© Sauce*Box, Fall 1996.
All rights revert to author.
Whatza Saucebox?
by T.L. Kelly
"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.
The coals were reddening."
In my search through the web to find out what exactly is a "saucebox," I found this, which begins "Episode Four" of James Joyce's Ulysses, which is graciously provided online by the scholar and professor James J. O'Donnell. And what a surprise it was to find in the middle of this rich episode a one word sentence. "Saucebox." And so carefully placed. And it turns out that Joyce writes in a manner that often makes its way into Sauce*Box - a sort of schizophrenic, raw, passionate writing style, the sort of writing that grabs you and feels you up when you read it. That's what Sauce*Box is about, really. It's not about keeping one hand on the keyboard while the other is masturbating - it's about writing that is so rich and sensual and raw and passionate, it is erotic in and of itself.
And so when readers write to me now, asking why Sauce*Box doesn't have pictures of naked people or letters like in Penthouse that start out "I couldn't believe it would happen to me, but there I was, in the back of the bus with three blonde bimbos with huge tits," I have decided that I will reply by sending them back Episode Four of Joyce's Ulysses and letting them figure out for themselves what reading passionate work that is almost better than sex is all about. Orgasm for the mind. And you don't even have to take one hand off the keyboard. Why, you can read Sauce*Box at work, at your 9-5 job in your cubicle, and you just might go outside after work and see how sensual the world is when your mind is as alive and awake as Joyce's when he wrote "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." Or when Chris Hagelstein wrote "In the aftermath of a mid-summer blazed day which fried the city of Dallas into charred anthrax," or when Jemiah Jefferson wrote "My hand shook and spilled the cream into the saucer," or when Ernest Slyman penned "There is no nakedness like love."
Good erotica is an expression of a vulnerable truth that displaces us from where we think we know everything, makes us shift in our seats, makes us squirm. The writing that makes it into Sauce*Box does this, and every now and then in the writing a sexual act occurs because it's part of the natural progression in a world that is changing in complicated and marvelous ways. But long before the sex was mentioned, you were already squirming, weren't you?
We hope so.
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