I first heard the song in my teens in the late 70s, probably on Dr. Demento, had read the Classics Illustrated of The Odyssey, seen the Kirk Douglas film Ulysses, and had vague knowledge of an old scandalous book James Joyce’s Ulysses.
I thought from the first it was a reference to the latter, due to the disturbing nature of a camp coach reading it & yes, he was reading naughty stuff so the boys wouldn’t be gay.
I’m really surprised there’s a debate.
The only context in which the kid knows that a book called Ulysses exists is the context in which he found the book in his parents’ bedroom when he was snooping around one day. All he needs to know is that his parents are not going to read it to him, and they probably won’t be happy to learn that somebody else is.
The whole letter is about him finding strategies to get his parents to bring him home.
Agreed. And if we simply must find a justification for “sissies” being in there, it’s perfectly plausible to suppose that the boy’s father tried to cajole his son into some enthusiasm for camp by saying it would keep him from becoming a sissy (or something along those lines).
Loving this thread, by the way. That said, when we do a thread about the Camp Granada Redux song, we won’t have to debate this much about the meaning of:
Every night, the campfire’s really keen,
(oh, Ma: please send some Unguentine)
Yep. It’s also hilarious that the boy is in danger of being eaten by alligators and bears, and that his campmates are being poisoned by the food and contracting malaria. Pro tip: comedy doesn’t work if you take it seriously.
For fuck’s sake, I didn’t say it was necessarily being taught to him that very year, just that it was commonly on the curriculum in school. I personally had reached the ripe old age of 13 when we read The Odyssey in English class. Made a big impression on me, as a matter of fact. I sure didn’t go around referring to it as “something called Ulysses.” 
Exactly.
It doesn’t matter, because it never happened. It’s not just Sherman who needs a rhyme, but the kid himself who needs to stick something in there, so he sticks in Ulysses. It might not be any book at all. It might just be a word floating around the kid’s head that for some reason sounds vaguely bad to him. It’s a device. It gets you from here to there.
The kid is writing the letter on the first day of camp, where it has been raining all day, and there is nothing to do. There may not even be a “coach.” Then, it stops raining, and kids start coming out and playing ball and doing other things, and the kid abandons his letter.
Albeit, if this were a poll, I’d vote for Joyce, just because the construction “he reads to us from something called ‘Ulysses,’” sounds like he’s reading from a single book, with “Ulysses” on the cover, not a relatively short poem (for Tennyson), which would be in a collection of poetry. I, too, have never seen The Odyssey published under Ulysses. Looking up “Homer Ulysses” on Amazon brings up DVDs.
It is hilarious that you feel comfortable enough with this insanity to be condescending about it.
It doesn’t matter whether Odysseus or Ulysses is more recognizable. This is because neither Ulysses nor Odysseus is the name of anything by Homer. And because Ulysses is recognizable as the name of a different work. By James Joyce.
There is no work by Homer called Ulysses. When you are discussing works “called Ulysses,” right off the bat you can exclude the one by Homer, on account of it not existing. Ulysses? By James Joyce or by Homer? Oh, that’s right, the one by Homer doesn’t exist; it must be the one that does exist.
Except that (and my memory may be hazy) but there’s no *straight erotica *in Ulysses. There’s a passage that refers to the main character masturbating.
It doesn’t matter what is actually in Joyce’s Ulysses. All that matters to the boy writing the letter is that his parents will read “Ulysses” and assume “porn.”
But, assuming the Head Coach really did read to them this first rained out day, Joyce would not turn them from being “sissies”.
And porn would be Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Maybe The Catcher in the Rye. Kinsey. Tropic of Cancer. Moll Flanders.
Not Ulysses.
But Ulysses had the reputation for being porn. The reputation is all that matters in the context of this song.
As for keeping boys from being sissies: I have a relative who was married to a man who used to show their toddler sons centerfolds, and tell them what they (the toddlers) were supposed to do to the centerfolds. He was that terrified that they’d grow up gay.
There’s a lot of that about (and has been for decades, if not centuries).
In some parts of redneck country, when a boy got to be a teenager, his father would take him to a prostitute to “make him a man”. That mindset lasted well past the 1960s.
Yeah, I’ve changed my mind about this: I originally considered that Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” was the more likely reference because the kid was trying to stress how awful and not-fun he found the camp experience (“the coach makes us listen to boooring ‘heroic’ Victorian poetry instead of playing games!”).
But subsequent posts have persuaded me that it’s more about the kid trying to horrify his parents about how dangerous and unsuitable the camp is. He’s trying to pitch the tale that he’s in serious physical and moral jeopardy at camp rather than that he’s just having a lousy time there, and in that context the Joyce reference makes more sense.
And the personal testimony of older Dopers who say that they associated the reference with Joyce’s Ulysses when the song first came out seals the deal for me.
Man, I can’t believe we’ve practically done a doctoral dissertation defense debate here over an Allan Sherman novelty song! 
In case the raging debate shows signs of dying down, here’s another bit of ambiguity to consider:
In my mind, the kid is not inventing horrifying scenarios. This is all stuff that actually happened. The humor comes from the over-the-top horror: malaria, alligators, missing children, coaches reading erotica; and then juxtaposed with the final line, which means none of that matters because the sun came out.
(In the early 60s, the idea of an adult reading porn to children was so far-fetched that it didn’t cause any shock - it was just funny.)
Nothing in the letter really happened. That’s the joke.
The only solution may be for someone to come up with a photo with an unidentified guy in it.
Many boys growing up at that time discovered that the horrid erotica kept from us was hardly erotic at all.
Not just boys. As a teen in the mid-70’s I was leafing hopefully through the Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence novels on my parents’ bookshelves and finding them pretty meh in that regard.
Some of the offending language:
Well, I sure don’t feel like a sissy now.