312 Pages Out of 628

I have read 312 pages of Finnegans Wake, which is a 628-page book.  I know that it is 628 pages long because I carry it around in my backpack, and I think, “My back hurts because of this 628-page book that I am always carrying around.”

I’ve read longer books, heavier books.  My copy of Ulysses is 783 pages.  Gravity’s Rainbow checks in at 776. Infinite Jest tips the scales at 1,079. So why does Finnegans Wake feel so heavy in my bag?  Is it made from extra dense paper?  Does the universe simply recognize how much of itself has been collapsed between the covers? 

Finnegans Wake is the white dwarf of literature.

312 pages is very close to half of 628.  We began at Easter, and we’ll be past halfway before Halloween.  That’s not too bad.  I was feeling a sense of accomplishment when I finished the first book. That was back on page 216.  Since then, I’ve bushwacked my way through the first half of Book II. 

Why did Joyce wait until almost the midpoint to abuse us with Book II, Chapter II? Did he think that anyone who made it this far deserved the punishment?

My phone

If you didn’t want to suffer through 50+ pages of text laid out with notes on the left margin and Latin titles on the right and footnotes below, then why did you keep reading?  Maybe you were asking for it?

Recently, someone saw the book on my counter, and remarked, “I know that book.  They turned it into a movie a couple of years ago, didn’t they?”  No, I can assure you they did not turn it into a movie. Not unless you’re referring to 1965’s “Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.”

Sometimes, when I look at the book, I think, “I kinda wish I was reading Ulysses right now.” 

Then I look down at my phone, which has a drawing of Leopold Bloom on the cover. Other times, I look at the book on my bedside table, where it is resting next to my copy of Dubliners, and I consider re-reading “The Dead” one more time.

I am a member of a book club.  Or maybe I should call myself an occasional member of a book club. The group is reading The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.  That’s a very different kind of book.  I’m not really reading it.  I’d like to, but it’s not happening at the moment. If I’m being honest, this isn’t completely the fault of Finnegans Wake.  But the Wake is still my reading priority, so other things get pushed down the list.

I am still reading it, though. That’s something.

“312 pages is very close to half of 628,” I tell myself.  “We began at Easter, and we’ll be past halfway before Halloween,” I say. “Yeah, that’s not too bad.”  

Weeks 18-20 (JF) - Lollapalooza?

FW pp. 519-59

Hi.  Did you miss me?  Yeah?  Awesome.  I missed you, too.  I mean, I don't know you (except for OM), but I missed reading and writing about reading.  I started this post more than a month ago, and just finished it tonight.  The usual reason: Real life.  Busy at home, busy at work.  Too distracted to find the kind of attention that FW deserves.  And, whoa, it doesn't just deserve it in Book II, it demands it.  And then, after a few pages, it doesn't?  JJ lets you off the hook in a weird way.

Wester's online dictionary defines "lollapalooza" as "one that is extraordinarily impressive" or "an outstanding example," states its origin is unknown, and dates its first use as 1896.

I saw the second Lollapalooza Music Festival twice (nice symmetry there) in 1992.  Both shows were more enjoyable than Book II, Chapter I of FW, which includes the word lollapalooza - or JJ's version, "lollapaloosa."  Here's the sentence, so you get a sense of what these weekly segments were like:

"Doth it not all come aft to you, purity snooper, in the television opes longtime ofter when Potollomuch Sotyr or Sourdanapplous the Lollapaloosa?"

If you're thinking that that lacks context to make it more comprehensible, then you're thinking wrong.  There's a sliver of context there - the preceding sentence makes it clear that this is about HCE's indiscretion.  But the entire chapter is a struggle through dreamspeak and its accompanying allusions.  And fwiw, I'm pretty sure Perry Ferrell didn't snake the name of his cashcow from JJ.  I should tweet him and ask.  (Actually, I shouldn't because he'd probably file a trademark suit against the Joyce Estate.)

So.  An aside.  Like OM, I subscribe to The New Yorker.  Which means, personally, I get the magazine in the mail every week and feel pressure to read it before the next one arrives.  Which means, personally again, I get behind.  Idk know if you guys read TNY.  It's heady and cool, but not every article is interesting to me.  So I skim the culture stuff, check out the lead piece in "Talk of the Town," check out the cartoons and most of the poems, and then dogear the articles that I want to revisit.  My last issue came the other day, and I'm not reupping until I blast through the stack waiting.

