June 15, 2023 • 27 mins
In celebration of Bloomsday on June 16th, we’re bringing you a special James Joyce mystery. Ten years after achieving stratospheric and unlikely fame, the world’s greatest Ulysses scholar disappeared. Reporter Jack Hitt went on a quest to find out if he was dead, alive or insane.
You can read Jack Hitt’s New York Times story “The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar, here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-joyce-scholar.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. My favorite holiday of the year is about to happen.
June sixteenth is Bloomsday, the day when James Joyce's novel
Ulysses takes place in nineteen oh four. The book's famously
long and confusing, and at the time it was considered
(00:35):
shockingly sexually explicit. It follows this guy named Leopold Bloom
throughout the course of one ordinary day in which he
tries to win back his wife. I love the book
so much that one year I flew to Dublin and
joined hundreds of people as we retraced the main character's
steps around the city. I went to davy Byrne's pub,
which is still there, and drank burgundy and ate Gorganzola sandwiches.
(00:59):
I drank guinness in well a lot of places. As
women dressed in early twentieth century costumes walked by, I
felt what other people must feel it, only I felt
much much smarter writing his heart. Who's got that kind
(01:21):
of time when you're.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Already busy trying to be joll stined, So it turns
on a mic.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Maybe the twidles enough because a journalist trand has got
in that you tidies single story just listen to smart
people speak, conversation, film and information is the story of
the week. Ten years after he achieved stratospheric and very
(01:57):
unlikely fame, the world's greatest Ulysses scholar disappeared. Jack hit
went on that quest to find out if he was dead, alive,
or insane. Thank you for doing. I'm a big fan.
When did you first read Ulysses in college?
Speaker 2 (02:14):
You know, I took I was a comp lit major,
and it was at a time when if you were
a lit major or just kind of anyone interested in
writing or reading at the time, you know, you kind
of had to select your big book. In those days,
there was a kind of wonderful pomposity to carrying around
your big book in college.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Well, okay, I carried around my big book in college.
What was it? It was Ulysses?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Just very quickly. You know, when Joyce wrote this book,
he wrote it over a period of seven years. He
wrote it on scraps of paper. He published parts of it,
and then edited the parts that had been published and
then rewrote them again. So what happens is is that
over time, a lot of editors have argued, well, there
is this one perfect kind of Ulysses that hasn't been
(03:01):
published yet. There's all this controversies that what's the exact text,
because it clearly comes into existence as a kind of
hot mess.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
And this amazing story is about this Ulysses scholar named
John Kidd, who was on track to create the definitive
edition of the book but then disappeared. Okay, so before
we get to the mystery, actually, can you just read
the beginning of your piece because it sets it up
so well.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
John Kidd's early life is like a Wes Anderson newsreel
of an American upbringing extraordinary and crackpot bending towards fabulousm
He grew up with a brother of the same name,
just without the h. John John and John Jo n
were the sons of Captain John William Kidd, a naval
(03:47):
officer known to the sailors on board as Starbuck. So
I mean you practically have an American mythic figure sort
of emerging to become the kind of great Joyce scholar
of this time.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
And he didn't go to college right.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Right he started, you know, he read Ulysses I think
in high school and just became obsessed with it.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
So then he without going to undergrad. He gets himself
in grad school, which is pretty crazy and impressive, right,
and he gets his PhD and then goes back to
just reading himself. Right, he doesn't go on to teach, right, Okay,
so how does he become this famous Ulysses scholar?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
In the late eighties, it came out that this brilliant
German scholar, Hans Gobbler, had spent you know, most of
his professional career going through all of the versions of Ulysses,
all the notes and pieces of paper that Joyce had
written on it was going to annotate the whole thing,
which I have a copy of. It's three volumes, and
(04:49):
show you how he created the one definitive, error free Ulysses.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
So I in nineteen ninety three when I read Ulysses,
I read the Gabbler edition, and as far as my
brain knows, that is the only one I can buy,
that is the official Ulysses. It's clear to me that like,
this is my only option.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Right, And as that was coming out, as it was
being published, suddenly the self taught autodidak Joyce critic John
Kidd appears in the New York Review of Books.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yeah, somehow kid gets published in the New York Review
of Books, and he's critiquing Gobbler's edition of Ulysses, this
new edition. But it's more than just a critique, right.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
It's just this scathing attack of Gobbler's methods and of
his edits and all of the things he was doing.
And this is where I come into the story.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I remember I had just joined the staff of Harper's
magazine as an editor, and I remember sitting down to
read this piece and it was the most amazing piece
of writing for so many reasons. One is that had
this cocky, sort of kind of like Twitter tone to
(06:07):
his criticism, which is something you never saw in the
New York Review Books. He was being flip in all
kinds of ways. I remember he dismissed the entire Gobbler effort.
He said that the corrected text by Gobbler is quote
marbled with the fat of such pseudo restorations from shoulder
to shank. You know, he just didn't read sentences like that.
(06:30):
Or another time he's just being playful where he caught
Gobbler at some tiny mistake and he wrote, irony abounds,
What redounds to doctor Kidd rebounds on several grounds, it
sounds he's out of bounds. So he's just I mean,
he just sounds like this kind of drunk poet, you know.
