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I listened to a decent chunk of that Terence McKenna thing last night, but I'd been drinking and felt really rough and could barely keep my eyes open. Ideal given the whole dream angle to the book some might say, but I can't remember any of it. Just his strange, reedy voice.

 

catalog

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The only thing I've listened to about fw that made any sense was one of the RAW talks. Even that was very cryptic. None of the talks will do it, you just have to read it.

I read 20 pages late last night and it was full of Lukes.
 

version

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The only thing I've listened to about fw that made any sense was one of the RAW talks. Even that was very cryptic. None of the talks will do it, you just have to read it.
I just bunged it on because it was too late to watch another film and I could drift off to it.
 

catalog

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"...the deprofundity of multimathematical immaterialites wherebejubers in the pancosmic urge the allimmanenceof that which Itself is Itself Alone exteriorises on this ourherenow... in the higherdimissional selfless allself, theeming narsty meetheeng idoless..."

FW is different to Ulysses in that it really resists quoting... all the lines fall away as you try to get a sense of them and separate the points out.
 

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FW is different to Ulysses in that it really resists quoting... all the lines fall away as you try to get a sense of them and separate the points out.
"Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear."
 

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They are real. He had a thing about Nora farting. There's a good one about him wanting to watch her do a shit in a cupboard or something.
“Fuck me if you can squatting in the closet, with your clothes up, grunting like a young sow doing her dung, and a big fat dirty snaking thing coming slowly out of your backside.”

—December 16, 1909

I think "closet" meant the toilet. So maybe not quite so odd. But still pretty weird obviously.
 

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Found an interesting contemporary review the other day. Apparently Richardson wasn't part of Joyce's circle or anything either, so she didn't have the benefit of Joyce explaining it to her like the people in the ... Exagmination...

Adventure for Readers - Dorothy Richardson (July 1939)

Having defined poetry as “the result of passion recollected in tranquillity” (the opening words here are apologetically italicized because, though their absence makes the definition meaningless, they are almost invariably omitted), Wordsworth goes on to describe what happens when the poet, recalling an occurrence that has stirred him to his depths, concentrates thereon the full force of his imaginative consciousness; how there presently returns, together with the circumstances of the experience, something of the emotion that accompanied it, and how, in virtue of this magnetic stream sustained and deepened by continuous concentration, there comes into being a product this poet names, with scientific accuracy, an “effusion”.

In Wordsworth’s own case, the product can itself become the source of further inspiration, and the presence upon the page of offspring set beneath parent and duly entitled “Effusion on Reading the Above”, affords a unique revelation of the subsidiary working of an emotion tranquilly regathered.

And while this enchanted enchanter and his successors (the greatest of whom, dead e’er his prime, produced for our everlasting adoration, effusions inspired by the reading of Lempriere’s Dictionary) sang to the spirit their immortal ditties, our novelists, following the example of their forebears, those wandering minstrels who told for the delight of the untraveled, brave strange tales from far away, wove stories whose power to enthral resided chiefly in their ability to provide both excitement and suspense; uncertainty as to what, in the pages still to be turned, might befall the hero from whom, all too soon, returning to the “world of everyday”, the reader must regretfully take leave.

With vain, prophetic insight, Goethe protested that action and drama are for the theatre, that the novelist’s business is to keep his hero always and everywhere onlooker rather than participant and, “by one device or another”, to slow up the events of the story so that they may be seen through his eyes and modified by his thought.

The first novelist fully to realise his ideal was Henry James and, by the time James had finished his work, something had happened to English poetry.

How, or just why, or exactly when the shift occurred from concentration upon the various aspects of the sublime and beautiful to what may be called the immediate investigation of reality, it is not easy to say, though a poet-novelist, Richard Church, in his recent address to the Royal Society of Literature, made, one feels, some excellent guesses as to the practical reasons for the changeover. Whereunto may be added the widespread application, for some time past, of Pope’s injunction as to the proper study of mankind.

Whatever the combination of incitements, certain of our poets have now, for decades past, produced short stories rather than lyrics and, in place of the epic and foreshadowed by The Ring and the Book, so very nearly a prose epic, have given us, if we exclude The Testament of Beauty, rearing a nobly defiant head in the last ditch of the epic form, the modern novel.
 

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The proof, if proof be needed, of the transference may be found in a quality this new novel, at its worst as well as at its best, shares with poetry and that is conspicuously absent from the story-telling novel of whatever kind. Opening, just anywhere, its pages, the reader is immediately engrossed. Time and place, and the identity of characters, if any happen to appear, are relatively immaterial. Something may be missed. Incidents may fail of their full effect through ignorance of what has gone before. But the reader does not find himself, as inevitably he would in plunging thus carelessly into the midst of the dramatic novel complete with plot, set scenes, beginning, middle, climax, and curtain, completely at sea. He finds himself within a medium whose close texture, like that of poetry, is everywhere significant and although, when the tapestry hangs complete before his eyes, each potion is seen to enhance the rest and the shape and the intention of the whole grows clear, any single strip may be divorced from its fellows without losing everything of its power and of its meaning.