Anyway, the other day [that is, sometime in August], I read a quasi-review of a Joan Didion biography in the Arts section.  As TNY readers know, a book review is rarely a book review.  They're usually a lot more - a review of the book, and a scan of the scholarship about the subject.  J.D. was kind of an asshole, tbh.  I loved her for her words and her Corvette, but now kinda hate her for voting for Barry Goldwater.  Whatever.  The reviewer, toward the end, got into something relevant to my journey through FW: close reading.  I was a poli-sci major in college, I was a con-law geek in law school, and I'm a textualist by trade IRL.  Close reading is what I do.  It's gauche.  Ha, I even didn't know.  It's how I'm approaching FW, and I didn't know that lit crits think it's bullshit.  Here's a blurb from the review:

"This makes her later work [of political events] seem a little more like literary criticism than like reporting.  Didion was an English major at Berkeley at a time when close reading was the gold standard in literary analysis, and Daugherty [the biographer] suggests that those methods stuck with her.  She has said as much herself.

There is a small but immitigable fallacy in the theory of close reading, though, and it applies to political journalism as well as to the reading of poetry [and prose].  The text doesn't reveal its secrets just by being stared at.  It reveals its secrets to those who already pretty much know what secrets they expect to find.  Texts are always packed, by the reader's prior knowledge and expectations, before they are unpacked.  The teacher has already inserted into the hat the rabbit whose production in the classroom awes the undergraduates."

Huh?  Two related points.  (They might be the same point, but I don't have the energy or, frankly, the intellectual chops at this hour to parse or reconcile them.) 

First, who's the teacher for me?  Mild Bill Tindall?  Ok, I get it.  He's got an agenda.  As do many of the people who have finished FW and want to school the noobs like OM and me who haven't.  And I'm wowed by them.  We had a weird, and fun, Twitter exchange a few weeks ago [again, sometime in August] with somebody who spent ten years reading this damn book and seemed to think that O's last post about dad jokes was...hm, how can I fairly characterize this?...insufficiently respectful of people who have devoted their lives to another person's 628-page creation.  (A laudable path, for sure, but that long?  A decade in the Wake?  I couldn't do it.)  Maybe it was?  I know that he's tiring of this project.  Shit, I am, too.  But wouldn't JJ want a dad of two boys (OM), or two dads of two boys (us), to occasionally take a piss on his masterwork?  Wouldn't he be into the entire FW blogosphere?  Not to mention, e-communication, which is our collective nat-language?

Second, and more importantly, The Death of the Author.  I've beaten this drum to death already, but it's a gotdam solid drum that defies death.  The problem with close reading, as identified in that blurb, isn't really a problem.  If the problem is that any reading is flawed because it's not definitive, so what?  There's no definitive, and that's cool.  We bring to this book what we bring to this book - intelligence, biases, etc.  And we got out of it what we get out of it.  You got that outta that, but I got this outta that.  And neither one of us is wrong, or right, but neither one of us gets to decide who's closer to close.

OM has bagged on Tindall.  I haven't.  And that's b/c I know, as a reader, there are huge gaps in my understanding.  JJ wasn't a fool.  He was a brilliant, and frustrating, writer.  Anybody who can help me approach his level is a well-appreciated friend.  This chapter more than ever so far, which brings me back to my intro.  JJ lets you/me/us off the hook here.  This chapter is JJ writing for himself, and not caring if we tag along.  [The next chapter is worse, in that way, imo.]  Get out of it what you get out of it, he challenges, and see you a few hours closer to morning.

Onto the close reading bs...

This chapter was very difficult.  I finished it without peeking at Tindall or anything else until afterwards.  I figured that was probably a mistake, but even Mild Bill admits that this is a headscratcher and that "nothing is denser."  Great.  Later, he claims that it's "[d]ense and allusive maybe, but pleasing."  It's definitely the former. 

Apparently, the overarching structure is provided by a group of children playing in front of HCE's pub as night falls.  I missed that initially, but it's there.  They're sort of performing a play called The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies.  JJ offers a cast of characters, including Glugg (Shem because he's played by Seumas McQuillad), Izod (or Issy, played by Mis Butys Pot, who, having jilted Shem, has turned her attention to Shaun), Chuff (Shaun because he's played by Sean O'Mailey), Ann (or ALP), Hump (or HCE, played by Mr. Makeall Gone), and Kate from the museum, along with the Floras (Issy's girlfriends) and some bar customers.  According to Tindall, this play is less a frame or vehicle for JJ than a metaphor for children playing.  It takes place in the "pressant," but its list of (theater?) support staff opens with references to the future and the past.  Cyclical, Wake-ian?  Sure.  And the main action is Issy asking a riddle that Shem tries several times without success to answer.

