If a 4,000-word sentence (sans punctuation marks), the last breath of J. Joyce’s Ulysses, is a classic then thank you very much—at this point I am internally urged to put an end to this, but I will hold, watch me—Joyce may hold the crown of the best bore there was, but his star fades when compared to the longtime endeavors of my friend David—whose Mom has just turned 101 last December, and whose sister is in her 80s, so they all flew from Knoxville, Tennessee, to see the Grand Canyon and experience the perils of the mule ride—who called me last night to engage himself in a three-hour-long monologue about mules and something else, hard to tell what, but it had something to do with a woman pastor in Colorado, her promiscuity, and the loving—at this point I’m not sure if that was the love of god, but it surely involved one of her parishioners—which reminded me of that fateful call I received from David twenty years ago, when he told me in exquisitely nuanced details, exposed to me in over two hours, about the burning of his gray Peugeot—if you wonder what it looked like, recall Lieutenant Colombo’s vehicle; that’s right, but I’ve never asked if David bought his from Colombo—which inferno started with an innocent fragrance of burning rubber, progressing through floating swirls of whitish smoke to ever intensifying grayish puffs, to eventually explode with the vulgarity of the black smoke interlaced with red tongues of fire, which chased David out of the driver’s seat—you think “lucky;” sure, you are right, as he came to stop right in front of the fire station, after driving through a considerably deep pool of water in a pothole; David gave me its size in feet and inches, but I save you from yawning at the numerics—so there he was on the sidewalk, watching his car burn to a shell in less than three minutes, which David timed up precisely to a second with his wrist watch, then he walked home to call me about the event, which itself wouldn’t have been anything extraordinary if not for his wife, who asked David about his day as soon as he stepped into the house, to which he answered, “Nothing unusual”—and, a moment later, she overheard him on the phone, telling the story—yeah, your curiosity is burning, so you must know that she left the following morning—which brings us back to the original issue of who is better on telling tortuous stories: Is it James Joyce, whose 24-hour tale of Ulysses is supposed to be absorbed in just under 14 hours, or David, who took two hours to tell about a car that burned for less than three minutes?
Bartholomew Lamb is the pen name of a Polish-American/Canadian mathematician and emerging writer who lives in Texas. More about the author can be found at BartholomewLamb.com.
Accompaniment: “Straight No Chaser” — Thelonious Monk
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This piece reminds me of what Ellen Bass coined: a Long-Armed Poem, after Frank Gaspar's Late Rapturous. What's great about BURNING, and Gaspar's work, is that the reader is never lost, but waits in trust for the closing of the circle.
Interesting to read since last week I finished the grammar book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.