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy" (U, 15.106-7). Hours after his walk on the strand, Stephen returns to the question of the visible and his hope that he can both read the language of nature and learn to speak it. Alas, Stephen's illustrative gestures allude to"the loaf and jug of bread or wine in Omar" (U, 15.117); The Rubaiyat is for the moment the dominant work, although not the only one giving contextual significance to Stephen's gestures. One of the things that Joyce's insistent alluding makes clear is that thinking, the streaming of consciousness, the content of interior monologue, the very shape of the self are woven from the materials of one's culture. Fair Tyrants joins The Odyssey and a host of other books in accounting for the contours of individual experience in the narrative; such works insure that whatever the stream of consciousness accomplishes in terms of artistic technique, it does not provide even the shadow of an access to a mythical human nature within or behind or beyond or above those informing texts. The art that seems to bring us closer to life seems to show us that art constitutes life and that nature as we can know it is always only culture. This conclusion, though familiar enough in contemporary thought, had its own radical charm in Joyce's day; it clearly fascinated Joyce enough for him to devote years to charting its implications.A similar point might be made in our consideration of Molly's thoughts as they are rendered in Penelope. Even without knowing Joyce's famous description of her chapter as "perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrew limited prudent indifferent 'Weib,' "9 readers would have identified Molly with nature. Her ready acceptance of sexual difference and of different sexualities, her flowing speech and overt desiring, her maternity and menstruation, all mark Molly's Gea-Tellus status and distinguish her from the more intellectual Stephen and Bloom. This assessment of Molly recurs throughout Joyce criticism. And yet, however fundamentally unreflective she may appear to be, Molly's "thoughts"exhibit as much of the reflexive quality of language as do Stephen's. For example, the almost continuous pressure of syntactic ambiguity in her monologue ("the german Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to make a whore of me" "U, 18.95-96") urges on the reader the constructedness of that prose and its attention to itself as language. Similarly, the eight "sentences" of Penelope and the "8 big poppies because mine was the 8th" (U, 18.329-30), like her reference to other books that have Mollys in them, nudge the reader into seeing Ulysses as a world of ambiguous and constantly shifting signs.10 Like the Circe episode, which pretends to be a descent into the unconscious but constantly cycles out into the comedy of received ideas, Penelope paints the mind almost exclusively as the site on which convention and cliche register. And yet, perhaps because of Molly's own enthusiastic embracing of the natural ("God of heaven theres nothing like nature" "U, 18.155859"), or because of the convention by which women are construed to be closer to nature than men,11 readers have often coded her as the Flesh or Nature or Life that Stephen must embrace before he can become an artist. Elaine Unkeless directly attacks this view in her recent essay, "The Conventional Molly Bloom," in which she argues that Joyce's portrait mostly restricts Molly to "preconceived ideas of the way a woman thinks and behaves."12 

Hence, our response to Molly as Earth Mother is based on our conventional notions of what constitutes naturalness. Drawing that artificial nature into the text, Molly's interior monologue is not unshaped thought but idea and self-image structured by society. The episode conveys at best a nostalgia for primal authenticity voiced from within the heart of culture. This voice echoes Stephen's sense that the "self" is "ineluctably preconditioned to become" what it is (U, 15.2120-21); such conditioning, as we see it in Ulysses, is largely social.The ersatz quality of nature in Ulysses is perhaps most pointedly conveyed when Joyce's Dubliners go on or think about going on holiday outside of Dublin. Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce vacation at a seaside of musichall clichés; Bloom recalls a "High School excursion" (U, 15.3308) to the falls at Poulaphouca, the most typical of tourist day-trips from the city. In Eumaeus, the narrative portrays Bloom as pompously and hilariously holding forth on the value of such trips; "the man in the street," he feels, "merited a radical change of venue after the grind of city life in the summertime for choice when Dame Nature is at her spectacular best constituting nothing short of a new lease of life." Bloom cites Poulaphouca, Wicklow, "the wilds of Donegal," and Howth as suitable spots in which to become attuned to nature (U, 16.551, 552-54, 557). Similarly, Simon Dedalus seems able to conceive of nothing farther outside Dublin than the fifty-mile-away Mourne mountains: "—By Jove, he mused, I often wanted to see the Mourne mountains" (U, 11.219). Significantly, in Sirens that wish becomes part of the linguistic play of that extraordinarily reflexive episode: he speaks and drinks with "faraway mourning mountain eye" (U, 11.273). Even when Ulysses deals with animals, natural behavior is subsumed by cultural vision. Consider Bloom's conversation with his cat.

