'one joke' and finnegans wake

That being said, I think this gimmickry/style/whathaveyou, sustained over the course of the book, rewards those who dedicate themselves to it for the long haul. The more I immersed myself in it, the more enjoyable it became (notwithstanding new strategies in reading). And I can't think of any other trickery, but given the opacity of the puns, it has to be the dominant theme of FW so that one can acclimate oneself to its rules.

brg: uh, kind of. I'm too tired to look up the names, but he discussed in detail ulysses with someone, and shared a bit about the wake and intended to share much more (more on a par with how much he revealed about ulysses), but died before he could do so.

I enjoyed it in fragments. Some of it can be quite funny ("unhemmed as it is uneven", but it's tough going much of the time.

*I used to read sit in back of class reading it during Geometry class, after it had already become clear I was going to flunk it. Mind you, I would have been better off applying myself to Geometry.

Budgen died in 1971. He certainly wasn't some kind of sole recipient of the one true secret about either book. JJ did feed information to various people, but I don't think it's true to say that there's a fact that he kept from us that, if we had it, would clarify everything. We ('we'?) already know a great deal about both books, though FW does remain darker than U.

Josh: I think your question could also be approached in terms of 'style'. Ulysses is obviously not a one-trick pony - partly because it's such a many-styled book, and different things are at stake and different pleasures available in each case. FW, on the other hand, can look from a distance rather uniform in style. If it felt less uniform I'd like it more warmly than I do. But those Wakeans who love it so much would probably maintain that its style was far from uniform -- which suggests to me that this is indeed a key aspect of the question you're trying to raise.

Possibly the most clear-yet-rigorous accounts of 'what the gimmick is [gimmicks are]' are those offered by Derek Attridge, eg. in Peculiar Language (1988) and Joyce Effects (2000).

Never read much on the Wake, so this is a start:

The LRB should give this guy some space, from here:

"Finnegans Wake is based on the structure of the zodiac, the zodiac signs being derived from the nature of numbers and a corresponding geometric sequence."

why on earth do i need to shell out $410 for a hardcover copy of this

you don't.

If you find $410 burning a hole in your pocket, there may be worse things to fling it away upon. Otherwise, what jed said.

because art is dead

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6a/1974Jeopardy!Art1.jpg
RIP

what a fantastic piece of work this is.

i was thinking of reading this over spring break

also the cantos

nv, thanks for ruining any kind of productivity i had planned for this afternoon! looks great, thx

nice. making me want to finish the fcker.

i want a counterpart to those two to read, ideally something like 'pilgrimage' w/o my actually having to read 'pilgrimage'

the site looks good but a lot of its 'glosses' appear to be straight definitions of well-known words that were already appearing in FW in unaltered, Standard English form.

yes some of the glosses feel unnecessary, am not sure whether the annotator feels those words are archaic or peculiar to British usage

Haha, the pinefox otm

https://twitter.com/finnegansreader

^Shortly after finding the twitter I found a really lovely looking paperbk on Viking Press just yesterday (although it has a 'embodying all author's corrections' which did make me laugh) so now I have a copy.

Funny how that twitter account makes the wake an everyday thing.

I have at least _looked_ at every page of Ulysses, and more than half of the pages in FW. But I don't think any of Joyce is just one joke, and even when Joyce is joking I doubt he's ever "just" joking.

I suspect the Joycean impulse is more like: This be the jokeyjoke that hath occurred to me whan I found meself besat on this ineluctable shore-rock whilst thinkin this ineluctable series of thoughts. Begob and videlicet, yr man can't be expected to be shiftin out which bits are important from which bits arrrent.

This is one strain of high modernism: The jokes stay, and the Latin stays, as stay the dhrinkin and the fookin. If anything is omitted, so is the magic, which is contained in the weft of the thoughts recorded in the text. Perhaps Twitter is as good as any a way to read that kind of collage.

