tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62447554729822206112024-02-07T11:21:35.717-06:00Finnegans, Wake! "Wipe your glosses with what you know."
PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.comBlogger95125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-65004936241392515222024-01-19T16:30:00.002-06:002024-01-19T16:59:04.144-06:00Announcement: Venice Wake Reunion Event in Los Angeles, CA on Joyce's Birthday (2/2/24)<p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><b>28-Year Book Club Conquers Literary Everest</b></div><b><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Gains National Attention</b></div></b><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">Press Event: Reunion Party is Set for <b>Friday, February 2, 2024</b>, Venice, CA, on the birthday of James Joyce</p><p>Jan. 18, 2024 - (Venice Beach, CA) For many, reading <i>Finnegans Wake</i> would be a daunting undertaking. But after 28 years of perseverance, the Marshall McLuhan/<i>Finnegans Wake</i> Reading Club (a.k.a Venice Wake) in Venice Beach has finally reached the last page of James Joyce's infamous and widely considered unreadable novel. It took 28 years to read a novel that Joyce took 17 years to write! </p><p><b><u>Location: </u><br /></b>Venice - Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch Library<br />501 S. Venice Blvd. Venice, CA 90291 <br />https://www.lapl.org/branches/venice</p><p>We invite you to celebrate community & literature evoked by this line written by James Joyce from <i>Finnegans Wake</i> (p.154): "Let me be Los Angeles." </p><p>The book group will begin again on Friday, February 2, at 1:00 P.M. </p><p>Book club founder Gerry Fialka (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Fialka" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>) will read aloud the last and first lines of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> restarting the book where he began his book club 28 years ago beginning mid-sentence:</p><p></p><blockquote><b>riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.</b></blockquote><p></p><p><br /></p><p>Available for Reporters/Editors: </p><p>Archival Video Footage of the Venice '<i>Finnegan Wake</i>’ book club in action on YouTube (Courtesy of book-club member Duncan Echleson):</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o_s2m-oUlE" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o_s2m-oUlE</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa-xa8fLy2Y&t=28s" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa-xa8fLy2Y&t=28s</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM5lOcpzLQM&t=19s" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM5lOcpzLQM&t=19s</a></p><p>To learn more about the Marshall McLuhan/Finnegans Wake Reading Club (a.k.a Venice Wake), visit <a href="https://LaughTears.com/McLuhanWake.html " target="_blank">https://LaughTears.com/McLuhanWake.html </a></p><p></p><blockquote>"Fialka brings his distinctive approach. My phone interview with him lasted one hour and eight minutes, and its zigs, zags, and sheer velocity were unmatched in my nearly 20-year journalism career. Was I writing about <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, or was I suddenly inside it?" - Lois Beckett, <i>The Guardian</i> 11-12-23 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years</a></blockquote><p></p><p><br /></p><p>Marshall McLuhan/<i>Finnegans Wake</i> Reading Club is an independent, unaffiliated public-service literary group. Not a part of the LAPL.org. Free admission.</p><p>Book-club founder Gerry Fialka available for interviews on request at pfsuzy@aol.com </p><p>Recent NEWS articles about the Venice Wake's record-setting 28-year read-a-thon:</p><p>The Guardian (Sunday edition, called The Observer)<br /><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years</a></p><p>The Washington Post <br /><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/16/finnegans-wake-book-club-california" target="_blank">https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/16/finnegans-wake-book-club-california</a></p><p>and<br /><br />[Finnegans, Wake! blog]<br /><a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2023/11/guardian-observer-celebrates-galaxy-of.html" target="_blank">https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2023/11/guardian-observer-celebrates-galaxy-of.html</a></p><p>and<br /><br />Mental Floss <br /><a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/book-club-reading-james-joyce-finnegans-wake-30-years" target="_blank">https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/book-club-reading-james-joyce-finnegans-wake-30-years</a></p><p>and NEW YORK TIMES<br /><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/books/finnegans-wake-james-joyce-venice-book-club.html" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/books/finnegans-wake-james-joyce-venice-book-club.html</a></p><p>and RADIO:</p><p><a href="https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/venice-book-club-humperdinck-indigenous/finnegans-wake" target="_blank">https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/venice-book-club-humperdinck-indigenous/finnegans-wake</a></p><p>and</p><p><a href="https://www.wbur.org/npr/1213890392/this-book-club-finally-finished-finnegans-wake-it-only-took-them-28-years" target="_blank">https://www.wbur.org/npr/1213890392/this-book-club-finally-finished-finnegans-wake-it-only-took-them-28-years</a></p><p>and</p><p><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/finnegans-wake-book-club-1.7028252" target="_blank">https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/finnegans-wake-book-club-1.7028252</a></p><p>and TV:</p><p>CBS Evening News and more <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@gfa1930/videos" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCIAHiEwINU</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Worldwide news coverage, too:</p><p>Paris <a href="https://actualitte.com/article/113760/insolite/ce-club-de-lecture-a-mis-28-ans-pour-lire-finnegans-wake" target="_blank">https://actualitte.com/article/113760/insolite/ce-club-de-lecture-a-mis-28-ans-pour-lire-finnegans-wake</a></p><p>Poland <a href="https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/koktejl-v-kniznim-klubu-cetli-jedno-dilo-28-let-ted-si-to-chteji-zopakovat-40446363" target="_blank">https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/koktejl-v-kniznim-klubu-cetli-jedno-dilo-28-let-ted-si-to-chteji-zopakovat-40446363</a></p><p>Prague <a href="https://lubimyczytac.pl/czlonkowie-pewnego-klubu-czytelniczego-przeczytali-ksiazke-zajelo-im-to-duzo-czasu" target="_blank">https://lubimyczytac.pl/czlonkowie-pewnego-klubu-czytelniczego-przeczytali-ksiazke-zajelo-im-to-duzo-czasu</a></p><p>Pretoria <a href="https://maroelamedia.co.za/vreemdhede/boekklub-lees-28-jaar-lank-aan-een-boek/" target="_blank">https://maroelamedia.co.za/vreemdhede/boekklub-lees-28-jaar-lank-aan-een-boek/</a></p><p>Mandarin 第一本就選中「天書」<a href="http://WorldJournal.com/wj/story/122986/7516835" target="_blank">WorldJournal.com/wj/story/122986/7516835</a></p><p>Munich, Süddeutsche Zeitung <a href="https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/james-joyce-finnegans-wake-buchclub-lesen-1.6302605" target="_blank">https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/james-joyce-finnegans-wake-buchclub-lesen-1.6302605</a></p><p>Berliner-Zeitung <a href="https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/panorama/james-joyce-finnegans-wake-buchklub-liest-28-jahre-an-einem-buch-und-faengt-jetzt-wieder-von-vorn-an-li.2159346" target="_blank">https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/panorama/james-joyce-finnegans-wake-buchklub-liest-28-jahre-an-einem-buch-und-faengt-jetzt-wieder-von-vorn-an-li.2159346</a></p><p>Estadão, São Paulo, Brasil: <a href="https://digital.estadao.com.br/article/282303914871638" target="_blank">https://digital.estadao.com.br/article/282303914871638</a></p><p>Stockholm, Sweden: <a href="https://omni.se/bokklubben-laste-varldens-svaraste-bok-i-28-ar/a/0Q618E" target="_blank">https://omni.se/bokklubben-laste-varldens-svaraste-bok-i-28-ar/a/0Q618E</a></p><p>London Times <a href="http://theTimes.co.uk/article/book-club-takes-28-years-to-read-james-joyces-finnegans-wake-vfzvlgcm5" target="_blank">theTimes.co.uk/article/book-club-takes-28-years-to-read-james-joyces-finnegans-wake-vfzvlgcm5</a></p><p>Miami en Español <a href="https://www.infobae.com/leamos/2023/11/18/en-1995-empezaron-a-leer-una-novela-de-james-joyce-en-grupo-acaban-de-terminar" target="_blank">https://www.infobae.com/leamos/2023/11/18/en-1995-empezaron-a-leer-una-novela-de-james-joyce-en-grupo-acaban-de-terminar</a></p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-85508283587772360042023-12-23T11:58:00.003-06:002023-12-23T12:00:55.518-06:00The Solstice Maybe Wake Night <p>Maybe the longest night of the year is the night on which the dreamworld of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> unfolds? A remark by Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson in their <i>Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake</i> (1944) suggests they believe it may be so. From there sprung the premise for celebrating <i>Finnegans Wake</i> on the longest night of the year, <a href="https://www.maybeday.net/night/" target="_blank">HERE</a>, meticulously arranged by Bobby Campbell. This webpage features comics, videos, links to various Wake-related subject matters (including links to recent blog posts by Oz Fritz on crossovers between the likes of <a href="https://oz-mix.blogspot.com/2023/12/overlaps-and-folds-between-aleister.html" target="_blank">Aleister Crowley</a> and <a href="https://oz-mix.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-hermetic-transmission-of-francois.html" target="_blank">Francois Rabelais</a> with Joyce), and other audio-visual Joycean treasures. There's a recording of a panel I participated in with several others, discussing all things Joyce and <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, plus Robert Anton Wilson, and also touching on Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero theory. </p><p><br /></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><a href="https://www.maybeday.net/night/" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="1389" data-original-width="1080" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTBMvAmMhbc5DYNJo62LVxu-ORzSo3m_VpLhnptn_m1oc6Qi6CwdwYlDb4Nf-_6LO61LsoC_gk7z2asScsM0jYBELWqj6G4vezPIDEBTm8vDCBLkuvuEw0oCo3l-jmqO21nYftw18FI72C027b3aKmxhdAT-UgIp5-qh1fm8eC7zJR1mF9Rmegvc4NBx5n/w311-h400/ALP-AND-HCE-1080.jpg" width="311" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.maybeday.net/night/" target="_blank">Maybe Night, Solstice 2023</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p>In the panel session, I mentioned Harry Levin's book <i>James Joyce: A Critical Introduction</i>, which was originally published by New Directions in 1941. Despite being one of the earliest critical works discussing <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, it still stands as a great entry point, on par with the <i>Skeleton Key</i>. (Later in the discussion I mentioned a quote that I forgot the attribution for, and it turns out that was from Levin's book: "The peculiarity of Joyce’s later writing is that any page presupposes a reading knowledge of the rest of the book. On the other hand, to master a page is to understand the book. The trick is to pick out a passage where a break-through can be effected.") </p><p><i>Time Magazine</i> <a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,766359,00.html" target="_blank">reviewed</a> Levin's book in 1942, noting that Joyce himself felt it was a rare reading which caught onto what he was doing: "The review of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> by Harvard's Harry Levin was one of the few that gave James Joyce the sense that his book had a reader."</p><p>It's worth quoting more from that <i>Time</i> article of 1942, which perceptively captured the Wake's relevance within the context of those tumultuous times:</p><p></p><blockquote>In <i>Finnegans Wake</i> naturalism and the artist himself all but disappear; the book is a shimmering death-dance of chameleon-like symbols; an attempt at nothing less than a complete serio-comic history of human consciousness—in Levin's neat phrase, a "doomsday book," culminating in a Phoenician paradox of dissolution and resurrection. <br />...<br /><i>Finnegans Wake</i> derives much from the philosopher Giambattista Vico's cyclic theory of history, which is highly apposite to the present. According to Vico, and Joyce, the first of a civilization's four phases begins, and the last collapses, in fear of thunder, and a rush for underground shelter; and in that sheltering cave, religion and family life begin again. Today the ambiguous thunder talks above every great city of the earth, and the shelters are crowded, and a civilization, if it is ending, is no less surely germinal. In one great warning work of literature after another, meanwhile, a similar mental cavern is retreated to and explored (Joyce's was a Dedalean Labyrinth).</blockquote><p></p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-74763518098380463552023-12-16T13:24:00.000-06:002023-12-16T13:24:42.332-06:00Find the Others: The Lightning-Struck<p></p><blockquote>"Remember the lightning-struck? Those who experienced something profound and rare, so they sought out others who had felt what they felt? Other than the coded messages of their newsletter, there’s nothing conspiratorial to their organization. What it really is is a community. And a community, after all, is just a conspiracy everyone’s aware of, in on, participants in. Sure, the bigger communities become, the more complex their problems and the more corrupt their leaders. But in these niche groups that are only nominally conspiracies, because no one knows who they are, you can find the teeny-tiny instance of grace that can make our meaningless trajectories tolerable, even beautiful: the intimacy of sharing ourselves with another person. Although the lightning-struck have modest aims and probably zero influence, their club has given them a method by which they can communicate to their cabal, their little conspiracy of no importance, and share with others what the lightning gave them, because the only reason Those Who Know, know, is because somebody, somewhere, let them in on the secret…" </blockquote><blockquote>(from a recent <a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43095495/gravitys-rainbow-anniversary/" target="_blank"><i>Esquire</i> article on the 50th anniversary</a> of <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>)</blockquote><p></p><p><br /></p><p><i><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/books/finnegans-wake-james-joyce-venice-book-club.html " target="_blank">New York Times</a></i>: "Peter Quadrino, another member, said that reading Joyce created an urge to discuss his work with others." </p><p><i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years" target="_blank">The Guardian</a></i>: "Peter Quadrino, 38, joined Fialka’s group around 2008 or 2009. He would drive up three hours from San Diego, where he lived, to attend the meeting. “If you’re really interested in <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, it’s kind of hard to find people who will talk about it with you.”"<br /></p><p><i><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/16/finnegans-wake-book-club-california/" target="_blank">Washington Post</a></i>: "“It’s a giant friend group, and it’s like you’re reading a poem — basically a multilingual, multi-referential poem — with so many different people,” said Quadrino."<br /></p><p><i><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/finnegans-wake-james-joyce-book-club-28-years-180983411/" target="_blank">Smithsonian Magazine</a></i>: "For many readers, <i>Finnegans Wake</i> isn’t a text to master or a puzzle to solve. Instead, it’s something of a psychoactive agent. The question of what it means is less interesting than how it affects the reader."</p><p><br /></p><p></p><blockquote>"I have always been grateful for what I call the Joyce community, however you define it. It was initially a scattered bunch of readers who shared a common interest. I wouldn't be where I am without all those contacts. In my isolation I needed kindred spirits. Harmless maniacs like the Joyceans tend to flock together, and flock we did, after extended correspondence gave way to more and more gatherings. What I refer to here is not a common or overlapping interest but the many friendships that grew out of it; they can last even if Joyce is given up, as has happened in some cases. I think I am not the only one who feels that in case of a real emergency, material or emotional, there would be Joyceans friends to turn to, and this is reciprocal. Maybe some of us share an underlying despondency as well as some built-in irony. I am not talking about our views on the works or the author, but the people."<br />- Fritz Senn, <i>Joycean Murmoirs</i> (2007), pg. 50</blockquote><p></p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-45684328572126836902023-11-12T19:08:00.010-06:002023-12-16T13:17:34.601-06:00The Guardian/Observer Celebrates the Galaxy of Wake Reading Groups<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfAuC5ylQugXBUyPNW0fo3JmLweGZmIDEC-7yG4YOMLpT1VtziAdl_K68NfB5cBi54ywiNkT-HXXmoRySa0hLqfS_ihJsl3cfPInjDYPVeee8UtXiXRsT5wUsir0d9cfKvfRm9RefcUJtaaMBr2b4eQDkw1vr1G22__rM4zAJbI2sT_1HUyuxQJWZYOrJ0/s2048/FW%20-%20PC.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1758" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfAuC5ylQugXBUyPNW0fo3JmLweGZmIDEC-7yG4YOMLpT1VtziAdl_K68NfB5cBi54ywiNkT-HXXmoRySa0hLqfS_ihJsl3cfPInjDYPVeee8UtXiXRsT5wUsir0d9cfKvfRm9RefcUJtaaMBr2b4eQDkw1vr1G22__rM4zAJbI2sT_1HUyuxQJWZYOrJ0/w550-h640/FW%20-%20PC.jpeg" width="550" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Print edition of the UK <i>Observer/The Guardian</i> from Sunday Nov 12, 2023. Courtesy of <a href="https://twitter.com/PeterChrisp/status/1723712178614673542/photo/1" target="_blank">Peter Chrisp</a>.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;">The Sunday edition of </span><i style="text-align: left;">The Guardian</i><span style="text-align: left;"> newspaper, The Observer, </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">prominently featured an article about the Venice Finnegans Wake Reading Group</a><span style="text-align: left;"> having recently completed a full cycle of reading the text after 28 years. The media ecologist, Venice Wake group founder, and self-described "antiquarian ne'er-do-well" Gerry Fialka receives some great coverage here. And alongside descriptions of other </span><i style="text-align: left;">Finnegans Wake</i><span style="text-align: left;"> reading groups led by renowned Joycean scholars Sam Slote in Dublin and Fritz Senn in Zurich, </span><i style="text-align: left;">The Guardian</i><span style="text-align: left;"> piece interviewed me to discuss the background of the Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group I've been hosting going on 12 years now, originally inspired by my visits to the Venice group. </span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span> </span>I am honored to be a part of this celebration of Wake reading groups around the world. The author, Lois Beckett, did a great job covering the oddity of one-page-a-meeting reading groups dedicated to Joyce's bizarre night-book. To look at a global newspaper and see the front page with all the wars and turmoil and then have this article appear next to all of it feels like a celebration of the eternal forces of creativity and imagination. Poetry, the realm of the mind, the joy of art, language and humanity, remains undefeated.</p><p><i><span></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6WyfJCejTV2d5mF66Wrqz_OlQNaD1yoC6UGPF9ZFn6Qp-lFbrhwmwV1hKtPqoPs2zZ4a5_fPcHPsS2Hka5JMoox0TsHqvpjFWf0zYWKrCu7NW0-IpCPSprlEuP0vtIhY3sGhkCD_b7SP3AmMKjhrEUhvdCb6II42zQG09o4yC2fgWjEUN1iPfywJOYkQm/s2430/TheGuardian%20front%20page.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1532" data-original-width="2430" height="404" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6WyfJCejTV2d5mF66Wrqz_OlQNaD1yoC6UGPF9ZFn6Qp-lFbrhwmwV1hKtPqoPs2zZ4a5_fPcHPsS2Hka5JMoox0TsHqvpjFWf0zYWKrCu7NW0-IpCPSprlEuP0vtIhY3sGhkCD_b7SP3AmMKjhrEUhvdCb6II42zQG09o4yC2fgWjEUN1iPfywJOYkQm/w640-h404/TheGuardian%20front%20page.png" width="640" /></a></span></i></div><i><span><br /> </span>The Guardian</i> piece appears on the heels of the same story being reported in newspapers and journals all across the world. Over the past couple weeks, the news of Gerry's Venice Wake group passing a 28-year reading cycle has appeared in <a href="http://WorldJournal.com/wj/story/122986/7516835" target="_blank">Chinese</a>, <a href="https://maroelamedia.co.za/vreemdhede/boekklub-lees-28-jaar-lank-aan-een-boek/" target="_blank">Afrikaans</a>, <a href="https://actualitte.com/article/113760/insolite/ce-club-de-lecture-a-mis-28-ans-pour-lire-finnegans-wake" target="_blank">French</a>, <a href="https://lubimyczytac.pl/czlonkowie-pewnego-klubu-czytelniczego-przeczytali-ksiazke-zajelo-im-to-duzo-czasu" target="_blank">Polish</a>, <a href="https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/koktejl-v-kniznim-klubu-cetli-jedno-dilo-28-let-ted-si-to-chteji-zopakovat-40446363">Czech</a>, various <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/procrastinating-book-club-finally-finishes-31127001" target="_blank">news</a> other <a href="https://www.readingeagle.com/2023/10/19/facebook-group-desperately-seeking-a-hero-news-of-the-weird/" target="_blank">weird</a> <a href="https://whattheythink.com/articles/116928-around-web-finnegans-finale-taboo-tomes-reading-remedy-tack-tech-poultry-performance-fish-fable-webb-wonders-candy-cartography/" target="_blank">news</a> <a href="https://www.fark.com/comments/13012414/-28-years-ago-a-book-club-got-together-to-read-James-Joyces-Finnegans-Wake-They-finally-finished-it-yesterday-This-may-be-fastest-anyones-ever-read-that-book " target="_blank">venues</a>, as well as the <i><a href="https://www.ocregister.com/2023/10/06/the-book-pages-what-it-was-like-as-the-finnegans-wake-group-read-the-final-page/" target="_blank">Orange County Register</a> </i>and the <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irish-diary/2023/10/04/venice-vigil-frank-mcnally-on-an-epic-californian-reading-of-finnegans-wake/" target="_blank"><i>Irish Times</i></a>. <p></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">"wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. </span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">In four tubbloids"</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;">(FW 219.16-17) </div><p></p><p></p><p><span> </span>Gerry's group continues to meet on the first Tuesday of each month. Our Austin collective gathers two Thursdays a month. The Wake Watchers of NYC meet twice a month. Dozens of other collectives around the world continue to excavate the text of Joyce's puzzle book. Novelist philosopher Umberto Eco once described <i>Finnegans Wake </i>as "the book of an epoch of transition, a time in which science and the evolution of social relations propose a vision of the world that no longer obeys the schemas of other, more secure epochs yet lacks any formula for clarifying its own situation. The Wake attempts to paradoxically define the new world by assembling a chaotic and dizzy encyclopedia from the old one and filling it with explanations that once seemed mutually exclusive. Through his clash and the ‘Big Bang’ of these oppositions, something new is born." (Read more <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-pantheon-of-finnegans-woke-or-why.html" target="_blank">testimonials</a> here.)</p><p><span> </span>If you enjoyed this, I can also recommend you check out the trove of recorded interviews Gerry Fialka has conducted with accomplished Joyce scholars like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/ekexDHaZMX0?si=uoHy6RCTGXsrSXxS" target="_blank">Sam Slote</a> of Trinity College Dublin, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/8o66Aty3k7Y?si=Sxn4M9Ur0RVNr8On" target="_blank">Roy Benjamin</a> from Borough of Manhattan Community College in NYC, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/h2h9RWXi4as?si=6TnmAgru_2iYBXYN" target="_blank">Decio Slomp</a> from Brazil, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3lfw-IUUxk" target="_blank">Benjamin Boysen</a> from Denmark, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/Ns9R8V3Cn6w?si=sV_VcwI5O5mEXQ1P" target="_blank">John Gordon</a> from USA, or the late <a href="https://youtu.be/6tMb4l2ie3g?si=1fxey8RRpfMPGcyZ" target="_blank">John Bishop</a> who wrote perhaps the greatest analysis of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> ever. Another good one I heard recently is Gerry's interview with media theorist and author <a href="https://youtu.be/03SmGoWeamo?si=BlpyXIoP0gx2k8rE" target="_blank">Douglas Rushkoff</a>. Many more such podcasts from Gerry to check out on Youtube. </p><p> If you want to check out more of my writings on <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, I'd recommend starting with <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-pantheon-of-finnegans-woke-or-why.html" target="_blank">this piece</a> or this <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2014/01/book-review-part-1-joyces-book-of-dark.html" target="_blank">book review</a> <a href="https://www.abuildingroam.com/2014/11/the-lingerous-longerous-book-of-dark.html" target="_blank">series</a> or <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2019/03/carvings-in-claybook-reading-of.html" target="_blank">this close reading</a> of a passage, or this <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2020/07/video-binaries-bibliomancy-finnegans.html" target="_blank">video essay</a> I made. Lots more in the works, watch this space.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>(Many thanks to Lois Beckett, Peter Coogan, Gerry Fialka and everyone who has ever been to the Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group.)</p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-72586139484278798592023-07-06T17:59:00.016-06:002023-09-19T21:03:47.167-06:00Reviews of Five (Mostly) Recent Books on Joyce, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake<div><i><b>Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland </b></i><b>(2022) by John McCourt</b></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgHQzZ1FOC9C6I_D1T6swQ0R1cdvRIGTWrRQSB9e3Zo68z7nHxYTZp6QYozG8T6ctZBrE4Ot00MQdYZDmNMOyEqfHZuZEbyPMM2ngvC0dYnCKNvClVdQoLui2dBypOEYAaZu4bYRvZf9WazyXMB1kue2ydCKSq1GhNTOLRfAWPpg-2JS5jUAuV8HKuw97m/s838/Screenshot%202023-07-06%20at%206.53.09%20PM.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="838" data-original-width="556" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgHQzZ1FOC9C6I_D1T6swQ0R1cdvRIGTWrRQSB9e3Zo68z7nHxYTZp6QYozG8T6ctZBrE4Ot00MQdYZDmNMOyEqfHZuZEbyPMM2ngvC0dYnCKNvClVdQoLui2dBypOEYAaZu4bYRvZf9WazyXMB1kue2ydCKSq1GhNTOLRfAWPpg-2JS5jUAuV8HKuw97m/s320/Screenshot%202023-07-06%20at%206.53.09%20PM.png" width="212" /></a></div><div><br /></div>Last year in June, I was in Dublin for the James Joyce Symposium at Trinity College where I presented a paper. That was my third trip to Dublin in a span of nine months, prior to which I'd never been to Ireland before. The city was bustling for the centennial celebration of <i>Ulysses</i>, which first appeared in 1922. On Bloomsday, June 16th, after attending some panels at Trinity, I wandered around the city and watched locals in the pubs genuinely thrilled for Bloomsday like they were celebrating a local sports team's victory. Dublin was lit and I had a great time hanging with friends throughout the symposium. </div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I acquired a few new books during that trip, including this recently published study by John McCourt detailing the reception and impact of <i>Ulysses</i> in Ireland over the last century. Once I started reading <i>Consuming Joyce</i>, I couldn't put it down. I completed it in one long reading session on the flight back to the US. McCourt's approachable yet academically rigorous study goes decade-by-decade showing how Ireland's initially intense hostility against Joyce (and his devoted readers) evolved into hoisting Joyce up on a pedestal as a national hero. <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div><div><span> </span>As an American in Ireland soaking in and savoring the local connections from Joyce's texts, one thing I found especially compelling in <i>Consuming Joyce</i> was the early hostility from the Irish against American readers of Joyce's work and how much that changed over the century. McCourt's book is peppered with quotes from Irish critics and commentators who, in the initial few decades after <i>Ulysses</i> appeared in 1922, relished the opportunity to trash Joyce's American readership. One example (from a review of Stuart Gilbert's guide to <i>Ulysses</i> which appeared in 1930) delivered Joyce some backhanded praise while needling the Americans who love his work: "Joyce is constantly pulling the long Homeric bow in order to astonish the uninitiated; and he has succeeded to some extent, especially with the Americans, where classical learning is not very widely cultivated." (pg. 60) </div><div><span> </span>Joyce's old frenemy from Dublin, Oliver Gogarty (immortalized as Buck Mulligan in <i>Ulysses</i>), published an editorial in a Dallas, Texas newspaper in the year 1950 mocking the "Joyce fetish" of Americans, remarking that they all belong in kindergarten, and concluded, "This is a moment in the history of art where cross-word puzzles, detective stories and distortions take the place of literature and beauty. And when we consider that America is the original home of smoke signals, the popularity of Joyce here can be explained." (pg. 110)</div><div><span> </span>In 1965, an article in the <i>Irish Times</i> mocked "the Joyce posers (or symposers)" and complained that Joyce would be rolling his grave if he'd known what an enthusiastic international readership he'd attained: </div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><blockquote>'The bould Jamsie Joyce was writing for Irishmen and for nobody else. I wish the Americans would learn that simple fact. They would be happier if they did.' Joyce would be 'vastly annoyed if he had the gift of clairvoyance to foresee that his books would take on the veneration which is accorded the Talmud. Joyce is now a money-spinner for Dublin hoteliers and if he revolves in his Zurich grave I shall not be very much surprised.' (p. 169)</blockquote></span></div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>McCourt's book is filled with quotes like this. The impression I get was that the trajectory of Joyce's reception in Ireland began as disgust and hatred at his portrayal of his fellow countrymen, followed by a sort of nationalist covetousness which disdained foreign admirers hijacking their hero, until the widespread attitude suddenly flipped in the 1980s after the centennial of Joyce's birth. Ireland as a country had changed drastically from its tumultuous revolutionary period in the first couple decades of the 20th century, to its era of repressive Catholicism and strident nationalism, and now strived to become a cultural and economic force on the global stage. McCourt's tracing of these changes alongside the reception of Joyce makes for an insightful recent history of Ireland. The once-reviled Joyce had become central to Ireland's ambitions as a nation: "The post-nationalistic, anti-Catholic, pro-European (but more crucially pro-capital) Ireland of the 1990s—proudly the world's most global economy—found the perfect symbol in Joyce, who had earlier rejected so many of the pieties that the country was now finally beginning to question and demolish." (pg. 210)</span></div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>While it is an academic study packed with information and footnotes on every page, <i>Consuming Joyce</i> is also an engaging read and I learned much from it. The book mostly shies away from direct engagement with Joyce's texts themselves, mainly focusing on the Irish reception of <i>Ulysses</i> and <i>Finnegans Wake</i> over the years. Also included in here is a fascinating and informative history of the development of the "Joyce industry" including the stories of how places like the Joyce Tower in Sandycove and the Joyce Center on North Great Georges Street became the Joyce museums they are today, as well as background on the origins of the annual international Joyce Symposium. I've attended several of these symposia over the last decade and it was eye-opening to learn how these events began with hostility from the locals until eventually the widespread ostracism of Joyce and his readership evolved into hero-worship, accepting and celebrating Joyce as a leading source of tourism in Ireland, all leading up to the grand celebrations of <i>Ulysses</i> at 100. McCourt skillfully captures the details of how this all came to be. Towards the end, he also surveys the vast landscape of Joyce criticism and scholarship to have appeared over the decades pointing to some of the open frontiers of untapped research. (McCourt is noticeably dismissive of the John Kidd side of the "Joyce wars" and adopts the party line of Joyce academics in accepting the Gabler edition of <i>Ulysses</i>.) Historical nuggets of interest to Joyceans abound in this study, the context provided will be useful to any Joyce reader, and I expect I'll be drawing more anecdotes from <i>Consuming Joyce</i> for blog posts in the near future.</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>The Book About Everything: Eighteen Artists, Writers and Thinkers on James Joyce's Ulysses</i> (2022) ed. by Declan Kiberd, Enrico Terrinoni, & Catharine Wilson</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgPQJzCFtAGXutwLiC6xrIsCUtxo54To1ugBNstfhpio1gC2LjcxkkQVRCATOGPKtK-gVHU4P42Pkl2XydsW96d8y1wj1r1cYDEFn_2kpENZ-Yn6w3k-2WaTW1pPUJt3uLIVRIq1H1_2Cdu2g0gSykAYUepCpz3C0Lb7ApEfaB6cwYze9A2tOGU3DUIKNE/s878/Screenshot%202023-07-06%20at%206.54.34%20PM.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="878" data-original-width="574" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgPQJzCFtAGXutwLiC6xrIsCUtxo54To1ugBNstfhpio1gC2LjcxkkQVRCATOGPKtK-gVHU4P42Pkl2XydsW96d8y1wj1r1cYDEFn_2kpENZ-Yn6w3k-2WaTW1pPUJt3uLIVRIq1H1_2Cdu2g0gSykAYUepCpz3C0Lb7ApEfaB6cwYze9A2tOGU3DUIKNE/s320/Screenshot%202023-07-06%20at%206.54.34%20PM.png" width="209" /></a></div><div>Another book I acquired in Dublin on its publication day on Bloomsday 2022 (at The Winding Stair bookshop on Ormond Quay a few steps away from the Ha'penny Bridge), this is a colorful collection of reflections on Joyce's art from eighteen different contributors from diverse backgrounds. There's some intriguing stuff in here like an Irish Times newspaper correspondent discussing the newsroom scenes of the Aeolus chapter of <i>Ulysses</i>, a Michelin-starred chef from Dublin digesting the lunch-time episode of Lestrygonians, and a Palestinian-born Jewish Irish sociologist insightfully examining the political implications springing from the Nestor episode. Despite eighteen different voices with vastly different approaches to discussing a complicated novel, the prose throughout this book is refreshingly easy to consume, the collection feels well-edited and stands among the best recently published Joyce books for the general reader. </div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Even though I thought a few of the chapters deviated too far from the topic, where authors hardly touched on the <i>Ulysses</i> episode they were assigned, or abandoned <i>Ulysses</i> to instead surf around the infinite multiverse of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, there were also some absolute gems to be found in here. Eric A. Lewis, co-host of the <i>tipsyturvy</i> <i>Ulysses</i> podcast, presents a superb examination of the Ithaca episode arguing that it turns the reader into a surveillance agent gathering intelligence on Leopold Bloom. It's gotta be the most insightful and unique piece of <i>Ulysses</i> criticism I've read in a while. Another standout was Dublin-born novelist Joseph O'Connor's essay on Sirens, captivating for its rich prose and local context. Additionally, Jhumpa Lahiri's wide-ranging analysis of the meaning behind the flittering bat in the Nausicaa episode left a lasting impression, prompting me to seek out more of Lahiri's work. While this collection may not always offer groundbreaking new readings for the seasoned Joycean, it offers a wealth of great material celebrating the author and his work from a multitude of angles.</span></div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * * </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>James Joyce in Context</i> (2014) ed. by John McCourt</b></div><div><br /></div><div>This batch of 32 essays from different Joyce scholars on various topics related to reading Joyce is a dense academic tome. Unlike the previous book above, the authors here don't attempt to get too creative in their prose style, so I would not consider this an engaging or especially enjoyable read. But as a reference text for various topics related to Joyce, it proves helpful. Personally, I picked this up because I wanted to fill in some gaps in my understanding of Joyce, especially some missing contexts that became apparent during a few trips I took to Ireland. Thus, for instance, I appreciated the essay in this collection about post-colonial Joyce by Gregory Castle. I was curious to know more about Joyce's complicated and seemingly contrarian views about Irish politics since, for example, he maintained his British citizenship all his life, never opting for an Irish passport after Ireland gained its independence. There are no easy answers to these questions, but I do think the reader is provided some helpful perspective in trying to understand, Castle puts it, "that Joyce's nationalism takes the form of a <i>transnationalism</i> in which an anti-nationalist position enters into a dialectical relation with pro-nationalist sentiments." (p. 108) Similarly, Brian G. Caraher's essay on Irish and European politics looks at Joyce's political writings from his younger days and sees an affinity towards socialism—Joyce even attended a meeting of the Italian Socialist Party in Rome in October 1906—but the author, making reference to the book <i>James Joyce and the Question of History</i> by James Fairhall, concludes:</div><blockquote><div>Joyce's cultural politics may share in the broad outlines of a general disillusionment consequent upon the betrayals of international socialism in the early years of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in Fairhall's persuasive reading, 'however we try to define his ambivalent, elusive politics,' Joyce 'was in any event not a passive esthete, but a literary revolutionist for whom writing represented the supreme political act. (p. 290)</div></blockquote><div></div><div>These essays attempt to summarize in a limited space the existing scholarship on certain topics. Another very complex subject that was well-explained here is the postmodernist study of Joyce, the semiotic viewpoint of thinkers like Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida. I also found the chapter chronologically going into detail about the composition and publishing history of each of Joyce's major works to be a useful and accessible refresher with some new info added too. This volume is a good resource for undergrad or grad students studying Joyce, though hardly a top pick for a general reader interested in the subject.