Writing in the New York Review of Books, it was
(06:50):
impossible not to read.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
What I love about it is it reads like an
onion piece because he is so pissed off about the tiniest,
most inconsequential things you can imagine correct or.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Another one that's famous is the big black dot.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
You're talking about this big black dot that's in some
editions of Ulysses.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Right, So let me just back up and tell you
what this is. So at the at the end of
a long chapter that's done in sort of Q and A,
it's almost like a legal deposition. It's a parody of
kind of like an inquisitor. It's pretty funny, right, And
it's pretty funny. I mean, it's very specific and it's
cracking jokes the whole time. It's supposed to it may
or may not be God himself, you know, sort of
quizzing the events of June sixteenth.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Of a drunk bloom, Yeah, right, Bloom being leopol Bloom,
the main character of right.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yes, So at the very end, I mean, the inquisitor
is getting so annoyed with the answers, you know, ostensibly blooms,
you know, annoying little answers that at the end there's
a question, and then there's just this big black dot.
In the addition I had it was probably the size
of the head of a nail, so you know, considerable
(07:59):
when you talk about ink on a page. And then
in all these other editions it was not there at all,
or it was just a regular period or a slightly
bigger period, and God publishes it simply as a period.
Kid loses his mind in this essay because to many
readers right and scholars over time, that big black dot
(08:21):
might be the earth as seen from God's perspective, or
it might be Bloom's open mouth now that he's kind
of fallen asleep. That's what most people assume. That's what
ends the chapter, is that Bloom is just finally knotted
off and is snoring.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Some people thought it was an egg or a portal
to another dimension, or Molly Bloom's anus.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Ye, Molly Bloom being Leopold's wife.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Right, And so there are many interpretations of what that
dot is, but the most important thing is is that
it's a it's an outsized dot. That's what Kid is
pointing out. And so that controversy erupted. And so you know,
when you're reading this thing, if you if you've read Joyce,
you realize that, of course, on the one hand, none
of this matters, but on the other hand, it is
(09:04):
a book about how everything tiny does matter.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
But this New York Review of Books article leads to
a rebuttal from Gabler. Yes, and then of course Kid
has to write back. But then the amount of people
who get involved in what seems like a picky, un
you know, academic fight is crazy, like Updike, John Updike
gets involved. David Remnick, who's the longtime editor now with
(09:29):
The New Yorker, writes an article about it, right, like,
people get sucked into this fight.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Oh, absolutely, because it was impossible not to. I closed
the door and lit a cigarette I used to smoke
in those days, and step back and just went wild
reading this thing.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
And so the next issue, yes, there's a letter from
John Updike, who has gotten hold of Gabbler's addition and
sees that like he has these completely unconventional paragraph indentations,
which as far as he's concerned, is like putting a
mustache on the Mona Lisa, and he is just fuming
with rage in this letter. You know, it's just impossible
(10:06):
not to get into the mood of the thing. Everybody
suddenly became these kind of kid like experts on minutia
of Joyce's ulysses.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
And the framing of this fight is there's a dour
academic German versus an upstart American named John Kidd.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Like it's a very clear fight. Almost everybody came to
Kid's side. What happens is, essentially John Kidd establishes himself
as the most revolutionary, badass, rebel Joycean critic on the planet.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
And then because of this controversy, he gets scooped up
by Boston University and they give him like a bunch
of resources to work on his definitive version of ulysses. Right.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Oh, money pours in from all kinds of locations, and
basically what happens is this guy who didn't go to
college gets plucked out of this controversy to Boston University
and he's he has this thing called the James Joyce
Research Center, which is entire suite of offices completely funded
for him, right, So all these other professors of English
(11:16):
there are certainly jealous beyond all description. This guy's in
his twenties. You know, he hasn't worked his way up
from assistant to associate professor to tenured full No. No,
he's just leapfrogged everything and become the world's greatest choice
scholar with his own research center and a bevy of
research assistants out to publish the competition to Gobbler's edition,
(11:40):
the real solid, absolutely pure Joyce's Ulysses.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
And so in addition to all the money coming into
Boston University for him to work on this, he's also
got a publishing deal. He's supposed to come out with
his version of Ulysses to compete with the Gabbler one exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
So he got like a three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars advance. I mean, that's what best selling authors got,
you know, if they were lucky at the time. And
I remember I called him at the time. I was
an editor at Harper's. He and I had several conversations,
and the hope was that at that point the Internet
was very, very young, but there was this creaky sort
(12:18):
of technology known as c d ram And so the
idea was that all those books you just held up
the annotated ulysses and all that the idea was is
that he would Kid was going to create this electronic
version of Ulysses where you could just touch each word
and it would give you the whole history of that.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That must exist now, right.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yes, that does exist now, yeah you can. You can
definitely go online now and find versions of this. But
you know, in nineteen eighty eight, eighty nine, ninety, when
this whole thing was a great idea, Yeah, it was
just an incredible idea, and it was like the perfect
use of what was then emerging as the Internet. Oh
you are so excited. I'm sure, I'm thrilled. And then,
you know, one thing leads to another. I have a life.
(12:56):
You know, eventually, by ninety two, I step away from
Harper's to write a book, and you know, I forget
all about John Kid.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
And meanwhile, his book has never come.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Out, never come out, and you never I never hear
anything more about.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
It, which is we because he had a publishing deal
and a group that be you working on this and
the book never comes out. Okay, So then what happens.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Ten or fifteen years go by, and I'm up visiting
somebody in Boston, and I just happened to pick up
the paper and there's like an item in the paper
about John Kitt and how he's kind of gone insane.
He doesn't really teach anymore. He kind of hangs out
at the statue near the Boston University campus. He's feeding
(13:39):
the pigeons, He's given them names. He kind of talks
to them all day long. And this is this picture
with this kind of haunted figure in a long overcoat.