Particularly is this true of the effusions of Marcel Proust and of James Joyce. For while every novel, taken as a whole, shares with every other species of portrayal the necessity of being a signed self-portrait and might well be subtitled Portrait of the Artist at the Age of- where, in the long line of novelist preceding this two, save, perhaps, in Henry James as represented by the work of his maturity, shall we find another whose signature is clearly inscribed across his every sentence?

Reaching Finnegans Wake we discover its author’s signature not only across each sentence, but upon almost every word. And since, upon the greater number of its pages, nearly every other word is either wholly or partially an improvisation, the would-be reader must pay, in terms of sheer concentration, a tax far higher even than that demanded by Imagist poetry. And be he never so familiar with the author’s earlier work, and in agreement with those who approve his repudiation of the orthodoxies of grammar and syntax, finding, when doubt assails, reassurance in the presence of similar effective and, doubtless, salutary heresies in the practice of the arts other than literature, the heavily-burdened reader of Finnegans Wake, hopefully glissading, upon the first page, down a word of a hundred letters – representing the fall that carried Finnegan to his death – into pathless verbal thickets, may presently find himself weary of struggling from thicket to thicket without a clue, weary of abstruse references that too often appear to be mere displays of erudition, weary of the melange of languages ancient and modern, of regional and class dialects, slangs and catchwords and slogans, puns and nursery rhymes, phrases that are household words phonetically adapted to fresh intentions, usually improper, sometimes side-splitting, often merely facetious, incensed in discovering that these diverse elements, whether standing on their heads or fantastically paraphrased, apparently succeed each other as the sound of one suggests that of the next rather than by any continuity of inward meaning, and are all too frequently interspersed by spontaneous creations recalling those produced by children at a loss, bored to desperation by lack of interest and seeking relief in shouting a single word, repeating it with a change of vowel, with another change and another, striving to outdo themselves until the reach, with terrific emphasis , onomatopoeia precipitating adult interference.

Meanwhile the author, presumably foreseeing the breakdown of even the most faithful Joyceian as likely to occur in the neighbourhood of the hundredth page, comes to the rescue in the name of Anna Livia, invoked by a parody of a well-known prayer (“Annah the Allmaziful, the everliving, Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, un hemmed as it is uneven.”), with a chapter on the allied arts of writing and reading, here and there exceptionally, and most mercifully, explicit, preluded by a list of the hundred and sixty-three names given to Annah’s “untitle mamafesta memorializing the Mosthighest” (including Rockabill Boobu in the Wave Trough, What Jumbo made to Jalice and What Anisette to Him, and I am Older nor the Roges among Whist I Slips and He calls me his Dual of Ayessha), and one day perhaps to be translated, annotated, and issued as a Critique of Pure Literature and an Introduction to the Study of James Joyce.

The impact of this chapter, a fulfilment of the author’s prescription – “Say it with missies, and thus arabesque the page” – is tremendous, its high purpose nothing less than the demand that the novel shall be poetry. A grouped selection of caught missiles and fragments of missiles produces the following relatively coherent mosaic:” About that original hen…the bird in this case was Belinda of the Dorans, a more than quinque-genrarian…and what she was scratching looked like a goodish-sized sheet of letter paper…Well, almost any photoist…will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying…what you get is…a positively grotesque distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values…well, this freely is what must have occurred to our missive….by the sagacity of a lookmelittle likemelong hen…Lead, kindly Fowl!...No, assuredly they are not justified these gloompourers who grouse that letters have never been quite their old selves again since Biddy Doran looked ad literature…Who, at all this marvelling, but will press…to see the vaulting feminine libido…sternly controlled…by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering masculine fist?...To concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document….is…hurtful to sound sense.”

Quite as far goes Mr.Walter de la Mare, who has recently declared that “When poetry is most poetic, when it sounds, that is, and the utterance of them, and when is rhythms rather than the words themselves are its real if cryptic language, any other meaning, however valuable it may be, is only a secondary matter.”

Primarily, then, are we to listen to Finnegans Wake? Not so much to what Joyce says, as to the lovely way he says it, to the rhythms and undulating cadences of the Irish voice, with its capacity to make of every spoken word a sentence with parentheses and to arouse, in almost every English breast, a responsive emotion?
 

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Consulting once more the author’s elucidatory chapter, we find our instructions:” Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities…and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed to happen along. In fact…the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody…” We are urged also to be patient, to avoid “anything like being or becoming out of patience…so holp me Petault, it is not a misaffectual whyacinthinous riot…it only looks like it as damn it…cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while, that by the light of philophosy…things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour.”

