p108-110...and Happy St. Patrick's Day

This post is a bit slow getting up, but as we decided to take St. Patrick's Day off from Finnegan it probably doesn't matter much. I do really want to post about these pages, though. Page 109 is a beaut. And lest the casual reader thinks I mean page 109 approximately, well, no, I don't. Between us, we have at least four different editions of Finnegan, but the pages invariably sync up across the board. So you can just go to your nearby copy of the book and you'll see what I mean. I'm tempted to just quote the whole page, but I know that that will only put people off, so I'll attempt to find a few salient bits...

Has any fellow of the dime a dozen type...ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope? Admittedly, it is an outer husk: its face, in all its featureful perfection of imperfection, is its fortune: it exhibits only the civil or military clothing of whatever passionpallid nudity or plaguepurple nakedness may happen to tuck itself under its flap. Yet to concentrate on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as hurtful to sound sense...as were some fellow in the act of getting some intro from another fellow...to a lady of the latters's acquaintance...straightway to run off and vision her plump and plain in her altogether, preferring to close his blinkhard's eyes to the ethiquetical fact that she was, after all, wearing...some definite articles of evolutionary clothing, inharmonious creations, a captious critic might describe them as...but for all that suddenly full of local color and personal perfume and suggestive, too, of so very much more...

We've got a new book of annotations, so don't need to strain ourselves so much on references. But here's a word I realized that I didn't know as well as I should for all that:

tantamount

And here's word who's multiple meanings obviously delighted Joyce as master wordsmith:

Zot

Which was included in the perhaps most enjoyed phrase of the evening: "me ken or no me ken Zot is the Quiztune"

According to our guide, Zot has these four meanings:

"god or lord" in Albanian

"obscenity" in German

"crazy or mad, fool" in Dutch

"this" or "that" in Hebrew

I have no idea how accurate any of this is, of course, but it's interesting to think of this ambivalent or multivalent word in this context.

Did I just say "multivalent"?

Finnegans Wake--a brief digression

Due to the fact that I've skived off with a cold and postponed our gathering till March 3rd, I thought I'd keep this blog active by mentioning a rather remarkable denizen of Santa Cruz who puts our occasional musings on Finnegan to shame. Max Hoff was interviewed on Santa Cruz's own KUSP on the Poetry Show by Dennis Morton on May 10th. If you scroll down here to said date, you will be able to hear the whole thing.

No, this is not for everyone. But if you've made it this far, I'm pretty sure that it's for you.

Finnegans Wake--pages 104-108

Although originally I was thinking of this blog being kind of a one post wonder, after last night's meeting it seemed that it might be fun to post a bit as we go along. Keep it fresh in case anyone drops by. It's kind of like waiting for signs of intelligent life in the rest of the universe, but that's okay.

Our Favorite line:

E'en Tho' I Granny a-be He would Fain Me Cuddle

This comes in the midst of a long list of similar "Titles", all of which, supposedly reveal a discrete facet of the whole book or maybe just of the lost letter or maybe they are one and the same.

So far we have eschewed the internet coming to our aid in the midst of the meeting, so I thought I would post a list of words we found ourselves unsure about:

polyhedron
chimera
chiaroscuro

It's not that we don't have a vague idea, but more that we have a little trouble pinning them down.

Don't worry, though. This will all be fuel for another blog.

As far as we can understand, we have left the male principle, condensed down to the initials HCE, and its history behind for awhile and are now in the hands of the female principle, shortened to ALP, the little woman, also a hen, who gathers up the pieces out of the rubble of history and proceeds to move the whole thing forward in a new cycle.

Yeah, I know. That was kind of a spoiler.

I had two favorite moments of the evening. After I had questioned the point of immersing ourselves in the Joycean mythology of the four cycles of time, I read the line we will begin with next time.

Now, patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience.

I fear I shall be sorely tried.

Oh, I almost forgot the second great moment of the evening. When someone up at the bar asked me what we were reading, the bartendress, actually somewhat proud of having a reading group there, did have to ask, "What? You mean you all are still reading the same book?"

Indeed.

Finnegans Wake in Santa Cruz

This blog is a bit of an experiment. I've been meeting for the better part of a year with a small group of friends who are attempting to read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake together a couple of times a month. We're just over the 100 page mark.

Tonight, a question came up. We wondered how many people in the world were actually reading Finnegans Wake right now. A few hundred? A million? We really don't know. Nor can we. However, if you are reading the Wake right now, we'd like to hear from you. Our numbers are a bit thin--I almost wrote "fin"--on the ground, so even virtual fellow readers will be appreciated.