Nevada City, CA — Roy Riffle has lived in Nevada City all his life and recently announced to a small crowd of Millennials at area coffee house that he intended to write the town’s equivalent of James Joyce’s Ulysses
“History,” Roy pronounced to the indifferent crowd sipping their coffee and updating their Instagram accounts, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. Because every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”
James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was published in its entirety in 1922, and is considered by many to be a masterpiece that captured the entire modernist movement. The novel is approximately 265,000 words in length, uses a lexicon of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses), and is divided into eighteen episodes.
“I had no idea what he was talking about,” said Denis Breen outside on Broad Street. “At first I kept trying to wiki what he was saying, but then it became too tedious. So I stopped.”
Frequent coffee customer and fellow Millennial Brent Underwood was enthusiastic about the Mr. Riffle’s project saying, “[t]his is great. I’m gonna hang out with him and learn stuff.”
Not everyone appreciates Mr. Riffle’s attempts at the literary arts.
“I can’t imagine anyone even attempting to capture what goes on here in any coherent way,” said Nevada Union English teacher Garrett Deasy. “Roy has no idea what he’s doing. He’ll never amount to anything but gibberish.”
The Fazzler asked permission to serialize Mr. Riffle’s efforts, which he politely declined but submitted this puzzling written response:
If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.
