Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Finnegans Wake on the Trump-Ukraine Affair & Impeachment


The region of Crimea which was invaded and illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
(Image from The Economist.)



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 Finnegans Wake 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 Wake. Recently there was a reverberant convergence of the two when we read James Joyce's version of the "lock him up" chant, "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 Wake advises a populace to deal with a tyrannical, aspiring authoritarian like Donald J. Trump.

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 Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth, 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!" greeted the president 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.

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.

It turns out that when you read Finnegans Wake 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 "Waging Peace from the Inkbattle House: Finnegans Wake in the Shadow of War" for more discussion of war in the Wake.)

A bigger part of why the Crimean War is all over Finnegans Wake 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 Finnegans Wake 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 Wake, 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.)

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 Finnegans Wake 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 Finnegans Wake, 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 Wake 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 Finnegans Wake to read the news, it's because you can.

Now, I have touched on the echoes of Trump in the Wake briefly once before. It's pretty striking that Finnegans Wake 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 Wake these feelings are sublimated through dream, in the case of the American prez Trump these feelings are explicitly, repulsively expressed often), 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.

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 Finnegans Wake 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 Wake's own "lock him up" chant complete with musical score and thunderous applause.

The ballad exposes Persse O'Reilly (a stand-in for all tyrants and corrupt politicians as well as the Wake'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 Chamber Music and better by far than any in Pomes Penyeach." You can hear a performance of the ballad here. It's got a hilarious Irish pub vibe and to me this rendition sounds sorta like Adam Sandler's comedy songs from the 90s:





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.

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).

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 defrauded 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.

Then we get the Wake's most piercing rebuke of Trump on page 46. I touched on this line once before but it's worth revisiting and expanding on.

So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous
But soon we'll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery
And'tis short till sheriff Clancy'll be winding up his unlimited company
With the bailiff's bom at the door,  
(Chorus) Bimbam at the door.  Then he'll bum no more. 

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. "But soon we'll bonfire all his trash, tricks, and trumpery"---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.

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 Ulysses). Adding to the fascinating Nancy echo here is this note from Fweet's annotations 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.

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 Wake 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 Wake's version of the henchmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, 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 prison hulk (a prison ship), and the two meet up at a racetrack to plan some robbery or extortion schemes (see FW pg. 39).

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 notorious 1906 incident 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:

He ought to blush for himself, the old hayheaded philosopher,  
For to go and shove himself that way on top of her.

Next month, Trump will be 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."

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.

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.

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:

And not all the king's men nor his horses  
Will resurrect his corpus 
For there's no true spell in Connacht or hell
(bis) That's able to raise a Cain.

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 Wake 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)

Lastly, I should mention that in Finnegans Wake 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 barragio!... a poisoning volume of cloud barrage 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 Wake 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)

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)

Sunday, June 30, 2019

BBC Program "Free Thinking" Devoted to Finnegans Wake



To commemorate Bloomsday this year, the BBC radio program "Free Thinking" devoted a whole episode to discussing Finnegans Wake. I was pleasantly surprised at how great this discussion came out. The show features host Matthew Sweet discussing the historical facts and notorious idiosyncrasies of Joyce's final novel with Joyce scholar Finn Fordham, novelist Eimear McBride, and lecturer Eleanor Lybeck. They toss out favorite individual words from the Wake, speculate on why it was written in such an obscure language, collectively savor the book's unique delights, and read a few passages aloud. Most fascinating to me about the discussion is Finn Fordham's insights, as he's one of the premier Wake scholars in the world today and an engaging speaker. I was thrilled that he chose to recite the atomic explosion passage from the Butt & Taff episode at the heart of the text. That's about as rich and silly yet scientific and prescient a passage as you will find in Finnegans Wake.

On that note, I must admit that I was thunderstruck upon hearing the host bring up the I-Ching in relation to Finnegans Wake because I just presented my paper entitled "Binaries & Bibliomancy: Finnegans Wake as the Western I-Ching" at the annual Joyce Symposium in Mexico City a few days prior to the program being released. Not that there's any causal connection there, of course, it just struck me as a synchronicity that took on even more significance when Finn Fordham responded to the host's inquiry by dismissing the notion that Joyce designed the book to have oracular powers.

I can tell you that I am very, very excited about the material in my "Binaries & Bibliomancy" piece and I can't wait to share it with you all. I've been researching this subject for a few years now and spent six months writing the paper. The Wake & I-Ching have been strange bedfellows for a while but I found some fascinating concrete links between the two as well as myriad resonant echoes that enrich Joyce's text. The presentation I gave in Mexico City received some stunning responses from those in the audience, many of whom were veteran Joyce scholars. I am currently in the process of finalizing the paper (which contains more than double the material I shared in the presentation) to try getting it published somewhere. In the meantime, if you'd like to check out my presentation I will share a link of a video of the talk after the jump below.