—Milk for the pussens, he said.—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.—Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the dresser, took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.—Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they can't mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps. (U, 4.24-42)

Bloom's early morning interchange with Molly parallels this scene. Molly's twice-repeated "Poldy" and insistence that he hurry with the tea are forms of mild anxious, aggressive purring. Bloom "calmly" gazes at Molly's "large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder" (U, 4.304-5), much as he observes the cat's whiskers and sheen: "Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes" (U, 4.21-23). Molly drinks her tea with a degree of self-absorption also found in the milk-lapping "pussens." Of course, the cat does not question Bloom on the meaning of metempsychosis, but the narrative does suggest that the feline and the female share a quality that the book is working hard to capture. Again, many readers have taken this kind of connection at face value and have asserted that Molly is not only artless; she is nature itself. But we need only recur to the description of the cat to be aware of the nonobjective rendering of experience in Ulysses. On the one hand, it is the subjective Bloom who sees cruelty as natural to a cat and masochism as natural to mice. On the other hand, for the narrative to portray a cat as having "avid shameclosing eyes" that are "narrowing with greed" is not even to pretend to a neutral description; animal "nature" is indistinguishable from imposed interpretation. To be sure, there is much about cats that Bloom does not know: he is unsure of how he looks from the cat's perspective; he thinks its feelers might "shine in the dark." But to observe these gaps in his knowledge, especially the latter, is only to recognize that this modern Odysseus has merely blundered about in his culture's encyclopedia of texts and has emerged from his brief schooling with his facts awry. Bloom's view of what is natural and his quest to understand the essence of things lead only to conventional wisdom and comically fractured received ideas.In portraying the unreflective and animal, the text undoes our belief in the natural by circling us back to the social and to a language that purposefully confuses nature and culture. Despite the narrative's evident desire to uncover "subterranean forces" in the mind, the presentation of minds in progress remains a combination of old materials in new ways. In general, the primal unconscious mind, unknowable in words, is evoked— only to be blocked or even denied by the strategies, styles, and content of the fiction. And yet, there is the occasional exception to this statement. For example, Stephen's description of the self, which I mentioned above (the "self" is "ineluctably preconditioned to become" what it is), suggests a contradiction—that the self is culturally conditioned to assume a certain shape, and that identity is conditioned by certain unnamed inevitabilities. These ineluctable forces seem to have, because of their sheer predetermination, the status of natural forces. What intrigues me here is the summoning up of an unknown sphere of inevitability and instinct, which appears to counter the recurrently asserted constructedness of all conditioning forces and the reflexively self-contained quality of Ulysses.

The Schema: Encyclopedism and the Unknown

Ulysses produces within the terms of its own artistry an illusion of unmediated mind, of unstructured consciousness. At the same time, the narrative announces the dominion of culture over nature. In tandem with his ambivalent approach to the unknown unconscious, Joyce explored what in his notes for Ithaca he calls the "as yet unknown."13 This negative space within and outside the text is suggested by the known, the disciplines that make up Western culture and on which Joyce drew for his many allusions. From that body of knowledge, Ulysses generates problems of heuristics, epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics; it also produces lacunae, ambiguities, and our sense of what I have alluded to as the "cultural unconscious" (a concept discussed below by way of conclusion). One efficient way to deal with this version of the enigmatic while developing an argument about Joyce's portrayal of consciousness, is to explore Joyce's own abstracts of Ulysses, the schemata that he prepared for his friends as aids to textual explication.14 Certainly, the schemata cannot be considered authoritative guides to the fiction, for they are themselves only Joyce's fictions about Ulysses. Nonetheless, they continue to be reprinted, drawn on for clues, and distributed as hard classroom guides to the book. David Hayman's widely used study, Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning, includes a version of the charts. Similarly, Richard Ellmann's now classic Ulysses on the Liffey and Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman's Notes forJoyce both liberally incorporate schemata information as readily as do many Joyce scholars when they want to emphasize this or that point of interpretation. Hence, although no one would grant the charts a sacrosanct status, very few readers, scholars, and teachers of Joyce have eschewed their use altogether.

