I should make that the new official slogan of the blog.  It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake, one of the books I recently read. FICTION The Sword in the Stone (1938), T. H. White – I for some reason did not read this as a youth.  It is wonderful, full of anachronism and parody and outstanding British nature writing in the tradition of Gilber White (mentioned in the novel) and Richard Jefferies.  It turns out that the most important thing in the education of a king is to know what it is like to be a fish. Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce – begin Here and Continue to the End. The Big Clock (1946), Kenneth Fearing – A jittery Whitmanian poet of the 1920s and 1930s finally cashes in with a jittery multi-voiced semi-mystery.  The “detective” is the staff of the equivalent of Time Inc., making the killer Henry Luce.  The detective is deliberately not trying to solve the mystery.  The single best part is narrated by a cranky painter.  Odd, odd book, but I see why it survives. The Mountain Lion (1947), Jean Stafford – A Boston writer, but this sad descendent of What Maise Knew is set in California and on a Colorado cattle ranch. The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Samuel R. Delaney – His first novel, clumsily constructed but stuffed with imaginative conceits.  I’d never read Delaney. God's Country (1994), Percival Everett – Almost every Everett novel and short story I have read has a similar voice and narrator, a PhD with a savior complex.  James in James does not have a PhD, but might as well.  In this Western, however, Everett’s narrator is an idiot and another, non-narrating character fills the usual role, which is a lot of fun.  Thirty years older, God’s Country is a companion novel to James (2024).  I urge anyone interested to read them together.  It is time to get the James backlash going.  I have seen a couple of interviews where Everett himself seems to be trying to get the backlash going, but it has not worked yet.  I have read eleven of Everett’s books now and hope to read many more.  James is the worst one! POETRY Blues in Stereo (1921-7), Langston Hughes – It is like a gift book, a pointlessly tiny volume that could and should be expanded to include all of The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), both of which are in public domain, which seems to be the limiting concept.  But for some reason this book does include the pieces of a never-realized collaboration with Duke Ellington that is a fantasy refraction of The Big Sea (1940), Hughes’s first memoir.  I do not think the theater piece has been published before.  Worth seeing. Collected Poems (1940), Kenneth Fearing – High-energy Whitman mixed with advertising=speak and business lingo and gangsters.  So sometimes it’s kitsch. Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) & Autumn Sequel (1953) & Visitations (1957), Louis MacNeice Chord of Light (1956) & Hermes, Dog and Star (1957), Zbigniew Herbert What Rough Beasts (2021), Leslie Moore – An earlier book by a Maine poet and artist I read a year ago.  She specializes in prints, and poems, about birds and other animals.  About an hour after reading her poem about grackles invading her yard and establishing a grackledom the grackles invaded my yard and ruled for several days.  That was enjoyable. MISCELLANEOUS Lexington and Concord: The Battle Heard Round the World (2018), George C. Daughan – Preparation for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which is another thing I did in April.  Here I am at the Concord parade, the library in the background. Sound May Be Seen (2025), Margaret Watts Hughes Lecture on Radium (2025), Loie Fuller No Title (2025), Richard Foreman – Three little collectible conceptual art books.  I will just point you to the website.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Peregrinação de Fernão Mendes Pinto: Aventuras extraordinárias dum português no Oriente (The Pilgrimage of Fernão Mendes Pinto: Extraordinary Adventures of a Portuguese Man in the Orient, 1614), Fernão Mendes Pinto – The real book is a 900-page semi-true account of a Portuguese wanderer in the 16th century Far East who, in the most famous episode, joins up with a patriotic privateer, or a bloodthirsty pirate.  The book I read is a rewritten abridgement for Portuguese 9th graders.  How I wish I knew how it was taught.  La femme partagée (The Shared Woman, 1929), Franz Hellens La Cité de l'indicible peur (The City of Unspeakable Fear, 1943), Jean Ray – I plan to write a bit about these two novels, my excursion to Belgium. Navegações (1983), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