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Beating the Bounds: Excess and Restraint in Joyce's Later Works</i> (2023) by Roy Benjamin</b></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2G7XHDabZWzKibPtAwR-2hA4EnnsmsziyaRPQUu6nq_jiycUAtpT1LckXTkp-H7dJZqT4fGtJH31GP8gsmiCAymV2PEH19WkZiBJGBrG4zu9biuyML-9nmfFbhFJgA9zmcZ7H1EIeyiq71LHgPl-ZIJCWlFAluj4S117-bSjFNNFaGYN3h-Oz0rIIAoZv/s880/Screenshot%202023-07-06%20at%206.55.42%20PM.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="880" data-original-width="588" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2G7XHDabZWzKibPtAwR-2hA4EnnsmsziyaRPQUu6nq_jiycUAtpT1LckXTkp-H7dJZqT4fGtJH31GP8gsmiCAymV2PEH19WkZiBJGBrG4zu9biuyML-9nmfFbhFJgA9zmcZ7H1EIeyiq71LHgPl-ZIJCWlFAluj4S117-bSjFNNFaGYN3h-Oz0rIIAoZv/s320/Screenshot%202023-07-06%20at%206.55.42%20PM.png" width="214" /></a></div>Roy Benjamin teaches English at Borough of Manhattan Community College and has published many articles on Joyce, mostly focused on specific themes and patterns in <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. Among his published articles is a fascinating exploration of the role of axial precession myths in the Wake, a paper whose insights I was inspired to write about at length <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2016/01/what-is-finnegans-wake-simulacrum-of.html" target="_blank">on this blog</a> several years ago. The publication of a new book-length work by Prof. Benjamin, one of the more prolific and seasoned scholars of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> alive today, is a valuable addition to the canon of Joyce criticism. The new book <i>Beating the Bounds: Excess and Restraint in Joyce's Later Works</i> is published as part of the Florida James Joyce Series (edited by Sebastian D.G. Knowles) printed by the University Press of Florida (side note: ain't it ironic that the state of Florida, of all places, has an academic book production system churning out fascinating scholarly studies of James Joyce? For real though, the series has produced some great books but they need to do something about the exorbitant list prices). </div><div><span> </span>Benjamin's <i>Beating the Bounds</i> book presents a wide-ranging exploration of the role of boundaries and limits in Joyce's writing, showing how Joyce had a Jesuit penchant for structured systems organized by boundaries but also insisted on shattering any notion of limits. <i>Beating the Bounds</i> shows Joyce's tendency toward transgressing boundaries in several different aspects of his work. I describe this as a wide-ranging study because, while the book is laser-focused on the subject of creating boundaries and breaking them, Benjamin identifies this pattern across several disciplines; there are chapters on Joyce's treatment of these themes in philosophy, Irish politics, mathematics, aesthetics, ecology, gender studies, and scientific cosmology—while enlisting ideas and quotes from an eclectic array of thinkers like Camile Paglia, Ken Wilber, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The approach Benjamin takes in his examination is to crack open specific lines and phrases from <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, using Roland McHugh's annotations, Encyclopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary, while revealing connections and correspondences to illustrate the repeated dialectic of boundary making-and-breaking. To read of this dialectic playing out thru the realms of ecology in "the mountain and river system" of the Wake or the cosmologies of a bounded or an infinitely boundless universe, all through the freighted language of the Wake is an enlightening experience even if requiring close attention to understand. Benjamin's explications allude not only to the roster of thinkers listed above, but frequently touch on classics like Greek myth, the Bible, and Shakespeare. No doubt, the material is dense, not unlike reading John Bishop's study, <i>Joyce's Book of the Dark</i>—the pages of <i>Beating the Bounds</i> are built of paragraphs weaving in quotes from across the Wake, while annotating the portmanteaus. I'm usually hoping for new perspectives or new notes on specific lines from Joyce's text and Benjamin's book delivers plenty of that. It doesn't always make for easy reading, but also <i>Beating the Bounds</i> successfully avoids bogging down the reader in the analytical jargon of academic theories, managing to thread a needle in presenting a wide-scoped view of a specific subject found evident in abundance all across the Wake.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>James Joyce's Mandala</i> (2023) by Colm O'Shea</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Stuart Gilbert's 1930 guide to <i>Ulysses</i> has been criticized for reading too much eastern mysticism into his analysis of <i>Ulysses</i>, even though Joyce himself was supposedly feeding Gilbert information and overseeing his writeup. Joseph Campbell helped to bring the work of Joyce to a wider audience of readers (myself included) with his explication of Joyce finding ample elements from Buddhist and Hindu myths. One of Campbell's vital influences was the German scholar of Indian religions, Heinrich Zimmer. One of Zimmer's books on the study of Maya in Hindu mythology was discovered in the personal library of James Joyce with Joyce's annotations and markings indicating he'd been reading it with interest. This was the trimmed-down library Joyce kept after all the relocations, from his final years in Paris, these were the books he considered important. </div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Colm O'Shea's brilliant study of the eastern mystical elements glowing at the heart of Joyce's work begins with the foundation of the notable volumes in Joyce's Paris library. Besides the Zimmer book on Maya there was also a collection of Tolstoy's essays in which Joyce had underlined some striking passages in the essay "Religion and Morality" including these lines: "What is the meaning of my momentary, uncertain and unstable existence amid this eternal, firmly defined and unending universe? … The essence of every religion consists solely in the answer to the question, 'Why do I live, and what is the meaning of my relation to the infinite universe around me?" (O'Shea, p. 2)</span></div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Creating frequently compelling comparisons between the meanings involved in the "psychic architecture" of mandalas and <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, O'Shea presents his research in a clear and approachable writing style. <i>James Joyce's Mandala</i> is not only an in-depth study of mandala symbolism in <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, it also provides the reader a fascinating overview of the function of the mandala in eastern religions and meditative practices. The mandala is shown by O'Shea to embody an attempted response to the deep question posed by Tolstoy, "what is the meaning of my relation to the infinite universe around me?" The mandala can be considered a map of psychic states and structures, but it's also seen as a blueprint for the architecture of the universe, centered on a cosmic axis. </span></div><div><span> </span>The chapters of <i>James Joyce's Mandala</i> examine some of the "mandalic motifs" featured in the Wake including the quincunx, the squared circle, and the sphere-cube palace/city structure. The latter structural motif evolves as a more complex version of the world-tree or world-mountain mythic image prominent in eastern myths and prominent in the Wake, as well. Making frequent use of the 1892 study <i>Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth</i> by the English architectural historian William Lethaby, O'Shea identifies intriguing connections with <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, a multi-layered universe which centers around a Chapelizod pub. Parallels are drawn between the three-dimensional versions of a mandala like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupa" target="_blank">stupa</a> or a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagoda" target="_blank">pagoda</a> and the architectural elements featured in the Wake, where the world-axis is represented as a building which is also a shrine, a tomb or a gate. (There's some correspondence in this part with <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-portal.html" target="_blank">my comparison</a> of the Wake's portal into the bardo realm with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopuram" target="_blank">gopuram</a> entrance to a Hindu temple.)</div><div><span> </span>O'Shea builds a compelling argument, even providing a whole chapter in the beginning of his book going point-by-point comparing each episode of <i>Dubliners</i> with the structure of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra" target="_blank">samsaric wheel</a>, conveying the depths of Joyce early interest in eastern mysticism from his earliest writing days (the younger Joyce published a review of a book about Buddhism). One of the more notable links suggested in O'Shea's analysis is the comparison of the two main schools of Buddhism, Hinayana and Mahayana, with the different ways readers might approach <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. The main modes of Buddhism are "river vessels" after all (<i>yana</i> in Sanskrit means "ferry-boat" or "raft"), and the Wake is a book with a river flowing throughout the entire text. O'Shea argues that the Hinayana critic of the Wake imagines they could absorb all the existent critical and scholarly material and eventually reach a meaningful understanding of the text, or enlightenment. While the Mahayana critic of the Wake accepts that the journey from confusion to comprehension never really ends, never reaches a final conclusion. The journey is the point.</div><div><span> </span>The bulk of the book examines the meanings and uses of the mandala in Buddhism, Hinduism, and psychology while showing the presence and resonance of these in the text and structure of the Wake. Some of these links have been touched on by critics before (a springboard for the book is the explicit assertion that the Wake is a mandala made by Clive Hart in <i>Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake</i>, published in 1962) but O'Shea's study adds immensely to this discussion. The chapters detailing mandalic representations in the Wake yield rich insights. Along the way, O'Shea uncovers noteworthy gems from Joyce's earlier writings like <i>Stephen Hero</i>, <i>Portrait</i>, <i>Ulysses</i>, and <i>Dubliners</i>. I would not hesitate to describe this book as an essential work of Wake criticism (which makes it unfortunate the list price is ridiculously high). Alongside the Wake-as-mandala theories shared, what really draws the reader into this book is O'Shea's engagement with the question of whether Joyce was descending into a psychotic break while writing his final book. At the end of the book O'Shea devotes an entire chapter to this issue.</div><div><span> </span>In the introduction he states that, "Artistic genius in a work shouldn't obscure possible evidence that it comes from a sense of personal suffering; conversely, signs of psychological 'malfunction' behind the origins of an artifact do not negate the aesthetic, psychological, or spiritual insight rendered within." (p. 22, O'Shea)</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><span> </span>Later on in the last chapter, O'Shea returns to this question:</span></div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>The Wake bears uncanny similarity to schizophrenic speech. I'm not pointing this out to claim… that Joyce was a latent psychotic and so we should dismiss his work. I think the truth is more interesting: the Wake-as-mandala is a creative defense from psychosis; its construction is a response to the dark night that descends on spiritual refugees. … Joyce's Wake can be read as both a locus of that sickness–a focus lens for obsessional self-reflexivity—<i>and</i> its own unique method of dealing with that sickness: Joyce's act of writing it was his creative therapy. (p. 174-175)</blockquote></div><div><br /></div><div><span> </span>That conclusion resonates with his earlier description of the different schools of Buddhism: "Intellectual vehicles, such as the various Buddhist schools of thought, that float in the samsaric flood are, non-dually, part of that flood but also aim to save the refugee from it." (p. 140)</div><div><span> </span>Overall, this a stimulating and thorough analysis of an interesting correspondence which other authors have sometimes alluded to but never before delineated with such depth. O'Shea's book brings new light to some passages of the Wake, it also provides convincing arguments about the structure of the text as a whole, and hardly shies away from some of the thornier questions of Joyce's sanity, all while providing the reader an approachable overview of some of the key tenets of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. </div><div><br /></div>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-11578164037568232122022-11-13T21:38:00.001-06:002022-11-15T15:05:44.629-06:00Anatomy Lecture<p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjABl4Mqi3FUTWe9kpT_nibvvBm19Od29BZCwL1Yp4OlI-rGW4L-K-V8035LoEzn5bNulpVHZoYECyYxeGweeeJH-cFiRk4UvW40YcBPJdX4DtbegoAQhLV4bzlbmZlN2MJ8Uoyhxe7ooVB3JDkuneobQfARkpFPRtyzpByrAo7rUSqR6QuZKYGI3fqxg/s800/Rembrandt-Anatomy.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="603" data-original-width="800" height="482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjABl4Mqi3FUTWe9kpT_nibvvBm19Od29BZCwL1Yp4OlI-rGW4L-K-V8035LoEzn5bNulpVHZoYECyYxeGweeeJH-cFiRk4UvW40YcBPJdX4DtbegoAQhLV4bzlbmZlN2MJ8Uoyhxe7ooVB3JDkuneobQfARkpFPRtyzpByrAo7rUSqR6QuZKYGI3fqxg/w640-h482/Rembrandt-Anatomy.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp</i> (1632), Rembrandt. </td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>On pg 241 of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> there's a reference to this painting by Rembrandt in "<b>Aasdocktor Talop's onamuttony legture" </b>where Joyce places himself in the role of the doctor providing an anatomy lesson. The <i>Wake</i> is on some level a close examination of the inner life of the human body. </p><p>"Aasdocktor Talop" turns the name of Rembrandt's Doctor Tulp into an anagram of Plato ("Talop") while "Aasdocktor" not only recalls the proctologist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tujqM2u-BVo" target="_blank">license plate</a> in <i>Seinfeld</i>, it alludes to the author of the Wake who never shies away from a scatological joke. The double-a "Aasdocktor" line appears within the same extended paragraph (FW 240-242) that gives the Shem/Glugg/Joyce character the cryptic AA name "Anaks Andrum" (FW 240.27) before referring to him as "He, A.A." and the annotations to these lines connect this to the A.A. middle initials of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.</p><p>As a university student Joyce had tried to become a doctor, attending medical school in Paris. In Dublin, he hung out with medical students like Oliver Gogarty who, in the guise of Buck Mulligan in <i>Ulysses</i>, coldly describes seeing corpses "<span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;">cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom."</span></p><p>In <i>Stephen Hero</i>, Joyce wrote: "The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive." A line later in this chapter of the Wake (II.1) splices together new surgical words with <b>"mortisection or vivisuture, splitten up or recompounded</b>." (FW 253.34)</p><p>My <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2014/01/book-review-part-1-joyces-book-of-dark.html" target="_blank">review of</a> John Bishop's study of the Wake, <i>Joyce's Book of the Dark</i>, goes in depth on Bishop's theories about the human body underlying everything at play in the Wake. Among other examples, the anatomy lesson angle of the Wake stands out in the introduction to Shem to begin chapter 7 (FW 169) where we get this comical description of his anatomy:<br /><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p></p><blockquote><b>Shem's bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip, a trio of barbels from his megageg chin (sowman's son), the wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks, one gleetsteen avoirdupoider for him, a manroot of all evil, a salmonkelt's thinskin, eelsblood in his cold toes ...</b> </blockquote><p></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Later on in the Wake, during an active seance scene there springs brings forth "A disincarnated spirit...with messuages from my deadported" who is said to disbelieve in miracle cures like the <b>"soulsurgery of P. P. Quemby."</b> (536.06)</p><p>Joyce himself had all kinds of medical ailments during his life resulting in many treatments, including a dozen surgical procedures on his eyes. In early 1941 in Zurich, he was suffering severe abdominal pains and underwent emergency operation for a perforated ulcer. Weakened by loss of blood, Joyce died in the hospital following surgery and a blood transfusion. An autopsy showed two ulcers, one which had led to extensive blood loss, and his intestines were badly damaged. Joyce had been suffering stomach pains for years, even mentioned it several times in the Wake including "he's knots in his entrails!" (FW 231.25) but his Parisian physicians kept misdiagnosing him with nervous stomach cramps. Had his badly damaged innards been correctly diagnosed earlier he may have lived long enough to write a sequel to <i>Finnegans Wake</i>.</p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-89005428870421890082022-08-03T23:31:00.011-05:002023-11-28T16:40:33.382-06:00Notes on Ulysses, Pomes Penyeach, and Textual Materiality in Finnegans Wake<blockquote><p>It's evident that by the time he got to <i>Finnegans Wake</i> Joyce's unit of attention had narrowed to the single letter. He had fully absorbed the great lesson of his seven years with <i>Ulysses</i>, that what he was engaged in day after day was not "telling stories," no, but formulating minute instructions for printers, whose habit of attention goes letter-by-letter likewise. - Hugh Kenner, "Shem the Textman" from p. 38 of <i>Finnegans Wake: A Casebook</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>Ever since the big Joyce birthday this past February 2nd of 2022, which was also the centennial of <i>Ulysses</i> (1922) being published, I've been thinking about the richness of Joyce's own descriptions of <i>Ulysses</i> provided in the meta-textual-commentaries within <i>Finnegans Wake</i> (1939). These meta-commentaries show how much Joyce emphasized the <i>material</i> qualities of these texts. In a <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2015/11/what-is-finnegans-wake-simulacrum-of.html" target="_blank">previous post</a> I touched on scholarly work I was reading showing Joyce's intricate intentions for the final textual product of his books. With the first edition of <i>Ulysses</i>, to give one example, there were specific words referring to specific numbers set to appear on corresponding page numbers. These subtle quirks were lost when pagination was changed in subsequent editions. With <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, mercifully the pagination tends to be fairly consistent across different editions. But material quirks reign across its pages, the whole thing is made of puzzling epiphanic typos, "prepestered crusswords in postpositions" (FW 178.03-4), the reader is continually compelled to "Stop and Think" (FW 88.01) and the book has an entire chapter that serves as a metatextual primer on the appearance of the text itself (Book I, chapter 5). Within that chapter are also fascinating insights about <i>Ulysses</i> from Joyce's perspective, including on its material qualities. </p><p>Taking a look at the Letter chapter (I.5), starting on page 122 we get this commentary about <i>Ulysses</i>:</p><p></p><blockquote><span><b style="font-size: large;">the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness...the cut and dry aks and wise form of the semifinal; and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly, but at least, thank Maurice, lastly when all is zed and done, the penelopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso </b>(FW 122.36-123.06)</span></blockquote><p></p><p>How better to describe the blizzard of verbal information confronting a reader of one of Joyce's big novels than "the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness"? Overflowing and excessive, too much information packed into too many digressions, unsolvable riddles, and obscure jokes. Within that outlandish approach is a dynamic mixing of different styles, as with the penultimate or "semifinal" chapter of <i>Ulysses</i>, "Ithaca" which overflows with precise mathematical details, or Xs and Ys, in a cut-and-dry unadorned Q&A fashion, described here as "the cut and dry aks and wise form of the semifinal" (<i>ask</i> and <i>whys </i>or <i>x</i> and <i>y</i>'s). "Ithaca" is the 17th or "semifinal" chapter of <i>Ulysses</i> but since he had already completed the 18th and final episode, this was actually the last chapter that Joyce was trying to complete before the final typesetting of the text. (In addition to that, Joyce mentioned to his patron Miss Weaver in a letter from Oct. 1921: "Ithaca is in reality the end as Penelope has no beginning, middle, or end.")</p><p>The process of typesetting <i>Ulysses</i> was hectic, not least because the text contains so many idiosyncrasies and the printer Maurice Darantiere ("thank Maurice") was a Frenchman who didn't speak English, but also Joyce kept jotting in more lines to be added into the text. <br /><br />I recently got to view some of the typescript pages of "Ithaca" and they are filled with these "whiplooplashes" (FW 119), these long curvy lines indicating new blocks of text to insert. This could be in the reference here to "a leaping lasso" the rope-like lines lassoing in new bits to add into the final text. I think it's fascinating that Joyce, within <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, here comments not only on the materiality of his previous book <i>Ulysses</i> (including describing the first edition page count of "seven hundred and thirtytwo") but also the process of its creation, thanking the printer Maurice for his "penelopean patience" in dealing with the frantic final stages of composition.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjQAhPMR5nKKb3bG4PF0ySiLeQdrIsi1ODxkuDViiasDwMsBJeIE6jll6v68lqgF_cR_sfDHWvD6hCvgDj6VQiAV7zqisFFbVtChw37ZOZBpaz4sJEMd8EWWmNJdu_KTmBGCUvgULZ4xIpU2HKUiQrJ50phm_Hi1F0D0JN8MWtDl3XOTIFODttGlh39iQ" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="768" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjQAhPMR5nKKb3bG4PF0ySiLeQdrIsi1ODxkuDViiasDwMsBJeIE6jll6v68lqgF_cR_sfDHWvD6hCvgDj6VQiAV7zqisFFbVtChw37ZOZBpaz4sJEMd8EWWmNJdu_KTmBGCUvgULZ4xIpU2HKUiQrJ50phm_Hi1F0D0JN8MWtDl3XOTIFODttGlh39iQ=w480-h640" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From <i>Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript </i>(1975).</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /></div>The "last paraphe" "when all is zed and done" could refer to a number of things that appear at the end of <i>Ulysses</i>: "paraphe" means initials or signature, a final flourish, which could be the "<i>Trieste-Zurich-Paris</i>, 1914-1921" at the end of the text; or it could refer to the last long paragraph of the Penelope chapter; the word "paraphe" also is immediately followed by "a colophon" which means a printer's emblem at the end of a book, so the expression "thank Maurice" might actually be an allusion to the final page at the end of the first edition of <i>Ulysses</i>, the printer's emblem.<div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhNZbxN50PEEQJvWL5KOJrvXxpJjKKxAMxVH0LUDs_T_Gp92f9-SIudxkloBeOxVpaZUQQa9rmZlKKlEdQ2AdREXABeJKgLqmwM4aZlyacUCNQsM0rl9pK6thUbS3Wflvhq8vClkg5RpZ-eAhmeajweoAzaJOs23BxasctQ9zzkNyELUGLhGu7PSlpbnw" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2672" data-original-width="2790" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhNZbxN50PEEQJvWL5KOJrvXxpJjKKxAMxVH0LUDs_T_Gp92f9-SIudxkloBeOxVpaZUQQa9rmZlKKlEdQ2AdREXABeJKgLqmwM4aZlyacUCNQsM0rl9pK6thUbS3Wflvhq8vClkg5RpZ-eAhmeajweoAzaJOs23BxasctQ9zzkNyELUGLhGu7PSlpbnw" width="251" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">from the <i>Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: 1922 Text with Essays and Notes</i> (2022).</span><br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div>One other more remote possibility for the final "paraphe" at the end of <i>Ulysses</i> could be that mysterious black dot at the very end of the Ithaca episode: since this was the last chapter Joyce wrote, that concluding black dot might be Joyce's final flourish in writing that work (before moving on to his next book where all the characters have become typographical icons, "the Doodles family" or "Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies" FW 299.F05, FW 20.13). At an exhibit on "Women and the Making of Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i>" at the Harry Ransom Center here in Austin, I got to witness up close one of the typescript pages for the end of Ithaca where Joyce added in the final question "Where?" and the famous black dot. The typescript page had handwritten instructions in pencil (too faint to see below) in French, specifically addressing Maurice Darantiere about the final dot—"ne pas oublier le point final" ("don't forget the final point") and "imprimer SVP" ("please print"). Having known about this infamous black dot for years, it was incredible to witness the handwritten notes up close. </div><div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhcBA_ntL0y6M6b63mkjFeD27hu0StJDGsmnuBF0R-jvOWsX7JbfpSDoXCRsjO8mJvu0oswi0XqfCWTSM1fY0rW34boTLSX_-PW7DqpH6kzFOqx1DvzFbwdjnfathMDot6loAY0jsfe6x9U1vcIHwWck4a4PVRUszGTwwq8BOBd2Qyz6DVqNtuvs09_zg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1042" data-original-width="1034" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhcBA_ntL0y6M6b63mkjFeD27hu0StJDGsmnuBF0R-jvOWsX7JbfpSDoXCRsjO8mJvu0oswi0XqfCWTSM1fY0rW34boTLSX_-PW7DqpH6kzFOqx1DvzFbwdjnfathMDot6loAY0jsfe6x9U1vcIHwWck4a4PVRUszGTwwq8BOBd2Qyz6DVqNtuvs09_zg=w397-h400" width="397" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Typescript for Ithaca with Joyce's handwritten notes. <br />(Harry Ransom Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin.)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Continuing with the meta-commentary from the Letter chapter (I.5):</p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: medium;">the ulykkhean or tetrachiric or quadrumane or ducks and drakes or debts and dishes perplex... in the case of the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner... a Punic admiralty report... had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety... (FW 123)</span></b></blockquote><p></p><p>It seems the word "ulykkhean" is the closest thing to <i>Ulysses</i> that appears in the <i>Wake</i>, besides "his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" (on FW 179.27). Perhaps it's fitting that the Danish word <i>ulykke </i>which means misfortune or accident, is echoed here. Not only is the story of the <i>Odyssey </i>about a series of misfortunes at sea, in <i>Ulysses</i> mistakes become portals of discovery, and there are several noteworthy "accidents" both large and small throughout the book. My sense is that Joyce is actually conflating <i>Ulysses</i> and <i>Finnegans Wake</i> in this passage, that word "ulykkhean" meaning accidents or mistakes could refer to the <i>Wake</i> where essentially every word is a mistake, a typo.</p><p>The <i>Wake</i> is also a book of dots and dashes or a "debts and dishes perplex" and the cryptic words "tetrachiric" and "quadrumane" here both mean "having four hands" which could refer to the four book structure of the <i>Wake</i>, the four stages of the Viconian cycle, the annals of the four masters (medieval history of Ireland), or the four provinces of Ireland (compare pg 325.32 "our quadrupede island"). We are clearly focused on <i>Ulysses</i> when reading of "the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner… a Punic admiralty report" which gives strong emphasis to the Homeric parallels with Joyce's book. The word "periplic" refers either to circumnavigation or to a sailor's documentation of the ports, coasts, and routes on a voyage. The Punic wars, referred to here, took place in the Mediterranean Sea where the wanderings of Odysseus would have occurred. Every part of this passage is interesting, but for Joyce to describe <i>Ulysses</i> as "the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner" is especially funny, combining "littleknown" with a popular best-seller or <i>best-teller</i> since Homer was an oral poet. At the time Joyce was writing this passage (late 1920s), <i>Ulysses</i> was stuck in that in-between stage where it was still pretty difficult for a reader to acquire a copy, yet it was also popular, or rather it was notorious. </p><p>This is where I think he conflates <i>Ulysses</i> with the <i>Wake</i>: this popular book about the mariner "had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety" so it sounds like he flipped that book upside down in some clever way, as if the <i>Wake</i> is a capsized version of <i>Ulysses</i>. It also could be saying the original <i>Odyssey</i> was capsized and turned into the "dodecanesian" twelve Bloom-focused episodes at the heart of <i>Ulysses</i> (more about that shortly), but I think that word "dodecanesian" also echoes dodecahedron the "polydron of scripture" that is the <i>Wake</i>, a book with a geometry lesson in its center (II.2). </p><p>Going further into the <i>Wake</i>, looking at Book II.1 has some interesting stuff about <i>Ulysses</i> as well. In that chapter, the Joyce-based character Shem the Penman is now named Glugg. Glugg gets rejected by the girls in a kid's game and runs off into exile where he then composes his art. The text has become weirder and more opaque at this stage of the book, but the annotations suggest references to the events and context surrounding Joyce's composition of <i>Ulysses</i>. Looking on page 228, the densely constructed lines include several puns on World War I trench-digger dialect (Joyce was writing <i>Ulysses</i> in the middle of the war). Then TS Eliot's <i>The Waste Land </i>(1922) which took inspiration from the early serialized episodes of <i>Ulysses </i>(Joyce responded in kind by borrowing inspiration from <i>The Waste Land</i> in the <i>Wake</i>), seems to be present in "He do big squeal like holy Trichepatte" (FW 228.06) because the original title for Eliot's <i>Waste Land</i> was actually "He Do the Police in Different Voices" (taken from a line in Dickens). And most relevantly, the page mentions "ban's for's book" and "banishment care of Pencylmania, Bretish Armerica" because <i>Ulysses</i> was banned in America and England. Returning to the materiality of the book, we then get this encoded allusion to the final words at the end of <i>Ulysses</i>:<br /></p><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: medium;">quit to hail a hurry laracor and catch the Paname-Turricum and regain that absendee tarryeasty, his citta immediata, by an alley and detour with farecard (FW 228.22)</span></b></blockquote><p></p><p>"Paname-Turricum" with "tarryeasty" becomes a reversal of "<i>Trieste-Zurich-Paris</i>" which appears after the final “Yes” from Molly to conclude <i>Ulysses</i>. These are the cities Joyce lived in during the composition of <i>Ulysses</i>. "Paname" is a nickname for Paris (apparently from Panama hats, which are mentioned several times throughout <i>Ulysses</i>), "Turricum" is the old name for the settlement that became Zurich (the name is actually Turicum with one <i>r</i>, the double-r here brings in <i>turret</i> a tower like the Martello Tower where <i>Ulysses</i> opens), and "tarryeasty" would be the city of Trieste, but also John Gordon suggests Tara for Ireland of the east. I think it could even be a subtle reference to the Irish name of the city of Dublin, <i>Dubh Linn</i>, meaning "black pool" (hence "tarry") on the east coast of Ireland. I think "regain that absendee tarryeasty" also involves regaining his absentee city starting with the letter D, Dublin which Joyce was exiled from but mentally immersed in while he lived in Trieste, "his citta immediata." McHugh suggests there's also subtle reference to Swift here with "quick, hurry" followed by Laracor which is a city in county Meath, Ireland where Swift was a vicar. Also involved here, one of many Irish authors alluded to in this section is the 19th century Irish author Charles Lever, who wrote the novel <i>The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer </i>hence "hurry laracor." Lever was from Dublin, but he actually died in Trieste where he was living on assignment as British consul. This passage in the <i>Wake</i> centralizes train travel, perhaps recalling Joyce's odyssey across Europe in his years of exile, as he tried to avoid the destruction and turmoil upon the outbreak of the Great War, "detour with farecard." The train ticket could also be a metaphor for Joyce's constantly returning to Dublin inside his head while living abroad.</p><p>On the following page is where the names of the middle episodes of <i>Ulysses</i> are presented in the form of distorted Wakese:<br /></p><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Ukalepe. Loathers' leave. Had Days. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids' Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt. (FW 229)</span></b></blockquote><p></p><p>These are the 12 middle chapters of <i>Ulysses</i>, the Bloom-focused chapters. The first 3 and the last 3 chapters are excluded. This list suggests a couple interesting points (leaving aside the puns and wordplay on the chapter titles): for one thing, by drawing attention to the episode names this way Joyce seems to be expressing the importance of these titles despite them never actually appearing anywhere within the text of <i>Ulysses</i> itself; and secondly, the absence of the first three and last three chapters from this list highlights the emphasis on the Homeric correspondences embodied in the chapters focused on Leopold Bloom, strengthening the case for <i>Ulysses</i> "the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner" being very much about navigation and seafaring. My friend Decio Slomp, an engineer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, recently published a <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sZ-eks6QPt_cw_LpfdwQqLD39dQEiiVP/view?usp=drivesdk" target="_blank">book</a> documenting all of the nautical references embedded in each episode of <i>Ulysses</i> to argue exactly this: it's all about navigation.</p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>In 1927 Joyce was once again broke, hurting for cash, begging Sylvia Beach for help despite the substantial royalties she'd already been sending him for <i>Ulysses</i>. An exasperated Beach bristled at his pleas, listing out the monthly income he was receiving off <i>Ulysses</i> and suggesting he be a better friend "to me who is your friend if ever you had one" and admit that he was spending considerable sums of money (29 April 1927, see Gordon Bowker's Joyce biography, p. 363). Wishing not to upset the proverbial applecart, Joyce sent her manuscripts for <i>Dubliners</i> and <i>Stephen Hero, </i>the friends made peace and eventually agreed to have Shakespeare and Co publish Joyce poems in a new collection, <i>Pomes Penyeach</i>.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Pomes Penyeach was published by Shakespeare and Co in July 1927. The title plays on the French word pomme and the covers are the colour of James Joyce’s favourite apple, the Calville. They are susceptible to fading and no two copies seem to be the same shade. <a href="https://t.co/o25xTghhsT">pic.twitter.com/o25xTghhsT</a></p>— Glenn Johnston (@johnstonglenn) <a href="https://twitter.com/johnstonglenn/status/1545002687992823810?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 7, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<p>Another edition of <i>Pomes Penyeach</i> was printed in 1932 by Obelisk Press. Joyce scholar Katarzyna Bazarnik writes of this edition:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>Pomes Penyeach</i> was published once more during Joyce’s lifetime by the Obelisk Press of Paris in 1932. This was the most beautifully designed of all his books, printed on specially imported Japanese paper (called Japan nacre or iridescent Japanese vellum). It consisted of nine loose folio sheets, folded and laid one within the other, placed in a portfolio bound in pale green silk. The poems were printed in black on recto of each leaf, in facsimile of Joyce’s handwriting and opened with illuminated, multi-coloured initials designed by Lucia. Additionally, the pages were interlaid with sheets of transparent tissue on which the title and text of each poem was printed in green in the lower left-hand corner. (Bazarnik, "Joyce, Liberature, and Writing of the Book" from <a href="http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v8_2/main/essays.php?essay=bazarnik" target="_blank">here</a>.) </blockquote><p></p><p>Bazarnik shows a copy of this rare 1932 edition of <i>Pomes Penyeach</i> which belonged to Harriet Shaw Weaver that got damaged in a fire in her garage:</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEino2rxo8Y1c9f0Z1C2mXnqvqu1nAZuT4_AUyCVlorucnRegd4nJjz5r6G2BnsqTA3wBH3UBUygDZZmwo4KTTnxBFRviSJKvZ7rbBrPBf509q6HQJ1EN-hw1-lIVbDbBNFAlCL64GG-QURmz7u-DdwlWPh2jzFGSxgBZEATonv2Uiy1BLKx0MtStrPBog" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="844" data-original-width="695" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEino2rxo8Y1c9f0Z1C2mXnqvqu1nAZuT4_AUyCVlorucnRegd4nJjz5r6G2BnsqTA3wBH3UBUygDZZmwo4KTTnxBFRviSJKvZ7rbBrPBf509q6HQJ1EN-hw1-lIVbDbBNFAlCL64GG-QURmz7u-DdwlWPh2jzFGSxgBZEATonv2Uiy1BLKx0MtStrPBog=w330-h400" width="330" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Pomes Penyeach</i>, Obelisk Press, H.S. Weaver’s copy <br />burnt at the edges by a fire in her garage. (KB <a href="http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v8_2/main/essays.php?essay=bazarnik" target="_blank">here</a>.)