And that's all it says is that, you know, the
greatest Choice scholar has kind of gone mad.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
When we get back, Jack Hit decides to find out
what happened. It's the world's greatest joy Scholar. But first,
our advertisers are going to sell you a bar of
lemon scented soap that jumps from one of your pockets
to another. That's a really solid joke if you've regulous sees.
(14:17):
Reporter Jack Hitt couldn't stop thinking about the world famous
Joyce scholar who had never gotten back to him about
that cd ROM project.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
So I read that he had become a kind of
homeless person. And then After that, I never read another
thing about him, and so I thought, well, what happened
to him? I had read about another Joyce scholar who
had lost his mind trying to deal with all the
joycey ona. And you know, Joyce has this famous line
where he says, you know, he expects his work to
(14:48):
keep you know, scholars busy for the next three hundred
years or something, right, and it's so joysy. But you know,
part of how I read that was is that, you know,
the scholars would all just go crazy trying to figure
out what this book actually meant and how it all works.
And so he was sort of like this proof of
this that a number of scholars seemed to gone off
(15:10):
the deep end. And so I called all the professors
in the English department, every one of them at BU,
and said, where's John Kidd? Because I couldn't find an
obituary and I couldn't find any leads on the Internet
as to where he was. And half the faculty said, oh,
(15:30):
I've heard he's dead. And then I found some scholars
in Europe who would say, you know, affirmatively that he
was dead.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
But there should have been an obit somebody would have
written obit.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
If he died, you figured exactly. I mean, how could
he how could he die even in home? I even
called homeless shelters all around Boston, trying to see if
he was just living in one. You know, at this.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Point, how'd you figure out he was alive? Well?
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I talked to this one Finnegan's Wake scholar in Romania.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I think it's Wake being the even more complicated book
the Choice writes after Ulysses.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
The book where Joyce actually does go mad and writes
a book that almost no one can.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Read, and forces Samuel Beckett, because he's blind at this point,
to like transcribe it, dictate letter by letter of these
made up words. He that's right, Okay, So how do
you find out? This? John kid guys a lot.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
This happens over months and months and years. So at
one point someone had mentioned that he was in Central America,
and then I was reading these defunct blogs. I don't
even know how I got to him. I guess just
googling his name and going into the dead zone of
the Internet, like blogs that had been inactive for fifteen.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Years or ten years.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
And there was this nudist in Brazil who said that
he had gone to some festival and he had run
across the world's greatest joy scholar there. Now, you just
don't describe anybody like that except for maybe John Kid.
And I thought, okay, maybe he's in Brazil it.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Was a nudist festival, or he's just a newdist too. No.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
No, he was a nudist and all of his blogs
are about nudism. The mention of the joy scholar was
actually a fully clothed festival, a music festival.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
It must be really good music if nudists are willing
to put on clothes for it, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
And so then I wrote back to the Finnegans Wag
scholar in Romania, who said, well, you know, I was
trying to get Kid to write the intro to my
addition of Finnegan's Wake, and he said he would, and
then you know, he just then you just stopped answering.
I just figured he disappeared or maybe died. And then
(17:35):
she gave me the email address that she had last used.
And so one Sunday morning, I just wrote a note
and said I'm Jack Hitch, but he you and I
corresponded once a long time ago about the CD ROM
version of Ulysses, and I was wondering if we could
catch up. You know, it'd been thirty years since that correspondence.
(17:58):
And first thing Monday morning, I opened up my email
and there's a reply from John Kidd saying, oh, yes,
I remember you, and he not only remembered all of
our conversations.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
First, by the.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Way, I didn't even know if it was him, but
he put enough detail of what he remembered of our
conversation that I knew it was him. And then at
one point I said, you know, you haven't responded to
all of these people. People think your email is dead
and that you're dead, and I'm just wondering. It was like,
did you respond to my email? Because our names seem
(18:31):
to have a kind of Joysian connection. And he wrote back,
and he was so thrilled that I had made that
observation that Jack Hit and John Kidd are sort of
orthographically related, two names with four letters. Our last names
have double letter endings, iambic names that come at you
(18:54):
like two shotgun blasts, and it might be like an
obscenity in some other language, you know.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
But he loved it that and.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Wrote me this long note about how our names are
so familiar and related. And yes, that was one of
the reasons why he responded to my email.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Which, how do you feel after all this time that
you finally found him? I was so thrilled, Like, are
you telling your family what's going on? Well?
Speaker 2 (19:22):
I immediately wrote my editor at the New York Times magazine,
and of course, you know, no editor knew the story
because this story reaches out over thirty years. So I
had to go back and like basically re educate them
about the whole New York Review book things and then
the homeless thing.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
And so they send you to find kid in Brazil.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Well, I asked John if I could come down and
talk to him about Ulysses, and he said, sure, if
you're in Rio, give me a ring. So I called.
So when I wrote this bitch, I said he's in
Rio waiting for me, and they were like, Okay, get
a ticket and let's go.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
When you finally meet him, does he seem sane? Does
he look normal? Does he like? What's your vibe on
this guy?
