No news today - Guest Post - William Walsh

Flowers of Idleness

From Lotus Eaters, Episode 5 of Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Flowers of idleness.

Henry Flower Esq,
c/o P. O. Westland Row,
City.

A flower. A yellow flower with flattened petals. He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume.

Henry Flower.

The bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.

O, no, she's not here: the flower: no, no.

Flowers, incense, candles melting.

—Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said, and then orangeflower water…

That orangeflower water is so fresh. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

William Walsh edited the new anthology RE:Telling (Ampersand Books). He is the author of Pathologies, Questionstruck (both from Keyhole Press), and Without Wax (Casperian Books). His stories and texts have appeared in Caketrain, Quick Fiction, Annalemma, LIT, New York Tyrant, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.