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Seeing the imprint of Joyce's handwritten title and signature on the cover of this rare, delicate, and nearly destroyed book of poems (or pomes) further fed my fascination with Joyce's own interest in the material presentation of his writing. These ideas actually converge and resonate when Joyce weaves in a mention of <i>Pomes Penyeach</i> within a very rich passage in the middle of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, p. 302. The passage is worth looking at in detail, since it appears to describe Joyce "signing away in happinext complete" signing autographs from beyond the grave, and now coming back to life ("Can you write us a last line?") sending messages, his letters to the reader sounding like modern-day text-speak:</p><p></p><p></p><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: medium;">me elementator joyclid … the aboleshqvick, signing away in happinext complete, (Exquisite Game of inspiration! I always adored your hand. So could I too and without the scrope of a pen. … Can you write us a last line? From Smith-Jones-Orbison?) ...<br />And i Romain, hup u bn gd grl. Unds alws my thts. …<br />Two dies of one rafflement. Eche bennyache. Outstamp and distribute him at the expanse of his society. To be continued. Anon.<br />(FW 302.12-30)</span></b></blockquote><p></p><p><br />Joyce as "me elementator joyclid" intertwines Euclid whose<i> Elements</i> pop up throughout this geometry/mathematics lessons chapter (II.2). The way "joyclid" is described as "me elementator" also includes the word <i>mentator</i>, as in one who mentates, drawing our attention to the person whose mental activity gave written life to the consciousness buried in the pages of <i>Finnegans Wake, </i>a glimpse of <i>"</i>me" "joyclid" breaking the fourth wall. It does seems like Joyce is pulling back the curtain here to reveal himself, "the aboleshqvick, signing away in happinext complete"---the abolished bolshevik, still scribbling his signature from the next dimension beyond the grave "in happinext complete."</p><p><span>The paragraph's emphasis on signatures ("signing away","I always adored your hand") calls to mind a line from earlier in the book (FW</span>115.06-08), <b>"why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?" </b>The implication seems to be that Joyce knew by the time he was writing this that he was so famous that anything he ever wrote, scribbled, or signed would become valuable as part of his legacy. </p><p><b>"Exquisite Game of inspiration!" </b>hints at the creative game known as the Exquisite Corpse, made famous by the surrealists. Since Joyce has already brought himself into the equation here as "joyclid" and alluded to his continued existence after death "signing away in happinext complete" the reference to Exquisite Corpse seems a clever way of suggesting his corpse is constantly revivified by readers playing the game of reading this book. Collaboration among creators who are unaware of each other's contributions is the core of how the Exquisite Corpse game works, thus Joyce seems to be directly addressing the collective game of interpretation involved in reading <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. After all, the text at one point expressly considers whether "His producers are they not his consumers?" (497.01) Readers are active participants or collaborators with Joyce in giving meaning to this chaotic text. As Joyce scholar Alan S. Loxterman described in his essay "Every Man His Own God: From <i>Ulysses</i> to <i>Finnegans Wake</i>":<br /></p><blockquote><p>Joyce was working toward his ultimate achievement, an anomaly in the history of literature which expands the way we read. Today, and into our foreseeable future, <i>Finnegans Wake</i> survives not as the completed comprehensible entity which previous fiction (including Joyce's own) had conditioned us to expect. Rather it remains what Joyce first called it, a 'Work in Progress,' an artistic arrangement of words which requires continuous collaboration from its readers to make those words meaningful <i>as</i> a text. (from <i>Joyce's Finnegans Wake: A Casebook</i> p. 115)</p></blockquote><p>The impression I get from the paragraph on FW302 is that it's like Joyce letting the reader know he's still actively writing from beyond the grave, exchanging letters with the reader. Hence, "Exquisite Game of inspiration! I always adored your hand" could be like a reader actively complimenting Joyce on his writing here in the middle of a book. Then they request one last line, <b>"Can you write us a last line? From Smith-Jones-Orbison?"</b> McHugh notes Smith-Jones-Orbison as an allusion to the mathematician and puzzlemaker Henry Dudeney who used the names <i>Smith, Jones, Robinson</i> in his puzzles published in <i>The Strand Magazine</i> in the early 1900s. (Joyce would have been familiar with this magazine, it was published by the same company as <i>Tit-Bits</i> which Bloom reads in <i>Ulysses</i>.) Bringing in a popular puzzlemaker/mathematician makes sense here in the geometry chapter and it's fitting that the usage implies Joyce as the creator of mathematical puzzles. My reading of why Robinson becomes "Orbison" is the "orb" represents Joyce's boast that he had squared the circle, or circled the square. Since Dudeney appears elsewhere in the same chapter in another triptych ("Dideney, Dadeney, Dudeney" see FW 284), I wonder whether Joyce knew of Dudeney having <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Dudeney#Career" target="_blank">developed a hinge method </a>for turning a triangle into a square, by splicing it into pieces, rotating them (circling) until they form into a perfect square.</p><p><b>"And i Romain, hup u bn gd grl. Unds alws my thts." </b>This is Joyce, writing sometime in the late 1920s, predicting the clipped condensed language of millennial text messages. It's also yet another example of Joyce in the <i>Wake</i> calling attention to individual letters. The lowercase "i" certainly stands out, especially alongside the capital R in "Romain" and together suggests something like "iDomain" or maybe an echo of "iSpace" which appears earlier in the text (124.12), a link that could actually make sense since the German word <i>Raum</i> means "space." This amusing little line comes across in the context of the passage like Joyce answering the request to "write us a last line" with a declaration that he still remains. If "i Romain" really does echo the earlier "iSpace" (FW 124.12) with <i>Raum</i> (space) involved, then it seems to imply Joyce declaring that while he's absent from <i>time</i>, he remains in <i>space</i> through all of his printed works and the "signatures" of his surviving manuscripts and materials, "paperspace." "Unds alws my thts" has implications beyond "and always in my thoughts" which are enhanced by the minimized phrasing---"Unds" in the context hints at girl's undies and in millennial slang "thts" would be thots or promiscuous women, as though he's promising the girl that she remains among his favorite ladies. (This line has a footnote at the bottom of the page which carries similar implications: <b>"Lifp year fends you all and moe, fouvenirs foft as fummer fnow, fweet willings and forget-uf-knots." [</b>FW 302.F04] Not only does Joyce invent <a href="http://fweet.org/" target="_blank">fweet </a>here, he's once again calling attention to the visual presentation of the text on the page by using the so-called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s" target="_blank">long S</a> or lowercase F for the letter S in this sentence. The "fouvenirs foft as fummer fnow" are souvenirs left for his readers, and invoking snowfall here recalls the ending of "The Dead" where the snowfall is also described with f-words, "faintly falling"---compare also FW 17.27 "flick as flowflakes." And then "forget-uf-knots" would be the flowers called forget-me-nots, but also seems to be Joyce once again declaring he will not be forgotten, due to the "knots" of riddles his readers are forever unraveling.)</p><p><b>"Two dies of one rafflement." </b>So much information saturates these short sentences. The sound of two dice in "Two dies" along with the presence of the French word <i>rafle</i> for "game of dice" in "rafflement" draws an allusion to Stéphane Mallarmé's groundbreaking poem <i>Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard </i>(One Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance). The <a href="http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v8_2/main/essays.php?essay=bazarnik" target="_blank">essay</a> I've referred to throughout this post, Katarzyna Bazarnik's study of Joyce's focus on the textual object discusses the remarkable influence Mallarmé had on Joyce. In his study of Mallarmé and the dice poem, R. Howard Bloch's book <i>One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern </i>(2016)<i> </i>points out that "Joyce kept a copy of 'One Toss of the Dice' close at hand while writing <i>Finnegans Wake</i>." (Bloch, p. 26)</p><p>Condensed in here with Mallarmé is also one of Joyce's earliest publications, his essay "The Day of the the Rabblement" published in 1901 as a student. The essay was rejected by the university paper, so Joyce and his friend Francis Skeffington (who was later murdered in the chaos following the 1916 Easter Rising) collaborated to publish a pamphlet of two essays together and distributed them throughout Dublin, hence this passage in the <i>Wake</i> concluding with "Outstamp and distribute him."</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg9caMc7fVbwBidLJlAVwPYelmBdZhh8MgX1QjZ9RxV0s0b5N_toGqK2B7aoCwwbFRJte-IV7nAD-UxH3vVU2P1i1WrWKJvSW6X8DvePo0OONLloy25yvbhtNOXSsYmXJjjF5I7fODifQrjKxDl_CvJapcVLRarEisqMjjGVOzVwK6MFTorhF6atM9LaQ" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="737" data-original-width="460" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg9caMc7fVbwBidLJlAVwPYelmBdZhh8MgX1QjZ9RxV0s0b5N_toGqK2B7aoCwwbFRJte-IV7nAD-UxH3vVU2P1i1WrWKJvSW6X8DvePo0OONLloy25yvbhtNOXSsYmXJjjF5I7fODifQrjKxDl_CvJapcVLRarEisqMjjGVOzVwK6MFTorhF6atM9LaQ=w250-h400" width="250" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joyce's student essay "The Day of the Rabblement" (1901).</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The notebook dates at the JJ Digital Archive suggest Joyce was writing these lines around the same time Shakespeare & Co was publishing his poetry collection <i>Pomes Penyeach </i>(1927), thus the echo of the title in<b>"Eche bennyache"</b> resonates. Each, penny each. And then, "Outstamp and distribute him at the expanse of his society." The word "Outstamp" strikes me as another way to say <i>express</i>, but it also alludes to printing, Joyce's printed works for over a century now distributing across the world "at the expanse of his society" literally expanding the Joyce society and doing so at our expense as we shell out each penny, "Eche bennyache." "Eche" also contains the initials HCE for Here Comes Everybody. And McHugh notes the early Middle English word <i>eche</i> means "eternal, everlasting." The writer lives on through his printed works being distributed expansively throughout society, "To be continued. Anon."</p><p>Evident in the phrase "Eche bennyache" is also ache, belly ache. Joyce suffered from severe stomach issues while writing the <i>Wake</i> and shortly after the book's publication he died during surgery for an ulcer. Going back again to the section examined earlier (pgs 229-231 of book II.1) some of the same themes and references stand out, where the focus is on the autobiographical Shem character, the riddles he writes, and how "he's knots in his entrails!" (FW 231.25). </p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><b>"And oil paint use a pumme if yell trace me there title to where was a hovel not a havel (the first rattle of his juniverse) ..." </b>(FW 230.36-231.02)</blockquote><p></p><p>Joyce declares, I'll paint you's a poem ("pumme") if you'll trace me the riddle to the title to where was a novel not a novel (the first riddle of his universe). The first rattle of his junior verse, "Et Tu Healy" which he parodies immediately after these lines. This was Joyce's first poem written when he was 9 years old. His father proudly had it printed so he could distribute copies, even sending a copy to the Vatican. No surviving copies of "Et Tu Healy" have been identified as of this writing, though if one were to be discovered <a href="http://www.bookride.com/2007/03/et-tu-healy-james-joyce-1891.html" target="_blank">it could</a> fetch up to 2 million dollars at an auction. A poem written by a 9-year-old. Only a few lines from the poem are known, and Joyce parodies them on this page (231.05-08). Echoing the earlier quoted assertions of "i Romain" and "To be continued. Anon." this same page also begins a sentence with, <b>"Though he shall live for millions of years a life of billions of years" </b>(FW 231.18-19). </p><p></p></div>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-53331626991259818552022-07-31T21:11:00.003-05:002022-08-04T09:46:41.218-05:00from "The Hideous Hidden" by Sylvia Legris<p> 1, Plummet</p><p>WITNESS THE SPECTACLE OF THE WAKING BODY.<br />WHEN THE BODY IS AWAKE THE SOUL ACQUIESCES <br />TO EYES, TO EARS, TO LOCOMOTION AND TOUCH.</p><p>WHEN THE BODY STIRS, THE SOUL FOLLOWS<br />IN THE BODY'S ORBIT.</p><p><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>~</p><p>WITNESS THE SIGHT OF THE SLEEPING BODY.<br />WHILE THE BODY IS ASLEEP, THE SOUL, ALL-PERCEIVING,<br />OVERSEES THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BODY,<br />THE FUNCTIONS OF THE EYES, OF THE EARS,<br />OF MOTION AND TOUCH.</p><p>WHILE THE BODY DREAMS, THE SOUL SURVEYS<br />THE SPECTACLE OF THE SKY.</p><p>. . . . . . . .<br />What is the little book<br />of the collected work of sleep?</p><p>What is the sleepless continuo? <br />The endless malady?<br />The restless octave<br />that inoculates night?</p><p>. . . . . . . .<br /><i>Nocturna suppressio</i>.<br />The bacterially spreading falsetto.</p><p>. . . . . . . .<br />Dark dialyzes day's deliriums.<br />(Desperate cases demand desperate doses.)</p><p>Diazepamic diatonic.<br />The chemically sung interval<br />between sleep and shortfall<br />(the short slip between<br /><br />falling hypnagogic<br />off a cliff and falling<br />off a cliff). The shudder<br />awake, the crash.</p><p>- from <i>The Hideous Hidden </i>by Silvia Legris, pg. 20 (New Directions, 2016)</p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-22974640127624151592022-07-30T15:15:00.008-05:002022-08-15T16:28:46.705-05:0052 Wave Words in the Wake<p style="text-align: center;">A list of 52 Wave Words in <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. <br />An attempt to read <i>Finnegans Wake</i> only for the wave lines.</p><p style="text-align: center;">(See also <a href="https://www.abuildingroam.com/2022/07/several-short-videos-of-sea-from-my.html" target="_blank">Several Short Videos of the Sea from my iPhone</a>.)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgQHCu94jLWVHR6ffOy3b9UfQKVZr-6voBB6CIMJjcNFRVGJy32iOl94E7XZa1ftDR5lt4OFbrX-CUBA9g2gvjOpTWiC4FngYQ6u04SxGT0ik0_oUpGem4As9tncaagzlTHyzKPxvEY5A_53umDbL_WSKyfSvxR6s0pFdDdq_3t8uayDVHabTxKsU8jZA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="768" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgQHCu94jLWVHR6ffOy3b9UfQKVZr-6voBB6CIMJjcNFRVGJy32iOl94E7XZa1ftDR5lt4OFbrX-CUBA9g2gvjOpTWiC4FngYQ6u04SxGT0ik0_oUpGem4As9tncaagzlTHyzKPxvEY5A_53umDbL_WSKyfSvxR6s0pFdDdq_3t8uayDVHabTxKsU8jZA=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="text-align: center;"><b> </b><span style="font-size: medium; font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> <span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span></span>"By the fearse wave behoughted."</span></span></div><span style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(18.02)</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"the jimminies was to keep the peacewave"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(23.13)</span></div></div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>"The soundwaves are his buffeteers"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(23.26)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>"the wave of roary and the wave of hooshed"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(23.28)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"and the wave hawhawhawrd <br />and </span><span style="font-size: medium;">the wave of neverheedthem-"<br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">(23.28)</span></p><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Sweet bad luck on the waves washed to our island"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(46.11)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"They have waved his green boughs o'er him as they have torn him limb from lamb." (58.06)</span></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"under night's altosonority, shipalone, a raven of the wave"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(62.04)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Wave bore it. Reed wrote of it. Syce ran with it. Hand tore it and wild went war."</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(94.06)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"flammelwaving warwife"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(101.18)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"that the upper reaches of her mouthless face and her impermanent waves were the better half of her"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(101.30)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"<i>Rockabill Booby in the Wave Trough</i>"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(104.07)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"burning body to aiger air on melting mountain in wooing wave"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(132.08)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"and the bergs of Iceland melt in waves of fire"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(139.20)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"The meeting of mahoganies, be the waves"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(159.34)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"But the majik wavus has elfun anon meshes."</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(203.31)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"trickle me through was she marcellewaved or was it weirdly a wig she wore."</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(204.23)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"sequansewn and teddybearlined, with wavy rushgreen epaulettes"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(208.17)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Well, arundgirond in a waveny lyne aringarouma she pattered and swung and sidled"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(209.18)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"twinglings of twitchbells in rondel after, with waverings that made shimmershake"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(222.34)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"a message interfering intermitting interskips from them (pet!) on herzian waves"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(232.11)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Arise, Land-under-Wave!" </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(248.08)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"what are the sound waves saying"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(256.23)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"That grene ray of earong it waves us to yonder"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(267.13)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"our lavy in waving"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(275.12)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"(Wave gently in the ere turning ptover.)"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(280.19)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Will you walk into my wavetrap?"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(287.F01)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"fin above wave after duckydowndivvy"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(331.24)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"on the fields of the foam of the waves of the seas" </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(331.35)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Waves."</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(373.08)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: right;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"the four maaster waves of Erin, all listening, four.</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">There was old Matt Gregoryand then besides old Matt</span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">there was old Marcus Lyons, the four waves"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(384.06-08)</span></div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"not to forget the four of the Welsh waves, leaping laughing"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(390.16)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"at their windswidths in the waveslength"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(394.17)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"I might as well be talking to the four waves"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(424.29)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"he knowed his love by her waves of splabashing" </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(431.16)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"we come to newsky prospect from west the wave on schedule time"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(442.12)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"twill carry on my hearz'waves my still waters reflections in words"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(460.25)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"It was then he made as if be but waved instead a handacross the sea"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(470.35)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"with a posse of tossing hankerwaves to his windward"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(471.23)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"trailing the wavy line of his partition footsteps"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(475.25)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"They came from all lands beyond the wave for songs of Inishfeel."</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(510.32)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Among the shivering sedges so? Weedy waving."</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(526.05)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"and there, by wavebrink, on strond of south"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(547.21)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"These brilling waveleaplights!"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(571.01)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Only trees such as these such were those, waving there"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(588.30)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"awike in wave risurging into chrest"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(596.06)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"mild beam of the wave his polar bearing, steerner among stars"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(602.29)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"you spun your yarns to him on the swishbarque waves"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(620.35)</span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"When the waves give up yours the soil may for me."</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">(624.03)</span></div><p></p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-65077960751267443612022-02-05T23:14:00.002-06:002022-02-06T10:13:03.489-06:00Joyce's Birthday and Sylvia Beach <div>February 2nd, 2022 marked 100 years since the publication of James Joyce's <i>Ulysses </i>by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris<i>. </i>The day of 2/2/2022 was also the 140th birthday of James Joyce. Ten years ago at my other blog I wrote a short summary of Joyce's life for his <a href="https://www.abuildingroam.com/2012/02/happy-birthday-james-joyce.html" target="_blank">130th birthday</a>. Back then I also wrote a piece describing with 16 reasons <a href="https://www.abuildingroam.com/2011/08/16-reasons-why-james-joyce-is-greatest.html" target="_blank">why James Joyce is the greatest writer ever</a>. Both older pieces seem to hold up well I think, even though that was from before I had ever read <i>Finnegans Wake. Finnegans Wake</i> also had a birthday on February 2nd, it marked 83 years since Joyce's final masterwork first appeared in print after nearly two decades of serialization under the title <i>Work in Progress</i>. Joyce told a friend, "since 1922 my book has been a greater reality for me than reality." (Ellmann, 695) Back in 2010 after Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon brought out their new-and-improved "corrected" edition of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, I <a href="https://www.abuildingroam.com/2010/03/more-readable-finnegans-wake.html" target="_blank">wrote about</a> the frantic final stages in the proofreading and publication of such a bizarrely written book. This was how the <i>Wake</i> came into the world:</div><div><div></div><blockquote><div>Joyce finished composing the book on November 13, 1938 after laboring on it for nearly 17 years and then for the next month and a half, Joyce, with help from his friends Stuart Gilbert and Paul Léon and some professional proofreaders, frantically worked around the clock to proofread the book as Joyce insisted that it be printed by his birthday (February 2nd) no matter what. During this time, Joyce barely slept at all and once collapsed during a walk in Paris. In his famous Joyce biography, Richard Ellmann tells another story from this "frenzy of proofreading":</div><div><blockquote>Léon supplied a last drama by forgetting a section of the revised proofs in a taxi. He rushed back to stop the driver, but the taxi was gone. Bitterly ashamed, he hurried to Joyce's flat to inform him; Joyce did not reproach him, seemed rather to take it as the usual sort of bad luck. Léon telephoned to London to send more proofs, but the taxi driver, after two hours, miraculously appeared with the missing package. (<i>JJ</i>, Ellmann, pg 714)</blockquote></div><div>Joyce received a printed copy of the book from his publishers, Faber & Faber, on January 30th and for his birthday party on February 2nd, he celebrated the culmination of his years of work with friends and family. Paris' best caterer baked seven cakes, each one a replica of Joyce's seven books, with icing the color of the books' bindings. At the dinner celebration, Joyce told the guests how the idea for the book came to him in 1922 when he was at Nice in France and, after dinner, Joyce and his son sang a duet and his son's wife read aloud the last pages of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>.</div></blockquote><div></div></div><div><br /></div><div>When <i>Ulysses</i> was published in 1922 the era was fraught due to obscenity charges which led to Joyce's most famous book being declined by publishers in the English-speaking world for fear of legal action against them. Instead the owner of a small bookshop in Paris, American expatriate Sylvia Beach, took on the task of publishing the first edition of <i>Ulysses</i>. By the time Joyce was wrapping up <i>Finnegans Wake</i> in the late 1930s, he was the biggest literary celebrity in the world. He appeared on the cover of <i>Time</i> magazine and Faber & Faber published and promoted his new book.</div><div><br /></div><div>Joyce had in his hands the first printed copy of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> for his 58th birthday. He would not live to see the age of 60. He died January 13th, 1941 in Zurich after escaping Paris with his family before the Nazis took over France. With the Wake turning 83 years old, I was thinking what year would it have been had Joyce lived to the age of 83? 1965. One can only imagine. Ezra Pound died in 1972. Joyce's son Giorgio lived until 1976 and daughter Lucia died in 1982. </div><div><br /></div><div>Sylvia Beach died in 1962. That same year she recorded an interview that's available to watch on YouTube, shared below. It's a fantastic clip for Joyce fans, she describes what kind of person Joyce was, and (starting at 15:00) she tells the story of how, after the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, a group of German officers came to her shop demanding to have her final copy of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. She refused, and after they threatened to come back and confiscate all her stuff, she hurriedly emptied the shop and shuttered up Shakespeare and Company. </div><div><br /></div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/R1Zbw39MCm4?start=900" title="YouTube video player" width="493"></iframe>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-77178235828241357092021-12-22T22:26:00.010-06:002021-12-27T11:55:49.315-06:00"So This Is Dyoublong?" Living inside the World of the Wake, Part 1<p><b></b></p><blockquote><b>"He ought to go away for a change of ideas and he'd have a world of things to look back on."</b> </blockquote><blockquote><b>- <i>Finnegans Wake</i> p. 160</b></blockquote><p></p><p>This past summer, in the midst of a breakup from a long-term relationship and needing to go far away, I embarked on my first ever trip to Ireland. I ended up spending much of the past few months in and around Dublin. For somebody like me who has been interested in the writings of James Joyce for almost 15 years now, with the last 10 years spent hosting a <i>Finnegans Wake</i> reading group that deciphers each page down to its tiniest details, and maintaining this blog devoted to the <i>Wake</i>, the experience of spending so much time exploring Dublin and environs for the first time was transformative. Suffice to say I have an entirely new perspective on Joyce's work now. My head is filled with thoughts and reflections, so much that I don't know where to start. But since I have so much to say about it, I'm going to start posting a series of reflections about the experience on this blog. </p><p>My first few days in Dublin I recall being in awe at everything around me since I'd been reading about the details of the place for so many years. Landmarks felt oddly familiar and deeply significant even though I was seeing them for the first time. Howth Head, so prominent on the horizon when looking north or northeast, it wasn't just a piece of rocky terrain, it was the head of the sleeping giant Finn MacCool. The Wicklow Mountains weren't just some green rolling hills, they were the place where the sea-formed clouds rain down and become the source of the River Liffey, an ongoing natural cycle. Even the ubiquitous flocks of seagulls sprung to mind the squawking sea-birds in Book II.4 of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, "<i>Three quarks for muster Mark!</i>" (FW p. 383.01) </p><p>I grew up in New York City where famous sights like the Manhattan skyline, Verrazano Bridge, and Statue of Liberty were familiar aspects of home. An out-of-towner visiting a place like New York City for the first time would instantly recognize many of the landmarks and sights from the background or setting of the worlds of NYC-based films and tv shows. With Joyce's Dublin though, the city is not merely the setting for <i>Finnegans Wake</i>---so much of the book is <i>about</i> the landscape itself, the ecology, the littoral life of the coastal zone, the street grid and its voices, the layers of historical events that shaped the place. Dublin in the Wake becomes the universal city, a city rendered into text with so much mythical depth and detailed density it makes you contemplate all cities.</p><p>So far I haven't yet mentioned <i>Ulysses</i> in connection with my experience of Dublin. I certainly was interested in the <i>Ulysses</i> stuff during my time there. I swam in the Forty Foot in Sandycove, saw the magnificent Martello Tower (in fact, I stayed for a week in a different Martello Tower a stone's throw away, a story for another day), on an almost daily basis I walked along Westland Row just like Bloom and went to Sweny's Pharmacy to participate in readings a few times, I even made my way over to Eccles Street. There is no lack of <i>Ulysses</i> stuff in Dublin, the city seems to fully embrace the importance of <i>Ulysses </i>which was really cool to witness. A constant habit of mine while staying in Dublin and exploring Ireland was to always search inside the texts of both <i>Ulysses</i> and <i>Finnegans Wake</i> each time I experienced anything new. And the impression I got was that <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, even more than <i>Ulysses</i>, contains seemingly every single tiny detail of Dublin. Every street I spent time on, I looked for it in <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, and nine times out of ten I found it in there. Every district, every sight I saw, it all seemed to be there in the Wake. It became clear that Joyce redoubled his efforts to place every possible detail of the city of his birth into ink while writing the Wake over the last 17 years of his life. </p><p>There were a few instances I noticed where Joyce had included some Dublin detail within <i>Ulysses</i> as part of a listicle, only to expand on it and scatter more references to it in <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. A couple quick examples---I spent a few days staying in a nice little district called Ranelagh in south Dublin, so I started looking for the place in Joyce's books. It pops up one time in <i>Ulysses</i> in a list delineating the route taken by one of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_National_Invincibles" target="_blank">Invincibles</a> prior to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Park_Murders" target="_blank">Phoenix Park Murders</a>, whereas in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> the neighborhood Ranelagh appears at least four times. Later on, when I went to Howth Head the little islet known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%27s_Eye" target="_blank">Ireland's Eye</a> really stood out to me. It's a small island just off of Howth, a mysterious and striking sight visible from along the northern coast of Howth, the island has its own Martello Tower and the ruins of an early-medieval church. Ireland's Eye pops up once in <i>Ulysses</i> as part of a list of sites in the Cyclops episode, where in the Wake I have found at least a dozen appearances of Ireland's Eye. That could very well be because Howth and environs are so prominent in the Wake---a fact which really made a lot of sense to me once I saw Dublin and noticed Howth Head is an unmistakable feature on the horizon from almost anywhere.</p><p>A thought I kept returning to over and over was: how did Joyce, while in exile away from Ireland for the last few decades of his life, manage to render all of this in such precise detail? And <i>why</i>? Why would this genius author spend day after day writing only about <i>this place</i> (where he no longer lived) in such painstaking detail? As for the why, Joyce told Arthur Power, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." On days when I wandered around in what seemed like a James Joyce theme park (a phrase I'm borrowing from former Dublin resident Robert Anton Wilson), casually walking down Westland Row, past <a href="http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2021/08/finns-hotel.html" target="_blank">Finn's Hotel</a>, down to St. Stephen's Green, past the Shelbourne Hotel, over to King Street past the Gaiety Theater, back towards Grafton Street, up past Trinity College (all places that appear throughout <i>Finnegans Wake</i>) and then along the River Liffey, the river of life, the universal river Joyce anthropomorphized as Anna Livia Plurabelle in the Wake, I'd stop to stare at the varying ripples along the surface of the waters, and I was struck by a feeling I could only really convey in the following meme. I was this dude looking around at everyone else in the bustling city wondering how they didn't share my wonder for the Wake-ness of it all. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhzm4v3MahjBA90WdxHNyE8gqYzDythhv4Wd6WUl6GNHbgzHLA9qIsNwXzAnar1ei51Fpc-2lVeGrWdBREgqJlPaOTZBltcyJ4gsx9-wySR4Bt-8ETchJGZzuxsCXYFqUd54BVDXiFc3ASJJEbJFt8rSym3Kpg1P3E2IxuwRLi9Mo5NNqIz2-M6K8pe-A=s501" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="501" data-original-width="500" height="332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhzm4v3MahjBA90WdxHNyE8gqYzDythhv4Wd6WUl6GNHbgzHLA9qIsNwXzAnar1ei51Fpc-2lVeGrWdBREgqJlPaOTZBltcyJ4gsx9-wySR4Bt-8ETchJGZzuxsCXYFqUd54BVDXiFc3ASJJEbJFt8rSym3Kpg1P3E2IxuwRLi9Mo5NNqIz2-M6K8pe-A=w331-h332" width="331" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p></p><p>For more than a dozen years I had been a passionate reader of the Wake, so much that I was even writing this blog solely devoted to talking about this one book, and throughout that whole time I had never experienced Dublin and had only a minuscule appreciation for the actual Irish elements of the text. It was always just that I loved the literary pyrotechnics and have always been fascinated by the Wake as the darker and more under-appreciated twin of <i>Ulysses</i>, this mysterious text which Joyce labored on for so many years, through so many hardships and then died right after it was finally published. Once I finally made it to Dublin, the incomprehensible Wake I'd been puzzling through for so long began to make sense on a level I'd never experienced before. I can say without a doubt, you cannot truly comprehend the phrase "from swerve of shore to bend of bay" until you've seen Dublin. The swerving shore and bending bay is such a distinctive quality of that coastline and that coastline is such a fundamental part of that city.