Joyceways to release on Bloomsday

Thought you would find this new Kickstarter project interesting:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/504430587/joycewalk-0

Not soliciting, just thought it was really interesting what they are trying to accomplish.

Our latest session

Just for fun, I'm going to post some of the random, near indecipherable scribbles I took down from our last session a week ago.

Maybe someone else can make heads or tails of them...

Ed on consciousness in the Wake: And when you get to a certain point of lucidity it dissolves again.

Ann: waiting to discover the inside joke

Ed: Revealing the inside joke by concealing

The world is the joke played on itself.

We're in on the joke (as readers of the Wake).

Joyce wanted to give the world a gift, he didn't want the work turned into a pedantic mess. mask?

page 231--
Joyce will bring in  a particular language or subject for particular tones or moods. In this one, we have something from the East  

God the consolation and protection of our youth.

exercism=exercize, exorcize, aestheticism

by a prayer, by a hairsbreadth

m.d.s--my dears. Swift to Stella in letters. A private language.

a minor Irish poet--transported

tip-window

Tintagel

moiety (look up)

Green Pastures?

Cathy--the bigger picture: Glugg, frustrated, not getting the colors. Sail away. Major writer.

Was Liffey worth the leaving? Nay

Mouth full of ecstasy/toothache/meeting women

silence

exercise.

Drug trip? laity


...Yeah, like that. And writing this out, I'm remembering that what we really got to had very little to do with this at all.

I'll try to do another post with a bit more context, if not substance...

Drivel

I thought that as I have three weeks before our next meeting I might post a few shorter posts on the last meeting. So it seemed appropriate to start by saying that John announced that he spoke drivel, and then proceeded to do so. This is not to insult his intelligence, but only to say that he was able to speak a kind of alternate of pig latin, which involves messing around with the middle of the words. As with Pig Latin, you catch some of it before you know it. I have since looked around for it on the internet, but I haven't found anyone who acknowledges it, let alone provides examples, so you'll have to trust me on this one.

Tom said that Joyce did some of this too, and I see his point up to a degree, which is that he shared a love of messing around with words--in fact, I'd say he never met a word he could just leave well enough alone. But Joyce didn't write drivel, or pig latin either. He didn't write nonsense language like Carroll. I would say that he used nonsense languages as he used every other form of language, he shaped them to his own ends. When we speak in pig latin, we are really using a formula to mangle our ordinary speech. But for Joyce, mangling the language was only in aid of bringing out meaning after meaning. It was the meanings he was mashing together, not just the syllables.   

Sin Chronicity

I just had to post this.  I don't think Jung appreciated the synchronicity in Joyce's work.  (Or at least in the lives of his readers.)  This one came on so jungianly...it's sinful... or at least fairly freudening....

I am currently reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.  I came home to eat dinner after our meeting and I picked up the book and found my place and saw these words:

"I love everything that flows," said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences.

Eric McLuhan and Thunderwords

We had our meeting tonight, and a very meaty one it proved. But before I get to that, and as we for the moment have several posts to peruse, I thought I'd mention the quote Tom brought on the thunderwords. This is from Eric McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan's son:

"It took months of concentrated effort to begin to winkle out the thousands of words in the thunders; now, several of them have yielded thirty or more pages of words, each word denoting or alluding to a theme in the episode or an associated technology. Prior to our discovery of the thunders and their significance, Marshall McLuhan looked up to Joyce as a writer and artist of encyclopedic wisdom and eloquence unparalleled in our time.... After, he recognized in Joyce the prescient explorer, one who used patterns of linguistic energy to discern the patterns of culture and society and technology." -- Eric McLuhan

Although I'm ever hopeful that Tom and those who haven't posted here will do so, meanwhile, I thought I'd post this as representative of Tom's sense of the Wake, at least so far, as he has been quite consistent in impressing upon us the idea that language is all we have by way of apprehending reality. More on that, I will leave to Tom to say.

