Page 10-Thursday, June 10, 1982-The Mkhidan'Daily
EDUCATION SUFFERS AS GAME IMPROVES
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Pinball wizard flips for
ByIThe Associated Press
CONCORD, N.H. - Pop music booms
from a gigantic juke box. Lights flash,
alarms ring, and pinball machines
around the room whirr, buzz, and even
speak. Bob Lee hears nothing.
His face is impassive, lips tight, as
he stands before a pinball machine. Ina
boxer's stance, his knees flex, his hips
thrust forward and his hands slap the
flipper buttons. Lee double-flips a
magnificent save, gives a shake, bangs
down a target and slams the ball
around for the bonus.
Eight Ball - his favorite machine -
clacks off another free game. Lee does
not crack a smile. He keeps playing.
"I JUST LOVE pinball. It's part of
my life," the 19-year-old pinball wizard
says. "It's almost like I'm the only one
around for miles. It's like I'm almost
hypnotized."
Lee, the state pinball champion, is
tall, thin and slightly stooped. He says
he plays 25, maybe 30 hours a week.
He once played one machine for seven
hours. Pinball has strained his home
life and ruined his education. He won't
stop.
,If I didn't have to go home and eat to keep up my
strength, I'd stay allday.'
-Bob Lee,
pinball champ
"It's almost like a mystery," says
Lee. "I see the points there and I get
really excited. It builds up inside of
you. If I didn't have to go home and eat
to keep up my strength, I'd stay all
day."
LEE BECAME state champion by
racking up 5.6 million points on 2
machines in 2% hours. He once scored
4,782,860 points in a single game of
Eight Ball.
In the arcade, Lee is in the eye of a
howling electronics storm. Banks of
machines flash garishly, awash in
lights and colors. Some beckon in
metallic voices. Others offer mid-game
counsel.
"Try a tube shot," urges Xenon, of-
fering megapoints for a shot up a ramp
and down a clear plastic tube festooned
with flashing lights.
"HIT THE EIGHT ball," Eight Ball
prompts in stentorian tones.
Lee remains unflustered. "You've got to
be aware. You've got to be ready at all
times," he says.
A pinball player must instantly gauge
the changing trajectory of a rolling
steel ball, which ricochets through a
forest of bumpers, flip-down targets
and sink holes. The perfect touch
shakes the ball into optimum targets -
or out of trouble spots. Lightning reac-
tions keep flippers aflurry and the ball
in play.
"I GOT REFLEXES," Lee says.
"And it's the way I stand - I position
myself."
It wasn't a paying job until Lee took
home a three-foot trophy and $300 in
prize money from a tournament last
month, sponsored by Funspot, an ar-
glory
Orcade in Concord.
"Would you rather see him smoking
pot in a bar," asks Lee's father, Robert.
"The Funspots are clean and well run.
It's a social event for him."
AT FIRST, THE elder Lee was op-
posed to his son's playing. "It was the
money then," he says. "He earns his
own now."
The expense was high when Lee star-
ted playing six years ago - sometimes
$5 for an hour's play. But Lee stuck with
it. He can play now for hours on a single
quarter. He can win free balls, free
games and high scores on any machine.
Even with the free games, the ex-
citement and the recognition, there's a
cost. Lee, now a year out of Concord
High School, lasted just one semester in
vocational-technical college.
Lee has a carpentry job and does
grounds work. "With carpentry work, I
can make something of myself," he
says.
But whatever his future, Lee says
pinball will be in it. "Sometimes I get
the urge to play, and no matter where I
am, I'll find a machine," he says. "I'm
not hooked on it. I just love it."
in Dublin
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Centenary of James Joyce celebrated
(Continued from Page 5)
"Anna Livia," Joyce's affectionate
name for Dublin's river; readings and
dramatic productions will be staged,
and a symposium of scholars and
writers will fill the capital's lecture
halls.
Although Joyce's birthday was
marked last Feb. 2, the centenary
calendar focuses on June 16, "Bloom-
sday," the day in 1904 that was the set-
ting for the novel "Ulysses," his most
famous work, a thick slice of daily
Dublin life starring the ever-on-the-
move Leopold Bloom.
THE GOVERNMENT radio network
RTE will present a 36-hour non-stop
reading of all of "Ulysses" beginning at
6:30 a.m. June 16. And in the most
Joycean of events, an acting company
of more than 100 will bring the novel's
"Wandering Rocks" chapter to life on
street corners, in shops and waysides
across Dublin.