</p><p>Speaking of the coastline and the opening sentence of the Wake... my favorite spot in Dublin, the place that struck me the most and which remains tattooed on my heart, is Vico Road. The view from Vico Road is one of the most breathtaking sights I've ever witnessed. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4JhTzM9ES0Z8oECSVh1uHt5buWWxfFtIkPVxRTsLugtENdbLhxvFOJI6OI1BlngSZz1PMYeTQPkhNuxWbBLlPHPJgZxkuDEnqKUqkXOwtLk_TN9AX_Y5lZsYxcxms2tImDdLMIys_c6xbmmhCNn7Izh3AjMFMj0lTjocMD44b5Rd8UH0GvPy93jpAeA=s2048" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4JhTzM9ES0Z8oECSVh1uHt5buWWxfFtIkPVxRTsLugtENdbLhxvFOJI6OI1BlngSZz1PMYeTQPkhNuxWbBLlPHPJgZxkuDEnqKUqkXOwtLk_TN9AX_Y5lZsYxcxms2tImDdLMIys_c6xbmmhCNn7Izh3AjMFMj0lTjocMD44b5Rd8UH0GvPy93jpAeA=w400-h300" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">View from Vico Road.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj-G9YfCFU_HvmO8zEVgrdgZR6UPbRuPwey6nQUm1M3TuRad9saUzXmm36jD8bZ7hr_CvlrBEAF28NO30W3lilWxNp4by_wWP33y5dNbQ8FJGhQU0VnKhHHDJ5PJMj3SxAeTsrptnOhRBarKjCdOFXns2_r890vhJTo8z5TGVCCPjThwpXUdFE6rb80WQ=s1024" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj-G9YfCFU_HvmO8zEVgrdgZR6UPbRuPwey6nQUm1M3TuRad9saUzXmm36jD8bZ7hr_CvlrBEAF28NO30W3lilWxNp4by_wWP33y5dNbQ8FJGhQU0VnKhHHDJ5PJMj3SxAeTsrptnOhRBarKjCdOFXns2_r890vhJTo8z5TGVCCPjThwpXUdFE6rb80WQ=w400-h300" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">...more Vico Road views.</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhufbZUIOwyZeBpztLDzl4QBCPk2KlsBTW9F7u6KmeeowqI3jcjSSiX8kP_WDL2H0xKEs0cySRf31HD3CqIK1QJC3K9P95-Sr1JcF4n9QnTW1v7xgQ89Mrda0IxhFS-BMz5thyTgeOgvaN4QHgDPPs-YyfCP6oRXqKYHRcVLjVxscbSB9BM4cjSBAe-dw=s4032" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhufbZUIOwyZeBpztLDzl4QBCPk2KlsBTW9F7u6KmeeowqI3jcjSSiX8kP_WDL2H0xKEs0cySRf31HD3CqIK1QJC3K9P95-Sr1JcF4n9QnTW1v7xgQ89Mrda0IxhFS-BMz5thyTgeOgvaN4QHgDPPs-YyfCP6oRXqKYHRcVLjVxscbSB9BM4cjSBAe-dw=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhhKlmVbYk5EqNFwPzuKvBTOcrbB6FAI5cpPo1Mh6E7fGpsYtBi4238UtnrdXl11eESBMsti-0psB8InGYed8_ZHvsW7tO3kLHH0jc3ZTe5va7iTZ2pvrsGaU1Aa0ZdNheFfii3ohEKs9bzGKva-XhZePcN5atIsndLNNj6bCcQHKGL51e0Z6xcR26Q0w=s4032" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhhKlmVbYk5EqNFwPzuKvBTOcrbB6FAI5cpPo1Mh6E7fGpsYtBi4238UtnrdXl11eESBMsti-0psB8InGYed8_ZHvsW7tO3kLHH0jc3ZTe5va7iTZ2pvrsGaU1Aa0ZdNheFfii3ohEKs9bzGKva-XhZePcN5atIsndLNNj6bCcQHKGL51e0Z6xcR26Q0w=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>"The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin."<br />- FW 452.21</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div>Prior to experiencing the place, Vico Road in Dalkey had always seemed like it was simply a curiosity, a funny coincidence that there just so happened to be a road in the Dublin area named for the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico whose writings so heavily influenced <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. For a week I stayed in the beautiful old town of Dalkey and realized Joyce must have spent significant time there, I believe he had a teaching job in a school there. In Robert Nicholson's book <i>The Ulysses Guide: Tours Through Joyce's Dublin</i> I read that the Nestor chapter where Stephen teaches a class (and which chapter contains the only mention of Vico Road in <i>Ulysses</i>) most likely takes place at a school in Dalkey and I noticed Dalkey seemed to be home to many schools, the town was always filled with students in the afternoons. The <i>Ulysses</i> tour book mentions that Stephen likely walked down to the Dalkey train station after teaching class. Vico Road is a short walk from the Dalkey train station. <div><br /></div><div>For me, as a Wake nerd knowing the significance of Vico to Joyce, walking to Vico Road felt like a sort of pilgrimage. My first glimpse of the views from Vico Road blew my mind, I'd no idea it was such a beautiful place. It turns out this gorgeous area was thought to resemble the Bay of Naples in Italy and that's why the roads nearby are named after the Neapolitan Vico and the town of Sorrento on the Amalfi coast (Vico Road connects to Sorrento Road and Sorrento Park---Sorrento appears a few times in FW). During my trip, I was fortunate to meet a girl who lived right near Vico Road in Killiney Beach and so I got to spend a lot of time in that area staring out at those gorgeous views. That part of town truly felt enchanted to me. There's just a vibe over there. Having spent so much time there, trying to see that area through the eyes of young Joyce, it is now my theory that the area around Vico Road---where one looks southward at the promontory of Bray, and northward at Dalkey Island with its own Martello Tower and medieval church ruins, with the bend of bay and Irish Sea stretching out in between---made such an impact on the young Joyce that it significantly contributed to his fascination with Vico (which, if I'm not mistaken, had begun around the time of his earliest writings and grew into a full-fledged obsession with Vico in the Wake).<div><br /></div><div>I also think it was not only Joyce's appreciation for Vico's theories but also his memories of Vico Road itself which led to its placement in the first sentence of the Wake: </div><div><br /></div><div><b><blockquote>riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. </blockquote></b></div><div><br /></div><div>After witnessing all of these places firsthand, I feel there is an uncanny ecological poetry to this sentence. Tough to put into words but where I felt I understood this most clearly was while standing atop Killiney Hill (Molly Bloom recalls walking up Killiney Hill for a picnic, by the way). Close near Vico Road, there's a path that will take you up to the top of Killiney Hill, from which you can see a panoramic view of the whole city of Dublin. I think it's the best possible view of the city, and from there looking out at the jutting peninsula of Howth, and looking down at the river ostensibly in the lowlands in the heart of the city, casting your glance out to the swerving shore going southward, you begin to sense how that natural cycle so central to the Wake actually functions---the waters of the river rushing eastward and dispersing out to sea, spreading along the coast northward to Howth, and southward to the area along Vico Road, only to eventually evaporate into clouds which rain down on the westward hills (and the elevated areas of Howth and Vico Road) and drain into the river to recirculate and start the cycle over again. </div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Looking out at that panoramic view I had a vision that Joyce had rendered this city into ink on page with <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, as thoroughly and successfully as one possibly could transform a piece of populated land into a book. I was thinking of how the Wake describes itself as a mysterious written object that was discovered "in the course of deeper demolition" (FW 110.28), buried underground where it "acquired accretions of terricious matter" (FW 114.29). I pictured the book as an organic object, "underground and acqueduced" (FW 128.09) soaking in all the dirt and sewage of the city which fed the text's fusing together with the layers of earth and its history, branching out rhizomatic roots "of increasing, livivorous, feelful thinkamalinks; luxuriotiating everywhencewithersoever among skullhollows and charnelcysts of a weedwastewoldwevild" (FW 613.19-20). Even in the modernized city there are still so many old structures in Dublin such that it seems you're often staring back centuries into history, living alongside ghosts. Exploring Dublin, and thinking over the Wake's obsession with burials, archeological excavations, and resurrections sprung to mind how every city, seen through a Wakean timelapse, involves so much dispersion and dissolution down into the ground. We are all always walking on soil mixed with the blood of the dead, or as the Wake has it, "while a successive generation has been in the deep deep deeps of Deepereras. Buried hearts. Rest here." (FW 595.27-29)</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>To be continued...</i></div><div><p></p></div></div>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-48384918588690629942021-08-26T10:01:00.001-05:002021-08-26T18:54:56.232-05:00Beyond the Portal: Further notes from reading FW Book I.3-4<p>The text of Book I.3-4 of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> is so inexhaustibly rich (the word for it on pg 91 is "inexousthausthible") that my notes on this part of the book keep growing the more I think on it and each note could expand into its own area of study. Without going too deep into any of these subjects though, I'm going to share below some cursory and mostly disconnected observations from reading this part of the <i>Wake</i>. Consider these expanded footnotes to my previous post on <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-portal.html" target="_blank">The Portal</a>. </p><p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYnjjxEByZ_75VdkcOY6SFdFCTj9rlgKk48T1KGSL8eTPgk3jT_uMZ-p9I3g-qBASxf02qzXcTctvIcW7hHCTUYna5cVsHhcvHpS5XBdjaEHBNVfx9xKFPL_aO9RqYExUcimvnCOQt7k1f/s1024/Ishtar_Gate_at_Berlin_Museum.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYnjjxEByZ_75VdkcOY6SFdFCTj9rlgKk48T1KGSL8eTPgk3jT_uMZ-p9I3g-qBASxf02qzXcTctvIcW7hHCTUYna5cVsHhcvHpS5XBdjaEHBNVfx9xKFPL_aO9RqYExUcimvnCOQt7k1f/w400-h300/Ishtar_Gate_at_Berlin_Museum.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ishtar Gate reconstruction in Berlin Museum</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p><u>Babel</u></p><p>In my <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-portal.html" target="_blank">last post</a>, focusing on the scene of a confrontation at a pub gate, I talked about the image of the gate as a portal to the afterlife or to the underworld. I later learned that the name for the city of Babel, as in the Tower of Babel, comes <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/Babel#etymonline_v_163" target="_blank">from</a> the Akkadian <i>bab-ilu</i> which literally means "Gate of God" stemming from the <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/Babylon#etymonline_v_168" target="_blank">same root</a> as the name of Babylon. This section of the <i>Wake</i> touches on this etymological link in a few ways where the attacker at the gate is described: "This battering <u>babel</u> allower the door and sideposts, he always said, was not in the very remotest like the belzey <u>babble</u> of a bottle of boose" (FW 64.10-11, emphasis added). The passage on pg 69 of FW all about the Gate prominently mentions the Babylonian goddess Ishtar (to whom the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Gate" target="_blank">Ishtar Gate</a> of Babylon was dedicated) and, later on, in the last two pages of chapter 4, we find references to Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, and ALP sings the lyrics to a song called "by the waters of babalong" (FW 103) or Babylon. I think this chapter ending on pg. 103 is an echo of the chapter ending on pg. 74 where HCE drifts off into deep sleep at the sound of rain drops, whereas here it's the sound of a rushing stream, the waters of Babylon. My last post touched on the appearance of a ziggurat on pg 100 in the phrase <b>"beaconsfarafield innherhalf the zuggurat"</b> where HCE himself seems to have been buried inside a tomb within an illuminated ziggurat. The Tower of Babel legend is thought to be based on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat_of_Ur" target="_blank">Ziggurat of Ur</a>, the ziggurat being a meeting point or portal between this realm and the ethereal realm, in other words a "Gate of God." Generally I think the clusters of references to Bablyon and Ur (and elsewhere in the text, clusters of references to the Garden of Eden) are intended as a way of signaling the main character fallen asleep is descending back to origins---in deep slumber he's going back to the world of the womb, "backtowards motherwaters." (FW 84.30-31) </p><p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><p><u>The Bat</u></p><p>The attacker at the gate wields a "fender" or some type of a cudgel weapon that morphs and changes appearance throughout chapters 3-4. Details of the story keep changing---there was an attacker banging a bottle at the locked gate, or it was an encounter in the streets with the legless strangler <a href="http://mossreid.blogspot.com/2019/07/billy-in-bowl-stoneybatter-strangler.html" target="_blank">Billy-in-the-Bowl</a>, or there was a no-holds-barred wrestling match with an armed burglar. Joyce intertwines random details from various real-world contemporary newspaper accounts of crimes and trials. Witness accounts vary, "our mutual friends the fender and the bottle at the gate seem to be implicitly in the same bateau" (FW65.35-36) it says at one point, while earlier a witness declares "No such parson. No such fender. No such lumber." (FW 63.11) On page 81, the object is made to appear like a crowbar that a burglar and his victim wrestle over: "catching holst of an oblong bar he had and with which he usually broke furnitures he rose the stick at him." (FW 81. 31-32) On the next page the object could be a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webley_Revolver" target="_blank">Webley</a> revolver pistol, when, in the middle of their "collidabanter" it says "a woden affair in the shape of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webley_Revolver" target="_blank">webley</a>" (FW 82.16) falls out of the burglar's pocket. On pg 84 it's a "humoral hurlbat" a bat used in the Irish sport of hurling. Later on pg 98 the weapon evolves again through rumors and kaleidoscopic views, "Batty believes a baton while Hogan hears a hod yet Heer prefers a punsil shapner and Cope and Bull go cup and ball." The presence of bat and ball suggest cricket and/or baseball references here, but more on that in a moment. As discussed in my last post, in the book <i>Wake Rites</i>, George Cinclair Gibson describes the "Batter at the Gate" confrontation as paralleling certain rituals of the ancient Irish druids. One of these rituals, which were designed to divest the old king of his powers, apparently included a hostile druid confronting the king at a doorway while aggressively wielding the wooden "shamanistic device" known as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullroarer" target="_blank">bull-roarer</a>. Gibson gives a good argument for the mysterious wooden object in this part of the <i>Wake</i> being a bull-roarer (see <i>Wake Rites</i>, p. 88-90) and notes that J.S. Atherton in his <i>Books at the Wake </i>observed that Joyce definitely knew about this druid device. </p><p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><p><u>Wicket Gate</u></p><p>Joyce in his notes titled this section "Batter at Gate" and I'm intrigued by the use of the word batter here because, as the story morphs and mutates, there are noticeable elements of cricket and baseball. The mysterious wooden weapon wielded by the attacker becomes a bat (p. 84.04) and in the pages describing the gate at one point it says the attacker "went on at a wicked rate" (FW 70.32) which Fweet <a href="http://fweet.org/cgi-bin/fw_grep.cgi?i=1&o=1&r=1&b=1&s=%5E070.32" target="_blank">notes</a> as an echo of "wicket gate" which could be the wicket in cricket. Peter Chrisp wrote a really fascinating <a href="http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2016/07/james-joyce-cricket-lover.html" target="_blank">blog post</a> describing how Joyce was a lifelong fan of cricket with an extensive knowledge of the game's golden age players. There are tons of references to the gameplay of cricket and famous cricketers within the <i>Wake</i>. Notice also how the "trilithon" version of HCE's siglum resembles a wicket:</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1K8Fhh3Oos3r6pM2oXeZOdCAtYxs9oWmJeJStnXhO7egXTnkJBLklirnbVqbQMJ8Re9Etd5k72PHBDXZDxqdAdSh_IR43pZ4tf0oJzar2_KUIqDWRJH1d3TCCoRaloHI7jdO3n4zGVHrS/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="928" data-original-width="692" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1K8Fhh3Oos3r6pM2oXeZOdCAtYxs9oWmJeJStnXhO7egXTnkJBLklirnbVqbQMJ8Re9Etd5k72PHBDXZDxqdAdSh_IR43pZ4tf0oJzar2_KUIqDWRJH1d3TCCoRaloHI7jdO3n4zGVHrS/" width="179" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A wicket used in cricket. The name comes from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicket#History" target="_blank">wicket gate</a>, a small gate.<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH81IXM7Rb8DXLYX9gXtlMhpr-TUOUf1SGLU6K1OystXno1aUn5Q5ntum5z4Wgm_-MIZnQtIBypWuoD8mvU2KlcGtdLQZIp1Jav8LrhsNaW2hdXJOOCt2G71ZrLl_HGa4hIG4UJ0RztagH/s636/Sigla.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="462" data-original-width="636" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH81IXM7Rb8DXLYX9gXtlMhpr-TUOUf1SGLU6K1OystXno1aUn5Q5ntum5z4Wgm_-MIZnQtIBypWuoD8mvU2KlcGtdLQZIp1Jav8LrhsNaW2hdXJOOCt2G71ZrLl_HGa4hIG4UJ0RztagH/w200-h145/Sigla.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">trilithon E siglum for HCE</td></tr></tbody></table><p>The confrontation at the gate gets re-examined and re-litigated in this part of FW and each time the details change. The identities of the two combatants can seem to blur, the presence of a "fender" as weapon helps confuse offender and defender. The nature of the clash changes. By the time we get deep into chapter 4, evidently the clash at the gate involved somebody throwing a stone. The attacker under questioning "would swear... he did not fire a stone either." (FW 91.08-11) Knowing Joyce had a love for cricket, and knowing also (after reading Brian J. Fox's insightful and well-researched book <i>James Joyce's America</i>) that Joyce closely tracked American popular culture of the time and filled FW with American pop cultural references, I think it's highly plausible Joyce was aware of American baseball and included it within the <i>Wake</i>. Seasoned Joyce scholar John Gordon apparently agrees---in his annotations for this <a href="https://johngordonfinnegan.weebly.com/book-i/chapter-1-section-4" target="_blank">section</a>, he expands on the phrase "Pegger's Windup" (FW 92.06) with this: "given this chapter’s plethora of American idioms, 'pitcher’s windup' seem highly probable here. (For non-American readers: in baseball, a pitcher will gyrate his body before fixing it in position before releasing the ball. See 91.11-2 and note.)" His additional note from pg 91 refers to "Pegger Festy" where he explains the name has to do with someone throwing stones. Looking a little more closely at this page reveals more potential allusions things that sound like baseball, cricket, bat and ball games:</p><blockquote><p>91.26: "as true as he was there in that jackabox that minute" [baseball batter's box]</p><p>91.27: "or wield or wind" [wield a bat, wind up to pitch]</p><p>91.30-32: "if ever in all his exchequered career he up or lave a chancery hand to take or throw the sign of a mortal stick or stone at man" [take or throw, pitcher's signs, stick or stone]</p></blockquote><p>Following "Pegger's Windup" and "Pegger Festy" we also get "Wet Pinter" (FW 92.07) which, although likely anachronistic, could be an allusion to baseball terminology where a pitcher with good precision is said to "paint" the edges of the strike zone. With a batter at the gate and someone winding up to fire or peg a rock, and words like "sockdologer" on pg 91 (American slang for a decisive blow) there's definitely the impression of a clash resembling the pitcher/batter confrontation in baseball. Since this part of the <i>Wake</i> deals so much with origins, bringing in Babylon and numerous references to Adam & Eve, I think it's possible Joyce is touching on the metaphorical underpinnings of bat and ball games like cricket and baseball. In her insightful study of baseball and mythology <i>Ground Rules: Baseball & Myth </i>(1995), Deanne Westbrook quotes from the novel <i>The Celebrant</i> where Christy Mathewson theorizes on the origins of bat and ball as ancient weapons, stone and stick, perhaps even the first murder weapons: <br /></p><blockquote>"Throwing and clubbing. What could be more ancient?... We have to grant that our prehistoric forebears employed those same arts against the creatures of nature--indeed, against one another. Even in holy writ, mustn't we imagine that Cain slew Abel with a stone guided by the bare hand, or a club wielded as a bludgeon? Think of it. I stand on the pitcher's mound, the batter at home plate. We are surrounded by every manifestation of civilization... Yet my action in throwing and his in swinging are echoes of the most primitive brutality." (<i>Ground Rules: Baseball & Myth</i>, p. 110) </blockquote><p> </p><p></p><p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><p><u>Turnpike</u></p><p>When I shared that last post, a commenter replied asking "no turnpike?" So let's discuss the turnpike. The turnpike, as in a turnpike road where a toll is taken, and more specifically referring to the old <a href="http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/environment-geography/transport/growth-of-transportation-/roads-and-toll-roads/the-abolition-of-turnpike/" target="_blank">turnpike road system in Dublin</a> from the 1700s-1800s, appears frequently in <i>Finnegans Wake </i>usually in connection with HCE who is "our family furbear, our tribal tarnpike" (FW 132.32). The turnpike first appears on the opening page with "their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park" (FW 03.22) where "the knock out in the park" refers to Castleknock, the district on the western side of Phoenix Park in Dublin. So there must have been a turnpike road there, but <a href="http://fweet.org/cgi-bin/fw_grep.cgi?i=1&o=1&r=1&b=1&s=%5E003.22" target="_blank">Fweet</a> also alludes to a turnpike in Chapelizod, the area south of Phoenix Park where the action of the <i>Wake</i> is supposed to take place. HCE and his family are ostensibly asleep in their home above the pub owned by HCE, which is generally <a href="http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-pint-in-earwickers-pub.html" target="_blank">considered</a> to be the Mullingar House pub in Chapelizod. When we meet HCE at the beginning of chapter 2, he's "jingling his turnpike keys" (FW 31.01) and is said to be "a turnpiker who is by turns a pikebailer no seldomer than an earwigger!" (FW 31.27-28). </p><p>I think the turnpike takes on an additional meaning in the Gate passage I previously examined from page 69 where we read: "Now by memory inspired, turn wheel again to the whole of the wall." This is apparently referring to another very real pub in the vicinity of Phoenix Park, a pub known as The Hole in the Wall (formerly known as Black Horse Tavern). The Hole in the Wall pub is located in the district of Ashtown just north of Phoenix Park, and the phrase "turn wheel again" refers to the turnstile (or turnpike) set in a hole in the adjacent Phoenix Park wall. You can see the turnstile in the wall <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/24802530044" target="_blank">here</a> in this old photograph:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuJpxFbZzNtJQxE-mo5Q_ue3WohMYv_dpJBirMsx6WWThvYyQs2Bh4S1AE6_bV1ASDTlPQm7OEjfnuZI-zhrzY6Zt6qWNaadkNny1_fP5XDJFOiSWd5VxmucxSa89gUzZ0466LpL-eixtF/s2000/24802530044_8184db069b_k.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1309" data-original-width="2000" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuJpxFbZzNtJQxE-mo5Q_ue3WohMYv_dpJBirMsx6WWThvYyQs2Bh4S1AE6_bV1ASDTlPQm7OEjfnuZI-zhrzY6Zt6qWNaadkNny1_fP5XDJFOiSWd5VxmucxSa89gUzZ0466LpL-eixtF/w400-h261/24802530044_8184db069b_k.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>Looking at Google street view, you can see the turnstile is still there to this day in the same spot:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMHpvFo6WSd1pYPqjRNGfk0ysxmO6gwcXVymC-gHc0l_NPeEj2H9bLC1-yARwENGze1bWbVdz7oSP8f5ghfQ8CggvI6T6FiEX6qpLqtKMEH8eRdlhmAa_o7a2zxrtvIM0CzouX0mCgilnP/s1287/Screen+Shot+2021-08-23+at+11.14.35+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="916" data-original-width="1287" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMHpvFo6WSd1pYPqjRNGfk0ysxmO6gwcXVymC-gHc0l_NPeEj2H9bLC1-yARwENGze1bWbVdz7oSP8f5ghfQ8CggvI6T6FiEX6qpLqtKMEH8eRdlhmAa_o7a2zxrtvIM0CzouX0mCgilnP/w400-h285/Screen+Shot+2021-08-23+at+11.14.35+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p>I am left wondering why, though, if the action of the <i>Wake</i> is supposed to take place at Mullingar House in Chapelizod on the southern edge of Phoenix Park, why the scene would shift across the park to the Hole in the Wall pub in Ashtown. Maybe it's got something to do with the recurrent theme of HCE walking through Phoenix Park at night and either being accosted or encountering girls peeing or some other vague incident. Or maybe it makes more sense that the belligerent drunk who's banging at the locked gate would be stuck behind a locked turnstile. For what it's worth, the trek across the park from the pub in Chapelizod to the pub in Ashtown is about a 45 minute walk:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgawQ7gfhmTMg0bvoCV10vNrWqxKdEAUpsoiLxfV3QAWcQeacBmfjmcZ2Xx07-dTt_iLMefrCWsB963dkaifOIlWcdOEIBGjeLWaTgOXicCPIQp_G0KU4v5FutPGCEXeo8Dp8eF-hJl64Cn/s793/Screen+Shot+2021-07-04+at+12.41.10+AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="590" data-original-width="793" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgawQ7gfhmTMg0bvoCV10vNrWqxKdEAUpsoiLxfV3QAWcQeacBmfjmcZ2Xx07-dTt_iLMefrCWsB963dkaifOIlWcdOEIBGjeLWaTgOXicCPIQp_G0KU4v5FutPGCEXeo8Dp8eF-hJl64Cn/w400-h297/Screen+Shot+2021-07-04+at+12.41.10+AM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />I am actually in Dublin right now as I type this and I'm planning to get over there this week to explore both of those pubs and the space in between.<p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><p><br /></p><p><u>Via Heraklea</u></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm6CDKrZqHFy-4fkKc4GcXef3KGOcOjqPn8704tXRvXJOdgN8_hwGh8hNfKQmvBOXjMrDje7aLh1HM5UwhhAy3XVJb7yJlf7TOgjQk8jPbfb86ns-0Jr7inJbifqcRt-KgnDRrpisZ0TH5/s2048/Via+Appia_Piranesi.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1300" data-original-width="2048" height="406" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm6CDKrZqHFy-4fkKc4GcXef3KGOcOjqPn8704tXRvXJOdgN8_hwGh8hNfKQmvBOXjMrDje7aLh1HM5UwhhAy3XVJb7yJlf7TOgjQk8jPbfb86ns-0Jr7inJbifqcRt-KgnDRrpisZ0TH5/w640-h406/Via+Appia_Piranesi.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Ancient intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina</i> by Piranesi</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>We touched on roads in relation to the turnpike above, but later in chapter 4 the references to roads proliferate so much that it's worth taking a closer to see what's going on. On page 80, while the street-cleaner and scavenger Kate Strong is delivering her witness account of what transpired, she mentions "there being no macadamised sidetracks on those old nekropolitan nights" (FW 080.01-02)---where the allusion to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macadam" target="_blank">macadamization</a> refers to a method of making or repairing roads, and "nekropolitan nights" could be an allusion to how Roman roads were lined with tombs and gravestones since the dead were forbidden to be buried within the city walls---and then over the next few pages we get several references to roads and paths. </p><p>The allusions to roads cluster especially on page 81 where we get this interesting line: <b>"If this was Hannibal's walk it was Hercules' work."</b> (FW 81.03) The many references to roads and particularly this conjunction of Hannibal and Hercules and a pathway ("Hannibal's walk") took on a new meaning for me when I read Graham Robb's groundbreaking book <i>The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts</i> (2013) which is essentially a prehistory of the Roman road system. Robb mainly focuses on what's known as the Via Heraklea, an ancient road originally constructed by the Gaulish Druids extending from the tip of present-day Portugal along the southern edge of the Iberian peninsula up through the Alps. The road was said to be in the footsteps of Herakles who was originally a sun god, and Robb thoroughly lays out a convincing argument that the Druids, who were masters of astronomy, laid out the road to be in perfect alignment with the rising of the sun at the summer solstice and the setting of the sun at the winter solstice (the reference to "middle earth" in the book's title has to do with the Druids attempting to align the earthly world or middle earth with the upper world of the sky). As for the connection between Hannibal and Hercules in that line from FW pg 81, Robb offers this (mind you, he makes no direct reference to anything from <i>Finnegans Wake</i>):</p><p></p><blockquote>Ancient writers who described the Carthaginian invasion knew that Hannibal saw himself and wanted to be seen as the successor to Herakles. He would march across the mountains in the footsteps of the sun god, shining with the aura of divine approval. (<i>The Discovery of Middle Earth</i>, pp 18-19)<br />When Hannibal stood at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Col_de_Montgen%C3%A8vre" target="_blank">Matrona</a> in the early winter of 218 BC, watching his elephants stumble down to the plains of northern Italy, he knew that he was standing in the rocky footprints of Herakles. His strategists and astrologers, and their Celtic allies and informers, were certain that the sun god had shown them the way. (<i>ibid</i>, p 21)</blockquote><p style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>"If it was Hannibal's walk it was Hercules' work." <br />(FW 81.03)</b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwFSkUS_kkkviHzF1xjfzLiNMP2EvZ-5bjeHCIDBidgQVYZNryq_1ljdSR6wYr7Ed1-ix_0Zw6RkOZmT_dNC8O48V0E_GUIPh0vwxQOcrE1fLNmLyoCqB_0aYf77gmf1wznSkDw6uSAeDO/s522/Screen+Shot+2021-07-04+at+11.09.52+PM.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="507" data-original-width="522" height="389" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwFSkUS_kkkviHzF1xjfzLiNMP2EvZ-5bjeHCIDBidgQVYZNryq_1ljdSR6wYr7Ed1-ix_0Zw6RkOZmT_dNC8O48V0E_GUIPh0vwxQOcrE1fLNmLyoCqB_0aYf77gmf1wznSkDw6uSAeDO/w400-h389/Screen+Shot+2021-07-04+at+11.09.52+PM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Via Heraklea, from <i>The Discovery of Middle Earth</i> by Graham Robb</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>I have no idea how Joyce would've known about the Druid Geodesy underlying the Roman road system or whether he knew about the Via Heraklea, but the connecting clues in this part of the <i>Wake</i> certainly give credence to Joyce being aware of what Robb discusses in his book. For example, Robb emphasizes that the ancient Celtic road system in Gaul was designed during the Iron Age, and on pg 79 line 14 of the <i>Wake</i> we read of "those pagan ironed times." That quote immediately precedes the appearance of clusters of references to roads and paths in the text. Then we have on pg 81, "If it was Hannibal's walk it was Hercules' work" which is followed by a paragraph making multiple references to roads including a treacherous mountain pass---"in the saddle of Brennan's (now Malpasplace?) pass" (FW 81.14-15) where <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Pass" target="_blank">Brenner Pass</a> is a mountain pass that goes through the Alps.</p><p>And as regards the Via Heraklea as a solstice road, the very next page after the Hannibal/Hercules/roads passage mentions "the solstitial pause for refleshmeant" (FW 82.10) followed by the appearance of "Yuni or Yuly" (FW 82.28) and "Yuletide or Yuddanfest" (FW 82.36) which would be June/July and Yuletide/<i>Judenfest </i>(Christmas/Jewish holidays), in other words the summer solstice and winter solstice. I should also mention that one of the figures who frequently comes up in Graham Robb's book is the Celtic tribal leader <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercingetorix" target="_blank">Vercingetorix</a> who led a failed rebellion against the Romans, and Vercingetorix also appears numerous times in FW, including three times in the section of the book we're focusing on here. What any of this has to do with the confrontation at the pub gate, I'm not entirely sure. Notably, the Roman roads are often punctuated by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Augusta#/media/File:Spain.Catalonia.Roda.de.Bara.Arc.Bera.jpg" target="_blank">archway</a> gates. In my last post, I touched on the idea that the gate threshold has to do with HCE crossing over into the night-world akin to Osiris going into the underworld in his night boat. Osiris travels under the earth amid the stars and this part of the <i>Wake</i>, besides containing references to the astronomically-aligned Druid road system, is also loaded with references to astronomy and astrology, but that's a topic for another day. </p><p><br /></p><p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><p><u>H.E.R.E. C.O.M.E.S. E.V.E.R.Y.B.O.D.Y.</u></p><p>Among the many fun easter eggs to discover in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> are the instances of meta-reference where the book tells you about something specific located elsewhere in the book. One interesting example of this appears on page 6 where it says "see peegee ought he ought" (FW 006.32) and if you read that as "see pg 88" and look to page 88 of the book, what stands out is the long acronym that spells out the name Here Comes Everybody: "Helmingham Erchenwyne Rutter Egbert Crumwall Odin Maximus Esme Saxon Esa Vercingetorix Ethelwulf Rupprecht Ydwalla Bentley Osmund Dysart Yggdrasselmann" (FW 88.21-23). I mentioned in the last post that in this part of the <i>Wake</i>, HCE either encounters or is seen to embody dozens of mythic gods and historic kings from various cultures and I think that's evident in this long name here. But also, that line from page 6 "see peegee ought he ought" is, according to the <a href="http://fweet.org/cgi-bin/fw_grep.cgi?i=1&o=1&r=1&b=1&s=%5E006.32" target="_blank">notes in Fweet</a>, also a specific reference Joyce was making to an image plate shown between pgs 88-89 of a 1911 book by a French Egyptologist, <i>Gods and Kings of Egypt </i>by Alexandre Moret, and that specific plate displays an image of "The Wake of Osiris" not just the wake but the awakening, according to the mythology a revival via sexual arousal brought about by his sister Isis to resurrect him. You can read more about all of that <a href="http://www.rosenlake.net/fw/Troy-Mummeries/troybook.htm" target="_blank">here</a>. I bring it up to further emphasize the identification of HCE with Osiris who was also known as Osiris-Unnefer and I read somewhere that Unnefer could be why Joyce gave his hero the first name of Humphrey.</p><p>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</p><p><u>The Canon</u></p><p>That memorable line from the closing pages of chapter 4 "the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract" (FW 100.34-35) provokes many ideas. I previously discussed how, at this stage in the text, HCE as a person with an identity has been obliterated (either in deep sleep or in the transition thru the underworld after death) and here on pg 100 he has become "the prisoner of that sacred edifice" (FW 100.25), buried like an entombed pharaoh king inside of some kind of tesseract ziggurat, "innerhalf the zuggurat" (FW 100.19). <br /></p><p>Focusing on that word "canonicity" though---it's apparently a real word that Joyce took from apocrypha about the New Testament but I think there is more to it. HCE entombed inside a ziggurat tesseract is also HCE or Here Comes Everybody or all of human knowledge, myth, history, inventions, tools, and treasures buried inside The Canon of the book, the tesseract cube that is the book <i>Finnegans Wake</i> itself. Similar to how HCE in the <i>Wake</i> is made to literally embody the collective corporal body of the <i>city</i> of Dublin itself, his existence here has become <i>the canon</i>, and "the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract" means Joyce's Everyman buried forever inside the literary canon along with all of his "inhumationary bric au brac"(FW 77.33), the gems and artifacts to be discovered by the reader who exhumes the tomb of the text. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<p></p><p><u>The Trial</u></p><p>While the text grows increasingly opaque, the noticeable narrative throughout Book I.2-4 revolves around a scandalous legal trial, the details of which are always vague and obscured yet we return to the courtroom scene over and over. Witnesses give their differing accounts of what happened, lawyers cross-examine, judges convene in chambers, one of the defendants even rips a loud, stinky fart that shocks everyone. Besides bringing in <a href="http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2013/11/an-english-murder-in-finnegans-wake.html" target="_blank">details</a> from several legal trials of his era, Joyce also weaves into the text details from the tragic wrongful conviction of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maolra_Seoighe" target="_blank">Myles Joyce</a>, an Irish peasant who spoke no English but was tried in an English court, convicted of massacring a family, and executed in 1882, the year Joyce was born (Myles Joyce was posthumously pardoned in 2018). That trial was impactful for James Joyce, he published an essay about it in 1907, <a href="http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/authors/classic/Joyce_J/Criticism/Drama.htm" target="_blank">"Ireland at the Bar"</a>.</p><p>Also, though, for virtually the entire time Joyce was composing <i>Finnegans Wake </i>in the 1920s and 30s, he himself was essentially on trial in courtrooms in the United States for the scandals around his banned book <i>Ulysses</i>. The more the reader can understand that, the clearer it becomes why so much of the <i>Wake</i>, beyond even these chapters about the trial, uses a style of interrogation and intensive questioning trying to get to the bottom of something. A recent book by Brian Fox <i>James Joyce's America</i> sheds some clarifying light about all of this:</p><p></p><blockquote>The first part of the <i>Wake</i> to be drafted, Book I.2-4 in the finished work, deals with introducing HCE and his alleged crime and subsequent trial. The earliest drafts make clear that Joyce's own writing is under indictment here as well... The narrative voice immediately follows accusation with defence and counter-accusation---a move that will be repeated numerous times throughout the finished work... (<i>James Joyce's America</i>, p. 184)</blockquote><p></p><p>Fox goes so far as to argue, convincingly I think, that the central theme of a crime and a legal trial in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> has to do with the scandals of Joyce's American reception (specifically, the trials over the chapters of <i>Ulysses </i>published n the <i>Little Review</i>, Joyce's American copyright struggles and the piracy of his work by Samuel Roth, and the federal ban of <i>Ulysses</i>). Fox writes:</p><p></p><blockquote>The core theme of HCE's alleged crime in the park and its subjection to trial and defence from the start involves those adversarial elements of Joyce's American reception linked to legal confrontation...<br />Indeed, so much of the book is concerned with defending or indicting the alleged crime or crimes in the park that Joyce's response to his own exploitation [via Roth selling pirated editions of <i>Ulysses</i> & <i>Finnegans Wake</i> in USA] and condemnation---the incorporation into the work of its hostile reception---is arguably one of the primary themes of the <i>Wake</i> itself." (<i>James Joyce's America</i>, p. 184-185)</blockquote><p><br /></p><p>(Thank you Peter Coogan and the whole Austin <i>Finnegans Wake</i> Reading Group.) </p><p></p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-87967780596248334262021-06-06T15:13:00.011-05:002021-06-23T13:03:14.876-05:00The Portal <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="492" data-original-width="593" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnW8X43SUMOHcQB0S_y1rMa7vef3pzmIhbES6pKkKwXeuu5u-KX4xsTTZJox7QmM6Xsdb1GPddLl-ysOSLfjIv7TGYg9ViBbHLFUlIHU9xJivtzk1s0NjAFfylb_zmqGjzk5B4jUQUkV0A/s320/Blake-trilithon.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Illustration from William Blake's <i>Jerusalem</i></span></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnW8X43SUMOHcQB0S_y1rMa7vef3pzmIhbES6pKkKwXeuu5u-KX4xsTTZJox7QmM6Xsdb1GPddLl-ysOSLfjIv7TGYg9ViBbHLFUlIHU9xJivtzk1s0NjAFfylb_zmqGjzk5B4jUQUkV0A/s593/Blake-trilithon.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="color: white;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span></span></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><u><br /></u></div><div style="text-align: center;"><u>Some observations on the Gate or Portal in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> I.3</u></div>