Friday, April 26, 2019

Interview: Derek Pyle and Gavan Kennedy discuss upcoming "Finnegans Wake-End" celebration & "Finnegan Wakes" film project

Artwork by Boris Dimitrov.

[The 80th birthday of Finnegans Wake is next week, May the 4th. (Yes, Finnegans Wake day is also Star Wars day.) With the 80th anniversary of Finnegans Wake approaching, Dublin has been buzzing with events celebrating James Joyce's greatest and weirdest masterpiece. Two pals of mine, Derek Pyle and Gavan Kennedy, will be involved in an upcoming event called Finnegans Wake-End orchestrated by the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. Central to the festivities will be Gavan's ongoing documentary project "Finnegan Wakes" wherein a Here Comes Everybody array of random readers around the world are filmed reciting a page from the text alongside music. I did a Q&A with Derek and Gavan via e-mail discussing the upcoming Finnegans Wake-End event, Gavan's experience with the film project, and their love for Joyce's nightmaze. I'm excited to share this discussion here. Derek's words are in orange, Gavan the Irishman's words are in green. Enjoy! - PQ]

Saturday, March 30, 2019

New catalogue of illustrated Finnegans Wake pages "The echo is where" by Peter O'Brien



Artist and author Peter O'Brien has been engaged in an effort of illustrating every page of Finnegans Wake, LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE, that expansively brings the surface of the text to life with resplendent collages of annotations and illustrative doodlings. I first got to see an exhibit of his work in Toronto in 2017 where he had the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter on display. Here's a glimpse of those pages:


Peter O'Brien's "Lots of Fun with Finnegans Wake" exhibit at Victoria University, Toronto (2017).  

To mark the 80th birthday of Finnegans Wake, O'Brien has brought forth a catalog called The echo is where, collecting 43 pages of his illuminated manuscripts alongside 43 commentaries from artists, scholars, authors, including a number of notable Joyce scholars (Margot Norris, Finn Fordham, Tim Conley, Michael Groden, among others) and also, I'm honored to say, a contribution from yours truly on pg. 76.

Here's some info on the new project from O'Brien's "LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE" webpage where you can find the links to The echo is where:

I am currently glossing / illustrating / disrupting the 628 pages of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. I consider the book to be the most unstable, protean, multi-voiced, and fertile artwork that we have. This project allows me to yoke together my twinning interests of the illustrative and the intellectual, the palate and the palette, the visual and the verbal.  
In honour and celebration of the 80th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake on 5 May 1939, I have produced a catalogue, “The echo is where,” which includes 43 pages from the project, together with 43 contributions by Joyceans and non-Joyceans from 14 different countries, and ranging in age from 22 to 105.  
There is a high-res PDF of the catalogue here (which will take about 30 seconds to download):  
The echo is where Peter O’Brien 2019  
And a low-res flip-book of the catalogue is here:  
Flip-Book: The echo is where


And here are some details from The echo is where:










Saturday, March 9, 2019

Carvings in the Claybook: A Reading of Finnegans Wake pgs. 18-19

From Id-Grids and Ego-Graphs: A Confabulation with Finnegans Wake by Jacob Drachler.

After cycling from the last chapter back to the beginning, our Austin Finnegans Wake Reading Group recently finished reading chapter 1. As often happens with this astonishingly rich book, there's been one section of the text that I've been stuck on, pondering for months. It's the part beginning on page 18 immediately after the discordant dialogue between two cartoonish Neanderthals named Mutt and Jute. The passage seems like a direct address to the reader instructing us how to approach the very text we are reading. The more I look at this section, the more I get out of it. In some ways it feels like a mission statement of Finnegans Wake, a convoluted self-commentary outlining the book's archeological treasures.

The entirety of pages 18 and 19 is what interests me but for the purposes of trying to keep this post as neat and focused as I can, let's focus especially on one notable paragraph spanning these pages.

Here's the paragraph, from pages 18-19:

Sunday, February 3, 2019

McLuhan's Jolting Thunders plus Links: the Real Prankquean, RadioMOLI, Joyceans in Mexico & more

Happy (belated) Birthday, James Joyce!

Recently I finished reading Eric McLuhan's extraordinary work of scholarship, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake, after having thumbed through it for about five years. An extremely rich, thoroughly detailed, original and astute analysis, it's not always easy reading but its insights are manifold. It ranks up there with Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop and Wake Rites by George Cinclair Gibson among the best analytical Wake studies I've ever read. Eric McLuhan, son of the famous Canadian media philosopher and Wakean Herbert Marshall McLuhan, takes his father's theory on the meaning of the Wake's ten thunderwords (1,001 letters in all) and explores it in thorough detail for the reader, breaking down the elements of each thunderword to their most discreet etymological units, examining the hundreds of polylingual resonances therein, proving how each successive thunderword piles on the themes of its predecessors and encapsulates the themes of the section of the text where it appears while also signaling a shift into a new technological age.