Bloom and Stephen Dedalus will
again walk the Liffey's quays. Buck
Mulligan will take tea and crumpets at
a cafe. Actors playing Father Conmee,
Mrs. Daniel Sheehy and a host of other
characters will pass or meet in dozens of
small vignettes, climaxing with the
viceregal procession through the city,
watched by thousands of ordinary
Dubliners, along with Joyce's
Dubliners.
All in commemoration of a man who
left Dublin at age 22 because, he later
said, to stay would have been "to rot."
HE AND HIS companion, Irish-
woman Nora Barnacle, lived in Italy,
France and Switzerland for the next four
decades, rearing two children but not
marrying until their later years, and
then only for reasons of inheritance.
His collection of short stories,
"Dubliners," and semi-
autobiographical novel, "Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man," were both
published in 1914 after great difficulty
in finding publishers. "Ulysses" was
published in France in 1922, and his
final work, the sometimes lyrical, often
dense and still puzzling "Finnegan's
Wake," was brought out in 1939.
His concerns with sex, his frontal
assaults on Ireland's Roman Catholic
Church and Irish backwardness, his
'Future generations of Irish will claim Joyce as
they now claim Swift.'
-Irish writer Sean O'Faolain,
upon Joyce's death
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Joyce
... his work still debated
frank portrayals of the vulgar side of
Dublin life, his insistence on using real-
life characters to people his fiction-all
outraged many in the Irish establish-
ment. His books were effectively ban-
ned in Ireland during his lifetime.
THE INTENSITY and frequent ob-
scurity of Joyce's writing also won him
literary enemies.
"How can one plow through such
stuff?" Irish novelist George Moore
complained. "Joyce is a nobody from
the Dublin docks; no family, no
breeding."
When the notorious exile died in 1941
at age 59 in Zurich, the Irish Catholic
magazine Rosary intoned, 'The in-
fluence of Joyce as a writer was an out-
standing evil one."
BUT AT THE same time Irish writer
Sean O'Faolain sounded a prophetic
note. "Future generations of Irish will
claim Joyce as they now claim Swift,"
he wrote.
"He had the fixed idea that if he
returned to Dublin someone would
shoot him," Irish artist Arthur Power,
probably Joyce's last surviving close
friend, recalls ina memoir.
If he could come home today, Joyce
would see first how the face of his city
has changed-the signs for Sony video
and Fuji Film looming at the foot of
O'Connell Street bridge; the Old Ken-
tucky restaurant that has replaced
Graham Lemon's sweet shop, where
Bloom spied the Christian Brother
buying butterscotch; the four-cylinder
roar that has overtaken the "jingle of
harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing" on
fashionable GraftonsStreet, the ruins
that once were No. 7 Eccles St., famous
address of Leopold and Molly Bloom.
BUT HE would find, too, that much of
his old Dublin lingers-in Mulligan's,
Mooney's and countless other elderly
pubs drenched with the air of Guinness
ale, which Joyce saluted as "the free,
the froh, the frothing freshener"; in
Brown Thomas and other shopfronts on
Grafton, "gay with housed awnings;"
in Sweny the Chemist's, where Bloom
bought a bar of lemon soap for Molly; in
the brawny Dublin policeman; in the
beggars.
Where Bloom encountered a "two
apples a penny !" peddler woman on the
O'Connell Street bridge, a frayed old
lady still sells apples from a battered
baby carriage-22 pence each.
Where Buck Mulligan took a dip in
the "Forty Foot" swimming hole south
of the city, men and boys still descend
the steps into chilly Dublin Bay.
AND ABOVE the Forty Foot still sits
the Martello Tower, the converted ar-
tillery fort where Joyce lived briefly in
1904 and where "Ulysses" opens, with
Buck Mulligan ascending the "dark
winding stairs." The 34 steps are well-
lighted now; the tower is a Joyce
museum.
Beneath the surface, Dublin attitudes
have changed. "We're no longer a
remote backward outpost," said
Norris. "Censorship is very much a
dead letter now . . . The moves to
change the laws on contraception, on
homosexuality, on divorce and abortion
... I think he would be quite pleased."
Joyce remains an exile, however,
even in death, buried in Zurich's Flun-
tern Cemetery.
"It doesn't matter," Norris said.
"They used to ask him, 'When are you
coming back to Dublin?'
"'Have l ever left?' he'd say."
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'How can one plow through such stuff? Joyce is a
nobody from the Dublin docks; no family, no
breeding.'
-Irish novelist George Moore,
a contemporary of James Joyce
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