"Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space?"
- Finnegans Wake, p. 558
Welcome.
In this space shall begin a collection of content related to James Joyce's masterwork Finnegans Wake. Because of the book's rationality-shattering style, virtually nobody tends to read it or even talk about it much. Even many scholars of Joyce don't take his final work seriously. As such, contemporary and regularly updated websites related to this mysterious text are in short supply.
This blog is here to fill that void. It's also an inevitable result of closely studying the book while maintaining a blog (called A Building Roam) featuring not only Joyce but all the other galaxies of culture I've been immersed in. Over the last six months I'd been devoted to reading the Wake in its entirety along with some interpretative guides and with all the notes I've taken it became clear that the Wake was about to take over my other blog. So I've started this one instead.
Here you can expect to find links to articles, papers, videos, and any other media that sheds light on Joyce's book of the night. Mainly, though, I plan to be posting interpretations, reflections, meditations on parts of the text, whether chapters, paragraphs, sentences, single words, or even the entire book as a whole.
This website shall also serve as the homepage for the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, a group that meets once a month here in Austin, TX to read and discuss the text. We normally hold meetings on the first Tuesday of each month at the Twin Oaks Library in South Austin on the corner of Mary and 5th St. If you have any questions about the group, feel free to e-mail me: finwakeaustin@gmail.com.
I'm jazzed about this. Your conception: riffing on passages, discussing secondary (and tertiary and quaternary and quinsexsepoctnonnnnn...) sources, tangential tributaries Joyceana, etc: PERFECT for a blog. And NOT being an academic but a free-floating, unattached intellectual reader of thick stuff ("varsatile examinations in the ologies"? (FW468) promises to make this seductive, enticing, less scary to approach the Wake itself.
ReplyDeleteUnder the pudendascope (115),
RAWK ON!
Great comment, thanks for the encouragement.
ReplyDeleteWhy do I am a lookalike a passive porter pease?
ReplyDeleteGreat idea for a blog.
I first ran across references to Finnegans Wake when I read a novella by Philip Jose Farmer called "Riders of the Purple Wage" that references Joyce's work. Farmer and Robert Anton Wilson knew and liked each other's work. Farmer was one of my favorite science fiction writers for years.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but I may just have to take on the Wake at some point in the future. It may just be the most interesting book to read ABOUT in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteOh and here is great lecture by Terence McKenna called Surfing Finnegan's Wake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU78NdeKFtA
It's taken me a lot of time circling around the Wake and reading other people's explanations of it (The Symposium, essays from Coincidance by Robert Anton Wilson, A Shorter Finnegan's Wake by Burgess), as well as lectures by Joseph Campbell and Terence McKenna, but I think I'm finally getting up to making a full dive in.
ReplyDeleteI was on the mailing list for a FW reading group for about a year, but was never able to schedule the time for one of the meetings. I hope finding fellowship in this blog will help me to conquer (or at least cozy up to) this beautiful text.
I love Wakespotting. In Tom Robbins's novel Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, characters take an oath on the Bible and Finnegans Wake.
ReplyDeleteIn Julian Rios's rather avant novel Poundemonium, the prose mim-Micks FW-style, but has a lot about Ezra Pound in it.
Of course, Masks of the Illuminati mim-Micks FW in a way maybe the best I've ever seen outside of Darktown.
Terence McKenna and his brother Dennis brought a copy of FW with them when they spent a long time in the Amazon area, doing shrooms and ayahuasca, in one of the most outlandish "true hallucinations" anyone will ever read. When or if they contacted alien intelligence from another dimension, they thought the best book to share with Them would be FW.
Whatever one thinks of Campbell and Robinson's expedition into FW, in an effort to find its mouth, my hat's off to them, and I don't even wear a hat these daze.
Very glad to see this place already getting some attention!
ReplyDeletePutting together my first official post right now, it's funny because it ties perfectly in with where the convo seems to be heading here. Writing about a book that includes a chapter covering some of the many appearances of FW in popular culture.
And, Michael, I wasn't aware of the details behind McKenna's experience with the Wake, thanks for sharing. Certainly no surprise that the Wake would be the book they'd want to share with any extra-dimensional beings.