The Linati-Gorman-Gilbert charts have long puzzled those readers who seek in them the keys to the work or a simplified model of its meanings. In fact, the lists of places, times, organs, arts and sciences, colors, symbols, stylistic techniques, and Homeric correspondences tend to muddy the waters. Attempting to take the charts seriously, we often pose more questions than answers. Some questions involve the seeming overexplicitness of the charts; for example, what relationship does the "technic" of "tumescence / detumescence" have to the meaning of Nausicaa beyond underscoring the already obvious sexual encounter of Bloom and Gerty MacDowell? Why, amidst the Homeric citations of the Correspondences, is it necessary to mention that the Stephen of Telemachus is like Hamlet? Other questions probe strategy. Why do episodes such as Lestrygonians, Eumaeus, and Ithaca lack designated colors? What accounts for the choice of listed organs? (Why, for instance, is there no episode for the gall bladder? Why are both muscle and flesh given space?) Still other questions involve relationships among parts of the schema or the interpretation of individual items. How much do Homeric details control, for instance, the problems of organicity mentioned above? Does the art of Calypso, in Stuart Gilbert's version designated as "economics," suggest or include, as has been argued, "home economics"? Any reader of the charts could supply a sizable list of queries.Yet surely to pose such questions is to seek significance without first attending to the very process of categorization. Certainly, each column suggests a body of knowledge or a frame of reference in a way that highlights the conventionalities of Western culture. Like a university displaying in its catalogue its arbitrary division into what used to be regarded as self-evidently coherent "disciplines," Joyce's charts accept and even seem to authorize a divide-and-conquer mentality; they signify atomization as much as the encyclopedic wholeness that, following Joyce's lead, we often assume to be the point of the schematization.15 Hence, it is important that the bodily organs, the symbols, the colors—all the columns—are made analogous or homologous to the arts and sciences, the disciplines through which our culture marshals and imposes the information it generates. Music, medicine, and mechanics, like theology and magic, are in Ulysses the categories by which a social status quo is maintained. Similarly, the many "scenes" that Joyce's schemata list and that his narrative describes are the typical points of political and socioeconomic domination. School, house, graveyard, newspaper office, library, streets, tavern, hospital, brothel, cabman's shelter, house, and bed—the city scape is broken down into its institutional components, and these elements redefine as a cultural site the "natural" strand along which both Bloom and Stephen walk during their shared day. That Joyce was able to find in Ireland many a comic and many a serious parallel for the details of the society Homer portrays in The Odyssey reinforces our sense that Joyce's text reproduces the traditional organization of Western culture. The categories dividing and ruling the Dublin of 1904, including male and female, young and old, potent and impotent, rich and poor, country and city, science and theology, heart and loins, citizens and revolutionaries, are all implied by the terms of the schemata. They form a statement about what Joyce shows us in Ulysses, the swallowing up of the instinctual and unprogrammed by a form of highly organized urban culture that assimilates all experience. They represent the impossibility of conceiving of the self and of exploring nature, human and otherwise, except through this or a similar conceptual paradigm.

To summarize, both from within and from without Ulysses announces its approximation to a nature that is in fact absent from the work. The stream-of-consciousness technique, which seems to transcribe real thoughts and their typical patterns of association, may be more accurately described as documenting the emergence of what appear to be personal thoughts from an impersonal environment of conventions and texts. The schemata, which have long been used as external but reasonably reliable abstracts of Ulysses,must be recognized as signifying a wholeness or encyclopedism that they in fact undermine from within as they present more lacunae and differentiations than clues to coherence.This external evidence from Joyce's charts provides suggestions that are borne out in the narrative. For instance, Ulysses is a book of divisions more insistent than those divisions of economic convenience, the Victorian novel's "parts," or even than those units of mnemonic and pedagogical convenience, novelistic chapters. Eschewing such conventions, the narrative refuses to divide itself using titles, numbers, or asterisks. On the other hand, the movement from one episode to another becomes increasingly clear in Ulysses owing to the changes in point of view and style. Like the analytic schemata, the narrative achieves through these unpredictable shiftings not only a quasi-encyclopedic scope but also a content that refuses at many points to compose a seamless whole.