This is parroting Tindall a lot for two reasons: First, I read these segments several weeks ago, started this post, and forgot what I understood about them; second, what I understood about them was extremely limited.  My usual markings in the text are infrequent here, limited to an underlined name or letter or a few references to ALP ("Truly deplurabel!" p. 224).  There were several pages where I was completely lost.  (Tindall: "Nothing much happens in the interlude of several pages that follow[].")  Shem leaves for France, again, and Issy seems bummed, but she's ok later when he's around to whiff on more of her really tiresome, extended-riddle gag.

JJ's brother Stanislaus shows up at "Stainusless" (ouch) as an iteration of Shaun, whom the girls all love, and HCE, who rises (like Tim Finnegan, or because he's sexually aroused - "[w]ith his tumescinquinance on the thight of his tumstull") and becomes Shem.  I saw a couple of HCE references - "Howarden's Castle, Englandwales," "Hulker's cieclest elbownurse" - before "Housefather calls enthreateningly" for the children to end the/their play.

Then there's more riddle, ugh.  Tindal calls Issy "the incestuous girl," who hates to quit Shem.  I caught a lot of sex stuff here.  "If you nude her in her prime, make sure you find her complementary or, ... she'll prick you where you're proudest with her unsatt speagle eye."  "[W]ill ye na pick them in their pink of panties.  You can color up till you're prawn while I go squirt with any cockle."  And "She's her sex, for certain."  None of those lines made complete sense to me, but I sort of felt like it was about Issy and Shem.  There's a passage on p. 249 - the "In the house of breathings" paragraph, if you're one of those close-reading losers or, better, one of those following-along-at-home winners - that's quite beautiful, and too long to quote here, but which indicates that the stuff between them is mutual.

The Lollapalossa line is near the end of this chapter.  And there's this prayer to the playing children:

"Till tree from tree, tree among trees, tree over tree become stone to stone, stone between stones, stone under stone for ever.

O Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees of each of these thy unlitten ones!  Grant they sleep in hour's time, O Loud!

That they take no chill.  That they do ming no merder.  That they shall not gomeet madhowiatrees.

Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!

Ha he hi ho hu.

Muumuu."

That's pretty.  I'm happy for reading that, and for reading the rest of this book, even if I'm really just shooting for getting ten percent of it right now.

Tindall mentions that JJ wrote Books I and III before he wrote Book II, so when he got to Book II, he was just hitting his stride with this new way of writing and ready to cut loose.  That's obvious.  Also obvious?  Repetition.  JJ is a literary cubist, at times.  If Picasso in that period was interested in every facet of a face from every angle, Joyce is interested in every facet of a person from every other person's angle - how they appear to not only their closest others and the public, but their own subconscious.  

That's what OM and I have been talking about lately.  Repetition.  He's done with the next chapter, I'm almost done with it.  We're both bogged down in this project and wishing we could move to more enjoyable books.  A convo about that, and another multi-week post soon.  Sorry for the long gap.

JF

Joyce's 628-Page Dad Joke

Are puns the lowest form of humor? Why is it that after we make a pun, we often find it necessary to apologize?

“Sorry about that. Couldn’t help myself.”

Let’s be honest, puns are dad jokes, aren’t they?

"What do you call a belt made out of a watch? A waist of time."

There’s something about the way a pun twists in on itself, and away from the outside world, that makes most right-thinking people groan. The pun is simply about language. It’s not a joke about anything but itself. Once I make a pun, I’m no longer talking to you about something, I’m talking about the words I’m using to talk to you.

The lifespan of the pun is miniscule. It is alive only for that split-second it takes for your brain to solve the linguistic puzzle, and then snap, the pun is dead. Watch, waist, waste, time… Ugh. Clever, but fleeting. Quick, but without real depth.

Perhaps that’s why tabloid newspapers adore the pun so much.

I bring this up because I’m about 260 pages into Finnegans Wake, a novel which is based entirely on word play. My unofficial estimate is that 95% of the words printed on the pages of this book exhibit some sort of word play. Hell, 95% is probably low. It’s puns all the way down!

Does this make Finnegans Wake the world’s longest and most frustrating dad joke? Um, sort of? Let’s be honest, there is a lot of humor in these pages, and much of it is silly and sophomoric.

But (you just knew there was going to be a “but,” didn’t you?) this is James Joyce, so these aren’t just simple puns. The words in this book often exhibit several layers of punning. The book doesn’t take a half-step away from the world (as most puns do). Joyce keeps going, pushing the limit of how much meaning he can pack into each word and phrase and sentence and chapter.