<div><br /></div><div>Towards the end chapter 3 (book one) of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, a drunken German angrily bangs at the locked gate of an Irish pub shouting threats and insults at the pub owner for locking him out after closing time. The gate Joyce places at the entrance of his main character HCE's pub is a megalithic stone structure, described as a "stonehinged gate" (FW 069.15). </div><div><br /></div><div>I've been dwelling on the meaning of this gate in chapter 3. The door or portal is a recurrent image in the <i>Wake</i>. One of the many names used for the main character is Mr. Porter. The belligerent at the gate unfurls a litany of insults and nicknames at him including "<i>Sublime Porter</i>" (FW 072.02-3). That word <i>porter</i> has similar etymological roots to the word <i>metaphor </i>meaning "to carry across" like to carry across a threshold. I think that's relevant here because so much of the <i>Wake</i> and especially the part of the book I'm focusing on right now seems to speak in alternating metaphors. </div><div><br /></div><div>The banging at the gate calls back to an earlier clash at a doorway in chapter 1 when the Prankquean rains hell on Jarl van Hoother (Earl of Howth) for locking the door of Howth Castle. The "stonehinged gate" on page 69 is "triplepatlockt" and on the adjacent page appears the Prankquean, "a shebeen quean, a queen of pranks." (FW 068.22)</div><div><br /></div><div>George Cinclair Gibson's insightful study <i>Wake Rites: The Ancient Irish Rituals of </i>Finnegans Wake (University Press of Florida, 2005) discusses the "Banging at the Gate" scene as a parallel enactment of one of the ancient Irish rituals practiced at Tara. The actions of the verbal assailant at the gate, Gibson explains, "are the precise components of the Druidic curse known as the <i>glam dichenn</i>. The most compelling of all ritual curses, the <i>glam dichenn</i> would have been directed at a disgraced leader or failed king and delivered only by a powerful Druid." (p. 123)</div><div><br /></div><div>As for the location of this scene, Gibson notes: </div><div><blockquote>...the <i>glam dichenn</i> directed against the fated king of Tara is purposely delivered on a threshold. In Druidic tradition, threshold and liminal locations are the optimal loci for harnessing and generating magical power. Liminal locations---for example, 'the threshold separating the inside of the room or house from the outside world'---can be utilized by a Druid as 'the source of extraordinary powers because the liminal transcends normal distinctions between separate categories" (Nagy, "Liminality," 135-36). A Druid would use these liminal places (for example, near a door, on the boundary between civilization and wilderness) to create a magically charged "atmosphere" in order to "help generate the power necessary for ritual" (Nagy, "Liminality," 138). </blockquote><blockquote>(Gibson, <i>Wake Rites</i>, p. 124)</blockquote></div><div><div>The "threshold and liminal locations" which Gibson says "are the optimal loci for harnessing and generating magical power" represent a junction point where worlds intersect. The door in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> is a threshold wedged between the world of wakefulness and deep sleep. The book itself is also represented like a door or gate, the sigla Joyce uses for the book is a square ▢ a type of portal. I think the gate also represents a portal to the afterlife or the underworld, chapters 3 & 4 feature numerous references to the underworld journey of the dead in the <i>Egyptian Book of the Dead</i>. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>The description of the gate on page 69 includes an odd textual quirk where a capital letter appears unexpectedly with "There" in the middle of a sentence: "Where Gyant Blyant fronts Peannlueamoore There was once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was and such a wallhole did exist." The gate, or hole in the wall, is fronted by two giant pencils---"Gyant Blyant" includes the Danish word <i>blyant</i> for "pencil" and "Peannluemoore" is phonetically Irish for "big pencil"---even within the sentence itself, before we get to the gate we first encounter two giants fronting or guarding it. These "faithful poorters" (FW 069.26) are akin to the doorkeepers at Tara, named Camellus and Gemellus, who are directly named later on in the next chapter when the gate incident is re-litigated (see p. 90). Since they are described here as two giant pencils, it would appear these twin guardians of the gate are like two big obelisks. The obelisk is another recurrent image in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> usually representative of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington_Monument,_Dublin" target="_blank">obelisk at Wellington Monument</a> in Phoenix Park, but here since there are <i>two</i> pencils or obelisks it could be invoking the original Egyptian style of placing a pair of obelisks at an entrance way.</div><div><br /></div><div>This insight about the Egyptians using obelisks in pairs to create a portal between them came from a FW reading group discussion over this chapter last year. Architecture professor and Joyce scholar Marcin Kedzior shared this information with me:</div><div><blockquote>Obelisks were always raised in pairs in keeping with the Egyptian value of balance and harmony; it was believed that the two on earth were reflected by two in the heavens. Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson writes:<br />"The phenomenon of duality pervades Egyptian culture and is at the heart of the Egyptian concept of the universe itself. But rather than focusing on the essential differences between the two parts of a given pair, Egyptian thought may stress their complementary nature as a way of expressing the essential unity of existence through the alignment and harmonization of opposites - just as we today might use "men and women", "old and young", or "great and small" to mean "all" or "everyone" (129)."<br />(from here: <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Egyptian_Obelisk/">https://www.ancient.eu/Egyptian_Obelisk/</a>)</blockquote><a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Egyptian_Obelisk/"></a></div><div><br /><div>That point about duality pervading Egyptian culture links back to the <i>Wake</i> because duality and the unity of opposites are also central to <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. And I think the dualities and their powerful conflicts tend to cluster around gates, doors, thresholds in the book. The angry drunk guy berating HCE at the door is an opposing force, a polar opposite of HCE the sleeper himself. The violent confrontations depicted around this section, where the belligerent at the door goes on for pages describing how he wants to break HCE's skull and pummel him, I see these as being clashes within the sleeper HCE himself. The brutality of these clashes I think are similar to the destructive confrontations a soul goes through in its journey through the underworld or the Bardo---the type of thing that goes on in the <i>Egyptian Book of the Dead</i> or the <i>Tibetan Book of the Dead</i> where there are monsters and demons who will tear your flesh to pieces, putting your soul through the trial of your attachments and preparedness for nirvana or for reincarnation. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>I'm getting far afield here, so let me briefly summarize how I see all of this. The gate or portal, the megalithic "stonehinged gate" (FW 069.15) and everything that goes on around this part of the text are suggestive of a number of things: </div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>the sleeper HCE is crossing over a threshold and entering into the void of deep sleep, his persona obliterated. In John Bishop's introduction to the Penguin edition of FW, he notes "Chapters 3 and 4 of Book I are both murkier and harder to read than the first two chapters of FW---in part because HCE recedes even more deeply out of conscious life, now becoming literally absent... and therefore only indirectly represented, in rumor, gossip, and report." (p. xx)<br /></li><li>Traveling across the threshold of the portal into deep sleep, within HCE are enacted ancient rituals of the divestiture of the High King of Ireland at Tara by the Druids at megalithic sites (see <i>Wake Rites</i>).</li><li>Descending into the underworld of sleep, HCE experiences the death and resurrection myths of Osiris in the <i>Egyptian Book of the Dead</i>. </li><li>The megalithic portal or doorway which is the entryway to HCE's pub is also the gateway to deep sleep, to death, to rebirth, and an inviting open door for the reader to dive into all of the above, "<i>Opendoor Ospices</i>" (FW 071.13).</li><li>The megalithic gate becomes representative of HCE himself, or rather HCE transforms into a megalith or monolith or "monomyth" (FW 581.24).</li></ul></div><div>I'll try to expand on all of these points here. While a reader can try to identify a "narrative" or "plot" in chapters 3-4 of the <i>Wake</i>, what I'm usually more interested to follow are the consistent patterns noticeable in the subtext. So much of chapter 3 seems to involve HCE's personal identity fading away as he falls into deeper sleep. The sleeper's sense of individual identity becomes obliterated, as described on page 51, <b>"(since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightinesses this sword of certainty that would identifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone."</b> Mythological and historical personages abound in this chapter. Siddartha, Buddha, Osiris, Blakean gods, the Prophet Muhammad, ancient Vikings and Celtic Kings and Druid Poets all appear and proliferate in these pages as it seems like the dead from across history and the entire globe gather to arrange for the passage of HCE into the afterlife, he is being <b>"timesported acorss the yawning (abyss)" </b>(FW 056.03). </div><div><div><br /></div><div>The sleeper HCE in ever deeper slumber loses his entire persona, buried in a coffin of sleep paralysis, his consciousness dead to the world, he's <b>"nearvanashed himself"</b> (FW 061.18), his ego extinguished in nirvana and near-vanished in sleep. H.C. Earwicker, or Mr. Porter the pubkeeper, disappears and is replaced by any number of mythological heroes and gods and kings undergoing trials against entities trying to devour him. All these entities seem to be parts of his own being. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>There's an interesting and sort of subtle indication of the interlink between entities when the angry drunk at the gate is berating HCE. Notice the dualities in this description of the language used: <b>"swishing beesnest with blessure, and swobbing broguen eeriesh myth brockendootcsh"</b> (FW 070.03-4). Mixing business with pleasure, or a bee's nest with blessings, and swapping broken Irish with broken Deutsch. I think the presence of the words "eerie" "myth" and "brocken" also indicate a reference here to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brocken_spectre" target="_blank">Brocken spectre</a>, a phenomenon where an enormous shadow of an observer appears on a cloud, made legendary by the propensity for this spectre to occur when an observer stands atop the Brocken peak in Germany. This phenomenon has been referenced frequently in literature, most memorably for me in Thomas Pynchon's novel <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>. I think the presence of the Brocken spectre in this passage of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> is confirmed a few lines later with <b>"roebucks raugh at pinnacle's peak"</b> (FW 070.13) plus other references to hikers on a mountain top. </div><div><br /></div><div>So the confrontations with hostile entities can be seen as conflicts within HCE himself or with his shadow. One of these encounters takes place at a megalithic stone structure, first introduced as <b>"one of the granite cromlech setts"</b> (FW 061.14). The chapter seems to alternate between describing HCE inside an elaborate coffin and describing HCE being harassed at a doorway, with lots of Egyptian references embedded in these passages. The impression I get when reading this part of the book is that HCE is being prepared for reincarnation, <b>"striving todie, hopening tomellow"</b> (FW 060.29), he's placed inside a pyramid like a dead pharaoh, "<b>reberthing in remarriment out of dead seekness to devine previdence... first pharoah, Humpheres Cheops Exarchas</b>." (FW 62.07-21) Since we're jumping from Druids to Egyptian pharaohs here, it's worth mentioning that Joyce, from his early writings, made connections between the ancient Irish Druids and the Egyptian priests, memorably declaring in "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages" that, "Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead."</div><div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvrh0n1pg4Gs7wLYfH_U_pmi23nPTlOr6BFiRScpz94BANPGfiizP7ZZAc-ettO8xViVhJ2J7PGv59iA_GDYXxyrgyobqLsnXuIPxvvx_h46ikrum803DESgrurdSzFBeGq5rRd2oesCbz/s602/Cromlech.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="602" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvrh0n1pg4Gs7wLYfH_U_pmi23nPTlOr6BFiRScpz94BANPGfiizP7ZZAc-ettO8xViVhJ2J7PGv59iA_GDYXxyrgyobqLsnXuIPxvvx_h46ikrum803DESgrurdSzFBeGq5rRd2oesCbz/w400-h268/Cromlech.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Example of a granite cromlech.</span></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div><br /></div><div>HCE in this section seems to be traveling like the sun on a journey under the earth at night and through the stars, this is the mythical image of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_barque" target="_blank">Osiris in his night-boat</a>. Whether it's Stonehenge or Egyptian pyramids, these ancient temples were usually designed as star-gates and at this point of the book, cosmic elements abound as HCE seems to be floating among the stars in a boat:</div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>"combing the comet's tail up right and shooting popguns at the stars" </b>(FW 065.11)</div><div><b>"gazing and crazing and blazing at the stars" </b>(FW 065.13)</div><div><b>"they all were afloat in a dreamlifeboat" </b>(FW 065.29-30)</div></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>We get another reminder that we are actually talking about a coffin but the way it is described, <b>"The coffin, a triumph of the illusionist's art"</b> (FW 066.28), suggests death is an illusion and that our main character will eventually re-appear just <b>"round the coroner."</b> (FW 067.13) I should also point out this section contains a paragraph all about sex for procreation followed by a paragraph about the delivery of a letter through the post. John Bishop in <i>Joyce's Book of the Dark</i> wrote about the letter passage on p. 66 as having to do with a dream experienced by the sleeper and his attempt to transfer this dream information across the threshold of sleep into consciousness in the morning: <b>"Will it ever be next morning the postal unionist's ... strange fate ... to hand in a huge chain envelope... ?"</b> (FW 066.10-14) The passage about posting a letter is bracketed by paragraphs about procreative sex and a special coffin used in a magician's act. In discussing the recurring images of ancient portals throughout FW, George C. Gibson in <i>Wake Rites</i> confirms that "HCE's passage through these perilous thresholds is an act associated with themes of rebirth, Easter, initiation, and the transition from the old world to the new." (<i>Wake Rites</i>, p. 197)</div><div><br /></div><div>As we get to the passage with the <b>"stonehinged gate"</b> on page 69, we encounter more dualities. The long paragraph preceding the gate scene starts with <b>"Oh! Oh!"</b> (FW 067.32) and ends with <b>"(ah! ah!)"</b> (FW069.02), Joyce's way of summoning <i>alpha</i> and <i>omega</i>. In the "stonehinged gate" paragraph are more celestial references, with the dual <b>"Isther Estarr"</b> and <b>"Yesther Asterr"</b> suggestive of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar with the word <i>star</i> evident in both names. The text places us <b>"In the drema of Sorestost Areas, Diseased."</b> There are a number of meanings here (including, phonetically, the Irish for "Irish Free State"), but one of the ways I read it is "Solstice Areas, Deceased" in reference to Stonehenge or some other ancient abandoned solstice temple site. Stonehenge was important for Joyce. There are at least <a href="http://fweet.org/cgi-bin/fw_grep.cgi?srch=stonehenge&cake=A3990403&icase=1&accent=1&beauty=1&hilight=1&showtxt=1&escope=1&tscope=1&rscope=1&dist=4&ndist=4&fontsz=100&shorth=0" target="_blank">half a dozen</a> direct references to Stonehenge in <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, and as Peter Chrisp mentioned in <a href="http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2020/07/hce-interred-in-landscape.html" target="_blank">his blog post</a> about Joyce's development of the HCE character, when James Joyce visited the site of Stonehenge in 1931 he remarked, "I have been fourteen years trying to get here." The quote comes from David Hayman's book <i>A First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake</i> (p. 3), where Hayman says Joyce was referring to the work he was engaged in with <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>The "stonehinged gate" paragraph on page 69 further amplifies the significance of the gate metaphor with several references to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, "to garble a garthen of Odin and the lost paladays when all the eddams ended with aves." (FW 69.09-11) The gate becomes "an applegate" (FW 69.21) suggesting an apple tree in this garden, also inside the gate are sheep and goat and other livestock harvested by the primordial farmers. The etymology of the word <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=paradise">paradise</a> literally means "to build an enclosure around." So like we've said, this gate is a portal, an intersection of worlds. It could be a gate to the dreamworld, to the afterlife, to the cosmos, or to the lost paradise. Or all of the above, that's how the <i>Wake</i> works.</div><div><br /></div><div>Outside the gate, the belligerent drunk German continues to badger HCE with 111 different names mocking him. HCE refuses to <b>"respond a solitary wedgeword"</b> (FW 072.18) and attempts to not acknowledge <b>"his langwedge"</b> (FW 073.01). Those words "wedgeword" and "langwedge" are important and revealing here. We're talking about a "stonehinged gate" which serves as a portal between worlds. The gate would be wedged in between two separate dimensions. HCE doesn't respond and doesn't want to further drive a wedge between he and his assailant. Joyce placing the word "wedge" in association with language here could be alluding to ancient cuneiform writing which was wedge-shaped. But also, as we discussed in our FW reading group when we covered this passage, there's more to it because in architecture a wedge serves as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_(architecture)" target="_blank">keystone</a> holding together a doorway. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAq1jaUHuda1zZ9XmjdjcJQYknknL2y6hVCQN5Df7tOqr3r3mUA1ipF7vOD-GB9YEzJcnozNH9IjTDsmWc5zsOhbOMxqrnC2n7VTakJlau19vSsjSQBMA7RF3qbnG3uu3i-bepyS0TZr3/s432/Wedge+keystone.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="432" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBAq1jaUHuda1zZ9XmjdjcJQYknknL2y6hVCQN5Df7tOqr3r3mUA1ipF7vOD-GB9YEzJcnozNH9IjTDsmWc5zsOhbOMxqrnC2n7VTakJlau19vSsjSQBMA7RF3qbnG3uu3i-bepyS0TZr3/s320/Wedge+keystone.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Keystone wedge in architecture.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div>The wedge actually holds dualities together, strengthening the gate structure. This is the "langwedge" of the <i>Wake</i>, uniting opposites, often in this book you'll find polarities merged inside one word or phrase. With the appearances of that word "wedge" at the end of chapter 3, the stone architecture of HCE's gate builds into something more elaborate. No longer just a gate, now it has become a megalithic tomb. A nebulous somebody or nobody is seen to <b>"build rocks over him"</b> (FW 073.09) and he is safely ensconced in an <b>"archcitadel"</b> (FW 073.24) with <b>"chambered cairns"</b> (FW 073.29). <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chambered_cairn" target="_blank">Chambered cairns</a> are neolithic burial monuments for the dead:</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
<p><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PicMaesEntrance.jpg#/media/File:PicMaesEntrance.jpg"><img alt="PicMaesEntrance.jpg" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/PicMaesEntrance.jpg" /></a><br />By Islandhopper, <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/" title="Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1065052">Link</a></p>
<div><br />
</div><div>Even though the text says of HCE within his intricate stone tomb that <b>"he med leave to many a door beside"</b> (FW 073.28), the persona of the man asleep is hard to find. He seemed to say goodbye to his angry assailant right before traversing the portal, crossing over into time-bending dimensions on the other side lightyears away, he <b>"proceeded with a Hubbleforth slouch in his slap backwords... in the directions of the duff and demb institutions about ten or eleven hundred years lurch away in the moonshiny gorge of Patself on the Bach. Adyoe!"</b> (FW 073.18-22) All that's left for us to examine is the increasingly ornate megalithic structure, <b>"skatterlings of a stone"</b> (FW 073.34) forming an <b>"eolithostroton"</b> (FW 073.30). Now separated from HCE by time spans in the thousands of years we become archeologists trying to develop<b> "a theory none too rectiline of the evoluation of human society and a testament of the rocks from all the dead unto some the living."</b> (FW 073.31-33) And then Joyce ends the chapter on the following page with pretty clear indications that the main character has now fallen into deepest sleep. </div><div><br /></div><div>In describing the sequence of events from this part of the <i>Wake</i>, John Bishop emphasizes that this all "seems to have to do not only with HCE's disappearance from consciousness, but also with his physical 'arrest,' his immobilization in the world of night; while in chapter 4, a significant turning point in the book, a process of 'disselving' and dispersion begins, as HCE fades from central focus into a remote background." (p. xx, Penguin edition of FW) In chapter 4, we once again encounter some references to Egyptian pharaohs buried deep inside pyramids, HCE's coffin becomes like a torpedo or submarine transporting through an <b>"underground heaven, or mole's paradise"</b> (FW 076.33). Further within chapter 4, HCE officially becomes no longer a somebody but an everybody, on page 88 he is named "Here Comes Everybody" with each letter representing the name of some historical or mythical figure.</div><div><br /></div><div>By the end of chapter 4, where there was once a person now there is only an increasingly ornate stone structure, envisioned with <b>"beaconsfarafield innerhalf the zuggurat" </b>(FW 100.19). Maybe HCE is now the illuminated inner half of a ziggurat. He's no longer an entity but a geometrical structure, confirmed by <b>"the canonicity of his existence as a tesseract."</b> (FW 100.34-35) By the following chapter he has truly become a megalith, where the <b>"trilithon sign M"</b> (FW 119.17) is a fallen letter E meant to look like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilithon#:~:text=A%20trilithon%20(or%20trilith)%20is,the%20context%20of%20megalithic%20monuments." target="_blank">trilithon</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoXXVuUxiHqnn-zs1q5hTM1gwaPoSdQRvDX2SE0lvJ0nmLObAf8Co_yjcG3yKj6zSTeTpPRUxnUyvTxiDx6Xtp7Ef3Z22ShBOWXloqQHsMVJ7Xnzy_MEBrkiKabotTNp-hLD6cc6SdACeH/s378/Screen+Shot+2021-06-06+at+8.20.38+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="77" data-original-width="378" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoXXVuUxiHqnn-zs1q5hTM1gwaPoSdQRvDX2SE0lvJ0nmLObAf8Co_yjcG3yKj6zSTeTpPRUxnUyvTxiDx6Xtp7Ef3Z22ShBOWXloqQHsMVJ7Xnzy_MEBrkiKabotTNp-hLD6cc6SdACeH/s320/Screen+Shot+2021-06-06+at+8.20.38+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">FW 119.17</div><br /><div><br /></div><div>This evolution of HCE into a gateway portal built of stone that is also an elaborate <b>"eolithostroton"</b> (FW 073.30) or ziggurat or tesseract entombing him reminds me of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopuram" target="_blank">Gopuram</a>, the monumental and ornate entrance tower to a Hindu temple.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic60acP7M_uVwqxalHpcFNxo6wKGsifxOION5gBypgioe4iNB8TBjd44FbGKIYv9GC1lmzLC1_IiMXgcgjqkdiLgkXMxVgeATs-ksEVVVW7j9UUUbVd1hyphenhyphenoiQYxxcGu06madGdZ0voiYG6/s1024/Srirangam_Temple_Gopuram_%2528767010404%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic60acP7M_uVwqxalHpcFNxo6wKGsifxOION5gBypgioe4iNB8TBjd44FbGKIYv9GC1lmzLC1_IiMXgcgjqkdiLgkXMxVgeATs-ksEVVVW7j9UUUbVd1hyphenhyphenoiQYxxcGu06madGdZ0voiYG6/w400-h300/Srirangam_Temple_Gopuram_%2528767010404%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Gopuram, gateway entrance to Hindu temple</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>This transformation of a seemingly human character into a ziggurat or tesseract stone tumulus is weird and confusingly abstract, but bear in mind that structure is also a gate or door and Joyce repeatedly hints at having dropped keys for the reader. One of these keys might be the aforementioned trilithon sign formed by rotating the E sigla for HC Earwicker, and that seems to be hinted at on page 100 with <b>"tristurned initials, the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld"</b> (FW 100.29). Bear in mind too that the wedge in the aforementioned "wedgewords" and "langwedge" is indicative of the <i>key</i>stone in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_(architecture)" target="_blank">architecture</a>. So much of what all this is saying seems to be commentary on <i>Finnegans Wake</i> itself, Joyce's own history of the world thru the experience of one person asleep at night, the reader being led on an archeological dig thru the history of the human body and human experience.</div><div><br /></div><div>That amazing line on page 100 depicting lit up ziggurats, <b>"beaconsfarafield innerhalf the zuggurat" </b>conjures in my head a very similar image as that provided by the recently deceased poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (himself a Joycean) at the end of his epic poem <i>Time of Useful Consciousness </i>(2012): "Macrotiendas in Teotihuacan/ The pyramids lit up like cupcakes." The below picture shows me sitting atop a ziggurat pyramid structure staring down the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacan, Mexico, with a James Joyce shirt on my back.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0npDB8CAfeY9V2lggeN9shWAUivVjZKWF9P86twwWYijCNeRmXKRiShtEUNyHl_-LGi6wFN_uTkUo3VmAJyjFYsyZMqVgojUL7eafV0hbItkdO8y70z0hFFI0SYVbm1ZbNRxfXcipGSw_/s1600/IMG_7302.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0npDB8CAfeY9V2lggeN9shWAUivVjZKWF9P86twwWYijCNeRmXKRiShtEUNyHl_-LGi6wFN_uTkUo3VmAJyjFYsyZMqVgojUL7eafV0hbItkdO8y70z0hFFI0SYVbm1ZbNRxfXcipGSw_/w640-h480/IMG_7302.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div>Exploring that ancient site of a complex pyramid city that was abandoned thousands of years prior, I couldn't help but think of Joyce and <i>Finnegans Wake</i> and the way he designed his book. The tour guide described how archeologists discovered buried remains underneath each of the ziggurat temples, they even <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/discovery-secret-tunnel-mexico-solve-mysteries-teotihuacan-180959070/" target="_blank">found</a> an <b>"underground heaven, a mole's paradise"</b> deep underneath the main ziggurat/pyramid, a series of tunnels decorated with gems to create the atmosphere of a mythical underworld amidst the stars. </div><div><br /></div><div>Joyce when he was finishing up writing <i>Finnegans Wake</i> worried that his highly complex masterwork might end up being neglected and abandoned. "Perhaps it will end in failure, be a wreck or ‘catastrophe’ ...and perhaps in the years to come this work of mine will remain <i>solitary and abandoned, like a temple without believers.</i>" (<i>Portraits of the Artist in Exile</i>, p. 160-161, my emphasis) I think the <i>Wake</i> will always maintain the aura of an abandoned temple ripe for archeological exploration, but with <i>Finnegans Wake</i> group digs taking place all over the world and even assembling virtually via <b>"Bangen-op-Zoom"</b> (FW 073.26-27) amidst a global pandemic just like ours did, the great temple site has not remained solitary and the gems and treasures yielded from these group digs are invaluable to an appreciation of what the human mind is capable of. </div></div><div><br /></div><div><b></b></div><blockquote><div><b>"So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined... til Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor." </b></div><div><b>(FW 020.13-18)</b></div></blockquote><div><b></b></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>(Thank you to Marcin Kedzior, Madeline Melnick, and the Austin <i>Finnegans Wake</i> Reading Group.)</div>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-68334426617275037392020-12-23T16:51:00.010-06:002020-12-26T23:41:47.254-06:00Notes on Delmore Schwartz (Part 2)<p><i>Continuing from <a href="https://www.abuildingroam.com/2020/12/notes-on-delmore-schwartz-part-1.html" target="_blank">Part 1 here</a>. </i> </p><p></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX09Sl8pqkY2YgvowCD7SrA5C42BBeWswS4C7RG3W94DZ07tuH4W5s1X4sB0Gm39pDOCqL8fL0IgKCRdOdDcWg99Jv8DLGuFd4byru0a5OU-nXO23dei0FjStOb-TgtFD183OTFzrJ4_lH/s320/DelmoreBook.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX09Sl8pqkY2YgvowCD7SrA5C42BBeWswS4C7RG3W94DZ07tuH4W5s1X4sB0Gm39pDOCqL8fL0IgKCRdOdDcWg99Jv8DLGuFd4byru0a5OU-nXO23dei0FjStOb-TgtFD183OTFzrJ4_lH/s0/DelmoreBook.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz in 1938.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><blockquote><b>"as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" (<i>Finnegans Wake</i>, p. 120)</b></blockquote><p></p><p>That ideal reader of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, as described by Joyce in the above quote, could very well have ended up being the great poet from New York City, Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), who read the <i>Wake</i> voraciously and also suffered from terrible insomnia. He developed an addiction to sleeping pills and alcohol as ways to settle himself down to go to sleep. It didn't help much as his mind was too active, he was known to stay up all night reading through stacks of books. </p><p>In Saul Bellow's novel <i>Humboldt's Gift </i>(1975) where the main character Humboldt is based on Delmore Schwartz, there's a memorable scene in which the narrator spends the night at Humboldt's farmhouse in New Jersey. Deep into the night, Humboldt goes off on one of his brilliant and eclectic monologues about art, culture, baseball, politics, history, etc until finally the narrator retires to bed: "Next day he was still going strong. It made me giddy to hear so much subtle analysis and to have so much world history poured over my head at breakfast. He hadn't slept at all." (Bellow, p. 32)</p><p>In his journals, which were published in 1986 as <i>Portrait of Delmore</i> (edited by Elizabeth Pollet), Delmore jotted these lines of verse: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>Of three o'clock in the morning</p><p>Of four o'clock in the morning,</p><p><span> </span><span> </span><span> and of the early </span><br /></p><p><span>Morning light I would be poet laureate (p. 221)</span></p><p><span>I am insomnia's poet, Delmore Schwartz (p. 269)</span></p></blockquote><p>Elsewhere in his journals, he modified Joyce's famous line: "History is a nightmare: during which I am trying to get a good night's sleep, which gives me insomnia." (p. 458)</p><p><span></span></p><p>So it figures that Delmore could be "that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" because he even treated the book <i>Finnegans Wake</i> exactly as Joyce suggested, "to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim." His biographer James Atlas relates the intensity with which Delmore would read the <i>Wake</i> starting from its early excerpts: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>Delmore at seventeen was a self-styled member of the avant-garde; he read <i>Hound & Horn</i>, studied Pound's <i>Cantos</i> as they appeared, and collected first editions of everything T.S. Eliot wrote. <i>transition</i> was especially important to him now that excerpts of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> were appearing in its pages, and he pored over each new installment with Talmudic zeal. For the rest of his life, Joyce was to be his literary hero, <i>Finnegans Wake</i> a work he read and annotated with such intensity that his copies would fall apart; he went through several in his lifetime. (Atlas, p. 40)</p><p></p></blockquote><p>A copy of Delmore Schwartz's <i>Finnegans Wake</i> now resides at the <a href="https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3791456" target="_blank">Beinecke Library at Yale University</a> and by the wonders of technology you can view each page of the book and zoom in on the tiny details of Delmore's scribbled annotations. Over at the blog "Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay" Peter Chrisp has written <a href="http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2018/04/delmore-schwartzs-wake.html" target="_blank">a beautiful post</a> about Delmore Schwartz and his devotion to Joyce, including a close look at some pages from his annotated <i>Wake</i>. I am trying to avoid overlap as I don't want to step on Peter C's toes, but it was that post that initially sprung me off on my research of Delmore Schwartz.</p><p>The part that really struck me was his biographer James Atlas mentioning that Delmore's passion for the <i>Wake</i> was such that "he even annotated while sitting in the stands at the Polo Grounds." (Atlas, p. 327) That image---the poet Delmore Schwartz attending a NY Giants baseball game at the Polo Grounds and reading and annotating <i>Finnegans Wake</i> while he sat in the stands---that's what compelled me to write this. I am drawn to Delmore Schwartz because he loved <i>Finnegans Wake</i> and major league baseball like I <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2018/08/baseball-in-finnegans-wake.html" target="_blank">do</a>.