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Well, I'm six one and I'd say that John Kidd
is easily my height or taller. At this point, he
still had this sort of blondish white hair, but it
was halfway down his back. His hair was well and
again Dolphie and territory.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Does he have the beard too or just the hair? No,
just the hair. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
It was clear that every detail of this fight, going
all the way back to nineteen nineteen eighties, every textual critique,
every jot and tittle, the big dot, all of that
stuff was as fresh in his mind as anything. It
was nothing crazy about him. He was just he was
still the textual master of Joyce's ulysses. I'd be sitting
(20:53):
there with my random house or my gabbler and he
would just grab it from me and flip it open
and point to where he.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Was talking about. Oh he would know the page.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Oh yeah, yes, And.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Does that feel like, oh, this guy's just spent a
lot of time on this or this guy is a
different kind of brain.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Totally a different kind of brain. When we went to
his house, and his house was just, I mean almost
comical in that every piece of open space was had
books on it.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
And you also said, I love this that he is
still pissed off about that Boston Globe article about the
pigeons exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
He was furious that they described him as homeless and like,
you know, pennyless and living on the streets. And he
pulls out a bank statement from the year of that
Boston Globe article to show me that he had a
running balance of over fifteen thousand dollars in his checking account.
I mean, he just had that at the ready, like
(21:48):
when we sat down. He just pulled that out of
his coat pocket.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
And why do you say this book never came out?
His addition of ulysses.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So the editor you know whom I spoke to, you know,
eventually just gave up because so many years had passed
and they had not you know, gotten anything, but they
had gotten like an introduction and some piece of it.
And kid told me that, you know, parts of it
are whatever we're sent to the editor and got.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Lost got lost. That seems unlikely.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yes, back in the days when everything happened by mail,
there is some version of this attempt at this book
that did get published. And I went to look for
this thing and had paintings in it by Robert Motherwell.
And only one hundred and seventy five of these books
were ever published. So this just adds more, you know,
lore to the publishing history of this book by the way.
(22:37):
I went on Amazon and found one for sale. It
costs twenty five, six hundred and seventy eight dollars. It's
an impossible thing to find, but yeah, they're out there.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
And what did kids say he's done since leaving Bu?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Well, he went through this period of the Dream of
the Red Chamber, right, which is this you know, legendary
Asian novel.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
It's like the classic Chinese novel bits. It's very long, right,
super long. Have you ever tried to read that?
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I had not. I had friends in college. That was
the book they carried around, and so that was the
other book that was their big book. And so apparently
he lived in China for a long time and became
you know, a red ologist, that's what they're actually called,
who become obsessed with that book. And then eventually one
thing led or another, and he wound.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Up in Rio where he's working on some like Portuguese
big book. Right.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Right, So there was this book, you know, a century
or so ago that was very influential in terms of
ending slavery in Brazil, which ended shortly after our Civil war.
But it was sort of like Uncle Tom's Cabin to them,
and involved this person named Esora, and so he's he's
translating what he calls Esora Unbound.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
And he's still working on Ulysses or interested in ulyseser No.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I mean, you know, like I said, all every aspect
of the Joycean fight is very much alive in his mind,
but he's mostly consumed with this translation or adaptation of
Esora Unbound.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Okay, you write the amazing story. It comes out, and uh,
what's the reaction in general?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Well, I was amazed at how many people wanted to
rehabilitate him entirely and bring him back into the you know,
into the fold of academ and bring out his version
of Ulysses.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
But that's not going to happen, right, That's that was
or did that happen?
Speaker 2 (24:32):
I don't know how that left off. Okay, you know
I wrote him and said, these people want to contact you.
Can I forward them your email?
Speaker 1 (24:40):
He was like, absolutely, Okay, Well I found that. I'm sure, Yes,
you have the blog post or some such that he
wrote about your piece.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I haven't. I haven't read it. But tell me what
have you not read it? No?
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Hold on, hold on the New York Times review of books.
You I'm so excited now, I should double check this
now that I know you haven't read it, to make
sure it really is him. But I'm pretty sure I
can tell you if you start reading. Okay, I have
never claimed I was on the quest to perfect Ulysses,
(25:13):
or to edit a definitive Ulysses, or to concoct any
perfect edition. New York Times Magazine author Jack Hit simply
made that up, as he seems to have done with
several other things attributed to me by him. Or maybe
he has an uncredited source that inspired him to romanticize
my mundane drudgery as a tropical textologist and translator. Does
(25:34):
it sound like him so far? Oh?
Speaker 2 (25:35):
That's him, Yeah, totally. I even told my editor, I said,
of course, you know, the greatest attack on this piece
will be from John Kitt. Oh. You know, maybe you
can convince some of your friends to buy each of
us a copy of the Motherwell Edition of Ulysses to
round out our collections.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
You know, I bet we can start a dow, one
of those the web three dows and get them. We'll
buy one. We'll have one in no time. He has
a gofund me page exactly. That's easier. The Lesson of
Ulysses of course, is to be nice to your wife.
But the other lesson is that we need to stop
banning books. The fact that Ulysses was a band for
(26:16):
ten years in the US for being too sexually explicit
is insane. Like, listen to this part that they got
to set about, it's nothing. He must have come three
or four times with that tremendous, big red brute of
a thing he has. I thought the vein or whatever
the dickens they call it was going to burst through
his nose. Oh, come on, guys, it's a classic. It's
(26:38):
about to get hot.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
At the end of the show.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
What's next for joel Stein? Maybe he'll take a nap
er poker round online. Our show is produced by Joey
fish Ground, Mola Bard and Nishavenka. It was edited by
Lydia jedden Kopp. Our engineer is Amantha kay Wang and
our executive producer is Cathroinald Cheradah. Our theme song was
produced by Jonathan Colton. A special thanks to my voice
(27:06):
coach Bicky Merrick and my consulting producer Laurence Alasna. To
find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app Apple
Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel
Stein and this is Story of the Week.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
This is a completely illegal copy of Ulysses. This was
published by a pornographer in the sixties. But when you
get to the very last few pages, let me see
if I can show you this. Here's a page with
a penis a peter meter.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Wait, wait, wait, you threw out the word peter meter,
as if that's something that people know. Is that Is
that a ruler?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, it's like a ruler to measure your penis.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Wait, that was a peter meter was a popular phrase
and thing at some point.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Absolutely
Pushkin. My favorite holiday of the year is about to happen.