Coiling in on itself, Finnegans Wake begins to emerge on the far side. Joyce takes the stuff of this world, bends and twists it as far as he can with the tools at his disposal, and ultimately ends up with a completely new universe, one that exists through a refraction of linguistic representation.

I’ve read that Joyce packed the history of the world into Finnegans Wake. I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I think he recreated the history of the world, and ended up with something that echoes our universe, but is totally and completely unique at the same time.

And he did it all with the lowest form of humor. Pretty neat trick.

Book I Clickbait (JF)

OM did a Book I recap, so I'll do one, too. I don't have nine points (was that some tether into FW? I don't remember many nines), only three. And if you multiply three by something, and add something to that, you get 1,001. For example, 3 x 333 + 2.  Joycean math, right? And 1,001 = ALP. Uh-huh. I think that's on line 17 of...hey, Tindall, which page is that number thing?

Anyway.

1.  I've gotten better at reading FW. Better's normally the first-step superlative of good, but it's also a relative to other adjectives. Check it out. "Anna, I've been a good husband, and I can be an even better one," vs. "Anna, I've been a bad husband, but I can be a better one." See what I did there?

On this project, I tend toward the latter better. There have been a lot of passages or segments, and posts about them, where I've been a bad reader (on the blog, that's where I whine and lean on Tindall). Not intentionally bad, but still bad. I've improved. And, hey, that's pretty cool. As I tell my kids, it's the hardest book ever written in English, even though most of it is not really written in English.  #natlanguage

2.  I'm daunted by the next howevermany pages. OM got bogged down a few chapters ago, and we texted and emailed about that. He's an avid reader; I used to be. This book often makes him want to quit and read something else, and it makes me want to do the same. Thanks to FW, I've remembered how much I love reading and writing. But, gotdam, I'd sure love to be reading almost anything else for the next eight months or so, and writing my own stuff in my all-too-little personal time. Maybe that's the best compliment about FW? It makes me want to absorb and create.

Those pages? Ugh. I'm behind, way behind - 24 pages on this Sunday. Book II is supposed to really suck, too, and I have an almost stepkid packing and moving to college this weekend. And the fifth anniversary of the first date with my gf is Friday.  (What do you get as a present for that, btw?  Pretty sure it's not a AYITW post, haha. Flowers, maybe?  Ugh, I always do flowers on Fridays.  No ... holy shit ... wait. I got it. Shhh.) Super hectic real life. Then again, when Shem and Shaun moved out, and Izzy followed the Ren Faire people, it must've been nertz.

3.  You. You guys, who are reading this. You guys, who seem to give a shit about this wack-ass thing that me and my too-far-away, new-father-again friend are doing. Yeah. His wife and my gf don't care much about this; they don't read the blog or share the tweets, but you do? You Twitter followers are sort of real to me. Weird? Not really. I'm pretty excited when I get a notification that another person is paying attention, or when I see our pageviews and learn that a person in Portugal is into this. So great. As OM mentioned in his most recent post, JJ would be proud to know that this book has united us. Maybe, because of that connection, this post isn't complete click-bait.

Oh. The header image?  It's Danis Rose, not Susan Sontag.  Mystery solved, and what I wouldn't give if Sue left notes on the Wake for us.  What I wouldn't give to spend a day with her - young/old, healthy/sick - and talk about lit and the content/context debate?

Anyway, redux.

More soon.

Music: From Newsom to Burgess and Beyond

Yesterday, Joanna Newsom released a video for a new song, "Sapokanikan." The song will be on her new album, Divers, and since its her first release since 2010, I went searching to see if I could find any more information. That's when I came upon this tidbit in a LA Times review of the song:

In the video for Joanna Newsom’s first new work in five years, “Sapokanikan,” the harpist-pianist-singer-composer-actor strolls through Manhattan in long takes while singing kaleidoscopic lyrics. Around her the city sparkles. As she moves, Newsom stares into the camera and offers a vivid recounting of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” ... Just kidding about that last part. 

Ah, can you only imagine if Joanna Newsom had decided to set Finnegans Wake to harp and glockenspiel?

Of course, there have been actual attempts to capture the music of FW. Is there anything stranger than this video of Anthony Burgess singing "The Ballad of Perse O'Reilly"?



The caption of the video states, "Finding himself happily locked in the pub after closing time, Burgess sings from The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly (from Joyce's Finnegans Wake)."  There's something distinctly creepy about this one.

Far more interesting for me is the project of Waywords and Meansigns. From the website's description: "Waywords and Meansigns is an unabridged musical version of James Joyce's famous text, Finnegans Wake. The book has been divided its 17 chapters, with a different musician or performance group assigned to each chapter."