Nabokov is a different creature. Not so sloppy, but also not so warm. There's plenty of fun in Pale Fire, but all of it was put there intentionally, as a chisel-mark by a meticulous sculptor.

http://www.waywordsandmeansigns.com/

Earwicker, that patternmind, that
paradigmatic ear, receptoretentive as his of Dionysius, longsuffer-
ing although whitening under restraint in the sititout corner of
his conservatory, behind faminebuilt walls, his thermos flask and
ripidian flabel by his side and a walrus whiskerbristle for a tusk-
pick, compiled, while he mourned the flight of his wild guineese,
a long list (now feared in part lost) to be kept on file of all abusive
names he was called (we have been compelled for the rejoicement
of foinne loidies ind the humours of Milltown etcetera by Joseph-
ine Brewster in the collision known as Contrastations with Inker-
mann and so on and sononward, lacies in loo water, flee, celestials,
one clean turv): Firstnighter, Informer, Old Fruit, Yellow Whigger,
Wheatears, Goldy Geit, Bogside Beauty, Yass We've Had His
Badannas, York's Porker, Funnyface, At Baggotty's Bend He
Bumped, Grease with the Butter, Opendoor Ospices, Cainandabler,
Ireland's Eighth Wonderful Wonder, Beat My Price, Godsoilman,
Moonface the Murderer, Hoary Hairy Hoax, Midnight Sunburst,
Remove that Bible, Hebdromadary Publocation, Tummer the Lame
the Tyrannous, Blau Clay, Tight before Teatime, Read Your
Pantojoke, Acoustic Disturbance, Thinks He's Gobblasst the Good
Dook of Ourguile, W.D.'s Grace, Gibbering Bayamouth of Dublin,
His Farther was a Mundzucker and She had him in a Growler,
Burnham and Bailey, Artist, Unworthy of the Homely Protestant
Religion, Terry Cotter, You're Welcome to Waterfood, signed the
Ribbonmen, Lobsterpot Lardling, All for Arthur of this Town,
Hooshed the Cat from the Bacon, Leathertogs Donald, The Ace
and Deuce of Paupering, O'Reilly's Delights to Kiss the Man
behind the Borrel, Magogagog, Swad Puddlefoot, Gouty Ghibeline,
Loose Luther, Hatches Cocks' Eggs, Muddle the Plan, Luck before
Wedlock, I Divorce Thee Husband, Tanner and a Make, Go to
Hellena or Come to Connies, Piobald Puffpuff His Bride, Purged
out of Burke's, He's None of Me Causin, Barebarean, Peculiar
Person, Grunt Owl's Facktotem, Twelve Months Aristocrat,
Lycanthrope, Flunkey Beadle Vamps the Tune Letting on He's
Loney, Thunder and Turf Married into Clandorf, Left Boot Sent
on Approval, Cumberer of Lord's Holy Ground, Stodge Arschmann,
Awnt Yuke, Tommy Furlong's Pet Plagues, Archdukon Cabbanger,
Last Past the Post, Kennealey Won't Tell Thee off Nancy's Gown,
Scuttle to Cover, Salary Grab, Andy Mac Noon in Annie's Room,
Awl Out, Twitchbratschballs, Bombard Street Bester, Sublime
Porter, A Ban for Le King of the Burgaans and a Bom for Ye Sur
of all the Ruttledges, O'Phelim's Cutprice, And at Number Wan
Wan Wan, What He Done to Castlecostello, Sleeps with Feathers
end Ropes, It is Known who Sold Horace the Rattler, Enclosed
find the Sons of Fingal, Swayed in his Falling, Wants a Wife and
Forty of Them, Let Him Do the Fair, Apeegeequanee Chimmuck,
Plowp Goes his Whastle, Ruin of the Small Trader, He — —
Milkinghoneybeaverbrooker, Vee was a Vindner, Sower Rapes,
Armenian Atrocity, Sickfish Bellyup, Edomite, — 'Man Devoyd of
the Commoner Characteristics of an Irish Nature, Bad Humborg,
Hraabhraab, Coocoohandler, Dirt, Miching Daddy, Born Burst Feet
Foremost, Woolworth's Worst, Easyathic Phallusaphist, Guiltey-
pig's Bastard, Fast in the Barrel, Boose in the Bed, Mister Fatmate,
In Custody of the Polis, Boawwll's Alocutionist, Deposed, but anar-
chistically respectsful of the liberties of the noninvasive individual,
did not respond a solitary wedgeword beyond such sedentarity,
though it was as easy as kissanywhere for the passive resistant in
the booth he was in to reach for the hello gripes and ring up Kim-
mage Outer 17.67, because, as the fundamentalist explained, when
at last shocked into speech, touchin his woundid feelins in the
fuchsiar the dominican mission for the sowsealist potty was on at
the time and he thought the rowmish devowtion known as the
howly rowsary might reeform ihm, Gonn.

#poll

"Miching Daddy" has always intrigued me as something in the dark, love the musical ones like "Flunkey Beadle Vamps the Tune Letting on He's Loney"

take any one of the atoms of the book out like this and look at it is the best argument for how wonderful the whole is

Yes. I follow the twitter account and seeing that on the timeline - mostly ignore it but every now and then something like this comes up and its perfect. Turning out to be a good way to skim thru.