June sixteenth is Bloomsday, the day when James Joyce's novel
Ulysses takes place in nineteen oh four. The book's famously
long and confusing, and at the time it was considered
(00:35):
shockingly sexually explicit. It follows this guy named Leopold Bloom
throughout the course of one ordinary day in which he
tries to win back his wife. I love the book
so much that one year I flew to Dublin and
joined hundreds of people as we retraced the main character's
steps around the city. I went to davy Byrne's pub,
which is still there, and drank burgundy and ate Gorganzola sandwiches.
(00:59):
I drank guinness in well a lot of places. As
women dressed in early twentieth century costumes walked by, I
felt what other people must feel it, only I felt
much much smarter writing his heart. Who's got that kind
(01:21):
of time when you're.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Already busy trying to be joll stined, So it turns
on a mic.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Maybe the twidles enough because a journalist trand has got
in that you tidies single story just listen to smart
people speak, conversation, film and information is the story of
the week. Ten years after he achieved stratospheric and very
(01:57):
unlikely fame, the world's greatest Ulysses scholar disappeared. Jack hit
went on that quest to find out if he was dead, alive,
or insane. Thank you for doing. I'm a big fan.
When did you first read Ulysses in college?
Speaker 2 (02:14):
You know, I took I was a comp lit major,
and it was at a time when if you were
a lit major or just kind of anyone interested in
writing or reading at the time, you know, you kind
of had to select your big book. In those days,
there was a kind of wonderful pomposity to carrying around
your big book in college.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Well, okay, I carried around my big book in college.
What was it? It was Ulysses?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Just very quickly. You know, when Joyce wrote this book,
he wrote it over a period of seven years. He
wrote it on scraps of paper. He published parts of it,
and then edited the parts that had been published and
then rewrote them again. So what happens is is that
over time, a lot of editors have argued, well, there
is this one perfect kind of Ulysses that hasn't been
(03:01):
published yet. There's all this controversies that what's the exact text,
because it clearly comes into existence as a kind of
hot mess.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
And this amazing story is about this Ulysses scholar named
John Kidd, who was on track to create the definitive
edition of the book but then disappeared. Okay, so before
we get to the mystery, actually, can you just read
the beginning of your piece because it sets it up
so well.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
John Kidd's early life is like a Wes Anderson newsreel
of an American upbringing extraordinary and crackpot bending towards fabulousm
He grew up with a brother of the same name,
just without the h. John John and John Jo n
were the sons of Captain John William Kidd, a naval
(03:47):
officer known to the sailors on board as Starbuck. So
I mean you practically have an American mythic figure sort
of emerging to become the kind of great Joyce scholar
of this time.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
And he didn't go to college right.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Right he started, you know, he read Ulysses I think
in high school and just became obsessed with it.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
So then he without going to undergrad. He gets himself
in grad school, which is pretty crazy and impressive, right,
and he gets his PhD and then goes back to
just reading himself. Right, he doesn't go on to teach, right, Okay,
so how does he become this famous Ulysses scholar?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
In the late eighties, it came out that this brilliant
German scholar, Hans Gobbler, had spent you know, most of
his professional career going through all of the versions of Ulysses,
all the notes and pieces of paper that Joyce had
written on it was going to annotate the whole thing,
which I have a copy of. It's three volumes, and
(04:49):
show you how he created the one definitive, error free Ulysses.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
So I in nineteen ninety three when I read Ulysses,
I read the Gabbler edition, and as far as my
brain knows, that is the only one I can buy,
that is the official Ulysses. It's clear to me that like,
this is my only option.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Right, And as that was coming out, as it was
being published, suddenly the self taught autodidak Joyce critic John
Kidd appears in the New York Review of Books.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yeah, somehow kid gets published in the New York Review
of Books, and he's critiquing Gobbler's edition of Ulysses, this
new edition. But it's more than just a critique, right.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
It's just this scathing attack of Gobbler's methods and of
his edits and all of the things he was doing.
And this is where I come into the story.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I remember I had just joined the staff of Harper's
magazine as an editor, and I remember sitting down to
read this piece and it was the most amazing piece
of writing for so many reasons. One is that had
this cocky, sort of kind of like Twitter tone to
(06:07):
his criticism, which is something you never saw in the
New York Review Books. He was being flip in all
kinds of ways. I remember he dismissed the entire Gobbler effort.
He said that the corrected text by Gobbler is quote
marbled with the fat of such pseudo restorations from shoulder
to shank. You know, he just didn't read sentences like that.
(06:30):
Or another time he's just being playful where he caught
Gobbler at some tiny mistake and he wrote, irony abounds,
What redounds to doctor Kidd rebounds on several grounds, it
sounds he's out of bounds. So he's just I mean,
he just sounds like this kind of drunk poet, you know.
Writing in the New York Review of Books, it was
(06:50):
impossible not to read.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
What I love about it is it reads like an
onion piece because he is so pissed off about the tiniest,
most inconsequential things you can imagine correct or.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Another one that's famous is the big black dot.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
You're talking about this big black dot that's in some
editions of Ulysses.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Right, So let me just back up and tell you
what this is. So at the at the end of
a long chapter that's done in sort of Q and A,
it's almost like a legal deposition. It's a parody of
kind of like an inquisitor. It's pretty funny, right, And
it's pretty funny. I mean, it's very specific and it's
cracking jokes the whole time. It's supposed to it may
or may not be God himself, you know, sort of
quizzing the events of June sixteenth.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Of a drunk bloom, Yeah, right, Bloom being leopol Bloom,
the main character of right.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yes, So at the very end, I mean, the inquisitor
is getting so annoyed with the answers, you know, ostensibly blooms,
you know, annoying little answers that at the end there's
a question, and then there's just this big black dot.