</p><p>I have been trying to track down more details about that note---which game(s) did he attend? What pages of the <i>Wake</i> was he annotating? Since we have every page of his personal copy of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> available to view online and since his journals are available in published form, you would think this information might be discoverable. As I described in <a href="https://www.abuildingroam.com/2020/12/notes-on-delmore-schwartz-part-1.html" target="_blank">Part 1</a>, Delmore would often jot the details in his journals when he attended a baseball game. I still have not been able to track down where exactly James Atlas got that information described in his excellent biography, though. I've been scouring Delmore's journals trying to find any mention of this. There's several times where he mentions indulging in following a Giants ballgame and reading <i>FW</i> on the same day. The closest thing I can find is this brief note from July of 1954: </p><p></p><blockquote>F[<i>innegans</i>] W[<i>ake</i>], 300-314. Giants doubleheader (losing second game)---distressed by nightfall. (<i>Portrait of Delmore</i>, p. 494)</blockquote><p></p><p>I suspect this might be it. Delmore was a regular at the Polo Grounds when he lived in New York and he's pretty clear about it whenever he was following a game on the radio rather than attending in person. So it's possible this note indicates Delmore was there at the Polo Grounds watching the 1954 NY Giants (who went on to win the World Series that year) play a doubleheader against the Pittsburgh Pirates on Sunday, July 11, 1954 and that he was also reading and annotating pages 300-314 of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> during the game. </p><p>Recently I had the pleasure of participating in an online <i>Finnegans Wake</i> reading group session with the members of the <a href="https://finneganswake.org/FoundingOfFWSoNY.shtml" target="_blank"><i>Finnegans Wake</i> Society of New York</a> in which we read page 308. This is one of the strangest pages in the book, with text in three columns, footnotes, and even doodles in the margins. It's also one of the pages Delmore would have been annotating at the Polo Grounds during that doubleheader on July 11th, 1954. I found Delmore's annotations on this page (which he may or may not have scribbled while watching Willie Mays patrol centerfield for the Giants) to be pretty helpful in pointing out how the various blocks of text and drawings all interrelate. </p><p>You can see at the top of page 308 how he drew lines connecting the countdown ("Aun Do Tri" etc) with the marginal text on the left. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgesIaRoY0P-bWzbK5sHu0_K8Kkmtc6ayc2UXva3EirKkvczWyrEBs8jN0XjlmpwuMAbwvnrQVdsOq1eDa0gCq9wea8qnRPs7Mg7AFLLw31PyAK8nizrGeXArFijUaagGCFEkGrgkjPW0Kj/s928/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+10.23.59+PM.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="693" data-original-width="928" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgesIaRoY0P-bWzbK5sHu0_K8Kkmtc6ayc2UXva3EirKkvczWyrEBs8jN0XjlmpwuMAbwvnrQVdsOq1eDa0gCq9wea8qnRPs7Mg7AFLLw31PyAK8nizrGeXArFijUaagGCFEkGrgkjPW0Kj/w400-h299/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+10.23.59+PM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail, top of pg 308 of Delmore Schwartz's copy of FW. (Beinecke Library)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>He also identifies connections between the middle text ("tea's set") and the marginal text on the right ("YOUR BEEEFTAY'S FIZZIN OVER") and he drew lines for the connection between the five and ten from the countdown to the footnotes below. He also drew links between the doodles on the bottom left and the marginal text on the right. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh16HyTbfNFUJv0RETlzt7Nr6oKQY04rZB0rIVVJBJssISId7K6mqxjA9f4jSkIJ_MmOG5HcdmTuqFQUuAKzWj8Hd6aKXLYCLSWXnsvzh6X4hpDuqoH2pLEuDzTBU_6S450Rz2_P0EFALDr/s989/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+10.28.56+PM.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="802" data-original-width="989" height="324" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh16HyTbfNFUJv0RETlzt7Nr6oKQY04rZB0rIVVJBJssISId7K6mqxjA9f4jSkIJ_MmOG5HcdmTuqFQUuAKzWj8Hd6aKXLYCLSWXnsvzh6X4hpDuqoH2pLEuDzTBU_6S450Rz2_P0EFALDr/w400-h324/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+10.28.56+PM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail, bottom of pg 308 of Delmore Schwartz's copy of FW. (Beinecke Library)<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>In the meeting with the NY group, our collective unpacking of the page did find that some of these connections bore out. At a bare minimum, it's just incredible to look at all of these notes on this one page and try to think alongside Delmore as he reads the <i>Wake</i>. The page a palimpsest of different shades of ink and pencil written and overwritten over multiple readings (stains of coffee or beer are evident on many pages), hieroglyphic lines scratched and arrowed like a <a href="http://baseballcraziness.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Blog_Scorecard_Old.jpg" target="_blank">baseball scorecard</a>. </p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQvc9PG3Jn4usO-nXtaQHE-CVgGs6bczQ9d2G3PzYYSyHj4S3VHNLL9gP0WihcTRrOuuuY92ahsyC3WBRpMAVrQPwORhvL8pVIlQaGFoQ2LIU5ZNSI9pfEtrpNC1u0XycijsUCD-xt7-I9/s1259/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+10.38.32+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="721" data-original-width="1259" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQvc9PG3Jn4usO-nXtaQHE-CVgGs6bczQ9d2G3PzYYSyHj4S3VHNLL9gP0WihcTRrOuuuY92ahsyC3WBRpMAVrQPwORhvL8pVIlQaGFoQ2LIU5ZNSI9pfEtrpNC1u0XycijsUCD-xt7-I9/w400-h229/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+10.38.32+PM.png" width="400" /></a></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj73cD1FXCs-nXIoxiaSIydk8MD-zSBG_RiAI9B7hjjqNToj7G6o_Axh1yBGI1DDa8j0THnsquNPkA65fQ5WoMDFeEhzEX5hEAkbECIx_bxWi3jB84rN2iv30SH7qL6VmaCaLVmMR4o2OmU/s1112/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+10.42.48+PM.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="731" data-original-width="1112" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj73cD1FXCs-nXIoxiaSIydk8MD-zSBG_RiAI9B7hjjqNToj7G6o_Axh1yBGI1DDa8j0THnsquNPkA65fQ5WoMDFeEhzEX5hEAkbECIx_bxWi3jB84rN2iv30SH7qL6VmaCaLVmMR4o2OmU/w400-h263/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+10.42.48+PM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Close-up of a random baseball scorecard.</td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN_EdK9GOmcZp84tlW7GChoodrlnL2Dx2g208YUjImfsIgnL7jiB8iLb7QyV5iidLUK0lT_5Q6Ypk51WtxSEbjpu-TF2aPIAz99w9JXTpf4LJeH7PKpvlgXC1c_x2CErNUeJGh1OuoJVZs/s2048/10647312.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1443" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN_EdK9GOmcZp84tlW7GChoodrlnL2Dx2g208YUjImfsIgnL7jiB8iLb7QyV5iidLUK0lT_5Q6Ypk51WtxSEbjpu-TF2aPIAz99w9JXTpf4LJeH7PKpvlgXC1c_x2CErNUeJGh1OuoJVZs/w450-h640/10647312.jpg" width="450" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Finnegans Wake</i> p. 308 with annotations by Delmore Schwartz. From the Beinecke Library of Yale website <a href="https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3791456" target="_blank">here</a>.</td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p><br /></p><p>Peter Chrisp in <a href="http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2018/04/delmore-schwartzs-wake.html" target="_blank">his post</a> says that "Delmore Schwartz must have spent more time thinking about <i>Finnegans Wake</i> than almost anybody else. Yet it's a shame he wrote very little about the book." It is a shame indeed. Delmore was known for being a sharp and witty literary critic, surely he must have had lots of interesting things to say about Joyce and the book he loved so much. Peter C shared the one paragraph from Delmore's essay on "The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World" where he talks about Joyce and <i>Finnegans Wake </i>at some length, stressing the global scope of the work and how it involves all of history. There's also a nice little footnote in that essay where Delmore argues that <i>Finnegans Wake</i> belongs in any serious discussion about poetry:</p><blockquote><p>Joyce's two best works, <i>Ulysses</i> and his last book, are not poems in the ordinary sense of the word; and he wrote several volumes of poetry, most of which consist of verses far inferior to anything in his major books. But any view of poetry which excludes <i>Finnegans Wake</i> as a poem and Joyce as a poet merely suggests the likelihood that Joyce transformed and extended the limits of poetry by the writing of his last book. If we freeze our categories and our definitions, (and this is especially true in literature) the result is that we disable and blind our minds. (from <i>Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz</i>, p. 22)</p><p></p></blockquote><p>His stressing of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> as a work of poetry here is important. Beyond that, though, it's true that Delmore never got around to publishing any extensive writings about Joyce. A letter from September 1938 mentions his intention to write "an extended review of Joyce's new work" (see <i>Letters of Delmore Schwartz</i>, p. 59) but it doesn't seem to have ever materialized. </p><p>In the preface to the <i>Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz</i> (1970) the editors explain: "Another omission is more surprising. This volume contains nothing on James Joyce. Two short pieces could have been included, but the editors thought them too perfunctory, too hastily journalistic to represent adequately Delmore's vast knowledge of the work of his chief literary hero. A likely guess would be that an extended essay or book on Joyce was one of Delmore's long entertained projects and that he never accomplished the project precisely because he thought of it as crucial." (p. xiii) (Reading about Delmore Schwartz reveals many intriguing yet uncompleted projects he labored on for years, some other examples: a book-length study of T.S. Eliot, an edited/translated collection of Heinrich Heine, and a textbook on the history of poetry.) </p><p>There are many abbreviated notes on <i>Finnegans Wake</i> to be found in Delmore's journals (edited by his second wife Elizabeth Pollet) but even there, when you read the introduction, you'll find a similar caveat: "The one major exception is the omission of Delmore's copying of other writers, particularly of James Joyce in both <i>Ulysses</i> and <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. Much that was cut was either illegible or so fragmentary or chaotic that it would have choked any movement." (<i>Portrait of Delmore</i>, p. xv) Reading through the journals, Delmore mentions frequently that he spent time copying passages from FW. These copied passages have been omitted, but there are some interesting bits to be found like this versification of a FW line:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>"To peek aboo</p><p><span> </span><span> Durk the</span><br /></p><p><span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Thicket</span><br /></span></p><p><span><span><span> </span><span> Of slumbwhere"</span></span></span> </p></blockquote><blockquote><p><span><span><span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> (</span>FW, p. 580)</span></span></span> </p></blockquote><blockquote><p><span><span><span>(from <i>Portrait of Delmore</i>, p. 510)</span></span></span></p></blockquote><p>The <i>Wake</i> as the height of poetry was a theme for him. In 1954, he noted "copying <i>FW</i> & letting it suggest the beauty & the future of language & of poetry to me." (p. 505) In 1943, he wrote this note on the <i>Wake</i>: "Liffey is Life, and it is a poem of nature, the male and the female principle, and all memory, hall memory." (p. 129) At another point he ruminates, "Reading <i>FW</i> must satisfy some deep need---beyond love of language & rhythm---since I go on, month after month, hour by hour." (p. 339) </p><p>He also mentions a few times how important it must have been to Joyce's development as an author that he taught at a Berlitz language school. <i>Finnegans Wake</i> is a book that deploys more than sixty languages, after all. At one point Delmore writes this note: "<i>FW</i>: The Authorized King James version of Anglo-Irish International Basic English." (p. 624)</p><div>At another point, he praises an essay by Edmund Wilson on Joyce especially what he found to be "a beautiful and generous and exact statement: 'The demands that Joyce makes upon the reader are considerable, but the rewards are astounding!'" (p. 497)</div><div><br /></div><div>It's also worth noting that, when he was teaching at Harvard, Delmore had a sort of rivalry with the scholar Harry Levin whom he loathed. Possibly because he was blinded by his intense dislike for Levin, Delmore argued that Levin's book on Joyce (<i>James Joyce: A Critical Introduction</i>, 1941) was terrible and his interpretations off-base. What's ironic and sort of ridiculous about the whole thing is Levin's book on Joyce was praised by Joyce himself for being a very sharp and accurate appraisal of his work. I've read Levin's book and I think it is superior to Campbell and Robinson's <i>Skeleton Key</i> among the early studies of the <i>Wake</i>. I think it holds up well. One wishes Delmore had written his own book on the <i>Wake</i> to counter his rival. </div><div><br /></div><div>Then again, there's that famous line from Joyce about mistakes. Delmore riffed on this in a journal entry from 1943:</div><blockquote><div>Joyce says, The artist makes no mistakes. His mistakes are the portals of discovery.</div><div><span> No, wrongly stated for the rhetoric of the paradox. The artist always makes mistakes; his mistakes are the only way in which he can make certain essential discoveries. (p. 135)</span></div></blockquote><div><span></span></div><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p style="text-align: left;">From <i>Humboldt's Gift </i>by Saul Bellow (a fictionalized account of Delmore Schwartz):</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote>"Poets have to dream, and dreaming in America is no cinch. God 'giveth songs in the night,' the Book of Job says. I've devoted lots of thought to all these questions and I've concentrated hard on Humboldt's famous insomnia. But I think that Humboldt's insomnia testified mostly to the strength of the world, the human world and all its wonderful works. The world was interesting, really interesting. The world had money, science, war, politics, anxiety, sickness, perplexity. It had all the voltage. Once you had picked up the high-voltage wire and were <i>someone</i>, a known name, you couldn't release yourself from the electrical current. You were transfixed.... Where are the poets' power and interest? They originate in dream states. These come because the poet is what he is in himself, because a voice sounds in his soul which has a power equal to the power of societies, states, and regimes. You don't make yourself interesting through madness, eccentricity, or anything of the sort but because you have the power to cancel the world's distraction, activity, noise, and become fit to hear the essence of things." (Bellow, p. 316)</blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">What's fascinating about Delmore's "famous insomnia" is that he so often wrote about sleep and dreams in his work. He was a poet of the liminal state, that threshold between waking and sleeping, a territory he must have been very familiar with. His most famous story is called "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" and many of his stories and poems involve dreams or the earliest inklings of dawn and waking up from a dream. He developed a great interest in Freud and psychoanalysis, he often wrote down his dreams in his journals and tried to analyze himself. He also tended to dwell on the type of ontological question about dreams and reality that opens his poem "The Fulfillment": </p><p></p><blockquote><p>"Is it a dream?" I asked. To which my fellow</p><p>Answered with a hoarse voice and dulled insistence:</p><p>"Dream, is it a dream? What difference</p><p>Does it make or mean? If it is only a dream</p><p>It is the dream which we are. Dream or the last resort</p><p>Of reality, it is the truth of our minds:</p><p>We are condemned because this is our consciousness." </p><p>(from <i>Summer Knowledge</i>, p. 150)</p></blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p><br /></p><p>Let's go back to that aforementioned note from 1954 once more---"F[<i>innegans</i>] W[<i>ake</i>], 300-314. Giants doubleheader (losing second game)---distressed by nightfall." (<i>Portrait of Delmore</i>, p. 494) This doubleheader <a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NY1/NY1195407111.shtml" target="_blank">took place</a> at the Polo Grounds on Sunday July 11th, 1954. Exactly one year later, Delmore was again reading <i>Finnegans Wake</i> on July 11th because he jotted the date "<i>7.11.55</i>" in the bottom left corner of page 89 in his copy:</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNmM3f93GWGTGSk0FmCMmB4fFz_1EpUtzBNwlaOgk4lOS4RW6JFood-bNIeIgk3p-0rnBo_ZG_A5BoYq9t1i7xe56Ws07PjS8EP9PGELjpZdUw44RI32KZQ5uCg8KKOwbidETKpbToM4jz/s316/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+3.22.03+PM.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="198" data-original-width="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNmM3f93GWGTGSk0FmCMmB4fFz_1EpUtzBNwlaOgk4lOS4RW6JFood-bNIeIgk3p-0rnBo_ZG_A5BoYq9t1i7xe56Ws07PjS8EP9PGELjpZdUw44RI32KZQ5uCg8KKOwbidETKpbToM4jz/s0/Screen+Shot+2020-12-23+at+3.22.03+PM.png" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail from Delmore's <i>Wake</i>, pg 89.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>There's an eerie significance here because it was on this same day a decade later when Delmore Schwartz died of a heart attack on July 11, 1966. </p><p>Frequently in his journal Delmore would quote lines from Anna Livia Plurabelle's closing monologue from <i>Finnegans Wake</i> as the river of life flows out to the sea and her death. In October of 1943 he wrote: </p><blockquote><p>When yellow leaves or none or few</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>My leaves have drifted from me--- (p. 129)</p></blockquote><p>He's quoting from the last lines of the <i>Wake</i>: "My leaves have drifted from me. But one clings still." (FW, p. 628) He draws on this same line again in this note from January 1944, a month after his 30th birthday: </p><p></p><blockquote>My years have rifted from me. One to thirty. How do I know how many more, and where will I be and when will I die and will I be sorry that I am I? Yes? Guess! (p. 147)</blockquote><p></p><p>By the mid-1960s poor Delmore Schwartz had descended pretty deep into madness and addiction which he'd been struggling with for years. He suffered from paranoid delusions about the Rockefellers beaming signals into his brain from the top of the Empire State Building, he alienated his friends and loved ones as he lobbed unfounded accusations at them and even brought lawsuits against them, he concocted a delusional story in which his wife was cheating with someone she had never actually met, and he fell into a sad and pathetic state. Despite his psychological maladies he still managed to publish some poetry and hold down a job as a professor at Syracuse University (where he became a mentor to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/16/garland-jeffreys-hung-out-with-lou-reed-brush-with-greatness" target="_blank">Lou Reed</a>), but in 1966 he got anxious and left the university to head back to New York City. He bounced around a few seedy hotels in crappy neighborhoods and then on July 11th, 1966, while returning from taking out his trash, he suffered a heart attack and ended up dead in the hallway of a floor other than his. He was 52 years old. It's assumed he must have suffered for hours in the middle of the night because he was found on the floor with his shirt ripped open. His body was unclaimed in the morgue for a few days since nobody seemed to know who the once-famous poet was.</p><p>Knowing that Delmore had a love for the Anna Livia monologue at the end of FW and knowing the sad circumstances of his death, I can't help but think of these lines in relation to him: <b>"...never heed of your name! O bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me."</b> (FW p. 627)</p><p>In his notes from 1945 he jotted down these lines from the end of the <i>Wake</i>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>And I rush, my only! into your arms---</p><p>I done me best when I was let---<br /></p><p>...</p><p>I mounted the steps of the high chair and recited, pointing my finger: "I done me best when I was let---"</p><p>(p. 262)</p></blockquote><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">James Atlas in <i>Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet</i> describes how Delmore fell into a depressed state shortly after his 28th birthday. And then, "The death of James Joyce a month later increased his desolation, and he summoned William Barrett [NYU professor of philosophy and his close friend] from Providence to come up and 'keen for our dead brother.' From then on, Delmore always referred to Joyce as 'our poor dead king,' echoing Mr. Casey's lament for Parnell in <i>A Portrait of the Artist</i>." (Atlas, p. 198-199)</p><p style="text-align: left;">Even though Delmore never got around to publishing a full-length study of Joyce, fortunately we do have a poem that he wrote in tribute to his literary hero. This poem appears in the posthumous collection <i>Last and Lost Poems</i> published by New Directions in 1989.</p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><p><b><u>A King of Kings, a King Among the Kings</u></b> </p></blockquote><blockquote><p><b> (by Delmore Schwartz)</b> </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Come, let us rejoice in James Joyce, in the greatness of this poet,</p><p> king, and king of poets</p><p>For he is our poor dead king, he is the monarch and Caesar of English,</p><p> he is the veritable King of the King’s English</p><p> </p><p> The English of the life of the city,</p><p> and the English of music;</p><p> </p><p>Let them rejoice because he rejoiced and was joyous;</p><p>For his joy was superior, it was supreme, for it was accomplished</p><p>After the suffering of much evil, the evil of the torment of pride,</p><p>By the overcoming of disgust and despair by means of the confrontation </p><p>of them</p><p>By the enduring of nausea, the supporting of exile, the drawing from</p><p> the silence of exile, the pure arias of the</p><p> hidden music of all things, all beings.</p><p>For the joy of Joyce was earned by the sweat of the bow of his mind</p><p> by the tears of the agony of his heart;</p><p> hence it was gained, mastered, and conquered,</p><p> (hence it was not a gift and freely given,</p><p> a mercy often granted to masters,</p><p> as if they miraculous were natural --)</p><p>For he earned his joy and ours by the domination of evil by</p><p> confrontation and the exorcism of language</p><p> in all its powers of imitation and</p><p> imagination and radiance and delight....</p></blockquote><p></p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-33496916876570804792020-11-28T15:39:00.000-06:002020-11-28T15:39:02.327-06:00Rare Recording of James Joyce Society Meeting in NYC featuring Joseph Campbell, Padraic Colum<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yuJhucKVqhM" width="480"></iframe></p><p><br /></p><p>This recorded meeting of the James Joyce Society of NY took place on Oct 23, 1951 at Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan. This a must-listen for Wakeans. Joseph Campbell provides a good introduction to newcomers and then reads select passages from the book, really capturing the lilt of the language beautifully. Padraic Colum shares personal memories of his old friend James Joyce. There is a Dr. Schwartz on the recording as well, and I thought it might be Delmore Schwartz (who was captured in a <a href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/01/02/nyregion/gothamliterary-480.jpg" target="_blank">photograph</a> with a group at Gotham Book Mart in 1948) but this Dr. Schwartz seems to have met Joyce personally which Delmore never did. Lately I've developed a great interest in Delmore Schwartz, reading his biography, his journals, and his letters, with no mention of this historic occasion anywhere so it must be a different Schwartz. </p><p>The gathering sounds sort of like a <i>Finnegans Wake</i> reading group. Listening to it I could feel myself there in that tiny Manhattan bookshop in 1951, enthralled listening to Campbell explore the text he loved so much, and seeing James Joyce come to life in the reflections shared by those who had known him personally. This was only ten years after Joyce's death.</p><p>"It was cultivated with a meticulosity bordering on the insane" - one of the members describing Joyce's approach to writing <i>Finnegans Wake</i>.</p><p>The recording is on YouTube thanks to the account "repetition compulsion" who has also posted the <a href="https://youtu.be/gyMubEjUAIk" target="_blank">Anthony Burgess FW</a> video and has also shared <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoiJVkdDbOo" target="_blank">a video of</a> Jean Erdman (Joseph Campbell's wife) performing her musical play "The Coach with the Six Insides." </p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-17038366162451465532020-10-10T20:11:00.006-05:002020-10-11T01:05:27.388-05:00"the mystery of himsel in furniture" FW 184.10<div></div><blockquote><div>"Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts, and fragments, are we, also, that?"</div>
<div>
- Virginia Woolf, <i>Between the Acts</i> </div></blockquote>
<div><br /></div><div>One relatively simple line from <i>Finnegans Wake</i> has been kicking around in my head for a while now. I say relatively simple because by Wakean standards, the language in this phrase is pretty straightforward. Yet, I've been stuck trying to unpack its meaning for a long time. </div><div><br /></div><div>The phrase comes at the end of one of the most famous sections of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, the listicle paragraph describing, in outlandishly catalogued detail, the interior of Shem the Penman's "Haunted Inkbottle" house on pgs 182-184. You can listen to Robert Anton Wilson reciting this passage with dramatic effect here:</div><div><br /></div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oTb9oqNMma4" width="480"></iframe> <div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>There are so many brilliant and hilarious phrases for the things in Shem's house like "solid objects cast at goblins, once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage ... tress clippings from right, lift, and cintrum, worms of snot, toothsome pickings" etc but what I've been thinking about is the final phrase of the paragraph where Shem is described as "writing the mystery of himsel in furniture." (FW 184.10)</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>"writing the mystery of himsel in furniture"</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>The two things that stand out to me are the bizarre quirk of the word "himsel" missing the letter f at the end of it and the use of the word "furniture" here. I kept wondering why furniture? And why not spell out the word "himself"? The <i>Wake</i> is made up entirely of little mysteries like these but this one so intrigued me because the phrase seems so close to being undistorted English in a paragraph that mostly uses recognizable words. </div><div><br /></div><div>For context, the phrase appears at the end of a long paragraph and as the final clause in a very long sentence. It's in the Shem the Penman chapter, ostensibly narrated by his very hostile twin brother Shaun the Postman. Shaun the Postman begins the paragraph by describing Shem's house how a postman might describe a really disgusting, dilapidated hoarder house on his mail route:</div><div><div></div><blockquote><div><b>The house O'Shea or O'Shame, <i>Quivapieno</i> known as the </b></div><div><b>Haunted Inkbottle, no number Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland, </b></div><div><b>as it was infested with the raps, with his penname SHUT sepia- </b></div><div><b>scraped on the doorplate and a blind of black sailcloth over its </b></div><div><b>wan phwinshogue, in which the soulcontracted son of the secret </b></div><div><b>cell groped through life at the expense of the taxpayers</b> ... (FW 182)</div></blockquote><div></div></div><div><br /></div><div>Shem the Penman really represents James Joyce himself, portrayed as a cartoonishly absurd and self-mocking caricature living inside a Haunted Inkbottle. (Joyce used lines from negative reviews for <i>Ulysses</i> as raw material for this chapter.) I love that description of "a blind of black sailcloth over its wan phwinshogue" which sounds like there is a black curtain covering the house's one window but is also alluding to the black eyepatch Joyce wore over his damaged blind eye. </div><div><br /></div><div>Following this we get a close look at the inside of the house through a comically long catalogue of items. The sentence begins, "The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls thereof, to say nothing of the uprights and imposts, were persianly literatured with ..." and then it goes on for an entire page, leading into the next page where the same sentence continues mocking Shem and his abode. Shaun says we might actually be able to catch a glimpse of Shem surrounded by all that junk in his house, "self exiled in upon his ego, a nightlong a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom (may the Shaper have mercery on him!) writing the mystery of himsel in furniture." (FW p. 184.6-10)</div><div><br /></div><div>So, why "furniture" here? Well, the most obvious answer is that we've just gotten this ridiculous description of a house and all the junk that its floors and walls were "persianly literatured with" which immediately connects all of the furnished objects in the listicle with literature. Since this passage is in fact Joyce describing his self-caricature Shem, the furniture filling up his Haunted Inkbottle house could be the literary matter Joyce collects and assembles in his books. He was "writing the mystery of himsel in furniture" because Joyce reveals mysteries about himself in the descriptions of all that junk furnishing Shem's house. </div><div><br /></div><div>Furthermore, since Shem is "noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom" he's perhaps terrified of death, the inescapable phantom or "Shaper" he asks for mercy from. He's terrorized "to skin and bone" nearly scared to death. Part of why this line has been in my head recently is because during this dark season of death while so many have perished from coronavirus or complications therefrom, I've thought about the furniture that is left over when a dead person departs. All the things that person has accumulated throughout their life, from their desks and bookshelves and picture frames to their little scraps or fragments, all of that stuff is the detritus of a soul. With more than 200,000 people in my country having perished from this virus, their loved ones prevented from being in close proximity in their dying moments, so many families are left with the furniture of the deceased. These physical leftovers are the shells of their life. </div><div><br /></div><div>I think what Joyce is getting at with "the mystery of himsel in furniture" is that the mystery of a person's true self or their soul can be searched for in the scraps or fragments or shells that are leftover after the person departs. Just think about a house occupied by someone with all their belongings. When that person dies and disappears, their physical belongings remain. All the things they loved or relied on, all the things that were important or meaningful for them remain. If you really wanted to understand that person or get to know them after they left you might try to uncover that mystery through the <i>things</i> that person kept nearby. </div><div><br /></div><div>Mysteries and worlds contained within everyday objects is a theme throughout Joyce's work. Recall the line from the "Oxen of the Sun" episode in <i>Ulysses</i>, "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods." Part of the debate about Shakespeare in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode dwells on the Bard having left his "secondbest" bed to his wife after he died and what that bequeathed piece of furniture may have implied. In the "Ithaca" chapter, after Joyce lists out all of the furniture in the living room of 7 Eccles Street, Bloom considers the significance invested in two chairs: "Significances of similitude, of posture, of symbolism, of circumstantial evidence, of testimonial supermanence." It's that "testimonial supermanence" that is most relevant to why Joyce might suggest the mystery of a self can be uncovered in furniture. The permanence of furniture outlasts the person and could provide a tribute to who they were.</div><div> </div><div>Now, what about the quirk of that word "himsel"? Why did Joyce have to truncate that word? Maybe he left out that final letter just to annoy the reader or just to be weird or maybe because the letter f is already nearby in the word "furniture." The word "self" appears several times in and around the passage we're looking at: on p. 182.19 "endlessly inartistic portraits of himself" and on p. 183.03 "exceeding in violent abuse of self and others" and on p. 184.06 "self exiled in upon his ego" and 184.11 "our low hero was a self valeter." So then why "himsel" rather than himself? </div><div><br /></div><div>I think I've figured out the answer but my reasoning is subjective and convoluted so I'll need you to follow me on this. That word "himsel" refers to Hansel from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. I will explain why, but first I should mention Joyce puns on Hansel and Gretel multiple times in the <i>Wake</i> (see p. 551.09 and p. 618.02). And I feel like the presence of Hansel in "himsel" on page 184 is verified in the passage immediately following "himsel in furniture" where we get a detailed description of Shem's alchemical oven ("an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanor" target="_blank">athanor</a>") and of course the oven is a major part of the Hansel and Gretel story. </div><div><br /></div><div>Moreover, "the mystery of himsel in furniture" could be alluding to the bread crumbs left over by Hansel to create a path to follow home. The mystery of the self to whom all that furniture belongs could be unraveled by following the breadcrumbs of their belongings, and again I'll remind you that in this passage Shem's house is said to be "persianly literatured" with all these objects so literature and furniture might be seen as synonymous here. </div><div><br /></div><div>Other lines from the <i>Wake</i> feed into my theory. This line on page 68 offers an interesting hint: "The column of lumps lends the pattrin of the leaves behind us." In the word "pattrin" Joyce is punning on the Gypsy word "patrin" which (according to Fweet) refers to "a Gipsy trail, handfuls of leaves or grass cast by the Gypsies on the road to denote to those behind the way which they have taken." This is exactly like the breadcrumbs left behind by Hansel, only it's more mysterious because it involves Gypsies using leaves for a traveler to follow. Think of how leaves can be the pages of a book. Of course, it's also a pun on <i>pattern</i>, we are looking for patterns to follow. In the very next sentence on page 68 is the phrase "life, limb, and chattels" where chattel is furniture or personal possessions. This hearkens back to Shem on page 184 terrorized "to skin and bone" and writing his mystery in furniture.</div><div><br /></div><div>That word "chattel" appears again at the bottom of page 598 in a sentence describing the archetypal family of HCE and ALP living over millions of years through their offspring with reference to all the belongings of their descendants including "their orts and their everythings that is be will was theirs." (FW p. 599.01) That word "orts" is important here, orts are scraps or leftover pieces of food, like breadcrumbs. The word "orts" pops up on page 69 in "your horde of orts and oriorts" where it is combined with Armenian words that mean young men and young girls, again following the theme of passing things down to descendants. And on page 67, again in the context of a passage talking about the perpetual upswell of future generations inheriting the leftovers of the past, we get the phrase "orses and hashes" which refers to lots things but I think "orts" are echoed in there.</div><div><br /></div><div>I bring all of that up to reinforce the possibility that "the mystery of himsel in furniture" involves seeking out the stories of the past by following the breadcrumbs left behind. Joyce scatters tons of clues all throughout the book and the reader is encouraged to play the role of detective, picking up little bits of evidence, putting it all together and trying to form a story. An important metaphor in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> is the dump or trash heap. The hoarder's nest in Shem's house is part of a broader pattern. The book itself is a sort of trash heap of cultures, languages, histories, random scraps of information, stories from Joyce's life, etc. For the reader sifting through it all, even with just a few pieces you can start trying to make sense of it. You can identify and follow patterns or patrins. </div><div><br /></div><div>While I wouldn't suggest "the mystery of himsel in furniture" has now been solved, I think we have at least identified some intriguing evidence, some meaningful scraps. I think that's why in the closing lines of the book we read "The keys to. Given!" (FW p. 628) The keys to unlocking the mysteries of the <i>Wake</i> are scattered all throughout the book. We're told this at the very end because it pushes us to cycle back to the first page and start digging in all over again. The search never ends.</div><div><div>
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</div>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-45765831421753463442020-09-19T15:34:00.001-05:002020-09-19T15:34:03.055-05:00Video: Anthony Burgess - "Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake" (1973)<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gyMubEjUAIk" width="480"></iframe></p><p><br /></p><p>In this extraordinary video, Anthony Burgess walks us through the basic plot points and features of <i>Finnegans Wake</i> while hanging out inside a pub. He even sings the Ballad of Persse O'Reilly. Check it out.</p>PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-5788751158574937332020-07-26T01:08:00.001-05:002020-07-26T11:09:16.342-05:00Video: Binaries & Bibliomancy: Finnegans Wake as the Western I-Ching<div style="text-align: center;">
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(contributed for Maybe Day 2020 <a href="http://maybeday.net/">http://maybeday.net/</a>)</div>