Vico, Language, Childhood, the Unconscious, and One Hundred Ways of theThe Dark Night

That Vico is associated with the four sided ("square wheel") of cycles is sort of a cliche of Wake scholarship.  Like many cliches it is true, as far as it goes.  However, Bishop drew my attention to a very interesting aspect of the psychological Vico and how it meshes with the Wake.  I really need to read some Vico to check into this more deeply, but this is what I have learned.  What actually is of interest in Vico is the Viconian idea of the unconscious, what Vico called "ignorance", and how the primitive consciousness comes into awareness, and how the enlightenment of full consciousness is reflected in language!


It is of special interest in the stories of the children and children's games and how they interface with sleep and the unconscious mind.  In Vico's imagination, the childhood of the world originates in a night of thick ignorance, where everything is "reveiled", as Joyce would put it.  Vico uses a term for the childhood of the human race that is usually translated as "ignorance".  But it in many ways anticipates modern psychology where childhood where one is "jung and easily freudened", is tied to the archaic, and that in turn is tied to the unconsciousness.  That must have been attractive to Joyce, who appears to have been deeply interested in how the night mind, the unconscious, represents a kind of cloud of unknowing, not just out of awareness, but forming a kind of erasure.  Certainly the term "ignorance" has an overlaid meaning, both simple lack of sophistication and knowledge on the one hand, but a dark vacuum of awareness.  Into that nothingness Vico posits the unnameable, "the fright of light" that is the first lightning spark of simultaneously, language ("O Loud") and consciousness, and the development of the individual mind (en-lightningment) on a parallel track with history.  Vico considers that the mind first frames consciousness in the form of poem and myth to react to this first flash, in confusion and fear, in "thud and blunder".  The Lord thundred from heauen: and the most high vttered his voice. ...2 SAMUEL 22:14 (1611 KING JAMES BIBLE).  Note that thundred implies both thundered, and hundred;  I have not heard this anywhere, but I suspect that's why Joyce uses a hundred letter word.

1. 
   

Here's a link with a discussion of the thunder words:
The hundredletter thunderwords of Finnegans Wake
For your convenience, I attach them here:

FW003 (thunder):
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk
 
FW023 (thunder):
Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun
 
FW044 (clap):
klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrottygraddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot
 
FW090 (whore):
Bladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapornanennykocksapastippatappatupperstrippuckputtanach
 
FW113:
Thingcrooklyexineverypasturesixdixlikencehimaroundhersthemaggerbykinkinkankanwithdownmindlookingated
 
FW257 (shut the door):
Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk
 
FW314:
Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup
 
FW332:
Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled
 
FW414 (cough):
husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamnacosaghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract
 
FW424 (Norse gods):
Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar

The tenth and last has 101 letters, making 1001 letters in all.

p229-30

To start off, last time, I had remembered that S.P.Q.R. on page 229 meant something in Joyce besides Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, which means "the Senate and People of Rome" and referred to the government of the ancient Roman Republic, but also, is the emblem of the current city of Rome. (With Joyce, it always helps to know all the possibilities--or as many as you can.) But in the context of talking about Glugg, John P. Anderson in Joyce's Finnegans Wake says it also means  "small profits with quick returns"

We've been doing a lot of identifying Glugg with Shem and Shem with Joyce, but in this section, it appears Joyce is disidentifying himself with Glugg a bit. Glugg, confused, has lost his way a bit. Anderson says that here, Glugg is considering throwing in his lot with other writers who are less courageous as artists. The following play on the names of the chapters of Ulysses are in fact parodies and even travesties of them. I found a quote from Anderson around all this interesting:

Now for the worst possible anti-divine and loss of control behavior, Glugg would write for quick profits about the problems in his family that should by all rights remain confidential, as no one else's business... Note that [this] is the exact opposite of the Joyce art strategy to connect with the reader on the basis of what is common human experiences; pity and the secret cause are everybody's business.    

This author of popular trash would be a SPQR Glugg as far removed from Joyce the artist as is possible: this would be the potboiler Joyce.

Well, there are a couple of more things I wanted to get to in this brief two pages--there is some meaty stuff here. But as usual, I've run out of time, so we'll see if I manage to revisit this another day.

Fellow Wakers, feel free to supplment your own thoughts as usual.

A manhole cover in modern day Rome