In the addition I had it was probably the size
of the head of a nail, so you know, considerable
(07:59):
when you talk about ink on a page. And then
in all these other editions it was not there at all,
or it was just a regular period or a slightly
bigger period, and God publishes it simply as a period.
Kid loses his mind in this essay because to many
readers right and scholars over time, that big black dot
(08:21):
might be the earth as seen from God's perspective, or
it might be Bloom's open mouth now that he's kind
of fallen asleep. That's what most people assume. That's what
ends the chapter, is that Bloom is just finally knotted
off and is snoring.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Some people thought it was an egg or a portal
to another dimension, or Molly Bloom's anus.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Ye, Molly Bloom being Leopold's wife.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Right, And so there are many interpretations of what that
dot is, but the most important thing is is that
it's a it's an outsized dot. That's what Kid is
pointing out. And so that controversy erupted. And so you know,
when you're reading this thing, if you if you've read Joyce,
you realize that, of course, on the one hand, none
of this matters, but on the other hand, it is
(09:04):
a book about how everything tiny does matter.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
But this New York Review of Books article leads to
a rebuttal from Gabler. Yes, and then of course Kid
has to write back. But then the amount of people
who get involved in what seems like a picky, un
you know, academic fight is crazy, like Updike, John Updike
gets involved. David Remnick, who's the longtime editor now with
(09:29):
The New Yorker, writes an article about it, right, like,
people get sucked into this fight.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Oh, absolutely, because it was impossible not to. I closed
the door and lit a cigarette I used to smoke
in those days, and step back and just went wild
reading this thing.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
And so the next issue, yes, there's a letter from
John Updike, who has gotten hold of Gabbler's addition and
sees that like he has these completely unconventional paragraph indentations,
which as far as he's concerned, is like putting a
mustache on the Mona Lisa, and he is just fuming
with rage in this letter. You know, it's just impossible
(10:06):
not to get into the mood of the thing. Everybody
suddenly became these kind of kid like experts on minutia
of Joyce's ulysses.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
And the framing of this fight is there's a dour
academic German versus an upstart American named John Kidd.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Like it's a very clear fight. Almost everybody came to
Kid's side. What happens is, essentially John Kidd establishes himself
as the most revolutionary, badass, rebel Joycean critic on the planet.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
And then because of this controversy, he gets scooped up
by Boston University and they give him like a bunch
of resources to work on his definitive version of ulysses. Right.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Oh, money pours in from all kinds of locations, and
basically what happens is this guy who didn't go to
college gets plucked out of this controversy to Boston University
and he's he has this thing called the James Joyce
Research Center, which is entire suite of offices completely funded
for him, right, So all these other professors of English
(11:16):
there are certainly jealous beyond all description. This guy's in
his twenties. You know, he hasn't worked his way up
from assistant to associate professor to tenured full No. No,
he's just leapfrogged everything and become the world's greatest choice
scholar with his own research center and a bevy of
research assistants out to publish the competition to Gobbler's edition,
(11:40):
the real solid, absolutely pure Joyce's Ulysses.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
And so in addition to all the money coming into
Boston University for him to work on this, he's also
got a publishing deal. He's supposed to come out with
his version of Ulysses to compete with the Gabbler one exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
So he got like a three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars advance. I mean, that's what best selling authors got,
you know, if they were lucky at the time. And
I remember I called him at the time. I was
an editor at Harper's. He and I had several conversations,
and the hope was that at that point the Internet
was very, very young, but there was this creaky sort
(12:18):
of technology known as c d ram And so the
idea was that all those books you just held up
the annotated ulysses and all that the idea was is
that he would Kid was going to create this electronic
version of Ulysses where you could just touch each word
and it would give you the whole history of that.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That must exist now, right.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Yes, that does exist now, yeah you can. You can
definitely go online now and find versions of this. But
you know, in nineteen eighty eight, eighty nine, ninety, when
this whole thing was a great idea, Yeah, it was
just an incredible idea, and it was like the perfect
use of what was then emerging as the Internet. Oh
you are so excited. I'm sure, I'm thrilled. And then,
you know, one thing leads to another. I have a life.
(12:56):
You know, eventually, by ninety two, I step away from
Harper's to write a book, and you know, I forget
all about John Kid.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
And meanwhile, his book has never come.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Out, never come out, and you never I never hear
anything more about.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
It, which is we because he had a publishing deal
and a group that be you working on this and
the book never comes out. Okay, So then what happens.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Ten or fifteen years go by, and I'm up visiting
somebody in Boston, and I just happened to pick up
the paper and there's like an item in the paper
about John Kitt and how he's kind of gone insane.
He doesn't really teach anymore. He kind of hangs out
at the statue near the Boston University campus. He's feeding
(13:39):
the pigeons, He's given them names. He kind of talks
to them all day long. And this is this picture
with this kind of haunted figure in a long overcoat.
And that's all it says is that, you know, the
greatest Choice scholar has kind of gone mad.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
When we get back, Jack Hit decides to find out
what happened. It's the world's greatest joy Scholar. But first,
our advertisers are going to sell you a bar of
lemon scented soap that jumps from one of your pockets
to another. That's a really solid joke if you've regulous sees.
