FINNEGANS WAKE.

[craner]

What a loser I was back in 2019

No, you were a winner

 

[version]

im reading marcuses attack on norman o brown (love mystified a critique) which happens to be a pretty decent rundown of some of the ideas in finnegans wake (a book brown loved) partiuarly as regards fathers sons and the foundation of the state

Someone sent me this the other day and told me to read it with The Wake in mind:

Massignon calls Sura 18 the apocalypse of Islam. But sura 18 is a résumé, epitome of the whole Koran. The Koran is not like the Bible, historical, running from Genesis to Apocalypse. The Koran is altogether apocalyptic. The Koran backs off from that linear organization of time, revelation, and history which became the backbone of orthodox Christianity and remains the backbone of the Western culture after the death of God. Islam is wholly apocalyptic or eschatological, and its eschatology is not teleology. The moment of decision, the Hour of Judgement, is not reached at the end of a line nor by a predestined cycle of cosmic recurrence; eschatology can break out at any moment. Koran 16:77; "To Allah belong the secrets of the heavens and the earth, and the matter of the Hour is as the twinkling of an eye, or it is nearer still." In fully developed Islamic theology only the moment is real. There is no necessary connection between cause and effect. The world is made up of atomic space-time points, among which the only continuity is the utterly inscrutable will of God, who creates every atomic point anew at every moment. And the Islamic mosque discards the orientation toward time essential to a Christian church: "The space," says Titus Burckhardt, "is as if reabsorbed into the ubiquity of the present moment; it does not beckon the eye in a specific direction; it suggests no tension or antinomy between the here below and the beyond, or between earth and heaven; it possesses all its fullness in every place."

-- The Apocalypse of Islam, Norman O. Brown

 

[sus]

Two very decent books on Lucia, Joyce's daughter:

Brian and Mary Talbot's graphic novel The Dotter of his Eyes
Alex Pheby's Lucia

I'm reading Shloss's Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake now. Can't say how it compares to Pheby's. But it's incredibly compelling. Joanna Newsom's Divers takes a lot of inspiration from Lucia's life, and includes dotter-of-eyes puns

 

[sus]

Apparently Lucia wrote a fucking novel and a ton of poetry and it's nowhere, you can't find any mention of it anywhere, ChatGPT will insist to its death no such text exists. AFAICT the only copy is in French in this $125 80s publication and I'm deciding whether to purchase: https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/James-Joyce-LHerne-Numero-cahier-ete/31568161757/bd