Finnegans, Wake! : May 2025

Thursday, May 29, 2025

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert roasted FWATX reading group on TV, and quoted me

Stephen Colbert, offering a prayer to the Good Book (FW).

Last week, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS did a segment roasting the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin, Texas (yes, our group, the one this very blog is about) and he even quoted my words from the recent NPR article about the group. That really happened. Colbert quoted me, on national television, talking about Finnegans Wake.

Watch the clip below (starting at 3:55):

There are layers to the joke here because Stephen Colbert, who is a proud descendant of Irish immigrants, is no lightweight Joycean, in fact, he has been performing passages from Ulysses at Bloomsday events for decades.

While he's making fun of Joyce's craziest book, he knows of what he speaks, and so he is either in on the joke and making fun of himself too, or, it could be this is Colbert's way of staking his claim that Ulysses is the superior of Joyce's major novels. Maybe a bit of both.

Either way it's amazing that Colbert was roasting our Finnegans Wake reading group on TV. Just to even see the book cover of Finnegans Wake appear on television is extremely cool! They just awakened millions of new Finnegans, gave birth to new HCEs and ALPs. Here Comes Everybody.

An added dimension to the joke is that the other subjects Colbert talks about in the segment, like vagina-scented candles, astrology, poop jokes, frauds, pyramids, Indiana Jones, hoarding, etc all of that is essentially akin to what's encountered in reading Finnegans Wake.

What's also a funny connection for me is I once encountered Stephen Colbert in person. True story: I was on a tour of the Tower of London on Thanksgiving Day back in 2008 and I happened to be on the same tour with Stephen Colbert and his family. I recognized him and he noticed that but I played it cool. All these years later, and he was quoting me on his tv show.

I've been a fan of Colbert's comedy since way back when he was a regular on the show Strangers with Candy with Amy Sedaris. I enjoyed his time on the Daily Show, and of course his long-running satirical show The Colbert Report was iconic. I find myself cracking up any time I think of the titles of some of his ridiculous books, like I Am America (And So Can You!) (2007) and the prescient America Again: Re-becoming The Greatness We Never Weren't (2012).

A bit more about his Joycean bonafides, from a Kirkus Reviews article:

Colbert is a longtime admirer of Joyce. When he published his 2012 children’s book I Am a Pole (And So Can You!), he arranged to have the manuscript displayed next to the Ulysses manuscript at the Rosenbach [museum in Philadelphia].

And in March, he recalled how Joyce’s masterpiece landed him in trouble during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics at the Ireland House. “There was a stage up there with a traditional band playing and they had a football game on,” Colbert said. “I went upstage and I said, ‘Who wants to celebrate Irish culture!’ And I took out a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. There was a riot, I had to be hustled out by security.”

Back in 2022, on St. Patrick's Day, Colbert tweeted this:

Maybe one of these St. Patty's Days he'll get so drunk that he'll make it through all of Finnegans Wake and then I'll add him to The Pantheon of Finnegans Woke.

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Interview with Texas Standard (on KUT Austin NPR station) + other recent podcasts

Last week I was interviewed by the Texas Standard radio program on KUT, Austin's NPR station, talking about the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin which has been gathering to discuss Joyce's greatest book for more than 12 years now. Audio clips from the interview with KUT's reporter Sean Saldaña appeared here, with a brief article and some pics from the group's history. The premise of the article, of course, is that we've been meeting for a very long time, reading one or two pages per meeting, and we're not nearly finished with the book yet.

The piece has been shared on social media, garnering some witty responses. My favorite ones are the comments observing that the readers in the picture look like a deadlocked jury trying to reach a decision on a tough case. That pic is from back in the golden era of our reading group when we used to have big gatherings at the Irish Consulate in Austin (eternal thanks to Adrian Farrell, Claire McCarthy, and Paul Breen for all their support over the years). We would also have meetings at the (now defunct) bookstore Malvern Books and they'd put up a big sign in the window advertising our meetings, which is also shown in the article. The KUT interview was a fortunate full-circle cipher completion moment for me because Malvern Books back in those days used to advertise our reading group meetings on KUT, and new people joined the group because of those ads. Nowadays, our meetings are all on Zoom, and our attendees come from far beyond central Texas, although there are still plenty of original members who still participate.

As I alluded to in the interview, I originally started the group in Austin because I had attended a similar group in Venice, California (the Marshall McLuhan/Finnegans Wake book club run by Gerry Fialka) when I lived in San Diego for a few years, a story that was originally told in The Guardian piece about the Venice Wake group published in late 2023. It's always pretty amusing seeing the response of the general public to these news pieces because to most people it seems super bizarre that a book club would be so focused on a close reading of one book for so long, and yet in the galaxy of Joyce reading groups it's pretty standard practice. I recently shared links to several active Finnegans Wake reading groups around the world, many of whom have been meeting to read the same book for years.

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Here seems like a good place to share some other podcasts I appeared on in the past six months, again discussing Joyce and Finnegans Wake.

Back in February, to celebrate Joyce's birthday, Gerry Fialka of the Venice Wake reading group organized a panel discussion to talk about Finnegans Wake, the panel featuring some of the most accomplished and prolific Joyce scholars in the world including Sam Slote (Trinity College Dublin), Tim Conley (Brock University), Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway Univ. of London), Roy Benjamin (Borough of Manhattan Community College), as well as myself. It was a huge honor for me to be on a panel with scholars I admire and whose work I have such great respect for, and we got into a pretty lively discussion covering many topics over more than 2 hours. Go check that out HERE.

Back in December, I took part in a panel discussion with a big group of several Joyce enthusiasts from around the world as part of the Maybe Night event. This panel was organized by the great artist and Wakean Bob Campbell, and among the many interesting panelists were Toby Malone (from the excellent podcast WAKE), Eric Wagner (who recently published Straight Outta Dublin, a book on Robert Anton Wilson and James Joyce), a few folks from the Ukrainian Wake reading group (including Linda Lotiel whose "Mind Map" illustrations of the Wake are phenomenal), the writer and esoteric thinker Oz Fritz, the creator of FWEET Raphael Slepon, and others, for the winter solstice 2024 event, go check out that video HERE.