In addition, just as the schemata do not make self-evident the logic behind the selection of arts and sciences they list, so Joyce's book fails to provide an Ur-rationale for all of the varied philosophical, philological, historical, mythical, literary, scientific, mathematical, and other information put to use in the narrative. Instead, the text seems to ground the information used in the story in the minds of its characters and to suggest that somehow Bloom, Stephen, and Molly directly or indirectly access their culture's most spiritually valuable knowledge. Certainly, one might argue that the controlling aim of Stephen's agonized self-examination is to engineer from the cultural material at his disposal an intuitive knowledge of some unifying code-system or other means of establishing connections among divine and human, person and person, philosophic theory and poetic lyric; this and more he appears to signify in the phrase "that word known to all men" (U, 3.435). Further, as already noted, Stephen's drunken entrance into Nighttown, during which he declares to Lynch his desire for a universal "language of gesture," recalls his morning's contemplation of the confluence of and perhaps potent parallels among natural process, linguistic variety, and primal matter. For all of his Aristotelianism, Stephen is also attracted to Giordano Bruno's Neoplatonic quest for grand design and substantial unity; he wants to connect the language of culture to the perhaps mystic vocabulary of nature and divinity. But the most that Stephen achieves is his morning's ironic restatement of Western humanity's chain of being: "God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain" (U, 3.47779). Like Bloom, who repeatedly puzzles over the exact wording of various scientific principles as well as over their meaning ("Black conducts, reflects, "refracts is it?", the heat" "U, 4.79-80"; "what's parallax?" "U, 8.578"), Stephen has access to only a part—and arguably a marginal part— of human knowledge. Despite the frequently cited suggestion that Stephen represents Art and Bloom Science ("What two temperaments did they individually represent? The scientific. The artistic" "U, 17.559-60"), their interaction in Ithaca does not encourage the view that together they form a "whole" person with "complete" knowledge, or even that they together possess an epistemologically sound and comprehensive approach to human experience.Hence, the extraordinarily diverse body of information alluded to in Ulysses defines an encyclopedism that is at best hollow; it serves to emphasize the distinctions which the schemata present in abstract—not wholeness but discrete sets that defy and thwart holism, terms for the deployment of institutional power. Given this framework, the more details Joyce added to typescript, galley, and proofsheet, the more he signified in his practice the futility of the encyclopedic enterprise: he could never include all of even the culturally selected information at his disposal. Yet ironically, as Joyce embroidered into Ulysses the names of flowers, references to science, Homeric allusions, and the like, the text did take on a "life" of its own. That is, it engaged with the energy of Western culture in absorbing into its organizational and conceptual paradigms any raw material exposed to it. But this process, by which facts become ideology, is a hegemonic activity, whether in a society or in a work like Ulysses that reiterates its social environment. Hence, more than representing unity and completeness, Joyce's fictional encyclopedism reproduces and critiques the dominating divisions at the heart of the Irish life that he shows us.Finally, like the schemata, the narrative prompts many questions and cannot help revealing many gaps, especially in the sphere of characterization. Like the schemata's list of "Organs," the text's references to organs, added together, would not form a whole individual, but only a textualized and scattered Osiris. Like the "Technics," which may appear to imply voices but actually include only such substitutes as "Narrative (mature)" and "Catechism (impersonal)," the narrative's voices are less personal than cultural. Above, I have tried to establish the sense in which Ulysses pretends to reveal identities but in fact undermines our traditional concept of mind by clearly deriving the content of consciousness from existingtexts and conventions. As Ulysses has it, individuals conceive the truth of their selfhood to rest not in theenclosing culture but in an unspecifiable and largely inaccessible personal unconscious. Yet the deriveddiscourses of Ulysses create a different sense of what it is to be a person in Joyce's world: one lives within a stream of consciousness that is finally not distinct from other discursive streams; one can never fullyknow the external imperatives that shape desire and condition action. In Ulysses, then, the signifiers ofnature and individuality are indistinguishable from those of culture and conventionality.

A fiction often read as struggling to present the unified complexity of consciousness,16Ulysses thus produces characters largely reduced to compilations of received fictions enacting a life that at best recalls the natural by arguing the narrative's nostalgia for it. As a fragmented product, the narrative ultimately signifies something other than itself, a kind of "cultural unconscious" that can never be known except through the styles and strategies of the narrative, which transmit restricted ideological practices and stylized versions of lived experience. The enclosing culture does not know but substitutes for a nature that is never trapped in discourse, for what is missing from Ulysses—the living tissue of consciousness and a Gestalt that exceeds the mechanically charted—is missing as well from the society Joyce shows us; at the very least, the "cultural unconscious" that Ulysses evokes is perpetually chased, never grasped. The result of Joyce's carefully engineered intersection of the social and the narrative is his exposing the insufficiency of our knowledge of self and society. For fifty years, readers have explained to one another what Stephen, Bloom, and Molly are really like, have unearthed the real reasons for Stephen's brooding inactivity, for Bloom's similar paralysis, for Molly's adultery. Ulysses has thrown the seeker after causes from Bruno to Vico to Aristotle to Jacob Boehme to Gaelic etymology to topographical study to Krafft-Ebing to Richmal Mangnall to the study of Joyce's school records. In these and in many other sources, valuable information has been discovered; we have enlarged our knowledge of what Joyce did know or could have known. We have understood more about the impact of life on art, even while the absorption of the first into the second demonstrated the artifice within both nature and culture. That is, Joyce's stream of consciousness is a gathering of discursive fragments from culture, and the schemata denote only an engineered unity that the novel partly produces and partly rejects—the unity of philosophic systems, the merely logical internal coherence of a cultural system or paradigm. The unconscious and the unknown are the same absent figures for both Ulysses and life, for nature and for a culture which cannot know themselves fully.

