Dad, you're not allowed to butt in on my Ulysses project with mom, but since you have read it, a Dad Moment feels necessary for the artistic integrity of the work. I'm going to tell you a story, pose a couple of questions, and ask for a favour.

The story: You and I (and my granny) went to the same university. You've told me many stories of campus shenanigans, and now I have a Ulysses-related one for you. I might know someone who, at the end of a night of drinking, barfed into his dorm room wastebasket—only to discover the next morning that somehow the copy of Ulysses he'd borrowed from the library was in the bottom of said wastebasket. Not wanting to pay a fine, he plucked the book from the mess, cleaned it up and returned it to the library. He later saw that copy back on the shelf—it was, I believe c. 3—and his library account was never dinged. I can't say whether that speaks to the thoroughness of his cleaning job, the durability of the plastic-infused industrial book binding, or the typical level of filth on a university library book—but personally, it is always the thing I think of first when Ulysses comes up (as it were).

Now for my questions:

1. when did you read Ulysses?
2. what motivated you to read it?
3. what has stuck with you the most about Ulysses since then? What are your memories of the experience of reading it, and the parts of the book that still stand out to you?

And the favour... No worries if you're not up for this, and really it may be something that's funnier in concept than in reality. You can say no.

We're at the part in Uly when Leopold Bloom cooks himself some kidneys for breakfast:

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Thursday: not a good day either for a mutton kidney at Buckley’s. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz’s.

He halted before Dlugacz’s window, staring at the hanks of sausages, polonies, black and white. Fifteen multiplied by. The figures whitened in his mind, unsolved: displeased, he let them fade. The shiny links, packed with forcemeat, fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pigs’ blood.

A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand? 

—Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for instance. What they called nymphs, for example.

Her spoon ceased to stir up the sugar. She gazed straight before her, inhaling through her arched nostrils.

—There’s a smell of burn, she said. Did you leave anything on the fire?

—The kidney! he cried suddenly.

He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork’s legs. Pungent smoke shot up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. By prodding a prong of the fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its back. Only a little burnt. He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and let the scanty brown gravy trickle over it.

Cup of tea now. He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf. He shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat. Then he put a forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant meat. Done to a turn. A mouthful of tea. Then he cut away dies of bread, sopped one in the gravy and put it in his mouth.

I remember being horrified by this scene when I first tried to read the book almost 20 years ago. It has remained seared in my brain since then. I know Mom is similarly not a fan of organ meat—unless it's pate!—but you will cook yourself liver and onions or steak and kidney pie if mom is away.

How would you like to surprise Mom with a fried kidney? Just to give her that full sensory experience and really bring Ulysses to life for her?

She'd hate it but the idea is terribly funny to me. Hope you're well. My Conophytum seedlings are thriving.

K.