“My friend, where are you coming from, at this hour?”

The student answered him:
“From the spirit-evocative, grandiosely illustrious, manifoldly celebrated academy which one vociferates as Lutetia.”

“What did he just say?” Pantagruel asked one of his companions.

“From Paris,” he answered.

“Ah, so you come from Paris,” Pantagruel continued. “And what do you do all day, you and all the other gentlemanly students in Paris?”

The student answered:
“We transmigrate the Seineian flow, both matutinally and nocturnally. We perambulate the transecting metropolitan arteries and assorted urban intersectional quadrant points. We converse continuously in Latinate verbalizations, and like veritable connoisseurs of aspects amatory we endeavor to captivatingly incur the benevolence of the universally magistrate, multiplicitously engendered, and ultimately endogenous feminine sex. At suitably appropriate intervals we ensure that we incarnate ourselves in certain well-defined habitations and, in an utterly ecstatic venereal transport, we inculcate our virile members into the most interiorally located recesses of the pudenda of these meretricious but supremely amiable personages. Then we engage in gustatorial ingestion at the meritorious quaffing establishments of the Pine Cone, the Castle, the Magdalen, and the Mule, imbibing inter alia appropriately elongated comestibles, liberally perforinated with quantities of aromatic herbal concoction. On occasion, the hazards of aleatoric existence being what they are, and our pecuniary chambers being entirely evacuated of their contents, inclusive of all assorted metallic substances of recognized potency in such affairs, we obligatorily terminate our parsimony through the vendation of our printed textual sources, and equally of the habilitating furnishings of our persons, pending to be sure the anticipated arrival of alleviating remunerations from the trusted ancient source of original domestic succor.”

To which Pantagruel said:
“What the devil kind of language is this? By God, you must be some kind of heretic.”

François Rabelais, Pantagruel

“Well, gentlemen,” says the landlord , “I reckoned you-all would be inquiring this morning. You all dropped off of the nine-thirty train here last night; and you was right tight. Yes, you was right smart in liquor. I can inform you that you are now in the town of Mountain Valley, in the State of Georgia.”

“On top of that,” says Caligula, “don’t say that we can’t have anything to eat.”

“Sit down, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “and in twenty minutes I’ll call you to the best breakfast you can get anywhere in town.”

That breakfast turned out to be composed of fried bacon and a yellowish edifice that proved up something between pound cake and flexible sandstone. The landlord calls it corn pone; and then he sets out a dish of the exaggerated breakfast food known as hominy; and so me and Caligula makes the acquaintance of the celebrated food that enabled every Johnny Reb to lick one and two-thirds Yankees for nearly four years at a stretch.

“The wonder to me is,” says Caligula, “that Uncle Robert Lee’s boys didn’t chase the Grant and Sherman outfit clear up into Hudson’s Bay. It would have made me that mad to eat this truck they call mahogany!”

“Hog and hominy,” I explains, “is the staple food of this section.”

“Then,” says Caligula, “they ought to keep it where it belongs. I thought this was a hotel and not a stable. Now, if we was in Muskogee at the St. Lucifer House, I’d show you some breakfast grub. Antelope steaks and fried liver to begin on, and venison cutlets with chili con carne and pine-apple fritters, and then some sardines and mixed pickles; and top it off with a can of yellow clings and a bottle of beer. You won’t find a layout like that on the bill of affairs of any of your Eastern restauraws.”

“Too lavish,” said I. “I’ve travelled, and I’m unprejudiced. There’ll never be a perfect breakfast eaten until some man grows arms long enough to stretch down to New Orleans for his coffee and over to Norfolk for his rolls, and reaches up to Vermont and digs a slice of butter out of a spring-house, and then turns over a beehive close to a white clover patch out in Indiana for the rest. Then he’d come pretty close to making a meal on the amber that the gods eat on Mount Olympia.”

“Too ephemeral,” says Caligula, “I’d want ham and eggs, or rabbit stew, anyhow, for a chaser. What do you consider the most edifying and casual in the way of a dinner?”

“I’ve been infatuated from time to time,” I answers, “with fancy ramifications of grub such as terrapins, lobsters, reed birds, jambolaya, and canvas-covered ducks; but after all there’s nothing less displeasing than a beefsteak smothered in mushrooms on a balcony in sound of the Broadway street cars, with a hand-organ playing down below, and the boys hollering extras about the latest suicide. For the wine, give me a reasonable Ponty Cany. And that’s all, except a demi-tasse.”

“Well,” says Caligula, “I reckon in New York you get to be a coniseer; and when you go around with a demi-tasse you are naturally bound to buy ’em stylish grub.”

“It’s a great town for epicures,” says I. “You’d soon fall into their ways if you was there.”

“I’ve heard it was,” says Caligula. “But I reckon I wouldn’t. I can polish my fingernails all they need myself.”

O. Henry, “Hostages to Momus”

This time, he rings off. He then gets up. He shaves. He has his coffee. Very depressing. Everyone’s in the same state. He tries to laugh it off, defiantly. And in doing so he becomes even more like everyone else. He puts his right foot into his right sock and his left foot into his left sock; he puts on his braces; he buttons up his flies; he takes out a clean handkerchief; he double-locks his door; he doesn’t say good morning to his concierge. Outside, he says: “Good God, what weather!” It is raining. He takes advantage of the fact to perform his little experiment. When the rain is very heavy, it forms a mirror and you can see yourself on all sides. It’s very pleasant for the back and the profile. When he raises his foot, three million feet rise with it. When he scratches his ear, three million hands scratch three million ears. They are my hands, my feet. Or rather my hand, my foot. Oh, look, I’ve put my jacket on inside out. Inside out? Yes, north, south, east and west, three million jackets inside out. Latirail stops. The jackets continue on their way. My God, what’s happening? The other one moves on. It’s me that’s moving. Hey, wait, I’m just coming!

He bumps into a gentleman.

“Oh, excuse me, I thought it was me…”

The gentleman looks very surprised.

Damn, it didn’t work, thinks Latirail. First time I took myself for someone else.

The gentleman has walked on. He is thinking exactly the same thing. He too was performing an experiment and he bumped into Latirail. He is very annoyed. He thought it was an original experiment. So he invents another one and bumps into Latirail again:

“This time, Monsieur, would you please put your jacket on right side out. It’s been annoying me a great deal.”

“But, Monsieur…”

It wasn’t Latirail any more. It was someone else. Latirail was standing off, observing the scene with some concern.

Robert Pinget, Mahu, or the Material

Were they indefinitely inactive?
At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Similarly?
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.

What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the invisible audible collateral organ of the other?
To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity, reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pilosity. To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised (1st January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine excrescences as hair and toenails.

James Joyce, Ulysses

My mother is a fish.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying