The Billiken's Bluff

I was reading an article about Jay-Z in Rolling Stone.



I enjoyed this excerpt:

Gehry also sent Jay a stack of James Joyce novels after explaining to Jay that Joyce was the first rapper. Gehry explained by email, “When I listen to the tapes of his voice doing Finnegan's Wake it sounds like rap. He's very fast with the Irish accent, it's all slurred together and it's quite interesting. When I heard it I thought he was a rapper and I sent them to Jay Z because I thought he might like it.” Jay says he only reads non-fiction.

Fer shizzle.

I love this type of incongriguity, worlds colliding, words colliding, dissimiliar associations, architects and rappers and novelists and streams of consciousness - oh my. I love that Jay-Z (Jay-Z the rapper? that in my lifetime n*gga? that scheming n*gga on the boat?) is now part owner of the soon to be Brooklyn Nets.



I love that architect Frank Gehry, who designed the Dancing Building in Prague



and who is now designing the Nets' downtown Brooklyn home, gave Jay-Z copies of James Joyce novels. I love that Gehry (in an effort to be what? hip? clever? down with the homies?) thinks that James Joyce's reading Ulysses sounds like some spoken word rap.



This reminds me of a few years back when I taking a fiction writing class at school I wrote about how I bought James Joyce's Ulysses while in high school. I tried to start reading it. I got about 20 pages into it before giving up (I'm pretty sure no one reads all of Ulysses). I did however turn to the last page and read the ending:

p.768

I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921

Ok fair enough. Later that year I went to Sound Factory on a Friday night.



They had a live performance by this dance/pop singer Amber.



One of the songs she performed was called Yes.

I put my arms around him, yes
And draw him down to me so he can feel my breast
And his heart was going like mad
I mean yes, I said yes, I will yes
Yes
Yes
Ohhh yes

WTF?!@?!?@ I went back to Ulysses and compared. Uncanny. Bizarre. Strange, but true. Amber's homage to James Joyce? A coincidence? Regardless of how or why the closing of James Joyce's Ulysses became the chorus to Amber's Yes, I felt the fact that I was able to identify this somehow made me unique. That I may have been possibly the only individual in the entire world who had read the last page of Ulysses and bothered to look up the lyrics to a dance song by Amber.



What does this mean?