More keys.  As Anna Livia Plurabelle says or thinks or dreams at the very end of Finnegans Wake, “The keys to.”  She is falling asleep so she unfortunately does not finish the sentence.  Some keys to the Wake: languages, literature, and themes. Languages In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Menard considers – rejects, but still, considers – the idea of really understanding Don Quixote by recreating the experiences of Cervantes: learning his language, reading the books he read, getting captured by pirates, and so on.  I have the impression that some Joyceans, some Wakeists, have tried to do this, to learn all of Joyce's languages and every detail about Dublin and acquire an Irish Jesuit education of the 1890s.  Joyce was a cognitively unusual person, but perhaps this is possible collectively.  This researcher tracks down the Finnish references, that one egghausts the egg theme.  Who here knows Romansh?  Joyce knew Romansh, and like everything he knew it is in Finnegans Wake. I read Ulysses and Joyce’s earlier books as an undergraduate but only poked at Finnegans Wake.  I realized that among other limits my languages were inadequate.  But since then I have learned French (hugely helpful) and to some degree Portuguese (minimally helpful) and picked up at least some words in German and a few other languages.  Gaelic and that Jesuit Latin are what I really needed.  But still: The older sisars (Tyrants, regicide is too good for you!) become unbeurrable from age… (162) Beurre is butter and fromage is cheese, and Butter and Cheese are Brutus and Cassisus, the regicides of “sisar.”  Beurre and fromage are common French words, menu words, but thirty-five years ago I did not know them.  The joke in the line was unseeable.  And I now know that in German cheese is Käse which gets me to Cheesey Cassius again.  And then I look up the Latin for cheese, which is caseus, which means this is not even Joyce’s joke, but something as old as, well, whenever schoolboys started learning Roman history and Latin at the same time.  Joyce is just spinning it out.  Large chunks of Finnegans Wake are just Joyce having his fun. He is almonthst on the kiep fief by here, is Comestipple Sacksoun, be it junipery or febrewery, marracks or alebrill or the ramping riots of pouriose and froriose.  (15-6) I think I knew what arrack was, and I think I knew that the French Revolutionists had given the months goofy new names – Showery and Flowery – so this boozy line I would have gotten.  Maybe. Literature Near the beginning of Chapter V of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “[t]he rainladen trees” are making young Stephen Dedalus think “as always” (!) of “the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann,” from which he passes to “the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman” and then on to Cavalcanti, Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Aristotle, Aquinas, and “the Elizabethans.”  I first read this passage when I was 18, in this class; Hauptmann, Newman, Cavalcanti, Jonson, and maybe even Ibsen might as well have been fictional.  I’d never heard of them.  Now, decades later, I’ve read multiple works by all of them, and Dedalus’s intellectual and artistic world is clear to me. We read more and learn more.  I’ve read Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725), which helped, although my big surprise was how much of the literary stuff of the Wake was childhood reading: Lewis Carroll and Huckleberry Finn; Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.  Lots of mentions of Swiftiana – Yahoos and Houyhnhnms; Stella and A Tale of a Tub.  Plenty of other Anglo-Irish writers, Sterne and Addison and Shaw.  Look, “ghuest  of innation” (414), it’s Frank O’Connor for some reason.  Swift and Sterne and Carroll are kindred spirits to Finnegans Wake but otherwise I do not understand how Joyce uses these references.  If I tracked down the mentions of Swift would a pattern emerge? I wonder how fair Joyce plays.  The literary references I can see are to titles, characters, and the most famous quotations: where the bus stops there shop I (540) The Tempest for some reason.  Now, looking at the page, I suspect everything of being a parody of a quotation I do not recognize.  And I just saw, looking at that page, a reference to Henry Fielding I missed, “Jonathans, wild and great.”  And a reference to Daniel Defoe in the previous line. Themes Or motifs, of the kind I associate with Flaubert.  Not that horses or cigars are symbols, but work through the horse theme or the cigar theme in Madame Bovary and interesting patterns appear, deliberate creations of Flaubert.  Ulysses has plenty of this kind of thing, but Finnegans Wake is so overwhelming that I do  not know how to apply the method. He was poached on in that eggdentical spot.  (16) The eggs are everywhere.  Humpty Dumpty first appears on the first page, as part of poor Finnegan’s fall from the ladder, “the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends… in quest of his tumptytumtoes” (3), the last on the last page, “humbly dumbly” (628).  The eggs have a mythic, symbolic meaning, as part of the cyclical story of the children reborn as the parents.  Humpty Dumpty is put back together in Joyce’s world.  This symbolic level is so clear as to be banal.  So what else is going on?  The eggs are everywhere. I see how this book becomes a hobby for some readers.  Gives you a lot to do if you want.  Of course at this point it is all catalogued and interpreted.  Someone else has compiled the concordance.  I can just look up the eggs and Swifts and Romansh.  Is that more fun or less?