The Cultural Unconscious

Above, the term "cultural unconscious" referred to something unrepresented in Ulysses, whose reality is nonetheless affirmed, or at least desired, by the narrative. Ulysses, that is, may be read as nostalgically yearning to embody discursively the nature that it posits as desirable and necessary for truly gratifying human experience. To this end, Ulysses asserts its status as an encyclopedic book, as a work so comprehensive that it implies or can even capture glimpses of raw motivation, nonideological concept, and uninstitutionalized experience. Bloom's thoughts, however continuously impinged upon and shaped by the city through which he moves, appear to offer the possibility of connection to uncensored impulse and unconditioned emotion. Especially when Bloom drifts off to sleep after his remote encounter on the beach with Gerty MacDowell, we seem to enter a gentle drift of uncontrolled idea, and this event seems to promise deep revelation when the reader gets to Circe. But the expectation is never fulfilled. In its place, the narrative provides a cycling through one cultural proposition after another. The minds that we see in Ulysses are very much the products of their environment, and tracking down the things alluded to in those minds has consistently driven scholars to the world external to the text. The book's cultural unconscious remains an inaccessible force which motivates the various searches by character, author, and reader for the chemical that will transform charted fragments into luminous certitudes about consubstantiality, the incorruptibility of the soul, and the meaning of experience.In The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson uses a term similar to "cultural unconscious," and clearly my own phrase alludes to his; in fact, the line of reasoning that Jameson follows in his exciting"Introduction" and problematic "Conclusion" must be partly rehearsed here if I am to round out my sense of the work enacted in Ulysses. Early in his study, Jameson states his belief that a chief task of the narrative analyst is to see every story as part of the "single great collective story" of, as Marx and Engels would have it, " 'oppressor and oppressed.' "17 Jameson contends, "It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity."

Whereas Jameson sees the "political unconscious" as a "master-narrative" of historical struggle which is inscribed in various ways into every literary work, I find that in addition Ulysses has inscribed into it also a cultural master-narrative (no doubt specific to the social formation in and through which the work was written) of human connection with primal instinct and authentic wholeness. This vision, what Jacques Derrida and others might subsume into a myth of plenitude, might also be viewed as the logical outcome of bourgeois reality in a world of increasing social fragmentation, reification, alienation, and commodification. By this line of reasoning, nature is construed as transcendent or at least as a good to be sought outside of or in the usually unexamined folds of culture. The cultural unconscious is thus a narrative of nature which emerges from the pressure of modern society, though it has obvious affinities with the pastoral vision of earlier centuries and with various countercultural ("back-to-nature") movements of the postmodern decades. A Lacanian might argue additionally that this cultural unconscious, however much it may be a social construct, nonetheless functions as a motivating Other, a nature that speaks culture. Thus, nature is less a place or an ideal than it is a discourse whose themes are wholeness and psychological or even spiritual integrity. The measure of Bloom's and Stephen's inevitable defeat by a manipulative society is their steady inability to procure imaginative access to this extracultural language. The measure of the narrative's affirmation of this discourse's potency is the constant stream of coincidence that textures the fiction and tempts us always to discern within difference the presence of consubstantiality, connection, and communication. The nature in question here is quite other than the ideological construct that marks Molly as Gea-Tellus and as earthily polyphiloprogenitive; the latter marks only desire in submission to convention, while the former "exists" in the negative space outside the text.One of Jameson's aims in The Political Unconscious is to broaden Marxist theory from its well-known concern with démystification to a recognition that "all literature must read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community."18 To be sure, Ulysses itself accomplishes many kinds of démystification; the narrative's exploration of selfhood, gender distinctions, family relations, the social order, and Anglo-Irish interaction vigorously exposes the ideological practices shaping these concepts and dominating much of the life in Joyce's city.19 However, Ulysses also addresses the issue of community, both by demonstrating the absence of the communal in the Dublin of 1904 and by emphasizing the events, actions, thoughts, and dreams linking meandering Stephen and wandering Bloom. In a city marked by clerical, patriarchal, economic, and political domination, Joyce signifies a consubstantiality of characters which, liberated from the theological doctrine that Stephen brings to the coding of coincidence, alludes to the many varieties of collectivity that the narrative aggressively lacks. Thus to contribute here my own coding of the characters' experience is neither sheer fabrication nor mere figure. Rather, to do so is to extrapolate the desire for community (as a version of nature) from the kinds of anomie experienced by Bloom, Stephen, and Molly; from the recurrent critical efforts to account for the novel's odd blend of depressing details and exuberant wit; and from Joyce's persistent interest in social forms and theories.20

One place in which theories abound is the penultimate episode of Ulysses, and it is from this site of rationalization that the cultural unconscious asserts its discourse of nature and community. In fact, it is the contradiction between culture and unconscious that accounts for the mixed readings of that chapter. Many critics have argued that despite the pseudo-scientific perspective, the narrative allows, via the good offices of Epps's Cocoa, a symbolic communion of father and son. Other readers maintain that even to suggest a meeting of minds is to indulge in the novelistic sentimentality that Joyce abhorred. But I detect in the Blephen Stoom encounter the same voice of desire for nature that shapes the consensus perception of Molly as Earth Mother. It is not just by convention that readers have found Molly to be natural; such a reading also emerges from the dialectic between the culture and its unconscious. Strictly speaking, of course, we can never know the difference between these two terms; certainly, those of us who are caught within Western language and logic can conceive of the cultural unconscious only by analogy to our thoroughly conventional experience. What we can know, as Vico proclaimed and Joyce undoubtedly noted, is the "world of civil society" (what Vico also calls the world of the "gentiles"), which "has certainly been made by men." Vico strictly distinguishes the humansphere from "the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows."21 Given the predilection for etymological study that Vico and Joyce shared, it is of interest that the word "nature" has affinities with the Indo-European root gene-, from which "gentile" derives; that is, "nature" contains Vico's world of culture. On the other hand, as anyone with an American Heritage Dictionary can determine, the word "culture" shares its Indo-European root kwel- with "entelechy," the Aristotelian term that Stephen seems in Circe to associate with the quidditas of an object. Perhaps because nature and culture writes themselves in each other, Joyce's fiction nostalgically projects wholeness despite the undeniable fragmentation in the work and its framing world.Less positive assessments of Joyce's fiction have, of course, always been made. Early readers of Ulysses emphasized the "waste land" of Dublin life as portrayed by Joyce, and shades of that reaction color many different readings of the narrative, from Hugh Kenner's Dublin's Joyce (1956) to Franco Moretti's "The Long Goodbye." Moretti's argument about Ulysses, which appears in his very instructive Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), interests me because he argues unequivocally for Joyce's portrait of a Dublin caught in the "crisis of liberal capitalism," a "negative utopia" informed by the author's "consummate scepticism." Moretti grounds this view in the notion that the specific Irish context of the narrative is far less important than is the pressure of English economic history.22 

That is, the essay screens out the very details that Ulysses uses (the life it absorbs into art) to strike a balance between dystopia and community. Such a detail occurs in Aeolus, in which the stalled trams call to mind not only the celebrated paralysis of Dublin life as Joyce portrayed it in his short stories but also the 1913 Dublin Lock-Out.23 That the Lock-Out was a brutally effective management strategy only highlights its equal success in generating some measure of class-consciousness. Such solidarity Jameson links to the Utopian desire for a communal society which he discerns in many literary works. Joyce's own text claims both less and more through its portrayal of the stalled trams, for swirling around those few paralyzed machines is the ongoing life of the city of words in which Irish laborers pursue their tasks, an Irish dilettante named Dedalus ponders consubstantiality, an Irish canvasser named Bloom seeks community, and the discourses of modern social life force us to recognize the significance of what is not said. It is at the margins of Joyce's discourse, where life and art entangle, that the dialectic of nature and culture enacts the work, in both senses, that we call Ulysses.