Epiphanies with words. A few years ago, I had this roommate.... I needed an excuse to leave the room at any given time to get away for a bit. I often needed a break. I took up smoking. Cigarettes never really appealed to me, though, so when a friend of mine went to the tobacconist where his brother worked, I tagged along and bought a pipe. I needed to get away quite a bit, and soon my pipe was full of yucky goo that had accumulated from smoking it. I thought about cleaning it, and I wondered how I could do that--what I might use. Then I had a kind of epiphany.

Pipe cleaners aren't just for elementary school art projects.

The other thing I wanted to talk about here was James Joyce. We're reading him now in two of my classes. I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a while back, and when I did, I found something on the internet. Apparently there was a correspondence between Joyce and his wife, Nora, that somehow got leaked to the world. They don't have the letters she wrote, but his are intact. I read them a couple years ago online. Think of a dirty, drunken Irishman writing sex letters to his wife. Think of the filth this guy would write. Now imagine that guy has the writing abilities of James Joyce. Disgusting words I'd never heard strung together like no one else could. It made such an impression on me that now I can't read anything he wrote without thinking of it. Stephen Dedalus, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, that kid from "Araby?" No. Nora keeps bumping everything else out of my head while I read with her fat ass.

I wanted to post a link for anyone curious and courageous enough to read it, but since I read them, the letters seem to have been taken off of the internet, so I can't post the link like I had hoped. I found a few snippets, though, so I've copied and pasted links to sites with those snippets here.

http://everything2.com/user/enth/writeups/James+Joyce%2527s+love+letters+to+Nora+Barnacle

http://www.nerve.com/regulars/jacksnaughtybits/bestof/index.asp?page=2