McLuhan's The Role of Thunder in FW opened up many portals for me. I'm sure you'll be seeing references to it pop up in my upcoming posts here and hopefully I can write a full review of my experience with the text sometime soon. For now, I just want to touch on one of the core aspects of McLuhan's study that left an impact on me and which resonates with the name I chose for this blog, "Finnegans, Wake!" McLuhan's book focuses on the Wake as being part of the tradition of Menippean satire, a form of Cynic parody which aims to jolt the reader into a renewed, heightened awareness of how their senses have been numbed, leading to a clarified perception. Finnegans Wake performs this action by putting daytime rational language to sleep, "otherwise the 'conscious levels' would obtrude upon or obliterate all the others." (McLuhan, p. 30) We are all somnambulantly wandering thru the conscious surface of our hyper-rational language, stuck in the world that cut-and-dry system of words and meanings creates for us. Joyce instead turns language into a wild circus, throwing every verbal trick imaginable into the mix and demanding that we not merely look at the words on the page but speak them aloud, awakening the auditory sense and adding new dimensions to our experience of words. Every part of the Wake is a pun, including the title. The name of the main character, Earwicker, carries many meanings, I often think of it as "ear-waker" awakening the ear. McLuhan points out that the German ihre Wecker means "alarm clock." The Wake's thunderwords contain its densest concentration of these forces.

The Wake enacts the aim of the ancient Cynic philosophers who sought to shake humans into an awareness of their dull adherence to systems of learning, leaving them stuck in a state of numbness. McLuhan points out:

The Cynics' constantly reiterated message stressed three things:
  • To the great and powerful, remember you're human.
  • To the proud, remember you're mortal.
  • To the rest, discard all your pretences and illusions.  (McLuhan, p. 7)

McLuhan also quotes Eugene Kirk who describes the core characteristics of Menippean satires, essentially describing the nature of Finnegans Wake:
"The chief mark of Menippean style was unconventional diction. Neologisms, portmanteau words, macaronics, preciosity, coarse vulgarity, catalogues, bombast, mixed languages, and protracted sentences were typical of the genre, sometimes appearing all together in the same work. In outward structure, Menippean satire was a medley---usually a medley of alternating prose and verse, sometimes a jumble of flagrantly digressive narrative, or again a potpourri of tales, songs, dialogues, orations, letters, lists, and other brief forms, mixed together." (McLuhan, p. 8) 
Key in all of this is the combination of low satire and highbrow learning, as McLuhan writes, "never so serious as when at riot of play, combining low sham with profound learning and the trite and trivial with the quadrivial. ... It can quickly be seen that every technique in the descriptive catalogue aims at the same jolt or sudden flash of awareness by irrationally flinging the reader from one situation or mental posture to another." (p. 8)

A main source of ridicule in all of this is the intellectual fraud, the theorizing intellectuals who think they've got it all figured out. This resonated with me as I've noticed more and more how irritated I am by the pedantry and pompousness of overly rational or scientific thinkers. As the Wake says, "Latin me that, my trinity scholard"! (FW p. 211) Finnegans Wake is kryptonite to people with that mindstate. Of course the western scientific tradition is immensely valuable, but to be so locked into that framework as to think the nature of reality consists of only what has been verified in peer-reviewed scientific research is, to me, a form of madness. McLuhan talks about the Menippean/Cynic approach as intending to wake the reader up using the Book of the Word in order to allow them to actually study the Book of the World. It can't all be explained away in theories and conclusions. McLuhan writes:

Menippean satirists simply deploy the one text, the written book, to cleanse the Augean stables of their readers' sensibilities, and then set the reader to work on the other text, the Book of the World: in all, an intensely grammatical enterprise, and no less so because they do it with language. Of these two books, one, the satire, is an entirely human production, while the other, the world, has been remade and re-uttered by man in and by his own speech and technologies and culture. Civilized man is so enveloped by his own artefacts and technological whims that he has forgotten himself, has lost the ability to perceive and read them as 'signatures' or signs, has become subject to them and spends his days ignorant that he lives in a wild fairyland of his own making. Restoring awareness is a Herculean labour. (p. 10-11, emphasis mine)
One last thing I want to mention here is McLuhan's discussion about the Letter at the center of the Wake as being a red herring. Joyce confounds and frustrates the reader looking for a literal meaning for the Letter and its importance, making us focus instead on the linguistic games used to obscure our pursuit of meaning.