I am too tired to write about Finnegans Wake which is a good state for writing about this dream novel where characters keep falling asleep.  “Dream” is conventional wisdom but I will note that no part of the book resembles any dream I have ever experienced or read about, although I am willing to believe that James Joyce’s dreams were mostly massive blocks of multilingual puns. A dream of favours, a favourable dream.  They know how they believe that they believe that they know.  Wherefore they wail.  (470) Who is the dreamer, Alice or the Red King, or both?  Both, at the very least both. Two dreamyums in one dromium?  Yes and no error.  And both as like as a duel of lentils?  Peacisely.  (89) Imagine the puns Joyce did not include. I accept the dream but reject the idea that since Ulysses is a day then Finnegans Wake is a night.  Ulysses is also a night.  A “day” includes a period of time called “night.”  Did these people not read the “Nighttown” chapter of Ulysses? Establishing time is actually not so high on the list of the difficulties of Finnegans Wake.  Joyce minimizes and disperses the usual novelistic clues about setting, situation, and narrators.  I am used to being patient about these things, but hoo boy.  In the first chapter, for example, which I am pretty sure is in a Dublin pub where mourners are drinking and drinkers are mourning the death of “freeman’s maurer” (6, bricklayer, wall builder) Finnegan, the speaker could plausibly be one extremely voluble drunk or a multitude of voices.  No idea. The action is so obscure that plot summary is speculation.  The plot exists on multiple levels, and I had trouble establishing myself in one.  I was most comfortable at the mythic level, where characters are hills and rivers or gods enacting a cycle of “the commodius vicus of recirculation” (3).  The domestic, Dublin level, which in some ways is the most ordinarily novel-like, was extremely difficult, difficult just to figure out what the heck is supposed to be happening on any given page.  I do have an idea about what HCE did in the park that led to the gossip about him.  I guess that is the domestic plot? The great shift Joyce makes takes that almost moves the book out of the genre of the novel is that the characters are barely characters.  They have symbolic and allegorical functions often of real richness, but do not have personalities.  They are not people.  Ulysses for all of its fuss and fireworks, is full of people, one of whom is among the greats of fiction.  In the usual, and some unusual, novelistic ways, I know Leopold Bloom, which is not true of any of the Finnegans Wake puppets. This is a complaint.  It is a shame to see a master artist give up something he is so good at, whatever else he might be doing. There is a near exception that has a parallel in Molly Bloom's chapter in Ulysses.  The dipper into Finnegans Wake will surely read the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter, I.8, with the two riverside washwomen who turn into a stone and a tree while discussing the novel’s principle female figure.  In the last nine pages, in a single paragraph, Anna for the first time (??? – everything I say about this book should be buried in question marks) speaks or dreams in her own voice, a passage of unusual poetic beauty.  On the last page Anna is turning into a river but also falling asleep: My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! This is the ending from The Tempest, from One Hundred Years of Solitude and Little, Big, the ending where we come to the last page of the book.  That “toy fair” was once said to Joyce by his infant son.  Joyce is rarely adorable. Then we get the last reference to Humpty Dumpty, mirroring the one on the first page, then the gulls and “Finn, again!” and we are ready to turn back to the first page perhaps after a good night's sleep. Tomorrow I will poke around the remains of Humpty Dumpty.

Over the last month I read Finnegans Wake (1939).  I first read some bits of it in college, in a Norton Anthology of British Literature, and other, although mostly the same, bits occasionally, mostly to remind myself what they looked like.  Anyone interested in literature should sometime read a few pages just to see what it looks like.  Last year I became curious about how readers saw Joyce’s text while it was appearing in various magazines as Work in Progress.  Did I miss the book that collects and discusses these first pieces?  Enough are in the public domain now to make an interesting book.  Admittedly at some point the map becomes the territory, and printing all of Work in Progress is just publishing Finnegans Wake in a screwy order. Speaking of which, this is going to be a true ramble.  I read without a key or a guide, although I certainly looked up plenty of things.  Finnegans Wake is a book for people who like to look things up.  But I mostly just read it, or at least looked at it.  I looked at every word, mostly in order. Now, kapnimancy and infusionism may both fit as tight as two trivets but while we in our wee free state, holding to that prestatute in our charter, may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far deciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily independence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness. (117-8) The bold is mine, a desperate attempt to extract meaning from mishmash but the words are Joyce’s.  He knows how this looks.  And this is, as Finnegans Wake goes, almost a plain old sentence.  I was always amused when a plain old sentence appeared, like: But the strangest thing happened.  (470) Or: All the world loves a big gleaming jelly.  (274) Or: That is more than I can fix, for the teom bihan, anyway.  So let I and you now kindly drop that, angryman!  That’s not French pastry.  You can take it from me.  (412) A genuine key to Finnegans Wake is that much of the text is on one level speech, so hearing it in the voice of your favorite ranting Irishman solves a number of problems; “teom bihan” becomes easy enough.  I used the voice of the great Jinx Lennon (explore widely, but be warned that Jinx is noisy).  It helped to make him drunker and more into wordplay.  Puns, the puns, the endless puns. Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain!  Comeday morm and, O you’re vine!  Sendday’s eve and, ah, you’re vinegar!  Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again! And this with poor Finnegan stretched out dead right in front of this joker.  Although he does get better.  This passage is a just example of Joyce’s bad habit of working through every combination, which I may complain about more later, but my question here is: Should, and I mean this as an ethical question, should the pun be the fundamental principle of prose writing? (technologically, let me say, the appetizing entry of this subject on a fool chest of vialds is plumply pudding the carp before doevre hors) (164) I mean, that is what I call a groaner.  This is the section where Brutus and Cassius assassinate Caesar but have been turned into Butter and Cheese, so there are food puns everywhere.  Multilingual food puns.  Omnilingual everything puns. Somewhere I remember Anthony Burgess writing that he found a good laugh on every page of Finnegans Wake.  My rate was not so high.  I got a good laugh here: … and by all means, after a good ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff's flung over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, stricly between ourselves, there is a limit to all things so this will never do.  (119) I sound like I am complaining.  Yes and no.  Let’s ramble for another couple of days.  I may eventually draw near a point.