 Banned in Boston
It's your so-called enemies who do you the biggest favors in life. With all of the anger and fallout of my banishment from Bethshort dotcom back in September has just left me cold. What should have been great fun was nothing of the sort. By returning their anger in kind I temporarily lost my objectivity as a writer and observer and became involved in the action. To lose objectivity is to lose control of one's art. Face down in the mud. It goes against my training, the gentle path, the turn of the trick.
It was James Joyce who was originally banned in Boston, and most of the English speaking world for his incendiary novel, Ulysses (1922). Now that's heady company there. No writer is more influential, none more worthwhile reading for anyone who dares to spill ink on paper or tap, tap, tap at a keyboard. All art must be revolutionary and bring about underlying change, however slow and incremental or it is soon forgotten.
To survive then, is to triumph upon wings of art. The Joyce's paid up their time in pain, poverty and exile, it would be seventeen years before his next, third and last novel, the ultramarine Finnegans Wake (1939). His banishment would only end with his death in 1941. Now, I'm no Joyce, but everybody has to start somewhere, or nowhere at all, or right about here.
Joyce would steal the English language and use it as a weapon to defeat the English oppressors, taking his cues form Paine and Jefferson as well as Freud, Yeats and the Book of the Kells. He could do anything, and say anything he wished with English, he broke it down into it's awsome poetics and recast it as an Irish counter history. An astonishing achievement. It's effect is truly liberating for the American reader as well. Joyce is finally freeing us from the old mother tongue, and allowing space for innovations like the internet to further explore the possibilites of symbolic language.
The blank page is a rude polyhedron of scripture. In the beginning was the word, and the word became flesh. Campbell would then take down the bound book itself and cut into it's verisimilitude, and literally break it's spine, opening the pages out onto the flat, erect surface of the computer screen, moving us effortlessly back to scrolls, and then pushed it further out to the convex space of the blogosphere.
Joyce had to lose Ireland in order to finally free it. I only got booted off a message board. Were the people involved with this act of artistic censorship aware that they we're paying me so high an honor? Sadly, no. Still, I don't feel so bad about it anymore, nor am I so unsure as to what I did to deserve it now. On the other hand, James Joyce didn't solve the Black Dahlia murder, did he? Or was he, like Tim Finnegan, already dead? Yes.
 James A. Joyce
6:32:03 AM 
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