I have never claimed that I was on a quest to perfect Ulysses, or to edit a "definitive Ulysses," or to concoct any "perfect edition".<p>New York Times Magazine author Jack Hitt simply made that up, as he seems to have done with several other things attributed to me by him. Or maybe he has an uncredited source that inspired him to romanticize my mundane drudgery as a tropical textologist and translator.<p>The term I prefer is "authoritative," which is not a claim of "error-free input," something Hans Walter Gabler wrote that had attained in his 1984 "Ulysses : A Critical and Synoptic Edition."<p>In 1986 the claim of non-erroneousness was repeated twice in a gushing review of Gabler written by Geert Lernout in the _Revue Belge de Philologie_, which ends with these words : << It seems that Joyce finally got the error-free text he waited for in vain during his life-time. >><p>One nice symmetry of Then and Now is that Lernout became the first academic in Europe to assail me as having weird ideas about Joyce. Gabler's work is, we are told twice, "error-free," and Kidd, we are assured, is an eccentric crank who "has a whole series of pet theories . . ."<p>1986, 2018, Nothing new under the sun, Gabler-Kidd-wise and Kidd-Gabler-wise. Lernout literally declares, "Kidd is the kind of person who . . ." It does not get more ad hominem than that.<p>I would be interested to learn if anyone can find online any pre-2018 claim that I sought to produce the impossible "perfect edition" of any book. That false claim seems to have appeared first on the web on June 12, 2018. The online version of Jack Hitt's New York Times Magazine profile of me is called "The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar," but the paper publication with a cover date of June 17 is titled “In Search of the Perfect Ulysses.”<p>What is stranger or more eccentric than I myself supposedly am, is a journalist of such high intelligence as Jack Hitt attributing to me beliefs that he does not sustain by a single quotation from my published work, whether it be Joycean or Jungian, or a even poem out of my youth.<p>Come to think of it, Jack Hitt's beautifully written essay fails to give the title of any of my works. Those curious about what Hitt skimmed over without dipping his beak into the salt green sea, may consult an old CV of mine by Googling this phrase, enclosing it within quotation marks : "Curriculum Vitae of John Kidd"