(14:17):
Reporter Jack Hitt couldn't stop thinking about the world famous
Joyce scholar who had never gotten back to him about
that cd ROM project.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
So I read that he had become a kind of
homeless person. And then After that, I never read another
thing about him, and so I thought, well, what happened
to him? I had read about another Joyce scholar who
had lost his mind trying to deal with all the
joycey ona. And you know, Joyce has this famous line
where he says, you know, he expects his work to
(14:48):
keep you know, scholars busy for the next three hundred
years or something, right, and it's so joysy. But you know,
part of how I read that was is that, you know,
the scholars would all just go crazy trying to figure
out what this book actually meant and how it all works.
And so he was sort of like this proof of
this that a number of scholars seemed to gone off
(15:10):
the deep end. And so I called all the professors
in the English department, every one of them at BU,
and said, where's John Kidd? Because I couldn't find an
obituary and I couldn't find any leads on the Internet
as to where he was. And half the faculty said, oh,
(15:30):
I've heard he's dead. And then I found some scholars
in Europe who would say, you know, affirmatively that he
was dead.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
But there should have been an obit somebody would have
written obit.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
If he died, you figured exactly. I mean, how could
he how could he die even in home? I even
called homeless shelters all around Boston, trying to see if
he was just living in one. You know, at this.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Point, how'd you figure out he was alive? Well?
Speaker 2 (15:52):
I talked to this one Finnegan's Wake scholar in Romania.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I think it's Wake being the even more complicated book
the Choice writes after Ulysses.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
The book where Joyce actually does go mad and writes
a book that almost no one can.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Read, and forces Samuel Beckett, because he's blind at this point,
to like transcribe it, dictate letter by letter of these
made up words. He that's right, Okay, So how do
you find out? This? John kid guys a lot.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
This happens over months and months and years. So at
one point someone had mentioned that he was in Central America,
and then I was reading these defunct blogs. I don't
even know how I got to him. I guess just
googling his name and going into the dead zone of
the Internet, like blogs that had been inactive for fifteen.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Years or ten years.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
And there was this nudist in Brazil who said that
he had gone to some festival and he had run
across the world's greatest joy scholar there. Now, you just
don't describe anybody like that except for maybe John Kid.
And I thought, okay, maybe he's in Brazil it.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Was a nudist festival, or he's just a newdist too. No.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
No, he was a nudist and all of his blogs
are about nudism. The mention of the joy scholar was
actually a fully clothed festival, a music festival.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
It must be really good music if nudists are willing
to put on clothes for it, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
And so then I wrote back to the Finnegans Wag
scholar in Romania, who said, well, you know, I was
trying to get Kid to write the intro to my
addition of Finnegan's Wake, and he said he would, and
then you know, he just then you just stopped answering.
I just figured he disappeared or maybe died. And then
(17:35):
she gave me the email address that she had last used.
And so one Sunday morning, I just wrote a note
and said I'm Jack Hitch, but he you and I
corresponded once a long time ago about the CD ROM
version of Ulysses, and I was wondering if we could
catch up. You know, it'd been thirty years since that correspondence.
(17:58):
And first thing Monday morning, I opened up my email
and there's a reply from John Kidd saying, oh, yes,
I remember you, and he not only remembered all of
our conversations.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
First, by the.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Way, I didn't even know if it was him, but
he put enough detail of what he remembered of our
conversation that I knew it was him. And then at
one point I said, you know, you haven't responded to
all of these people. People think your email is dead
and that you're dead, and I'm just wondering. It was like,
did you respond to my email? Because our names seem
(18:31):
to have a kind of Joysian connection. And he wrote back,
and he was so thrilled that I had made that
observation that Jack Hit and John Kidd are sort of
orthographically related, two names with four letters. Our last names
have double letter endings, iambic names that come at you
(18:54):
like two shotgun blasts, and it might be like an
obscenity in some other language, you know.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
But he loved it that and.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Wrote me this long note about how our names are
so familiar and related. And yes, that was one of
the reasons why he responded to my email.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Which, how do you feel after all this time that
you finally found him? I was so thrilled, Like, are
you telling your family what's going on? Well?
Speaker 2 (19:22):
I immediately wrote my editor at the New York Times magazine,
and of course, you know, no editor knew the story
because this story reaches out over thirty years. So I
had to go back and like basically re educate them
about the whole New York Review book things and then
the homeless thing.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
And so they send you to find kid in Brazil.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Well, I asked John if I could come down and
talk to him about Ulysses, and he said, sure, if
you're in Rio, give me a ring. So I called.
So when I wrote this bitch, I said he's in
Rio waiting for me, and they were like, Okay, get
a ticket and let's go.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
When you finally meet him, does he seem sane? Does
he look normal? Does he like? What's your vibe on
this guy?
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Well, I'm six one and I'd say that John Kidd
is easily my height or taller. At this point, he
still had this sort of blondish white hair, but it
was halfway down his back. His hair was well and
again Dolphie and territory.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Does he have the beard too or just the hair? No,
just the hair. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
It was clear that every detail of this fight, going
all the way back to nineteen nineteen eighties, every textual critique,
every jot and tittle, the big dot, all of that
stuff was as fresh in his mind as anything. It
was nothing crazy about him. He was just he was
still the textual master of Joyce's ulysses. I'd be sitting
(20:53):
there with my random house or my gabbler and he
would just grab it from me and flip it open
and point to where he.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Was talking about. Oh he would know the page.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Oh yeah, yes, And.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Does that feel like, oh, this guy's just spent a
lot of time on this or this guy is a
different kind of brain.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Totally a different kind of brain. When we went to
his house, and his house was just, I mean almost
comical in that every piece of open space was had
books on it.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
And you also said, I love this that he is
still pissed off about that Boston Globe article about the
pigeons exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
He was furious that they described him as homeless and like,
you know, pennyless and living on the streets. And he
pulls out a bank statement from the year of that
Boston Globe article to show me that he had a
running balance of over fifteen thousand dollars in his checking account.
