Sunday, December 23, 2012

Introduction

"Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space?"
- Finnegans Wake, p. 558

Welcome.

In this space shall begin a collection of content related to James Joyce's masterwork Finnegans Wake. Because of the book's rationality-shattering style, virtually nobody tends to read it or even talk about it much. Even many scholars of Joyce don't take his final work seriously. As such, contemporary and regularly updated websites related to this mysterious text are in short supply.

This blog is here to fill that void. It's also an inevitable result of closely studying the book while maintaining a blog (called A Building Roam) featuring not only Joyce but all the other galaxies of culture I've been immersed in. Over the last six months I'd been devoted to reading the Wake in its entirety along with some interpretative guides and with all the notes I've taken it became clear that the Wake was about to take over my other blog. So I've started this one instead.

Here you can expect to find links to articles, papers, videos, and any other media that sheds light on Joyce's book of the night. Mainly, though, I plan to be posting interpretations, reflections, meditations on parts of the text, whether chapters, paragraphs, sentences, single words, or even the entire book as a whole.

This website shall also serve as the homepage for the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, a group that meets once a month here in Austin, TX to read and discuss the text. We normally hold meetings on the first Tuesday of each month at the Twin Oaks Library in South Austin on the corner of Mary and 5th St. If you have any questions about the group, feel free to e-mail me: finwakeaustin@gmail.com.