Menippists often take a perverse delight in frustrating readers who try to educe 'right' meanings or coherent narratives from their work: techniques range from putting the preface late in the work, to jumbling the order of chapters or inserting blank pages as chapters... to instructing the reader to write the next few lines or paragraphs, etc. Joyce manages it in a more literary manner, by letting the very style of the Wake float a dozen levels of meaning simultaneously in every passage; so there is not one point of view at a time but many. Again, this ploy will keep the reader from becoming rigid, that is, from adopting a single fixed perspective on the text or the experience, and demands that the reader sustain maximal flexibility of response...
'Our subject is not so much the letter's content, as how that content becomes obscured, and how we are urged to embark on what is tantamount to an archaeological investigation so as to piece its meaning together. This task is carefully made impossible by the Wake itself,' remarks Philip Herring (Joyce's Uncertainty Principle, 200). In true Menippean fashion, the fun and the play is the point, not the interpretation of the content; or rather the real meaning is the effect that the book has on the reader. (McLuhan, p. 301-302)
I'll spare you any more of my scattered responses to McLuhan's book for now. I was sad to learn that Eric McLuhan passed away last year on May 18, 2018 at the age of 76. Now I wish I'd have taken the opportunity to get in touch with the man to discuss his richly fascinating perspective on Finnegans Wake, Menippean satire, and technology when he was alive.

Check out the post "Remembering Eric McLuhan" over at the excellent "McLuhan Galaxy" blog to learn more about his life and career. Also go read this piece by Eric McLuhan's son Andrew in remembrance of his father.

You might also dig this this interesting piece by Robert Guffey in "Paranoia Magazine" that touches on McLuhan's theories on the thunders, Joyce's technological insights, and other adventures in thought.


*   *   *

LINKS:


RadioMOLI is now live! 
The Museum of Literature Ireland (MOLI) has launched a 24/7 digital radio broadcast featuring discussions, interviews, radio plays, documentaries and more. Listen to it HERE. I have it on in the background right now, they are currently playing an audiobook version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The radio program launched last night for Joyce's birthday, kicking off with the famous recording of Joyce reciting the end of the Anna Livia Plurabelle episode and they even played a rendition of the "Ballad of Persee O'Reilly" from Finnegans Wake.


RTE "The History Show" discusses the legendary piratess Grace O'Malley
This RTE program featured a terrific segment on the history of the legendary pirate queen Grace O'Malley, the real life figure satirized in Joyce's fiery Prankquean character (discussed in my last post). Listen to the 27 January episode to hear the segment.


How Joyce gave Guinness a new slogan
Over at his always interesting "Swerve of Shore" blog Peter Chrisp details how Joyce provided Guinness beer with a new slogan in a passage from Finnegans Wake while touching on Joyce's penchant for devising new ideas for advertising.


Joyceans in Mexico City
The next James Joyce Symposium will take place this June in Mexico City. "Joyce Without Borders" is now accepting proposals for papers. I'm currently working on mine. The theme and location of this event promises something special. I've been to a few of these conferences now and they're like Disneyland for bibliophiles. Very much looking forward to it!


New online FW reading group "Blotty Words"
Carol Wade has been creating truly stunning paintings of pages from Finnegans Wake for a while now with her "Art of the Wake" project. Now she has launched an online FW reading group called "Blotty Words" which is being run thru this Facebook page.


Save Sweny's!
Sweny's Pharmacy, one of the locations featured in Ulysses (where Bloom buys Molly some lemon soap) is in trouble as the surrounding neighborhood has experienced extreme gentrification and rising rents. The rent for Sweny's, which has been in the same spot since the 1850s, doubled in the past year. A cultural landmark that features daily readings of Joyce and hosts Bloomsday celebrations every year, they are asking for support to help them stay open. You can go HERE to pledge as little as $1 per month thru Patreon to help this landmark of Joyceana stay alive.


Finnegans Wake-End, May 3rd-5th in Dublin
"Waywords & Meansigns" mastermind Derek Pyle and documentary filmmaker Gavan Kennedy will be participating in a weekend celebration hosted by the James Joyce Centre in Dublin in honor of the 80th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake which was officially released to the world on May 4th, 1939. Read more about this event HERE.


Finnegans Wake at 80
Another big event scheduled to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Joyce's masterwork will be this three-day symposium at Trinity College in Dublin, scheduled for April 11-13. Lectures and panels will focus on encouraging "a synthesis of thematic and formal approaches to the Wake through genetic approaches, that is, to look at its stylistic and linguistic complexity through the prism of the notes and manuscripts on which it was written during the period 1922–1939." Read more about this symposium HERE.