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Robert

Roman

Empire

RED BRICK ALLEY STORIES

The Killards Are Coming

Every damn day in Religion Class, Sister Anna Banana yapped about the Soviets revving up to start a nuclear war with the new president, Ronald Reagan. She said after the cities burned to Holy Hell, there’d be something called “nuclear winter” that would kill all... 

Double-Strength Demon Dogs

Fantastic Freddie was the only altar boy from the Red Brick Alley. He was always consecrating Ritz Crackers and trying to make us eat them like communion wafers. He light-fingered incense from the sacristy, and he blessed water from Old Lady Tully’s spigot...

Laser Loop

I couldn’t see over the tall green school bus seat except when we hit a pothole and I bounced up in the air like a Pop-Tart jumping out of a toaster. Nobody at Saint Augie’s could believe I was allowed to go. My first school picnic ever. I was good from the day I handed in my pink...

The Boy Wonder

How the Hell did Jaggerbush get himself up there? He was clawing his way up into the open window above the Science class door like a real-life gargoyle. The blockhead of a wooden mallet stuck out of the back of his Toughskins where his butt crack was. He wore three...

About The Author

Rob.jpg

Robert Roman grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, where he sold newspapers to cars from a concrete island. Read more→

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  • Robert Roman
    • Feb 5, 2023

My Own Private Ulysses: Nabokov on Nausicaa



While banging out Lolita, Naughty Nabokov slummed it at Cornell. His lecture notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses describe the incriminating Nausicaa episode as “a sustained parody of feminine magazine or novelette prose with all the clichés and false elegances of that kind.”

I'm unschooled in the vast literature “of that kind.” I somehow dodged the required reading of Jane Austen novels and their endless adaptations, zombies included. The only romance novel I’ve ever read is Fight Club.

This utter lack of qualification didn’t stop one creative visionary from hiring me to perform a lickety-split, uncredited re-write of a Hallmark Channel movie. The usual script paramedics must have been ignoring their beepers that weekend. I don’t recall the title: The Something Somewhere of Saint Somebody. It stared Jeopardy! champion Cheech Marin as a Catholic priest. I’m not sure what role Chong played. That’s a whole other podcast.

Besides reading thousands of Bumble profiles (looking at the pictures anyway), I remain woefully ignorant of the romance genre.

And yet, I love the Gerty MacDowell half of Ulysses' Nausicaa episode, every “cliché,” every “false elegance,” every single sentence.

Wait until my psychotic sparring partners at the mixed martial arts gym hear about this one.


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