Allowing each artist to interpret a chapter in his or her own way captures the essence of Finnegans Wake. This is the famous Work in Progress, a text so alive that you can encounter the word "googling" in a book written some 60+ years before anyone used Google to search for something. Stranger still, Joyce seems to be using the word correctly.



Above is the first chapter of Book II of FW by way of Waywords and Meansigns, and it gives you a good taste of what the project is all about. I think this is something Joyce himself would've got on board with!

I Finished Book One of Finnegans Wake – Now What?

Book One of Finnegans Wake is done, and I’ve already begun wading into Book Two. This means, at 230-ish pages down, we have a mere 400 or so pages to go.  Now seems like a good time for some general thoughts.

1. Book One, comprised of eight chapters, feels like a complete piece. Of course, it’s intended to be the first of the four cycles, so this shouldn’t be a shock. Still, I wonder what else Joyce could have up his sleeve.
2. The first two chapters of Book Two are reportedly two of the hardest chapters in the novel. It’s unclear how they could be more difficult than several of the previous sections, of which I understood basically zero percent. How can you understand less than nothing of a text? And yet, I don’t really doubt that Joyce pulls it off. He probably figured out a way to remove knowledge from your brain or something. (ed. note—20 pages or so into Book Two now, and it IS exceedingly difficult.)
3. I’m done with Tindall. In all honesty, I haven’t consulted him since Chapter 6 anyway. He writes as though he is the only authority on the text, but the more I’ve read and the more I understand about Finnnegans Wake, the less I agree with the old codger. Most damningly, the Finnegans Wake you can read about in Tindall is less interesting than the Finnegans Wake I’m holding in my hands. I don’t need someone to make this less interesting for me.
4. There must be a thousand and one other sources to consult. On the website Original Positions, a blogger recorded his thoughts on each chapter of FW as he read, and I’ve found this to be more enjoyable than dusty ole Tindall. Obviously, the OP blog doesn’t capture a fraction of what’s to be found in the book, but he makes some broad strokes that I find compelling.
5. I prefer my commentary on Finnegans Wake to grapple with the text, not try to dominate it. Remember that Joyce called this book Work In Progress as it was being written. This was not Joyce being lazy. He wasn’t saying, “Oh, I’ll think of a title when it’s done.” He meant that this new work was alive. Reading it will be an active process for as long as people dare to read it. Finnegans Wake will always be In Progress.
6. The first episode of the Reading Finnegans Wake podcast was posted shortly after A Year in the Wake began. The podcast performs a very close reading of the text, unpacking the various meanings to be found in single lines. Although I’m far ahead of the reader at this point, the podcast still sheds light on elements that I missed. If you’re not aware, Finnegans Wake is NOT a linear novel, so deepening my understanding of Chapter One has repeatedly enhanced my readings of later segments.
7. However, if I need a close reading of a segment in a later chapter, both this glossary and this wiki offer interpretations at the cellular level. Sometimes a new perspective on a single word can unlock an entire section. 
8. This whole book messes with my brain. Last night I read a bit before turning out the light, and spent 20 or so minutes thinking about what I’d read before falling asleep. That quiet thinking about Finnegans Wake took over my mind, and didn’t let go even after I’d fallen asleep. I woke up multiple times in the night feeling like the words in my head were scrambled. How ironic that this book, which many claim is Joyce’s attempt to reconstruct the night, actually makes it more difficult to sleep if I get too immersed in the text.
9. Finally, I’m not really overwhelmed by the 400 pages, or the three Books, or the nine chapters remaining. What’s daunting is the thought that I’ll still be reading 12 pages a week come February. Miles to go before I sleep!

László Moholy-Nagy's Diagram of Finnegans Wake

László Moholy-Nagy.  (Phonetic: Laz-lo Ma-ho-li Naj.)  Ever heard of him?

Amazing man, amazing artist.  Hungarian-Jew, born 1895, converted to Calvinism, fought in WWI for Austro-Hungary, supported communism, moved to Germany in 1920, taught at the Bauhaus, moved to England in 1935, moved to Chicago in 1937, taught at the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design or ID before Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan) in Chicago, drew a weird diagram of FW and died in 1946.

That's it up there.  Kinda cool, mainly because the guy who made it is a modernist visual art icon, and, b/c I'm an ID fan and completely geek-into Siskind and Callahan, an influence on me.  (Influence more photography-wise, back when I used to do that, than writing-wise.)  Idk how helpful it is in reading the actual book.  It's not unhelpful, I guess.

Hope you're all having great weekends.

More soon.