I mean, he just had that at the ready, like
(21:48):
when we sat down. He just pulled that out of
his coat pocket.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
And why do you say this book never came out?
His addition of ulysses.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So the editor you know whom I spoke to, you know,
eventually just gave up because so many years had passed
and they had not you know, gotten anything, but they
had gotten like an introduction and some piece of it.
And kid told me that, you know, parts of it
are whatever we're sent to the editor and got.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Lost got lost. That seems unlikely.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yes, back in the days when everything happened by mail,
there is some version of this attempt at this book
that did get published. And I went to look for
this thing and had paintings in it by Robert Motherwell.
And only one hundred and seventy five of these books
were ever published. So this just adds more, you know,
lore to the publishing history of this book by the way.
(22:37):
I went on Amazon and found one for sale. It
costs twenty five, six hundred and seventy eight dollars. It's
an impossible thing to find, but yeah, they're out there.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
And what did kids say he's done since leaving Bu?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Well, he went through this period of the Dream of
the Red Chamber, right, which is this you know, legendary
Asian novel.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
It's like the classic Chinese novel bits. It's very long, right,
super long. Have you ever tried to read that?
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I had not. I had friends in college. That was
the book they carried around, and so that was the
other book that was their big book. And so apparently
he lived in China for a long time and became
you know, a red ologist, that's what they're actually called,
who become obsessed with that book. And then eventually one
thing led or another, and he wound.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Up in Rio where he's working on some like Portuguese
big book. Right.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Right, So there was this book, you know, a century
or so ago that was very influential in terms of
ending slavery in Brazil, which ended shortly after our Civil war.
But it was sort of like Uncle Tom's Cabin to them,
and involved this person named Esora, and so he's he's
translating what he calls Esora Unbound.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
And he's still working on Ulysses or interested in ulyseser No.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I mean, you know, like I said, all every aspect
of the Joycean fight is very much alive in his mind,
but he's mostly consumed with this translation or adaptation of
Esora Unbound.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Okay, you write the amazing story. It comes out, and uh,
what's the reaction in general?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Well, I was amazed at how many people wanted to
rehabilitate him entirely and bring him back into the you know,
into the fold of academ and bring out his version
of Ulysses.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
But that's not going to happen, right, That's that was
or did that happen?
Speaker 2 (24:32):
I don't know how that left off. Okay, you know
I wrote him and said, these people want to contact you.
Can I forward them your email?
Speaker 1 (24:40):
He was like, absolutely, Okay, Well I found that. I'm sure, Yes,
you have the blog post or some such that he
wrote about your piece.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I haven't. I haven't read it. But tell me what
have you not read it? No?
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Hold on, hold on the New York Times review of books.
You I'm so excited now, I should double check this
now that I know you haven't read it, to make
sure it really is him. But I'm pretty sure I
can tell you if you start reading. Okay, I have
never claimed I was on the quest to perfect Ulysses,
(25:13):
or to edit a definitive Ulysses, or to concoct any
perfect edition. New York Times Magazine author Jack Hit simply
made that up, as he seems to have done with
several other things attributed to me by him. Or maybe
he has an uncredited source that inspired him to romanticize
my mundane drudgery as a tropical textologist and translator. Does
(25:34):
it sound like him so far? Oh?
Speaker 2 (25:35):
That's him, Yeah, totally. I even told my editor, I said,
of course, you know, the greatest attack on this piece
will be from John Kitt. Oh. You know, maybe you
can convince some of your friends to buy each of
us a copy of the Motherwell Edition of Ulysses to
round out our collections.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
You know, I bet we can start a dow, one
of those the web three dows and get them. We'll
buy one. We'll have one in no time. He has
a gofund me page exactly. That's easier. The Lesson of
Ulysses of course, is to be nice to your wife.
But the other lesson is that we need to stop
banning books. The fact that Ulysses was a band for
(26:16):
ten years in the US for being too sexually explicit
is insane. Like, listen to this part that they got
to set about, it's nothing. He must have come three
or four times with that tremendous, big red brute of
a thing he has. I thought the vein or whatever
the dickens they call it was going to burst through
his nose. Oh, come on, guys, it's a classic. It's
(26:38):
about to get hot.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
At the end of the show.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
What's next for joel Stein? Maybe he'll take a nap
er poker round online. Our show is produced by Joey
fish Ground, Mola Bard and Nishavenka. It was edited by
Lydia jedden Kopp. Our engineer is Amantha kay Wang and
our executive producer is Cathroinald Cheradah. Our theme song was
produced by Jonathan Colton. A special thanks to my voice
(27:06):
coach Bicky Merrick and my consulting producer Laurence Alasna. To
find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app Apple
Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel
Stein and this is Story of the Week.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
This is a completely illegal copy of Ulysses. This was
published by a pornographer in the sixties. But when you
get to the very last few pages, let me see
if I can show you this. Here's a page with
a penis a peter meter.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Wait, wait, wait, you threw out the word peter meter,
as if that's something that people know. Is that Is
that a ruler?
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, it's like a ruler to measure your penis.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Wait, that was a peter meter was a popular phrase
and thing at some point.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Absolutely
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.