Thus encouraged, with this easily decipherable chapter’s rich treasure in hand and perceptions exalted and luminous, the reader presses hopefully onward; only to find his feet once more caught in impenetrable undergrowths, and his head assailed by missiles falling thicker and faster than before, hurled by one obviously in silent ecstasies as he watches the flounderings of his victim. Scanning and re-scanning the lines until their rhythm grows apparent, presently acquiring ease in following cadence and intonation as he goes, the reader again finds himself listening to what appears to be no more than the non-stop patter of an erudite cheapjack. Weariness returns. So what? Weeks of searching for the coalescence and the somebody?

Let us take the author at his word. Really release consciousness from the literary preoccupations and prejudices, from the self-imposed task of searching for superficial sequences in stretches of statement regarded horizontally, or of setting these upright and regarding them pictorially, and plunge, provisionally, here and there; enter the text and look innocently about.

The reward is sheer delight, and the promise, for future readings, of inexhaustible entertainment. Inexhaustible, because so very many fragments of this text now show themselves comparable only to the rider who leapt into the saddle and rose off in all directions. The coalescence and the somebody can wait. Already, pursuing our indiscriminate way, we have discovered coherencies, links between forest and forest, and certain looming forms, have anticipated the possibility of setting down upon a “goodish-sized sheet of letter paper” the skeleton of a long argument. For the present, for a first reading, the “meanderings” of the “masculine fist” are a sufficient repayment. Event a tenth reading will leave some still to be followed up; and many to be continuously excused.

Do we find it possible, having thus “read” the whole and reached the end, a long, lyrically wailing, feminine monologue, to name the passion whose result is this tremendous effusion? Finnegan, the master-mason, and his wife Annie and their friends may symbolise life or literature or what you will that occasionally calls for mourning. For their creator they are food for incessant ironic laughter (possibly a screen for love and solicitude), mitigated only here and there by a touch of wistfulness that is to reach at the end a full note. Shall we remind ourselves that most of our male poets have sounded wistful? And the women? Well, there is Emily Bronte, who, by the way, would have delighted, with reservations, in Finnegans Wake.
 

catalog

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i've nearly finished. Will go back over this thread when I have done and go thru the commentary bits people have posted.

Wonderful paragraph this morning, at the end of part 3:

"How did he bank it up, swank it up, the whaler in the punt, a guinea by a groat, his index on the balance and such wealth into the bargain, with the boguey which he snatched in the baggage coach ahead? Going forth on the prowl, master jackill, under night and creeping back, dog to hide, over morning. Humbly to fall and cheaply to rise, exposition of failures. Through Duffy’s blunders and MacKenna’s insurance for upper ten and lower five the band played on. As one generation tells another. Ofter the fall. First for a change of a seven days license he wandered out of his farmer’s health and so lost his early parishlife. Then (’twas in fenland) occidentally of a sudden, six junelooking flamefaces straggled wild out of their turns through his parsonfired wicket, showing all shapes of striplings in sleepless tights. Promptly whomafter in undated times, very properly a dozen generations anterior to themselves, a main chanced to burst and misflooded his fortunes, wrothing foulplay over his fives’ court and his fine poultryyard wherein were spared a just two of a feather in wading room only. Next, upon due reflotation, up started four hurrigan gales to smithereen his plateglass housewalls and the slate for accounts his keeper was cooking. Then came three boy buglehorners who counterbezzled and crossbugled him. Later on in the same evening two hussites absconded through a breach in his bylaws and left him, the infidels, to pay himself off in kind remembrances. Till, ultimatehim, fell the crowning barleystraw, when an explosium of his distilleries deafadumped all his dry goods to his most favoured sinflute and dropped him, what remains of a heptark, leareyed and letterish, weeping worrybound on his bankrump."

I like the sense of things moving - first this, then that.

and the slippages in concepts "Later on in the same evening two hussites absconded through a breach in his bylaws"
 

catalog

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also liked this snippet from earlier in the chapter:

"mala, hyber pass"

half expecting "dubstep" to make an appearance

1625810110965.jpeg
 

catalog

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Finished it this morning. Woke up at 3.30 couldn't get back to sleep and suddenly thought I've only got 20 pages left.

Quite a sombre and profound ending. It basically comes back to quite easy to follow poetry.

"First we feel, then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes".

Earlier, this caught my eye cos of the return of Mr davis:

"With mata and after please with matamaru and after please stop with matamaruluka and after stop do please with matamarulukajoni".

On the same page, this felt very much like WS Burroughs:

"It is the Chrystanthemlander with his porters of bonzos, pompom my plonkyplonk, the ghariwallahs, moveyovering the cabrattlefield of Slaine."

I like that word "ghariwallahs" = hindi corruption, "car ones" or "car people" but it also made me think of ecstasy tabs. Garys.

So now you all have to read it, so we can talk about it. This would definitely be a brilliant group read actually. A lot more enjoyable than I thought it was going to be.

But I couldn't tell you a word of what it's about.
 
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