PQ on Trump in the Wake

Unlike me, someone's keeping up their Finnegans Wake blog. Finnegans, Wake! has a new piece on how the Wake foretold Trump, which is no surprise as it seems to foretell pretty much everything. Unfortunately, it does not reveal how our  own sad spectacle ends. Or perhaps it does, had we but eyes to read and ears to hear. Check it all out HERE.

tip

I've been watching a PBS series called The Greeks tonight. Much to my surprise, an early segment showed how we know about the so called Dark Ages of Greece through archeologists digging through the garbage dumps of ancient Greece. Guess what kind of things they found in the trash? Papyri of ancient Greek writings. Preeminently Homer.

Thanks, ancient Greeks, for throwing stuff out. Even the premier texts of Western Civilization.

And thanks, Mr. Joyce for making me see how important this is.

 

Happy Bloomsday, 2016!

Bloomsday snuck up on me this year. (Apparently it did on Google Blogger too, as I just noticed that the wavy red line beneath it as I write means that they don't recognize Bloomsday as a word. Come on, Google, you've had over a hundred years to catch up on this.) I was actually scrolling through the more depressing news of the day when I saw an article about Ulysses in the Daily Beast. It's about the judge who rendered the verdict that lifted the ban on Ulysses, and you can read it HERE.

The writer of the piece, Ben Cosgrove, notes how incisive Judge John M. Woolsey's literary observations are, and quotes from his opinion thusly:

"Joyce has attempted—it seems to me, with astonishing success—to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious."

Thank you, Judge Woolsey.

Why We Are No Longer Shocked by “Ulysses” - The New Yorker

Why We Are No Longer Shocked by “Ulysses” - The New Yorker:



'via Blog this'

Wordplay...Bloomsday

...is just around the corner!

and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. 

And, yes, the title, Ulysses, contains the word "yes"!

As far as the Wake is concerned, I hope you are not getting worn down--"Weakening Fans" is an anagram for Finnegans Wake!

Diagramming Finn Fun

I just ran into a site that diagrams (remember those things?) sentences online in real time.

After trying it out with a couple of jawbreaking sentences from Proust, which, curiously, seemed to resemble iguanas when diagrammed, it was all but inevitable.

It took on Proustian monsters with ease...

...so naturally, I wanted to give it a sentence from Finnegans Wake! After all,  what would the application decide was the subject? the verb?

So I gave it the following:

"The whool of the whaal in the wheel of the whorl of the Boubou from Bourneum has thus come to taon!), and with tambarins and cantoridettes soturning around his eggshill rockcoach their dance McCaper in retrophoebia, beck from bulk, like fantastic disossed and jenny aprils, to the ra, the ra, the ra, the ra, langsome heels and langsome toesis, attended to by a mutter and doffer duffmatt baxingmotch and a myrmidins of pszozlers pszinging Satyr's Caudledayed Nice and Hombly,

Dombly Sod We Awhile but Ho, Time Timeagen, Wake!"

It blithely gave me the following.  Not a bad effort at that:

Sentence diagram of a sentence in Finnegans Wake on page 415.  Click for full diagram.

You can play around with it at: https://foxtype.com/sentence-tree

Uh oh, I just realized that there is a dangling parenthesis, so the sentence ACTUALLY STARTS ON THE PREVIOUS PAGE. So there are several sentences in parenthesis embedded in the surrounding sentence, so actually I have to diagram

He would of curse melissciously, by his fore feelhers, flexors, contractors, depressors and extensors, lamely, harry me, marry me, bury me, bind me, till she was puce for shame and allso fourmish her in Spinner's housery at the earthsbest schoppinhour so summery as his cottage, which was cald fourmillierly Tingsomingenting, groped up. Or, if he was always striking up funny funereels with Bester farther Zeuts, the Aged One, With all his wigeared corollas, albedinous and oldbuoyant, inscythe his elytrical wormcasket and Dehlia and Peonia, his druping nymphs, bewheedling him, compound eyes on hornitosehead, and Auld Letty Plussiboots to scratch his cacumen and cackle his tramsitus, diva deborah (seven bolls of sapo, a lick of lime, two spurts of fussfor, threefurts of sulph, a shake o'shouker, doze grains of migniss and a mesfull of midcap pitchies.  The whool of the whaal in the wheel of the whorl of the Boubou from Bourneum has thus come to taon!), and with tambarins and cantoridettes soturning around his eggshill rockcoach their dance McCaper in retrophoebia, beck from bulk, like fantastic disossed and jenny aprils, to the ra, the ra, the ra, the ra, langsome heels and langsome toesis, attended to by a mutter and doffer duffmatt baxingmotch and a myrmidins of pszozlers pszinging Satyr's Caudledayed Nice and Hombly,

Dombly Sod We Awhile but Ho, Time Timeagen, Wake!

OK, I have no idea if this will even work... Here goes...

... it took a few seconds... it almost died... but it came up with this:

  Click for full diagram.

Wings of Art - Joseph Campbell on James Joyce

The complete audio: "Wings of Art - Joseph Campbell on James Joyce" on Youtube.

Haven't listened to all of it yet, looks good.....

part 1

part 2

part 3

part 4

part 5

Birthday celebrations of Finnegans Wake have already started!

I just got an email from Waywords and Meansigns, reminding their following that May 4th is Finnegans Wake's birthday. That's still ahead of us out here in California, but I thought I'd mention it a little early, because it's already happening in England, and Soundart Radio in Totnes England is at this moment already 9 hours into their 30 hour broadcast of Finnegans Wake. Check it out HERE!

Annalisa Volpone : "The Marriage of Mystery and Mystettry: Blake’s Apocalypse and Joyce’s Last Podding"

https://www.academia.edu/7151398/The_Marriage_of_Mystery_and_Mystettry_Blakes_Apocalypse_and_Joyces_Last_Podding

Book III, Chapter 3

We've started a new chapter here in Santa Cruz tonight. I happened to bring my tablet along so did a little more on the spot word searching than I've done in past months. Searching out the word "electrolatiginous" I discovered that at times the web is smaller than we think, as it led me to our Austin Wake compatriot PQ's blog, Finnegans, Wake! Although I was aware that he had done a segment of reading for the group Waywords and Meansigns, I hadn't remembered that it was this very chapter. Quite exciting. I will be sure to listen to it during the time we are reading this, and if you're up for this point in the Wake, you can too. Just go here and look for track 15, the Quadrino reading. Or start at the "beginning". Why not?  

                                                                                   Robert Berry

Happy Birthday, James Joyce!

For once in my life I've had a little warning that Joyce's birthday was about to come up and have thought to commemorate it in some way. How fortunate, then, that in an essay by George Orwell that Adrian McKinty has put up on his blog, I found a passing reference to Joyce just now. True, it's about Ulysses, not Finnegans Wake, but it was Ulysses I had more in mind today anyway. Here's the quote:

 But now and again there appears a novel which opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar. The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper. He dared — for it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique — to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America which was under everybody's nose. Here is a whole world of stuff which you supposed to be of its nature incommunicable, and somebody has managed to communicate it. The effect is to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being lives. When you read certain passages in Ulysses you feel that Joyce's mind and your mind are one, that he knows all about you though he has never heard your name, that there some world outside time and space in which you and he are together. 

"Elephantine pedant" is nice, I think.

Science News: The world's greatest literature reveals multifractals and cascades of consciousness (guess what book)

The whole article may be read here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160121110913.htm