A visit from PQ

I'd be remiss if I didn't take time out from writing my extremely random blog posts about reading the Wake  to mention a visit from our roving correspondent Peter Quadrino to Santa Cruz last weekend. Peter and his fiancee Colleen were here in the greater Bay Area and so we gathered an impromptu group from among our regular Wake attendants at our usual hangout, The Poet and Patriot. The links between our cell of Wakers and Peter's Wake group in Austin, Texas are many, as several of our members here have relatives who have ended up in Austin for a time, and have attended Peter's Wake group while they were in residence.

Peter's group meets twice a month, once at a local bookstore called Malvern Books, and once at the Irish delegation. Here's an account of their first meeting at the latter. The Austin Wakers approach is somewhat different than ours, in that they tackle a page at a time, everyone reading two lines, after which they all have at it. They also have Peter's blog post outlining it, which he refers to as Finnegans Wake Treasure Map.

I first connected with Peter when this blog was new, and its whole point was really just to discover whether we here in Santa Cruz could discover other Wakeans out there. At that point, he was living and working in Southern California and managed to get to a well-established group in Marina del Rey, which he posted about HERE. Not long after that, he presented a paper on some connections  between Joyce and Salvador Dali he'd made for an annual James Joyce conference at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which he talks about a bit HERE. He had previously shared that paper with me and by extension other members of our group in order to get some feedback before giving his talk. I found it all quite interesting.

On moving to Austin, though, Peter decided to form his own Wake group, and initially held meetings at the public library. Not long after that, he decided that he really needed to start a blog just about Finnegans Wake, which could also serve as the home page for the group.

We were all interested to hear about a trip he and another Austin Waker had made to the International James Joyce Symposium in Antwerp, Belgium, where he presented a paper called, "The Pantheon of FINNEGANS WOKE" , which I thought I might have to summarize, but which Peter has published a version of HERE. In it, you will find some of the usual suspects you might already know about, like Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, but there are also some surprises. One that he mentioned to us at our gathering was William Melvin Kelley, a black writer in the Langston Hughes circle, who the OED credits with coming up with the term WOKE. As Peter puts it in his post, "which means every time you hear someone use the term "woke" it was originated by a Wake head.

Check out his two blogs, A Building Roam, which covers other things besides the Wake, including his other passions, baseball and rap music, and of course Finnegans, Wake! Both are consistently thought provoking.

William Melvin Kelly-WOKE