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This essay was originally presented at the 2019 James Joyce Symposium in Mexico City and earlier this week I recorded it as a video for the <a href="http://maybeday.net/" target="_blank">virtual Maybe Day celebration</a> on July 23rd celebrating the work of Robert Anton Wilson. "Binaries & Bibliomancy" essentially builds upon the theories presented in Wilson's great book <i>Coincidance </i>where he outlines an isomorphic relationship (in mathematics, systems that are parallel in form) between the <i>I-Ching</i> and <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. In my piece I talk about the machinery of these two distinctly different classics, how both books are built as thinking machines, always up-to-date, always encouraging open readings. The <i>Wake</i> advertises itself as a book of "<i>Opendoor Ospices</i>" (FW p. 71) allowing for open-door readings and "<i>Ospices</i>" or auspices, consulting for prophecy much like the <i>I-Ching</i>. As Finn Fordham described it in his book <i>Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake</i>, "Through its continuously self-generating transformation, it is a text of modulation and becoming, flux and flow, an alternative classic of change to the I Ching."<br />
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Robert Anton Wilson Day was officially declared to be July 23rd by the mayor of Santa Cruz, California. John Higgs wrote a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/23/maybe-day-anton-wilson" target="_blank">great article</a> in <i>The Guardian</i> years back describing what RAW Day is all about. I enjoy the Santa Cruz connection with RAW because our Austin <i>Finnegans Wake</i> Reading Group has a lot of Santa Cruz links. We've had multiple longtime members from Santa Cruz who became good buddies of mine, the host of the <a href="http://finniganswakesantacruz.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><i>Finnegans Wake</i> Reading Group in Santa Cruz</a> is also an old pal of mine, I got to visit up there and attend their <i>Wake</i> groups multiple times. Robert Anton Wilson also had a <i>Finnegans</i> <i>Wake</i> reading group in Santa Cruz for many years. Last time I was there I got to hear stories from folks who knew RAW and also knew Norman O. Brown, the legendary UC Santa Cruz professor, scholar, and theatrical Wakean.<br />
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I want to thank Bobby Campbell (<a href="https://bobbycampbell.net/">https://bobbycampbell.net/</a>) for putting together the amazing virtual tribute to RAW with contributions from a talented group of RAW readers. There's some incredible visuals, writings, comics, and videos over at the 2020 celebration of <a href="http://maybeday.net/" target="_blank">Happy Maybe Day</a>. I also got to participate in a <a href="http://www.rawillumination.net/2020/07/blog-post.html" target="_blank">live panel</a> with the contributors that was a really inspiring and informative time, really enjoyed it and grateful to be a part of this event.PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-13723887061725126932020-06-28T23:14:00.000-05:002020-06-29T09:30:54.985-05:0016 June 1904 and the Letter in Finnegans Wake <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi97lOm27a5SZyy_xKv85N-cARee0sE0RXm7EKolGz3Pgfi5iIHnFBCMz087pp3p4a_0XU2ZIUh-QxhPdhC5K_Lnj-mc_G7ZMWWQMMRYUNkskRGpYyMFIW0aly79E2xKjWzwEZX3Ve6E65s/s1600/Screen+Shot+2020-06-28+at+11.55.59+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="393" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi97lOm27a5SZyy_xKv85N-cARee0sE0RXm7EKolGz3Pgfi5iIHnFBCMz087pp3p4a_0XU2ZIUh-QxhPdhC5K_Lnj-mc_G7ZMWWQMMRYUNkskRGpYyMFIW0aly79E2xKjWzwEZX3Ve6E65s/s320/Screen+Shot+2020-06-28+at+11.55.59+PM.png" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in 1929.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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It cannot be overstated how important Nora Barnacle Joyce was to the career and life of her loving companion James Joyce. The annual Joycean holiday Bloomsday celebrates Joyce's most famous book, <i>Ulysses</i>, which entirely takes place on June 16th, 1904, immortalizing the day on which they went out for their first date. That wasn't his only dedication to her, though. Nora was the muse that inspired Joyce's entire artistic approach, as he wrote to her in a letter from September 1909:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Guide me, my saint, my angel. Lead me forward. <u>Everything</u> that is noble and exalted and deep and true and moving in what I write comes, I believe, from you. O take me into your soul of souls and then I will become indeed the poet of my race. I feel this, Nora, as I write it.<br />
(p. 169, <i>Selected Joyce Letters</i>, ed. Richard Ellmann, underline in original)</blockquote>
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This year as Bloomsday approached, I went back to Brenda Maddox's excellent biography of Nora to read the chapter about the summer of 1904 when Joyce and Nora Barnacle first met. Nora had grown up in Galway before moving to Dublin where she landed a job working as a chambermaid and barmaid at Finn's Hotel on Nassau Street. It was in front of Finn's Hotel where James Joyce was walking by on June 10th, 1904 when he encountered Nora for the first time. It was love at first sight (although Joyce had poor eyesight even then at age 22). He approached her and asked for a date the following week. As Maddox writes in <i>Nora</i>, "In Dublin, far more than in Galway, Nora was vulnerable to unwanted male attentions... Wariness of the male was Nora's strategy for survival. When a well-mannered, well-spoken, amusing and unthreatening young man stepped into her path one day in Dublin, therefore, Nora was quite happy to accept his invitation to meet him one evening. But she did not appear." (p. 40)<br />
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They had set a date for June 14th, 1904 but Nora stood him up, likely because she couldn't get off her shift at Finn's Hotel in time. Joyce wrote to her in dismay and reading his letter it's funny to contemplate how close this historic couple came to never linking up in the first place:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: right;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
15 June 1904 </div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: right;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me---if you have not forgotten me! </div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: right;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="text-align: right;">James A. Joyce</span></div>
</blockquote>
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Although June 16th is supposed to be the day they did finally get together and change the course of history, Brenda Maddox notes that there actually is no clear evidence in their letters that June 16th was the exact date. The main piece of evidence is that <i>Ulysses</i> takes place on that day. When Herbert Gorman was composing his authorized biography of Joyce in the 1930s he submitted a questionnaire to Joyce and received responses in the handwriting of Nora. He'd gotten answers to every question except one:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Q: Why did you pitch on June 16, 1904 for Bloomsday? Was it the day you met Nora? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A: Reply later. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
(p. 41, <i>Nora</i>)</blockquote>
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Gorman never did get a response about this and it was never confirmed during Joyce's life, probably because it was "too personal and too shocking," as Maddox surmises. If you are here reading this blog, I will take it for granted that you understand why that might be the case and what supposedly occurred between James and Nora on June 16th, 1904.<br />
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Moving on... in our <i>Finnegans Wake</i> reading group we recently read page 66 where there is a passage about the mysterious letter that keeps popping up all throughout the <i>Wake, </i>and that sparked a discussion about the postal service. Joyce in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> is frequently preoccupied with the postal service and on p. 66 in writing about the delivery of the letter he describes a postal service that sounds sorta like Fedex except there's a hidden meaning in its acronym: "<b>Federals' Uniteds' Transports' Unions' for Exultations' of Triumphants' Ecstasies</b>." The acronym here spells out FUTUE TE which would be the vulgar Latin curse word <i>futue te</i> meaning "fuck you" or "you all fuck." This comes at the tail end of a passage about how people all over the world and all throughout history getting together and having sex is how the species ensures its future (note the root for the word "future" is contained in <i>futue te</i>). If you parse that sentence, a rare <i>Wake</i> line with normal words, you can identify how it is a sophisticated and clinical way of describing people fucking. The first word <i>federal</i>, for instance, <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/federal#etymonline_v_1190" target="_blank">originally</a> referred to a covenant and contains the root word for "faith" so this is all part of a faithful covenant, i.e. marriage. Faithful couples uniting in covenant for exultant triumphant ecstasies has allowed for the continuation of the species through time, that's basically what it says.<br />
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Immediately after that, <i>Finnegans Wake</i> asks "Will it ever be next morning the postal unionist's (officially called carrier's, Letters Scotch, Limited) strange fate... to hand in a huge chain envelope ...?" The letter and the postal service can be seen to symbolically connote the continuation of the species, hence why the parcel is called "a huge chain envelope." Elsewhere in the <i>Wake</i> we read how "ancients link with presents as the human chain extends" (p. 254) and later on "Since ancient was our living is in possible to be. Delivered as." (p. 614) The "huge chain envelope" to be delivered might be viewed as the DNA chain of humanity through generations, the links in the chain are formed by couples fucking.<br />
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The mysterious letter in the book has many different associations: on one level it <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-great-letter-and-infinite-process.html" target="_blank">represents the book itself</a>; on another level it factors into whatever narrative can be said to exist in the <i>Wake</i> since it appears at the end of the book as being written by the wife Anna Livia in defense of her besieged husband Earwicker; on another level it embodies the dream itself and the sleeper's attempt to carry the dream information across the threshold of sleep so he can remember it in the morning, as John Bishop has argued; and one might also see it the way <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2019/02/mcluhans-jolting-thunders-plus-links.html" target="_blank">Eric McLuhan did</a> when he suggested the letter is actually a red herring.<br />
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Going back to Nora and the summer of 1904 for a moment, though, it appears there might be something more personal to the <i>Wake</i>'s obsession with mailing letters. Brenda Maddox writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The swift progress of their love affair depended on a superb postal system. There were five deliveries a day, with the first collection at quarter-past one in the morning. Joyce, who liked to write in the small hours of the morning, took full advantage of the service. After he came in from seeing Nora, he would stay up writing long, painful, self-revealing letters ('It is only fair that you should know my mind on most things') and took them to the box, confident that she would get them in the morning. Both of them relied on letters posted before lunch to make or cancel a date that same evening... (p. 46, <i>Nora</i>)</blockquote>
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With all of that, it seems there's some good evidence to suggest that the letter in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> may actually be a love letter. That brings us to what I feel is one of the most brilliant studies of Joyce ever written, Benjamin Boysen's book <i>The Ethics of Love: An essay on James Joyce </i>(published in 2013 by University Press of Southern Denmark). In this large and ambitious book, Boysen examines all of Joyce's works (including <i>Chamber Music</i> and <i>Exiles</i>) and argues convincingly that the main theme throughout all of them is Love. Boysen's book has a large section devoted to <i>Finnegans Wake</i> that is especially filled with original insights that I have not seen other Joyceans touch upon. Most relevant to our current consideration is his discussion of the letter.<br />
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Boysen calls our attention to a passage that starts on p. 420 of the <i>Wake</i> which describes some of the notable characteristics of the letter. Beyond the familiar qualities that it was written by Shem the Penman and carried by Shaun the Postman, the passage provides a long, cryptic and comical list of the letter's many misadventures in postal conveyance. Here is a list of some examples (with page and line numbers and my clarifying notes in brackets):<br />
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- "Initialled. Gee. Gone." p. 420.19 [Initials are gone.]<br />
- "Tried Apposite House." p. 420.21 [Try opposite house.]<br />
- "Nave unlodgeable." p. 420.23 [Name illegible.]<br />
- "Noon sick parson." p. 420.24 [No such person.]<br />
- "No such no." p. 420.25 [No such number.]<br />
- "Opened by Miss Take." p. 420.26 [Opened by mistake.]<br />
- "None so strait." p. 420.28 [No such street.]<br />
- "Wrongly spilled." p. 420.33 [Wrongly spelled.]<br />
- "At sea. D.E.D. Place scent on." p. 420.30 [At sea. Dead. Please send on.]<br />
- "Kainly forewarred." p. 421.05 [Kindly forward.]<br />
- "Overwayed. Understrumped. Back to the P.O." p. 421.07 [Overweight, understamped. Send back to post office.]<br />
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Within this catalogue of characteristics, Boysen notices the presence of Leopold Bloom---on p. 420.22 you find the initials "L.B." and p. 420.33 mentions "Return to City Arms" which would be City Arms Hotel in Dublin where <i>Ulysses</i> describes the Blooms as having once lived---and then he also points out the presence of Joyce's loving companion Nora in the phrase "Loved noa's dress." That would be "left no address" but it's also saying "<i>I loved Nora's dress</i>." He further observes the presence of Finn's Hotel, the place where Nora worked when Joyce first met her, in this passage: "Finn's Hot." (p. 420.25) (It's worth mentioning that, according to some sources, Joyce's original planned title for <i>Finnegans Wake</i> was actually <i>Finn's Hotel</i>.) Boysen calls our attention to another appearance of Finn's Hotel later on in the Yawn chapter (III.3) where Yawn is asked for the <i>name and address</i>---"name or Redress" (p. 514.17)---of the <i>Wake</i>'s subject and his cryptic response is ".i..'. .o..l." (p. 514.18) We can't be certain but it is very likely the answer there is "Finn's Hotel." If that is indeed the case, Boysen concludes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
it means that all empty spaces, the uncertainties, the indeterminacies, and the obscurities of the book as such are meant to be interpolated by the singular event of James Joyce's <i>coup de foudre</i> [love at first sight, in French literally "stroke of lightning"] when meeting real love for the first time. What I suggest is nothing less than that Joyce's encounter with Nora---as commemorated in <i>Ulysses</i> by choosing 16 June 1904 (the date where Joyce had his first rendezvous with Nora) as the principal day---is similarly pointed out as a fateful event or <i>Hintertext</i> informing <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. (p. 351, <i>The Ethics of Love</i>)</blockquote>
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To suggest June 16th, 1904 is a major event at the heart of not only <i>Ulysses</i> but also <i>Finnegans Wake</i> is a groundbreaking assertion for Joyceans and the literary world as a whole, as there's no literary event quite like Bloomsday. Boysen bolsters his theory by informing us that the passage on p. 420-421 which lists out all the addresses of the letter (which, as I mentioned, can be seen as a stand-in for the book itself) in fact lists out the addresses where James Joyce lived in Dublin in the years prior to his life-altering encounter with Nora in 1904.<br />
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I won't list them all out here, you can find <a href="http://fweet.org/cgi-bin/fw_grep.cgi?i=1&o=1&c=1&a=1&b=1&s=_C,JoyceAddresses_" target="_blank">a list of them at Fweet here</a>, but Boysen makes it abundantly clear that the passage contains not only the names of the Dublin districts where pre-June-1904 Joyce lived but also many of the specific addresses (Fweet lists nine of them). On top of that, all of these addresses where Joyce lived before he met Nora are mutated in the language of the <i>Wake</i> to carry dark, depressing connotations. Quoting from Boysen once again:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As "Destined Tears" (FW p. 421.10), these early addresses (French <i>destinataires</i>) embody tearful <i>destinies</i>, which nonetheless did not come true on account of the amorous meeting. In other words, the letter comes to represent the author's metaphysical love-letter to existence, to love, and to himself as a young man not yet transformed by the amorous event. The letter is the mature author's gift to himself as a young man untouched by the amorous transubstantiation, testifying to Walt Whitman's lesson that "love is to the lover, and comes back most to him, / The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him - it cannot fail" ('A Song of the Rolling Earth' 2, vv. 15-16). As it says in Issy's love-letter, the letter gives testimony on behalf of "my old evernew" (FW p. 460.36) self, which is transformed and <i>ever renewed</i> by the gift of love and existence. (p. 352, <i>The Ethics of Love</i>)</blockquote>
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Elsewhere in his book, Boysen writes: "In sum, <i>Ulysses</i> and <i>Finnegans Wake</i> are to be perceived as great love letters expressing an existential gift to history and humankind." (p. 348) We can now be sure that the historically famous day of June 16th, 1904 is a pivotal day not only for <i>Ulysses</i> but also for <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. Nora Joyce herself, speaking to Joyce's friends after her husband had died, in response to their questions about the great author of <i>Ulysses</i>, responded, "What's all this talk about <i>Ulysses</i>? <i>Finnegans Wake </i>is the important book." While there's no doubt that <i>Ulysses</i> deserves to be celebrated, maybe it's about time we heed Nora's words and start giving some more attention to Joyce's grandest epic, <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, when we celebrate James Joyce every year on June 16th.PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-29728815431004208202020-06-23T23:29:00.000-05:002020-06-24T00:02:31.331-05:00Latest Examples of Reading the News inside Finnegans Wake<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>"News, news, all the news." - <i>FW</i> p. 28.21</b></div>
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<b>"old the news of the great big world" - <i>FW</i> p. 194.23-24</b></div>
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Ever since the coronavirus shut everything down, our local <i>Finnegans Wake</i> Reading Group transferred to online conferences and since the reading group is one of the most fun and fulfilling things going on for many of us right now, we shifted our twice-monthly meetings to now meet every week. The online venue allows us to branch out and bring in people who are outside of Austin, so now we regularly have people joining us from California, Ohio, and even Taiwan. It's been extremely satisfying having these weekly gatherings and doing digital group excavations of pages from <i>Finnegans Wake</i>.<br />
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One aspect of being involved in a regular <i>Wake</i> reading group that always intrigues me is how, without any intention on our part, we always manage to encounter material on the page we're reading that seems to speak directly to what is happening in the news that day. I've written about this phenomenon before (most notably when the <i>Wake</i> seemed to offer <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2019/12/finnegans-wake-on-trump-ukraine-affair.html" target="_blank">commentary on our Trump predicament</a>), it is a quality about <i>Finnegans Wake</i> that has interested me for a long time, ever since the first time I attended a <i>Wake</i> reading group many years ago in Venice, California where the guy sitting next to me made a bunch of notes about contemporary references on the page we were reading. The upcoming Super Bowl, Bush and Cheney, oil wars in the Middle East, it was all there on the page. My mind was blown.<br />
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Oddly, these synchronicities never stop popping up. Like I said, these connections happen when you aren't looking for them. <i>Finnegans Wake</i> simply cannot help itself, it always has something to say about the news. I want to give you three examples from the last few weeks of our reading group to show you what I mean.<br />
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- Usually we read one page per meeting, but when we were on page 66 we found it to be so dense and overflowing with allusions and references and topics for discussion that we split that one page into three separate sessions. So in our last session we read the final paragraph which begins with "The coffin, a triumph of the illusionist's art..." and so on. We spent about two hours unpacking just that one paragraph and what we took from it, if I remember correctly, was that the paragraph was saying even though somebody was in a coffin it was an illusion in the sense that their legacy was only just beginning, their legacy would go on to have a life of its own, giving birth to new cycles of life (through their memory, through their children and their descendants, etc) even while their body was left to decay, consumed by subterranean creatures and reduced to ashes. This is an important theme throughout James Joyce's work, that absence can be the greatest form of presence, that the dead take on a more powerful life after death. Of course, it so happened that the day we read this passage was the day of George Floyd's memorial service where he was mourned as he lay inside a golden coffin. And George Floyd, in death, has now become an incredibly powerful figure, a name known across the world, the impact of his tragic killing has sparked an enormous uprising intent on societal change. I think of Floyd's sweet little daughter sitting atop the shoulders of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Kj_ZqufQM" target="_blank">Floyd's friend Stephen Jackson and proclaiming</a> "Daddy changed the world!"<br />
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- The following week we were reading page 67 which features a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_constable" target="_blank">special constable</a> or policeman taking the stand in a trial and giving an eyewitness account of some occurrence in the book. At one point while the policeman is speaking, Joyce uses the phrase "he guntinued." The presence of this constable character opened up a whole discussion about police and the history of policing, which apparently originated from British colonialism and the need to keep colonial subjects in line. Of course, this discussion about the police and their history sprung up amid the backdrop of heated debates going on in the United States about the need to reform our police system. In a bizarre coincidence, the passage on 67 with the policeman features the phrase "You are deepknee in error, sir" which we couldn't help but connect with the horrific image of the policeman Derek Chauvin putting his knee on George Floyd's neck for nearly ten minutes until he died.<br />
(I should also mention that this same passage with the policeman and subtle appearances of police violence featured the word "tailliur" which conjures up Breonna Taylor, the young black woman who was killed while sleeping in her home in Louisville, Kentucky.)<br />
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- The most recent one really struck me as being uncanny. While we were reading page 68 we stopped at this sentence and chewed on it for a while: <b>"Nor needs none shaft ne stele from Phenicia or Little Asia to obelise on the spout, neither pobalclock neither folksstone, nor sunkenness in Tomar's Wood to bewray how erpressgangs score off the rued."</b> It is a very dense and difficult sentence to unpack, but there are some good clues in there. That word "stele" refers to a type of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stele" target="_blank">ancient monument</a>, a stone slab with inscriptions. You've got an obelisk, another monument, in there. The portmanteau word "pobalclock" combines two Irish words which basically translate to "folk stone" and there is "folksstone" following right after "pobalclock." <a href="http://fweet.org/cgi-bin/fw_grep.cgi?i=1&o=1&r=1&b=1&s=%5E068.30" target="_blank">Fweet</a> mentioned that there is a stone pillar monument in the town of Folkestone in England marking the spot where Saxon invaders landed on the shores. You see where this is going? The sentence essentially says we don't need monuments to mark where the invaders landed, we don't need to recognize those "erpressgangs"---a word combining the German <i>erpressen</i> meaning "to blackmail or extort" and also press-gangs which were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment" target="_blank">groups</a> that kidnapped men and forced them to enlist in the military. All of this stuff rung an uncanny echo with the ongoing debates in the United States about removing statues and monuments that commemorate Confederate generals or slave owners or other historical figures known for their roles in perpetuating America's history of bigotry and racial oppression. Page 68 is very rich and fascinating, there's a lot to it, but for me it was pretty mind-blowing to come upon this sentence about statues and monuments and how we don't need them if they're commemorating invaders and oppressors in the midst of what is happening in America right now. <i>Finnegans Wake</i> never disappoints.PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-85562980630337167752020-05-17T01:20:00.002-05:002020-12-03T11:26:26.038-06:00Renowned Educator and Finnegans Wake Scholar John Bishop Has DiedThe retired Berkeley professor and legendary James Joyce scholar who wrote <i>Joyce's</i> <i>Book of the Dark</i>, John Bishop, passed away on Friday May 15th, 2020 after suffering complications due to Covid-19. He had been fighting through health maladies the last several years. Read his <a href="https://obits.syracuse.com/obituaries/syracuse/obituary.aspx?n=john-bishop&pid=196200941&fhid=13173" target="_blank">obituary</a> here.<br />
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It is safe to say John Bishop's book <i>Joyce's Book of the Dark</i> made a huge impact on me. I owned the book for many years before I committed to reading all of it, but it always inspired me. My initial discovery of the book was right around the time I fell in love with <i>Finnegans Wake</i> around 2009 when I was living in San Diego, unemployed for months at a time, living in tiny apartments, spending days reading at the beach, nights reading at the library. I used to make the long drive up to LA to attend a <i>Finnegans Wake</i> reading group in Venice and drive home the same night. It was right around that time when I first started writing a blog. In fact, part of my inspiration to write a blog stemmed from my feeling that there was such a book as <i>Joyce's Book of the Dark</i> by John Bishop out there in the world and hardly anybody on the internet was talking about it. I write for people like me who are searching for discussions about this exact thing. The name of this blog "Finnegans, Wake!" and that little quote "you have nothing to lose but your chains" that sits atop this blog, that all came from John Bishop's book.<br />
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By the time I finally got around to dedicating myself to reading <i>Joyce's Book of the Dark </i>back in 2012 (the same year I started this blog)<i>, </i>the book struck me so much that I then spent a full year slowly re-reading the whole thing, taking copious notes and trying to comprehend it all. It's a huge book, peppered with various diagrams and word-trees, and stuffed with footnotes that are as rich and informative as the text itself. Bishop builds up his <i>Wake</i> theories so thoroughly that his book is easy to get lost in. I think it's tough to make an argument against <i>Joyce's Book of the Dark</i> being the greatest book ever written about <i>Finnegans Wake.</i> That book alone, I would hazard to surmise, has launched many academic and literary careers. The sharpest and most ardent <i>Finnegans Wake</i> readers across the globe hold Bishop's book in the highest regard. It helped open up the text of the <i>Wake</i> for all of us to read our own theories into it, while expounding thoroughly on Bishop's own profound and fascinating interpretation of the book.<br />
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After studying Bishop's great book I wrote a 4-part review attempting to summarize some of its most eye-opening aspects in my view. That review consumed an immense amount of time and energy, it was not an easy thing to write but I felt a need to do so and the final result became one of the things I feel most proud to have written.<br />
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Here are the links to my review of John Bishop's masterpiece <i>Joyce's Book of the Dark</i>:<br />
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<a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2014/01/book-review-part-1-joyces-book-of-dark.html" target="_blank">Part 1</a><br />
<a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2014/01/book-review-part-2-joyces-book-of-dark.html" target="_blank">Part 2</a><br />
<a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2014/02/book-review-part-3-of-4-joyces-book-of.html" target="_blank">Part 3</a><br />
<a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-part-4-of-4-joyces-book-of.html" target="_blank">Part 4</a><br />
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At the bottom of Part 4 there I shared some links to more material from John Bishop including an old lecture he gave on the Prankquean section of the <i>Wake</i>, a rich and enlightening interview with Bishop conducted by my friend Gerry Fialka (wherein Bishop reflects on FW p. 287: "If we could each always do all we ever did"), and the <a href="https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_354819401" target="_blank">full recording</a> of a literature course taught by Bishop at UC-Berkeley in 2008.<br />
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At some point after I began writing about the works of James Joyce, partly inspired by John Bishop, I started writing papers to deliver at academic conferences focused on Joyce studies. Though I have now been to a handful of conferences around the world and met many accomplished and inspiring Joyceans, I never did get to meet John Bishop. But I did get to see him. The first time I attended a Joyce conference was back in 2011 at Caltech in Pasadena, CA. Sadly, Bishop had recently suffered a stroke so he was unable to attend. His friends among the professors there channeled him in via Skype though, to have a <i>Finnegans Wake</i> reading group one afternoon during the conference. He was confined to a wheelchair, his physical faculties had taken a hit but his mind remained sharp. Years later when I was at a Joyce conference in Toronto in 2017, once again the professors channeled in their friend John Bishop via video conferencing. This time he delivered a paper on a panel about magic in <i>Finnegans Wake </i>(where there was also a great paper about the <i>Wake</i> as grimoire).<br />
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By that time I had already written the big review of Bishop's book, I was a huge fan of his (I had also been contacted by some of Bishop's caretakers who mentioned he had read and loved the review I wrote) so I sat there listening to him on a live-feed expound off the top his head all about one little line in the<i> Wake</i> ("Poor little brittle magic nation" spoken on FW p. 565 by a mother who comforts her child after he awoke from a nightmare, telling him it's only his imagination) and I tried to take as thorough notes as I possibly could, practically jotting down every word the man said. This is because, while there are many great exegetes of Joyce out there, no other has ever struck me to the degree Bishop has. And this would likely be my last chance to hear him share fresh insights about Joyce and <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. That short talk he gave totally blew me away. I think about it often. I wrote a summary of what he said at the end of <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-recap-of-diasporic-joyce-conference_16.html" target="_blank">this recap</a> of the Toronto Joyce conference.<br />
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Afterwards I sought out Bishop's friends, the professors who had arranged his talk. I told them I was someone with an immense appreciation for Bishop's work and let them know that, last I'd heard (in the interview Bishop did in 2009 that you can listen to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tMb4l2ie3g" target="_blank">here</a>) Bishop said he was finishing up a sequel to his <i>Book of the Dark</i> and also writing a book about what he had learned in his four decades studying <i>Ulysses</i>. I asked if they knew anything about those projects and implored them to ensure Bishop's notes for those projects are located and safeguarded. I maybe seemed a little crazy.<br />
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That was June of 2017. A year later at another conference, this time in Antwerp, Belgium, I got to have lunch with another great Joyce scholar whose work I admire, professor Vincent Cheng who wrote the powerful book <i>Joyce, Race, and Empire. </i>He also was a roommate with John Bishop when they were in grad school together. We talked for a long time, professor Cheng is a really nice guy, friendly and accommodating, he told me many stories. He mentioned how Bishop would stay up all night writing his thesis. That thesis is what became the book <i>Joyce's Book of the Dark,</i> but professor Cheng emphasized that the material in the book was only the first half of his thesis. There was a whole other part to it.<br />
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Here's hoping we haven't seen the last of John Bishop's unique angles of explicating the depths of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. Regardless, the man leaves behind a legacy of having inspired and sparked the passionate interests of many readers around the world. I hear stories all the time about the <i>Wake</i> reading group he hosted in Berkeley. I can only hope to carry on the tradition of enjoying and celebrating Joyce's book of the dark and spreading the spark of inspiration and excitement for Joyce's work that Bishop provided.PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-50490900261040791442020-04-08T22:47:00.002-05:002021-02-09T18:40:29.447-06:00A Tribute to Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group Member Richard Lee Price (1949-2020)<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Memory is not an eye that returns to the past; </b><b>it is rather the power that allows us to see what is, in its essence, outside of time ....</b> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>- Ermilio Abreu Gomez</b> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b></b><b>(quoted by Richard Lee Price in his novel <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Troubadours-Death-Richard-Lee-Price/dp/1523419199" target="_blank">Troubadours: Love, Death, Rumba</a>)</i></b></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Do not go gentle into that good night,</b> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Old age should burn and rave at close of day;</b> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</b> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b></b><b>- Dylan Thomas</b></span></blockquote>
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Yesterday I heard the news that a good friend who was part of our Austin <i>Finnegans Wake </i>reading group for years named Richard Lee Price (June 14, 1949 - April 7, 2020) had passed away. Richard was a truly beautiful soul, a poet, a musician, a songwriter, a scholar professor, a funny and witty chatterbox with a Bronx accent. I loved him and I feel crushed by the news of his loss. Since hearing about it, I have been overwhelmed by feelings of grief and anger that I will never get to see him again. I knew that he was battling an illness, he had been sick for a while but I was holding out hope, I felt sure he would get better and return to our group. I'm really going to miss him and I want to send my heartfelt condolences to his family and loved ones. (You can read an obituary for Richard Lee Price <a href="https://www.austinnaturalfunerals.com/obituaries/Richard-Price-20/#!/Obituary" target="_blank">here</a>.)<br />
