The high-brow world of literary scholarship was thrown into disarray earlier this week when lost manuscripts by the great Irish author James Joyce were discovered in one of Paris’ infamous northern suburbs by a team of French construction workers.

These priceless documents – which include fragments of a previously unknown sequel to Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses – were unearthed by the workmen during the building of a controversial new scenic landscape over a much-loved stretch of dual carriageway. This news comes as a further embarrassment to an already beleaguered intellectual community still reeling from several high-profile discoveries of lost Modernist texts by French construction workers.

Joyce’s Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom (a middle-aged advertising salesman), Stephen Dedalus (a melancholic young writer) and Bloom’s wife Molly (a successful concert singer who suffers from a rare form of PDD, or Punctuation Deficiency Disorder). During the course of the vast novel, Bloom takes a stroll through the streets of Dublin, forms an unlikely bond with Stephen, visits a whorehouse and finds out that Molly has been cheating on him. These events all take place within the course of a single day – 16^th June 1904 – and, on account of this, the novel is often cited as a major influence on the hit television series ‘24’.

For Joyce’s legion of fans, 16^th June 1904 is now affectionately referred to as ‘Bloomsday’ and every year they celebrate its anniversary by dressing up in Edwardian clothes, walking through the streets of Dublin and visiting local whorehouses for charity.

Experts have already determined that the Ulysses sequel – which Joyce provisionally entitled ‘Twolysses‘ – was to take place on 16^th June 1914, exactly 10 years’ after Ulysses and just prior to the outbreak of the First World War (which, as historians have been quick to point out, eventually had a sequel of its own). As well as a new date, there was also a new location: while its illustrious predecessor was famously set in the Irish capital city of Dublin, for the sequel Joyce relocated the inaction to the English second city of Birmingham (or ‘Brum’, as it was then known).

According to local historian Professor Charlie Chin, this change in setting was prompted by an “innovative local government cultural regeneration initiative” that offered “bostin’ (tr. ‘splendid’) tax breaks” to “arty-farty types” who agreed to move to “Birmingham”. Joyce, of course, was unwilling to leave Paris on account of his fondness for mille-feuille, pain au chocolat and other French pastries, so negotiated a deal with Birmingham’s civic leaders to relocate his characters instead. Ironically, the Irish government launched a similar scheme in 1969 to lure artistic migrants to the Emerald Isle, but the tax cuts were funded by an inheritance tax hike and Joyce would have ended up financially worse off on account of him already being dead.

The sequel was to feature the three main protagonists of Ulysses – Bloom, Stephen and Molly – interacting with fellow fictional characters and real-life historical figures from the area like Joseph Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain and Richard Chamberlain. As the novel opens, we find Stephen Dedalus – now in his early 30s – living in Perrott’s Folly, an abandoned Martello Tower in the Edgbaston district of the city which dates back to a time when Birmingham had a thriving coastline. Stephen shares the tower with a group of boisterous history students from the nearby University whose excessive drinking and late-night partying remind him bitterly of how he used to behave in a previous novel. At the end of the first chapter he storms into the communal kitchen area and confronts his tormentors by shouting: “Historians are the nightmare that keep me awake at nights!” This becomes a recurring theme of the novel, despite the fact that nobody in the book takes any notice of it.

Disillusioned by life, Stephen has all but abandoned his literary ambitions and now works at Digbeth’s famous Old Crown public house as its resident balladeer-balladist (an early form of singer-songwriter). His attempts at turning his complex theories on theology, philosophy and dermatology into toe-tapping crowd-pleasers have so far met with mixed success. This is partly due to the fact his radical and esoteric ideas are out of step with jingoistic pre-war mood of the period, and partly due to the venue’s poor acoustics.

Meanwhile, Bloom and Molly arrive in Birmingham at the nearby Digbeth Coach and Horse Station. When questioned by an obnoxious taxi driver en route to their lodgings at the Bartons Arms pub, Bloom claims he has come to the city to accompany his wife who has been booked to perform a selection of her hits at the prestigious Aston Hippodrome music hall. Privately, though, the advertising salesman is motivated by a strong desire to avoid Dublin on 16^th June as the Bloomsday festivities are starting to get embarrassing.

When Bloom discovers that Stephen Dedalus is living in the city, the two arrange to meet on the Number 11 Outer Circle tram so the “Bull Ring Befriending Bard” can take him on a guided tour of the city’s key residential areas, even though most of them are still fields. Unfortunately, Bloom boards a number 11 that is travelling along the route in a clockwise direction and Stephen boards another heading the opposite way. As a result the two characters never actually meet, although their respective buses briefly pass each other in Cotteridge. This seems to be an oblique reference to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics which states that any two particles moving in the opposite direction will eventually pass each other in Cotteridge.

Bloom and Stephen’s journeys are told in a variety of literary styles paralleling both their journey through the external environment of the Outer Circle route and their own respective inner-journeys of self-realization. This includes a chapter that’s written in the style of a bus timetable.

When Molly finds out about her husband’s planned rendezvous she’s incensed, having never forgiven Stephen for leaving the previous novel so abruptly. By way of revenge, she decides to resume her affair with sleazy showbiz impresario Blazes Boylan. Unfortunately, a bizarre backstage accident at the Hippodrome involving a case of HP Sauce falling from an overhead gantry renders Boylan incapacitated for several vital chapters and, in desperation, Molly is forced to arrange a hasty tryst with the woodwind section of the CBSO.

