A Manual for the Advanced Study of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

I know you will all be eager to read this...



Joyce Lexicography - Contemporary Literature Press:

A Manual for the Advanced Study of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

in one hundred and eleven volumes

by C. George Sandulescu and Lidia Vianu

26,000 pages



'via Blog this'

Joyce’s Complete Works Translated into Korean | JJQ

Joyce’s Complete Works Translated into Korean | JJQ: "JOYCE’S COMPLETE WORKS TRANSLATED INTO KOREAN"



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And yet more news from afar

For various reasons, we've been having a little trouble getting a quorum together here at the Santa Cruz Wakers over the last month, but this is down to scheduling problems, not lack of enthusiasm. As if in compensation, there's been quite a lot of news from outside sources and so I thought I'd assemble another links post.


First off, our Austin correspondent PQ has announced the completion of his four part series on John Bishop's Joyce's Book of the Dark. If you're reading anywhere near the time I'm writing this, you can probably see the fourth part posted in the sidebar. In any case, PQ has posted links to all four parts over on his other website, A Building Roam. It's quite an ambitious project. I bought a copy of this book at the beginning of the year and have recently been thinking about finally digging in. Obviously this whets my appetite.


Next, we had an email from the folks at Waywards and Meansigns , announcing their project of recording the Wake in its entirety. Seventeen parts, done by seventeen different groups or individuals. Sounds fascinating. They are asking for participants, so check out their website and get involved.


And finally, in talking with a fellow Waker about the dance project on Finnegans Wake that Joseph Campbell's wife, the dancer Jean Erdman, did, which I mentioned in my last post , I learned of another dance/multimedia project that just happened in San Francisco. It's over, unfortunately, but there's an extensive description at SF Arts. It's a piece by Jenny McAllister, who founded the 13th Floor Dance Theatre, and is called "A Wake". Which you know Joyce would have liked.


As a sort of postscript, Kathleen Kirk, who originally clued me in to it, suggested contacting the Jean Erdman Dance website to see if there was any film record of Erdman's Wake-inspired  "The Coach With Six Insides". I haven't gotten around to that yet, but don't let that stop you from inquiring if you're interested.

News from afar

I just thought I'd link to a couple of posts that have come my way related to the Wake. One can be found in the sidebar here anyway, but as that at some point will disappear, I'll just mention that PQ has posted a YouTube that he learned of from his Austin Wake group. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet--it's fairly long--but I will be. It's a discussion by Terrence McKenna about the Wake, and I suppose it's a small world kind of thing that it was filmed at Esalen, which is retreat center just a few hours down the road from Santa Cruz in Big Sur. It's from 1995.


Here's the link to the video on PQ's site, Finnegans, Wake! which is always worth dropping by in any case. 


The other comes from Kathleen Kirk's site Wait! I Have a Blog?! Kathleen is describing her current read, which is a biography of Joseph Campbell called A Fire In the Mind. Most Wakers who have made any headway with the Wake at all will have at least some familiarity with Campbell's work A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, which he wrote with Henry Morton Robinson. If you're like me, though, you don't know that his wife, Jean Erdman, composed a dance theatre piece based on Finnegans Wake called "The Coach with Six Insides." Perhaps not entirely surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be any video available of this, although I see that there are some rare LPs out there. It doesn't really seem like quite the right format to get what's going on, but I could be wrong. Wake fans, you may want to see what else you can track down about this one.

Limited Edition of Ulysses, Illustrated by Matisse

The ones that are signed by both Matisse and Joyce go for $37,000.00...
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/henri_matisse_illustrates_1935_edition_of_james_joyces_iulyssesi.html

His Story is a Nightmare From Which I am Trying to Awaken (with apologies to Stephen Dedalus)

I have my different phases with Joyce. I am often content to just sit back and admire his marvelous inventiveness, his sly humor, his virtuosity and, yes, I said yes, his genius. Other times, I feel both compassion for his suffering and admiration for his tremendous perseverance, feelings I definitely had in my recent reading of The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin  Birmingham. But running along as another undercurrent to my Joycean musings I also frequently feel a sense of alienation. Every once in a while it comes  right up to the surface, as it did at our latest Wake reading the other night. Afterwards, I was trying to remember what set me off this time, and realized that it was his whole raven/dove dichotomy as related to the feminine. Frankly, it just bugged the hell out of me.

First off, I don’t really have a huge taste for these kinds of polarities. I don’t like ravens being the symbol for dark, the sinister, or any of the underworld side of things. Ravens are smart and resourceful and are a lot more like us than we probably realize, and it’s a bum rap to cast our own shadow on to them. Doves, despite being appropriated by Christian iconography are probably mean and vicious sometimes themselves. I get a little tired of doves, rabbits, lambs all being the symbols of innocence when they’re actually a bit on the dim side.

Anyway.  Joyce and women. I really don’t buy his take at all. I have virtually no empathy for Molly Bloom, patron saint of the affirmative way of life though she well may be, and find Leopold Bloom himself much more a kindred spirit than his lie-abed counterpart. I mean, don't we all? Isn't that why we read Ulysses in the first place? Leopold Bloom, c'est moi?

As far as the Wake goes, well, Izzy is all right, in her dovelike, lamblike, cloudlike way, but ALP, the river, the past present future, fecundity, etc., I don’t get her. I know she’s not exactly meant to be a naturalistic figure of course, but it’s exactly in Joyce’s mythologizing of the feminine where I tend to run afoul of him. It’s not just an ideological disagreement. It's more visceral. The best I can say is that I start to feel in a trap or a bind, like I’m caught inside his way of seeing, and I feel like flailing against the bars. I find myself wanting what is outside his mind. Reality as it is not known, or dreamt of in the philosophies of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. I want the feminine equivalent of Joyce to represent reality from her own point of view.  

I bring this all up not just to rehash my rant yet again, but because just now, today, I seem to have been presented with a partial possible answer to that. I came across a glowing Slate book review on a novel called A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, and if you think that the book owes a little bit to Joyce himself, you’d be right, as she had a quote from Joyce’s letters taped above her desk as she wrote it:

“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”

A woman novelist’s response to Joyce in his own sort of vernacular? This is either a case of “Ask and it shall be given.” or “Be careful what you wish for.”  In any case, I’ve ordered the book. I’ll let you know how it goes.

My Review of The Most Dangerous Book at Escape Into Life

I was fortunate recently to have fellow Waker Leslie lend me her copy of The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham and have just posted my review at the website Escape Into Life. I haven't really come across that many books in my life that really help you connect so many dots, and even if it isn't strictly about Finnegans Wake, I do highly recommend it.