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He was a really unique guy, a true character, lots of fun to be around. Because I grew up in New York City the son of an old school Brooklyn guy with a heavy accent and most of my father's friends and associates were old New York guys with heavy accents, Richard felt like a long lost relative or family friend. Richard grew up in the Bronx, lived in Brooklyn for years, went to school in Queens, he was a true New Yorker. Like my dad and his pals, he was talkative, a super witty and funny and occasionally over-the-top chatterbox. Unlike most of the people I grew up around though, he was an intellectual, a poet, an artist. His NYC street-tinged accent spitting out rants was not raging about petty bullshit, no, he was frequently carrying on about Greek philosophy and mythology, about Shakespeare, about Yeats, about jazz music, about the Bible or eastern religion. He was a passionate and proud Jewish man with a great sense of humor. He had been an English professor for forty years and then became an avid practitioner of Tai Chi and Chi Kung in his retirement, battling back ill health. He had a sage-like presence, a wisecracking old professor who walked around with a cane, but who was a master of the art of kung fu (no kidding). I really enjoyed being around him and I feel sad and angry that I didn't get to spend more time with him and that I can never see him again. What I do have are lots of memories of him that I will cherish.<br />
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I want to tell you a few stories about Richard Lee Price that may capture what kind of guy he was.<br />
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- First time I met Richard was at a Bloomsday event at Malvern Books in central Austin about five or six years ago. I read an essay about <i>Ulysses</i> from the podium and then this guy with a white beard, wearing a sideways beret, carrying a cane gets up to ask a question and goes on into a longwinded and passionate discussion about Homer's <i>Odyssey</i> and the Molly Bloom chapter in <i>Ulysses</i> and then asks me some super heavy question that I had to think about for a while before I could muster an answer. I don't remember what the question was now, but I remember later on all of us from the group were wondering who the hell was that guy? He and I connected and he soon started attending our meetings.<br />
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- Richard was a brilliant guy, he sparked so many ideas and perspectives for me in our discussions. I remember the first time we had a <i>Finnegans Wake</i> reading group <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2016/11/finwakeatx-visits-irish-consulate-in.html" target="_blank">hosted at the Irish Consulate</a>, Richard went into detail on an interpretation of the <i>I-Ching</i> appearing on a page we read and what he said became part of my inspiration to write a paper on FW and <i>I-Ching</i> that I delivered in Mexico City last year. I recall many times when he'd point out something in the course of our reading groups, a unique interpretation of a line in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> that was just so perfect and enriching that I'd be pondering it for months and would always thank him. I still have ideas and notes for future pieces to write that sprang from talking with him. As a professor of literature and seasoned scholar he was a mentor figure for me but also a great buddy. I remember one time it must have been a rainy night or something and only he and I showed up to a reading group meeting we had at the Wheatsville food co-op in South Austin. So instead of doing the normal routine of studying a page from the book we just talked in great detail about <i>Finnegans Wake</i> in general, he wanted to hear my theories about it and then he went into long fascinating monologues about Dante and <i>The Divine Comedy</i> and Herman Melville and <i>Moby-Dick</i>. His mind was a treasure trove. Another great memory of him I have is one time at a reading group where Richard and I were discussing a subject related to <i>Finnegans Wake</i> and the next morning he left me a voicemail talking at length about an article he had read online about that same subject, an article he just loved and went on and on in great detail about and said he wanted to read it 10 more times. Then he left me another voicemail immediately afterward where he realized it was actually something I wrote on this blog and he said "in the parlance of my youth, you are one heavy dude, man." I still have these voicemails from him and I will cherish them. (Part of what I loved about Richard is he was genuinely interested in my writing and my ideas about Joyce, he would often read my work and give me really meaningful feedback. That piece he was talking about on the voicemail was one of my favorite pieces ever, called <i><a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2016/01/what-is-finnegans-wake-simulacrum-of.html" target="_blank">What is Finnegans Wake? A Simulacrum of the Globe (Part 2)</a></i>.)<br />
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- Richard was a scholar and a professor of literature for forty years. In our groups he would regularly go off into Greek philosophy and mythology, come back to Judaism and the Bible, veer into old New York City and the Bronx and jazz music, throw in some classic poetry and dirty jokes. He was known to break into song and he had a good voice. He had so many classic poems and amazing lines and lyrics memorized and he was eager to share them. For a while he had his own book group focused on Chaucer's book <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i> which he adored and often mentioned in our <i>Wake</i> discussions. This is the kind of thing that I wish I could hear him talk more about now. At one point some of our reading group members recorded a pilot episode for a podcast, the full recording is something like 4 or 5 hours and Richard is on there giving his typically wide-ranging and long-winded talks. I hope I can share some of that here soon.<br />
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- He was a very funny dude, kind of a goofball, always cracking jokes, being ridiculous and witty. One thing I remember that cracked me up was one night the reading group had a party and when Richard and his wife were getting ready to leave I was like "leaving already?" and he responded, "Peter I'm an old man! I gotta go home and have my milk and cookie and go to bed!"<br />
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- One of the last times I saw Richard was a <i>Wake</i> reading group night I will not soon forget. In the meeting prior to it, a young college student had attended the group for the first time and later while we all ate pizza afterward she had expressed some unkind opinions about Native Americans which Richard politely but firmly argued against and sorta shut down. The exchange was a little odd I guess but I didn't make much of it at the time. Then in the following reading group meeting a month later, the same young lady returned and brought her boyfriend along. He seemed sorta like a young conservative frat boy kinda dude but, as she boasted, "he knows everything" and he did indeed talk like he thought so. After our group meeting while we all ate pizza across the street again this guy and his girlfriend spouted some egregiously hateful and Islamophobic opinions and racist garbage interpretations of history and I got to witness the old professor, old school Bronx dude, and obligingly confrontational yet calm Tai Chi master Richard, sitting with both hands atop his cane, absolutely school them in the most articulate and info-dense manner possible. This was all an intellectual debate, mind you, but it got pretty heated. The more heated it got, the more calm, articulate and piercingly funny Richard got. I think my feelings on the matter were apparent by my hysterically laughing at how badly Richard was schooling them in this heated argument. God, it was great. He had been slicing through that kinda bullshit from loud, know-it-all assholes for decades. What an inspiring guy he was.<br />
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May he rest in peace.PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-55006651195610579252020-04-05T16:40:00.000-05:002020-04-05T16:47:01.092-05:00Steve Fly Examines "The Entourage Effect at Finnegans Wake" The multi-talented artist, author, thinker, and eminent Wakean named Steve "Fly Agaric 23" Pratt has been a prolific creator for many years. In my earliest days of reading blogs, I fell into a wormhole of more than a dozen different blogs authored by Steve Fly and was soon inspired to start writing my own blogs. His work draws on a variety of avenues including science, semantics, music, and of course James Joyce and <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. After years of reading his work and corresponding via email, I had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with Steve Fly during the 2018 James Joyce Symposium in Antwerp, Belgium. Also got to see an excellent performance from the man known as DJ Fly Agaric 23 at one of the symposium events, where DJ Fly alternated between spinning out tunes from his <a href="https://deepscratch.net/bloomjamm/" target="_blank">Bloomjamm</a> machine and running over to a drum set to crush it with drum solos. He is a talented dude.<br />
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For the Joyce Symposium in Mexico City last year (which I wrote a little bit about <a href="https://www.abuildingroam.com/2019/10/the-indelible-sensory-imprint-of-mexico.html" target="_blank">here</a>), Steve Fly prepared an extraordinary presentation entitled "The Entourage Effect at <i>Finnegans Wake</i>" a study of the interplay of terpenes (the organic compounds involved in cannabis) in <i>Finnegans Wake</i>. Unfortunately he was not able to make it across the Atlantic to present his work in Mexico City but he has shared the full presentation online at his <a href="https://deepscratch.net/the-entourage-effect-at-finnegans-wake/" target="_blank">blog</a>. I've been reading and re-reading his <a href="https://flyagaric23.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/the-entourage-effect-at-finnegans-wake-by-steven-james-pratt-1.pdf" target="_blank">essay</a> for a while now and I recommend you give it a read as well. Steve Fly writes in a unique style full of wit and wordplay while also packing in lots of fascinating information. I learned a lot from reading this and I think it provides an enlightening perspective on <i>Finnegans Wake </i>and how Joyce constructed a living, self-sustaining, and even potentially medicinal eco-system inside his greatest book.<br />
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Here's some choice bits from the paper:<br />
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<b><br /><i>Finnegans Wake</i> (FW) by James Joyce, among other things acts like a cookbook, a literary cauldron, a crucible for the swirling vortex-sutra of botanical species, perfumes, fruits, mushrooms, flowers, all spread out in a tapestry according to a spherically informed bricolage ecosystem perhaps? A biome of Joyce.</b></blockquote>
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<b><br />I’m not suggesting that Joyce, straight-up, smoked the devils lettuce. Although, who the hell knows what may of got into his pipe in Paris and beyond? I’m suggesting that cannabis and its hundreds of chemical components can be sniffed out within the botanically bulging text, and furthermore, that a wide array of phyto-terpenes, and endogenous-terpenes are detectable, in traces, within the wake. The evidence maybe consumable in some circumstances, which leads me to propose a textual gastric and multi sensory healing ceremony. “O.K. Oh Kosmos! Ah Ireland! A.I. And for kailkannonkabbis gimme Cincinnatis with Italian (but <i>ci vuol poco</i>!)--FW, 456.08-09.</b></blockquote>
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<b>Joyce’s hologrammic-prose orders the complex relationships that<br />encourage new neuro-semantic structures to form. This form of neurogenesis involves the seduction of the reader into paying closer attention to their own semantic reactions, and to the power of simple words and grammar used in a new order to modulate consciousness.</b></blockquote>
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<b>Language therapy, informed by FW, and further enhanced by experience with the endocannabinoid system and neuropeptide system, and following operationalist scientific methods, may, with some luck produce statistically higher cases of positive healing. True wellness and being in touch with yourself and with others. Analogous to the argument within cannabis medicine that the therapeutic impact of the whole plant is greater than the sum of its molecular parts, likewise, the therapeutic impact of FW is greater than the sum of its etymological parts.</b></blockquote>
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There's also some informative slides showing certain terpenes, their characteristics, and how they show up in <i>Finnegans Wake, </i>here are a few of those:<br />
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PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-34886034018574090422020-03-27T21:50:00.000-06:002020-03-28T18:12:24.973-06:00Joyce & FW References in Ferlinghetti's Little Boy: A NovelSo far this year I've found myself pretty much only reading books by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Been on a Ferlinghetti binge. First I read his famous poetry collection <i>A Coney Island of the Mind</i>, then I got completely hooked and read a bunch more of his poetry books leading up to his latest work, a miraculous little book called <i>Little Boy: A Novel</i>. What I noticed right away when reading <i>A Coney Island of the Mind</i> was that Ferlinghetti embeds echoes of Joyce all throughout his writing. He seems especially fond of <i>Ulysses</i> and <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, making so many references to them that it seems he expects his readers to be familiar with these texts.<br />
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Last year, to mark the occasion of his 100th birthday Lawrence Ferlinghetti published his newest book, an unclassifiable mix of memoir/poetry/social commentary entitled <i>Little Boy: A Novel</i>. I am not exaggerating when I say this is one my favorite books I've ever read in my life. Soon as I finished it I turned back to page 1 and read the whole thing again. After a second reading I still can't put it down. I've read half a dozen of Ferlinghetti's books this year, including his most highly regarded works, and I have little doubt that <i>Little Boy</i> is his best book. Though it's only 179 pages, it contains vast treasures of literary allusion, brilliant lyricism, fascinating historical anecdotes, profound ruminations on life and death, and hilarious, piercing political commentary. The wit and wordplay is very Joycean, but he always strives for clarity in his writing, the overriding essence of the book is a dream but the language is not opaque. On the other hand, reading sentences that go on for 10 pages requires a lot of focus. Also, someone needs to publish an annotated edition of this book soon, there are hundreds of allusions and quotes in this word stream.<br />
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I have a lot to say about this book. I've just submitted a review of<i> Little Boy </i>that I wrote, hoping to have it published somewhere soon (stay tuned). But since I am still unable to put this incredible book down, I want to share here all of the references to Joyce and <i>Finnegans Wake</i> that I discovered in the book. I shouldn't say all because he constantly weaves in subtle little motifs into the text that would be familiar to Wake readers like "tell me tell me" and toying with the word "riverrun" but the quotes here should give you a good idea of how important <i>Finnegans Wake</i> is in Ferlinghetti's cosmology.<br />
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Most of the book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style without any punctuation, the sentences go on for pages at a time.<br />
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<b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">my Anna Livia twinkle toes - p. 29</span></b></blockquote>
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<b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">And all the time the Ouroboros serpent eating its tail like life itself and by a process of concatenous circumnavigation do we wind around to our beginnings and recognize ourselves for the first time like Ulysses returning home or Stephen Dedalus turned into Finnagain where the iffey River Liffey flows back to its beginnings p. 61-62</span></b></blockquote>
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<b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">great father great artificer stand by me now in good stead as I set out now to meet my fate in the forge of the world - p. 72</span></b><b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span></b></blockquote>
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<b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">the leaden wheel of time measures out our lives in ticks as it whirs inside its intricate watchworks with digital springs tick-tick-tick around we go with Vico or Grandma or little John or Baby Blue, and the glue sticking us all together might be love or lust or hate or blood or you name it whatever sticks you to your brother or lover or Significant Other And so here we are again ok save us from the Other, yet still I and my father are One son-of-a-gun on the run along a riverbank along a riverrun in sun or in deep shade under a bridge on the River Liffey where I once slept a broke student imagining myself Stephen Dedalus or mad Rimbaud - p. 90</span></b></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span></b><b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">the portrait of the artist as an old man - p. 122</span></b></blockquote>
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<b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span></b><b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Oh the sublimity of it and if I weren't laughing I’d be dying I’d be crying with Samuel Beckett and Jimmy Joyce the master laugher behind the sublime babble of <i>Finnegan</i> yeah yeah I have read it all heard it all heard the falcon in its dying fall - p. 137</span></b></blockquote>
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<b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;"><br /></span></b><b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">no more regurgitation of everything seen or heard or said over the past century no more of that thank ye and this no Portrait of the Autist as an Old Man although this might be my hundredth year to heaven - p. 137</span></b></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span style="color: #9fc5e8;">Let’s get back to the present where the world is coming to an end for the millionth time but this time it’s for real yes sir I’m not giving you some Old Wives’ Tales by Irish washerwomen gossiping in the dusk while washing their clothes in the River Liffey while night birds twitter and far-off field mice twit - p. 161</span></b></blockquote>
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PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6244755472982220611.post-38131519888400047562019-12-18T20:23:00.004-06:002019-12-18T22:12:43.485-06:00Finnegans Wake on the Trump-Ukraine Affair & Impeachment <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The region of Crimea which was invaded and illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.<br />
(Image from <i>The Economist</i>.)<br />
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Here in the United States we've been consumed lately by presidential scandals and the impeachment of our grifter-in-chief for shady crimes involving the countries of Russia and Ukraine. With our twice-monthly <i>Finnegans Wake</i> Reading Group of Austin meetings often coinciding with major news stories unfolding, there have been nights where we've been struck to find echoes of the news of the day inside the pages of the <i>Wake</i>. Recently there was a reverberant convergence of the two when we read James Joyce's version of the "lock him up" <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/oct/27/donald-trump-booed-world-series-lock-him-up-chants-baseball" target="_blank">chant</a>, "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly," which begins on page 45. Here I'd like to discuss some ways Joyce's book comments on the present and take a look at how the<i> Wake</i> advises a populace to deal with a tyrannical, aspiring authoritarian like Donald J. Trump.<br />
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Anyone following the news recently has become familiar with the central role played by the region of Crimea in the current state of global affairs. In short: in 2014, Russia invaded and illegally annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea, the first time a country had violated another country's sovereignty in such a way since World War II. The western world watched on in horror and decided on a careful response in order to penalize Russia while avoiding starting World War III. The United States and the EU issued economic sanctions against Russia as a punishment---a very effective response it turns out because, as thoroughly outlined in Rachel Maddow's informative new book <i>Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth</i>, Russia is a petrostate entirely dependent on selling its oil to other countries. Those punitive sanctions incurred by Russia as a result of its hostile takeover of Crimea hit Putin and Russia where it hurts, putting the kibosh on billions of dollars flowing in from oil deals including a giant collaboration with ExxonMobil who had a deal to help Russia extract oil from the Arctic Circle. As part of their counter-response, the Russians attacked the 2016 US election to install the Putin puppet Trump much like they'd previously done in Ukraine with Victor Yanukovych, the Putin-installed candidate who was eventually overthrown by a revolt of the populace and fled to Russia. And now, not long after chants of "lock him up!" <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/27/boos-chant-trump-world-series-059714" target="_blank">greeted the president</a> of the United States at the World Series in the nation's capital, Trump finds himself being impeached because he extorted the Ukrainian president by dangling military aid as a bargaining chip in the midst of Russia's continued aggressive invasion of Ukrainian territory. That was the latest in a string of moves by the American president to benefit Vladimir Putin.<br />
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It's all a huge mess and the American people are sick and tired of it, but as it continues to unfold we'll no doubt continue to hear more about Russia, Ukraine, and the annexation of Crimea.<br />
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It turns out that when you read <i>Finnegans Wake</i> you are also repeatedly drawn to the regions of Russia and Ukraine with specific focus on Crimea. The Crimean War (1853-56) is an important recurring motif throughout the book. Why would a book that essentially centers around Dublin have so much to say about Crimea? There seems to be a number of reasons for it, not least because the word "crime" is embedded in the Crimean War and for Joyce all war is a crime against humanity. (See my piece <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2017/10/waging-peace-from-inkbattle-house.html" target="_blank">"Waging Peace from the Inkbattle House: <i>Finnegans Wake</i> in the Shadow of War"</a> for more discussion of war in the <i>Wake</i>.)<br />
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A bigger part of why the Crimean War is all over <i>Finnegans Wake</i> involves an apocryphal story Joyce's father loved to tell to his drinking buddies, the story of when Buckley shot the Russian general. So yes, not only is <i>Finnegans Wake</i> littered with references to Crimea, it also has a Russian general looming over everything in the book like a nightmarish cartoon version of Vladimir Putin. As with all the recurring elements in the <i>Wake</i>, the appearance of the Russian general mutates and morphs into various puns---on page 390 the Russian general appears as "the wretch in churneroil" a brilliant pun that evokes the modern Russian petrostate, a churner of oil, and the wretched leader of that country. (Can't help but hear a subtle echo of Chernobyl in there, too.)<br />
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At this point you might be thinking this is a silly creative projection onto a text that was published in 1939, but you should know that when you read <i>Finnegans Wake</i> you enter a textual representation of the dreaming mind, a phantasmagorical world unrestricted by the bounds of time and space. In "the no placelike no timelike absolent" (FW p. 608) of the book, all historical events and figures exist on the same plane and are continually "intermutuomergent" (FW p. 55) with each other. When you get into the world of <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, you begin to comprehend just how true are the adages about history repeating itself. When all historical facts and stories blend together into recurrent themes and archetypes dancing on the same plane, it does not take a huge leap to find elements that resonate or intersect with the news of the day in 2019. This was part of Joyce's intention and the <i>Wake</i> frequently celebrates its propensity to stay "as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute." (FW p. 309) If lines like that make it seem like you can look to <i>Finnegans Wake</i> to read the news, it's because you can.<br />
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Now, I have touched on the echoes of Trump in the <i>Wake</i> <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2016/10/finnegans-wake-on-donald-trump.html" target="_blank">briefly once before</a>. It's pretty striking that <i>Finnegans Wake</i> features a main character who is, among other things: a builder of skyscrapers, preoccupied with building a wall (and he falls off that wall, like Humpty Dumpty), owns a hotel, has two sons and a daughter who he exhibits incestuous feelings for (in the <i>Wake</i> these feelings are sublimated through dream, in the case of the American prez Trump these feelings are explicitly, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-elections/donald-trump-ivanka-trump-creepiest-most-unsettling-comments-a-roundup-a7353876.html" target="_blank">repulsively expressed often</a>), he gets embroiled in a vague scandal about watching two girls urinating, has nightmares about a Russian general, and gets overthrown and humiliated by a popular uprising. The last part is still slowly unfolding in Trump's case.<br />
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The same day that the comeuppance began for Trump, when House leader Nancy Pelosi announced that Congress was officially launching an impeachment inquiry into Trump's behavior with Ukraine and Russia, that night our <i>Finnegans Wake</i> reading group gathered to read page 45 of the text. How perfectly fitting that when the 45th president of the United States was finally going to be held accountable, we were reading "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" which begins on page 45. The ballad is a raucous, bawdy diatribe against corrupt political leaders, the <i>Wake</i>'s own "lock him up" chant complete with musical score and thunderous applause.<br />
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The ballad exposes Persse O'Reilly (a stand-in for all tyrants and corrupt politicians as well as the <i>Wake</i>'s main character HCE) as a fraud and a cheat who should be jailed in Mountjoy, the prison in Dublin. Joyce scholar William York Tindall called this ballad "one of Joyce's better poems---better than any in <i>Chamber Music</i> and better by far than any in <i>Pomes Penyeach</i>." You can hear a performance of the ballad <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph0BHu0PB-s" target="_blank">here</a>. It's got a hilarious Irish pub vibe and to me this rendition sounds sorta like Adam Sandler's comedy songs from the 90s:<br />
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There are a bunch of things in "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" that seem to speak to our situation today. To begin with it offers hope for Americans with Humpty Dumpty falling of his wall "hump, helmet and all." In this context I can't help seeing the "helmet" as Trump's doofy and bizarre helmet of hair and thus Trumpty Dumpty. The first stanza uses "-ump" sounds a lot--Humpty Dumpty, rumble, Crumple, Hump.<br />
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The Oliver Cromwell tyrant figure is accused of behaving like a "soffsoaping salesman" selling shitty cheap items. "Soft-soaping" means to flatter, like a salesman. I picture Trump selling his vodkas and steaks, a phony salesman always hawking worthless garbage (trumpery: worthless junk).<br />
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Next we learn that the locals nicknamed him "He'll Cheat E'erawan" which also perfectly fits Trump, who had set up a fake university and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/us/politics/trump-university.html" target="_blank">defrauded</a> students to the tune of $25 million and was penalized for running a fraudulent charitable foundation, not to mention the Trump name being associated with cheating vendors and contractors during his days as a real estate tycoon.<br />
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Then we get the <i>Wake</i>'s most piercing rebuke of Trump on page 46. I touched on this line <a href="https://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/2016/10/finnegans-wake-on-donald-trump.html" target="_blank">once before</a> but it's worth revisiting and expanding on.<br />
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<span style="color: orange;"><b>So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous<br />
</b><b>But soon we'll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery<br />
</b><b>And'tis short till sheriff Clancy'll be winding up his unlimited company<br />
</b><b>With the bailiff's bom at the door, </b> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: orange;"><b>(Chorus) Bimbam at the door. </b><b> Then he'll bum no more. </b></span></blockquote>
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The sumptuous hotel premises line is just too perfect, with our dear leader spending most of his weekends golfing at his Mar-a-Lago resort or some other sumptuous hotel premises of his. <b>"But soon we'll bonfire all his trash, tricks, and trumpery"</b>---this line provides me an absurd amount of hope and optimism, coming from a book with such a sweeping view of world history. At some point this WILL end and this egregious fraudster WILL go down. That word "trumpery" meaning "showy, but worthless" couldn't possibly describe Trump and his entire family any better. The line evokes an image of the Trumps thrown out of the White House and all their "trash, tricks and trumpery" tossed into a bonfire.<br />
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The rest of this line gets pretty interesting when you dig into it. I can't help but hear "sheriff Clancy" as sheriff Nancy rounding up the "unlimited company" of Trump's corrupt cronies, that clown car of endless goons like Rudy Giuliani, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, ad nauseam. This line is saying it won't be long til this crew gets strung up and hung by the sheriff (Clancy was a sheriff in Dublin during the time of <i>Ulysses</i>). Adding to the fascinating Nancy echo here is this note from <a href="http://fweet.org/cgi-bin/fw_grep.cgi?i=1&o=1&r=1&b=1&s=%5E046.07" target="_blank">Fweet's annotations</a> of this line, indicating that Joyce plucked that simple phrase "tis short till" from a 1922 newspaper article: "11 Nov 1922, 327/2: 'Our Ladies' Letter': 'Like that, I suppose 'tis short now till we'll have women labourers in the Government." How fitting that a powerful woman in the American government is about to lay the hammer down on this company of malign morons. Or specifically its chief executive Trumpty Dumpty.<br />
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I should also mention the ballad's references to a "bucketshop store" and "unlimited company" (p. 45) which each refer to criminal business schemes, another perfect fit for the lifelong schemer Trump. Also, as regards the clown car angle of "unlimited company"---this section of the <i>Wake</i> is preceded by a string of shady side characters being introduced to us before we meet the composer of the ballad. There's a pair we meet that, to me, feels like the <i>Wake</i>'s version of the henchmen <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/771849041/how-a-complicated-web-connects-2-soviet-born-businessmen-with-the-impeachment-in" target="_blank">Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman</a>, slimy Russian goons who helped Trump with his Ukraine scheme. The pair is named Treacle Tom and Frisky Shorty---one just got out of jail for theft, the other just got off a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_ship" target="_blank">prison hulk</a> (a prison ship), and the two meet up at a racetrack to plan some robbery or extortion schemes (see FW pg. 39).<br />
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At the bottom of p. 46 there's an accusation that involves the ballad's subject having accosted a woman "while admiring the monkeys"---a reference to a <a href="http://blog.insidetheapple.net/2010/11/enrico-caruso-and-monkey-house-incident.html" target="_blank">notorious 1906 incident</a> that took place in the Central Park Zoo where a famous opera singer named Enrico Caruso was accused of pinching a woman's butt and then went thru a highly publicized trial for it. Remind you of anyone? No? How about this part from the next stanza:<br />
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<span style="color: orange;"><b>He ought to blush for himself, the old hayheaded philosopher, </b> </span></blockquote>
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<b><span style="color: orange;">For to go and shove himself that way on top of her.
</span></b></blockquote>
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Next month, Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-called-woman-who-says-he-sexually-assaulted-her-phone-records-show/2019/11/05/d973b714-ffe2-11e9-8501-2a7123a38c58_story.html" target="_blank">will be </a>deposed in a court case brought against him by a woman who accused him of rape. She's one of over a dozen women who've brought up similar charges, a pattern that's all too apparent for a man who was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women "by the pussy."<br />
<br />
When we were discussing this part in our reading group and laughing over the absurdity of the parallels I sorta threw up my hands at one point in flabbergasted disgust over how these same patterns just keep repeating throughout history. We're about to be in the year 2020 and we still have political scandals involving lecherous creeps assaulting women, a pattern so well-established that it's referred to mockingly in Joyce's book from 80 years ago.<br />
<br />
The rest of the ballad mocks the Trump-like character for his looming fate which will find him in jail, his trousers torn apart ("rent in his rears") and his ass buggered by fellow inmates. You can see why I refer to this as Joyce's version of the "lock him up" chant.<br />
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When I took a break from writing this post to take out the trash, a neighbor walked by and said to me, completely out of the blue: "throw the politicians in the trash, not the recycling." We can only hope Trump meets such a fate. The closing lines of "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" invoke Humpty Dumpty once again:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: orange;"><b>And not all the king's men nor his horses </b> </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: orange;"><b>Will resurrect his corpus</b> </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span style="color: orange;">For there's no true spell in Connacht or hell</span></b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span style="color: orange;">(bis) That's able to raise a Cain.
</span></b></blockquote>
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My neighbor's comment about throwing politicians (ie, Trump) in the trash rather than in the recycling seems an echo of this stanza. (Involvement with the <i>Wake</i> oddly tends to proliferate these coincidences.) Once we finally dump Trump, they won't be able to bring him back again, his children (see Cain and Able in the last line) won't be able to rise up to take his place, and we'll finally be freed of the "fafafather of all schemes for to bother us." (FW p. 45)<br />
<br />
Lastly, I should mention that in <i>Finnegans Wake</i> the main character undergoes numerous legal trials, he's frequently embedded in webs of litigation. The book is filled with legalese. The complicated knots of law language remind me of the mental gymnastics American citizens have undergone the last year or so as we've tried to understand why the special counsel Robert Mueller did not prosecute the president even though he was shown to have committed numerous crimes in Mueller's report. (In the lines right after the ballad, pg. 48 a dense cloud moves in and obscures things like Barr did and we get "Corpo di <u>barr</u>agio!... a poisoning volume of cloud <u>barr</u>age indeed.") As I write this now, Trump has officially been impeached, the equivalent of a president being indicted. Soon, he'll get his day in court with a trial in the Senate. I don't pretend to be optimistic about the reality of what may unfold there but viewing things through the lens of the <i>Wake</i> I can't help but hope for a result where the jury deliberation unfolds as it does for the Persse O'Reilly figure, HCE : "reserving judgment in a matter of courts and reversing the findings of the lower correctional, found, beyond doubt of treuson, fending the dissassents of the pickpackpanel, twelve as upright judaces as ever let down their thoms." (FW p. 575)<br />
<br />
That's as knotty and vague as the legal news we've been hearing about Trump, and it goes on and on similarly but just like the harsh rebuke in "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly," I think the thumbs down from the judges indicates a conviction. God-willing, Americans will see a similar verdict. Then before all is said and done, we who've suffered through years of this lawless lowlife will get to watch him "arraigned and attainted, listed and lited, pleaded and proved." (FW p. 127)PQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.com3