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

James-Joyce-Cookies

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-original-James-Joyce-cookie-recipe

1132

I was stunned to realize that the passage where Krishna in the Baghavad Gita reveals his divine nature and exposes him to the unendurable bare divinity, where he says, "I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds" is 11.32 --chapter 11 verse 32.

(This is the point just before the battle where almost everyone will be wiped out and a new era, with just the five Pandevas remaining, will begin.)

Quark Findings from Leslie

Leslie, who is one of our Santa Cruz Wakers, jotted off an email to us all the other day and has given me permission to post it to the blog.


Now that scientists at the HCL have today announced the discovery of a new particle called the "pentaquark" (see here: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33517492), I decided to revisit Murray Gell-Mann's reasons for naming his discovery back in the 1960s(?) the "quark." And I say I gotta love this explanation of his that I found (credited as being from M. Gell-Mann (1995). The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. Henry Holt and Co. p. 180. ISBN 978-0-8050-7253-2.]:

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."

Interesting that he had come up with the word (though with the different pronunciation) before he found it in the Wake. And I learned from other online reading this evening that the particles now known as quarks occur in threes. Gell-Mann must have been over the moon when he saw that passage in the Wake! (Don't forget, of course, that Joyce--via the squawking of the gulls--was talking about the triad relationship between Tristan, Isolde, and Mark, in that particular ditty. Richard Wagner would so love that he ended up being a proximate cause of the name of the particle, I'm sure.)

Thanks, Leslie. I especially liked "in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake". Oh so offhandedly...

Finnegans Wake in 15 Minutes and...the last thunderclap!

I've been meaning to mention it for a while now, but a short intro style ebook called Finnegans Wake in Fifteen Minutes, written by Bill Cole Cliett, has been slowly making the rounds with us now. It may seem like stuff you already know if you've been living with this book for awhile, but at least for us, it has reinforced some of our own impressions. Obviously, it doesn't take long to read. I'm also interested in another book of Cliett's called Riverrun to Livvy in which he analyses the first page of the Wake for the many many themes that will come up subsequently.

And yes--we have reached the tenth and final thunderclap (page 424) of the Wake this last session! Which doesn't mean we are anywhere near the end--not by a long shot. Incidentally, Tom and maybe one or two of the others have looked into Eric McLuhan's book The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake
which breaks down each of the thunderclap words into some of their many different meanings. Apparently it all has to do with successive waves of technology. And yes, Eric is Marshall's son.