Twelve Famous Readings from RALPH

"Be my guest. What I'd like to see, though, is somebody from the New Jersey League Against Cruelty to Shooting Preserve Operators." While Duncan was explaining some of the cruelties inflicted on him by various types of shooters, Mr. Pritchert came over and watched me for a minute. "What are you doing to that duck?" he asked.
"I'm wetting it," I said.
"That's what he thinks," Duncan said. "He's been holding it under there for ten minutes, and it's no wetter now than when he started. The only thing he's wetting is the property. Why don't you pinch him?"
"Why are you wetting it?" Pritchert asked, more suspicious than ever.
"So I can kick it," I said, changing the duck to the other hand as my arm was about to drop off.
"Ha!'' said Pritchert triumphantly, and then he stopped and thought a minute and said, "Kick it?"
"That's right," I said. "I suppose that sounds kind of kooky to somebody who isn't a writer."
"Why in the world would you suppose a thing like that?" Duncan said, and Pritchert said, "Kicking a duck is cruelty, mister. I'm obliged to warn you. You kick that duck and we've got an airtight case against you."
"If he can't kick any better than he shoots," Duncan said, "you wouldn't have a snowball's case in hell."
"Chance in hell," I said. "Good Lord. Snowball's chance in hell. Case in hell doesn't make sense."
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Dual Mictiration
In Dublin
How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible person, his wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?
With indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations: with subdued affection and admiration: with description: with impediment: with suggestion.
Both then were silent?
Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.
Were they indefinitely inactive?
At Stephen's suggestion, at Bloom's instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom's, then Stephen's, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.
Similarly?
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom's longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen's higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.
What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the invisible audible collateral organ of the other?
To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity, reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pelosity. To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised (1st January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine excrescences as hair and toe-nails.
What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?
A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.
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Touring the
Bible Belt
For years she toured the Bible Belt in a Ford, haranguing the morons nightly, under canvas. It was a depressing life, and its usufructs were scarcely more than three meals a day. Often, indeed, there was too little money to buy them, and she had to depend upon the charity of the pious. She was attracted to Los Angeles, it appears, by the climate. The Bible Belt was sending a steady stream of its rheumatic mortgage sharks in that direction, and she simply followed. The result, as everyone knows, was a swift and roaring success. The town has more morons in it than the whole State of Mississippi, and thousands of them had nothing to do save gape at the movie dignitaries and go to revivals.
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The Grave
Mother
Her eccentricities might have irked and embarrassed us when we grew older. We might have forgotten her birthday, and teased her to buy a car or to change her hair. We would have left her finally. We would have laughed together with bitterness and satisfaction at our strangely solitary childhood, in light of which our failings would seem inevitable, and all our attainments miraculous. Then we would telephone her out of guilt and nostalgia, and laugh bitterly afterward because she asked us nothing, and told us nothing, and fell silent from time to time, and was glad to get off the phone. We would take her to a restaurant and a movie on Thanksgiving and buy her best-sellers for Christmas. We would try to give her outings and make her find some interests, but she would soften and shrink in our hands, and become infirm. She would bear her infirmities with the same taut patience with which she bore our solicitude, and with which she had borne every other aspect of life, and her silence would make us more and more furious. Lucille and I would see each other often, and almost never talk of other things. Nothing would be more familiar to us than her silence, and her sad, abstracted calm.
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Is It "Hanged"
Or Is It "Hung?"
Around six-thirty one night early in April, Jessika, Sally's former colleague from Boom Chicago called to say that Angie Driscoll's boyfriend, Rick, had hung himself.
"You mean hanged," I told her. "Who?" "Angie, from Boom."
"Angie ... The black girl who looks sort of like Chaka Khan?" She told me, yes, the black girl from Boom. I went on to say that that was awful, sad and everything.
"Anyway," Jessika said, "there's a kind of a wake tonight." I wished Sally had picked up the phone. She'd know what to say. "And who was he exactly, this Rick?"
"He worked at Boom, too. The wake's just around the corner from you guys."
"Out here in the west [Amsterdam district]?"
"That's right. They live nearby. You went to a party at their place last summer. In the back yard."
"Is it there?"
"No, but it's nearby. I think it'd be good for Angie to have people around her."
"Does she even know who I am? I never worked at Boom."
"If you don't want to go, Sean, don't go."
"Does anybody want to go to a wake, Jess? Is it the sort of thing people enjoy?"
I got off the phone and told Sally that Angie Driscoll's boyfriend, Rick, had hung himself.
"Hanged," she said. "Who's Angie Driscoll?"

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Pulling at
Broken Strings
In trying to recapture the presence of my Mother I am pulling at broken strings. The years run back through the pattern of her confusions. Her flowers and songs, her unshaken fidelities, her attempts at order, her relapses into squalor, her near madness, her crying for light, her almost daily weeping for her dead child-daughter, her frisks and gaieties, her fits of screams, her love of man, her hysterical rages, her justice towards each of us children --- all these rode my Mother and sat on her shoulders like a roosting of ravens and doves. Equally I remember her occasional blooming, when she became secretly beautiful and alone. And those summer nights --- we boys in bed when the green of the yew trees filled the quiet kitchen, and she would change into her silk, put on her bits of jewellery, and sit down to play the piano.
She did not play well; her rough fingers stumbled, they trembled to find the notes --- yet she carried the music with little rushes of grace, half-faltering surges of feeling, that went rippling out through the kitchen windows like signals from a shuttered cage. Solitary, eyes closed, in her silks and secrets, tearing arpeggios from the yellow keys, yielding, through dusty but golden chords, to the peak of that private moment, it was clearly then, in the twilit tenderness she created, that the man should have returned to her.
I would lie awake in my still-light bedroom and hear the chime of the piano below: a ragged chord, a poignant pause, then a twinkling wagtail run. Brash yet melancholy, coarse yet wistful, it would rise in a jangling burst, then break and shiver as soft as water and lap round my listening head. She would play some waltzes, and of course "Killarney"; and sometimes I would hear her singing --- a cool lone voice, uncertainly rising, addressed to her own refection. They were sounds of peace, half-edged with sleep, yet disturbing, almost shamefully moving. I wanted to run to her then, and embrace her as she played. But somehow I never did.

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Women and
All-Talk Radio
Women! He loves the way they walk, the way they move, the way they sigh, they way they think, are, see, grow old, love, laugh, die. They are to be taken to the beach, buried in the sand, then pulled from their warm graves and plunged into colorful warm oceans --- nixies in the sweet soft waters of the sweet soft sea.
Ernest is a Don Juan in the best sense --- he loves women because they are there to be loved. I regret that I did not fit our car with microphone and cassette, for our conversations, suitably transcribed, would go down as the Boswell-Johnson dialogues of the 18th, or the Miller-Durrell exchanges of the 20th Century.
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