The novel ends with Molly meeting Bloom at a bus stop in Perry Barr and pledging to make him a breakfast of tea, toast, eggs and haddock the next morning. Bloom realizes that Molly only ever promises to makes him a breakfast of tea, toast, eggs and haddock after she’s been unfaithful, but decides it’s not worth having a row about. Stephen, of course, has already wandered out of the novel, just like he did the last time.

It now seems likely that Twolysses was part of the short-lived Modernist follow-up fad of the mid-1920s, in which many of the writers of the period tried to cash-in on their artistic credentials by turning their masterpieces into money-spinning franchises. The craze was started by the American poet T.S. Eliot, who ruthlessly exploited the popularity of his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by churning out several dozen artistically inferior and increasingly tawdry spin-offs. These included The Protest Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Power Ballad of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hardcore Dance Anthem of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Eliot’s fellow experimental writers were quick to jump on board this lucrative bandwagon. Besides Ulysses, other classic Modernist texts to receive the sequel treatment include Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (‘Second Wave’), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (‘2 Loud 2 Furious’) and Ezra Pound’s Cantos (‘The Wrath of Cantos’).

The follow-up fad came to an abrupt end in 1927 during a party held at Ernest Hemmingway’s Parisian home to commemorate the removal of one of the great writer’s more troublesome wisdom teeth. Joyce, Picasso and other leading lights of the Modernist movement were in attendance when a drunken Gertrude Stein gatecrashed the gathering, making lewd and disparaging comments about the guests’ artistic integrity and the host’s choice of hors d’oeuvres.

Devastated by these comments, Joyce swiftly threw away his canapé and discarded his drafts of Twolysses. Like so many other abandoned Modernist sequels of this period, it was subsequently used as roadfill by the local authorities.

In addition to the sequel to Ulysses, the recently discovered Joycean hoard also contained journals and personal correspondence together with an unfinished screenplay for a Laurel & Hardy feature film entitled ‘Agenbite of Nitwits’. From next week, members of the public will be able to view a selection of the documents at museums in Dublin and Birmingham for a limited period. After this, the manuscripts will return to France where they will be housed in the permanent collection of Modernist literature located at the Paris headquarters of the National Union of French Construction Workers.

Here’s something else I recently dug out from the archives. If you have no interest in comic books – or, for that matter, low humour – then I strongly suggest you look away now.

Some years’ ago, during my ever-so-brief stint as a small-press comics creator, I used to write a page of made-up news stories in the style of Marvel Comics’ old Bullpen Bulletins. Technically speaking, it was filler material. As Alphonse Karr would say: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

Be warned: there’s plenty more where this came from…

This autumn, London’s ICA will be hosting an exhibition dedicated to the notorious underground comix title, Outside Now!

Originally launched in 1964 by the now-defunct publishing house Bench Press Press, Outside, Now! featured cartoon interpretations of fact-based fights between the major comic creators of the day. As its former publisher Cornelius Numb recalls: “In those days, the comic industry was full of people from all sortsa different backgrounds. Like me, most of them started out on the bare-knuckle boxing circuit.”

Holding up a 1960s Fantastic Four comic, Numb continues: “You only got to look at a page of Jack Kirby artwork to see for yourself. Take a look at that bold foreshortening and tough, no-nonsense linework. Just imagine the amount of muscle that went into each of those pencil strokes. Now, try to imagine the kind of damage the fist clenching that pencil could do to your face. It’s no wonder we called him ‘King’.”

According to Numb, Kirby wasn’t the only Comic Book Clobberer or Silver Age Scrapper. “These were stand-up guys who settled things the old fashioned way. Take [Steve] Ditko, a skinny guy to look at, but a real dirty fighter all the same. He never gave up. I watched him beat seven shades of shinola out of Carmine Infantino and Bill Everett after a Marvel vs DC baseball game turned ugly. He kept screaming: ‘Submit to my will! Submit to my will!’ He really knew how to psyche out his opponents.

“We ran that fight in our double-sized Christmas 1971 issues. Despite their injuries, Steve, Bill and Carmine [all] collaborated on the strip. Say what you like, but those guys were pros.”

The magazine reached its peak in popularity during the 1970s, and Numb claims that mainstream publishers were quick to cash-in on the phenomena: “You ever see that Superman vs Muhammed Ali book that DC put out? I rest my case.”

During the 1980s, however, Outside, Now! experienced a sharp decline in sales. A new wave of comic book artists went straight into the industry from art school or advertising. “Most of them were derivative little sons of bitches who just wanted to imitate their favourite comic artists,” recalls Numb. “Those guys didn’t know the first thing about fighting.”

“I mean no disrespect, but most of these people were fans,” says Numb bitterly. “If you ask me fans shouldn’t be making comics, they should be reading them.” By the time the 80s came around the only people in the industry who’d fight on a regular basis were the letterers. People like John Costanza, Ken Bruzenak and Tom Frame tried to keep the tradition alive, but without the involvement of ‘hot’ comic artists of the day, the days of Outside, Now! were numbered.

“Those guys tried their best,” says Numb, “but what kind of chump wants to read a book that doesn’t have drawings?”