I want this list to be read by Ms Doyle

That's so weird, I randomly opened it & read that exact passage the other day

reading that is very dispiriting if you've just finished your own experimental novel

There was a brief period when I felt like the Wake exhausted the possibilities for fiction after it but no way, if anything it celebrates the exhaustlessness of language

I never feel like that with Joyce at all, and FW isn't really fiction.

That passage is more like a Rabelasian feast.

pynchon's disgusting candy drill + alliterative feast at either end of gravity's rainbow were just standing on these shoulders huh

Is that the only book you've read?

yeah! pretty impressive isn't it

maybe you should get out more. Sun is shining.

try and find a passage from FW that evinces that sentiment idk

maybe you should: 2nd book for you to read.

A third: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-One-Day-Adventures-Britpop-ebook/dp/B008EMAL4G/ref=la_B001H6QKQ4_1_1/278-3832172-6854343?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461239689&sr=1-1

I'm in

To be read alongside Tōru Takemitsu's riverrun and a way a lone.

xxp cant believe you’ve never heard this extremely auld wan from Dublin phrase!

But yeah, I’m in!

Altho this online annotated edition is coming along nicely http://finwake.com/01/01.htm there's something distracting to me in superabundant footnotes, even tho they add thoughts and knowledge i didn't possess already

Some contemporaneous secondary reading material:

https://zehfilardo.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/our-exagmination-round-his-factification-for-incamination-of-work-in-progress-searcheable.pdf

(Work in Progress was Finnegans Wake's working title).

i love Takemitsu so yes yes

I feel like I'm ready for it, but always have 5 or 6 history books lined up on my kindle, and Shalamov was the author that taught me most that fictional worlds can be much more truthful than historical accounts by hardbrained professors. Sorry getting dizzy spells after too much coffee.

I'm in as well!

cuppa scald and trot a mouse well by god lads thats just everyday talk tbh

But deems, you are Finnegan.

if it really was scalding all the alcohol would be burnt away:(

No such thing as skalding without mulled wine.

im blissfully ignorant as to whether being finnegan is a good or bad thing and shall remain so

Good not bad imho.

I mean, he's a primordial giant and pub owner.

I gave this account a follow for a while. Loved the annotations as she read the thing:

Joyce's advice on goodbye #finnshotel pic.twitter.com/XOos80Uduq

— Susie Lopez (@LookUpYoga) October 30, 2017

a) one of the knottiest knots i find in reading FW is the feeling that each sentence and obv sometimes each word carries a semantic level informed by knowing the whole book - discovering the book is always partially predicated on rediscovering it or anticipating what you might be discovering

b) i got no idea what form a reading group might take or how we might proceed - but those aren't reasons not to do it

c) yeah there's always other books on the go. I'm only just beyond paddling in The Tale of Genji atm, amongs other sidetracks and a permanent sense of distraction and half-arsing everything. But there's probably always time to put the knitting down and wonder thru FW again, especially in company.

d) i had a (d) about the ghost story of the narrator of The Bell Jar getting lost and crazy in the shallow end of FW but i'm fucked if i can remember what it was, i'm kind of at work lol

e) maybe we should just follow the Twitter reader more diligently on here for a while and pull at the threads it throws up

How far in is the twitter?

Brb, going to remedy my ailing German and Italian, pick up proper Ancient Greek and Latin then dabble in Irish Gaelic, Norwegian and Old English before reattempting to read the whole thing, bemoaning my lack of Sanskrit and Hebrew all the while.

From my infrequent use of Twitter i think the account i follow tosses up excerpts at random, not necessarily reading from "beginning" to "end"

I mean that's not inappropriate

But another aspect of that knot i was talking about is that reading FW as atomised chunks feels as wrong as it's right, it's doing the book a disservice to imagine it's not moving or goung anywhere even if where it goes is an endless return

That account does do it from beginning to end, one passage at 10 min intervals.

If you want to know where it is just Google the passage.

ah right. Good. riverrun.

Delmore Schwartz’s cat

I was wacthing a thing on Joyce on the i-Player last night (presented by Angelica Houston, obv.). No-one on it really speaks up for FW.

Huston presumably got the gig cause of the dead

Yes and it was bad bad. Only liked Frank McGuiness' comments iirc

b) i got no idea what form a reading group might take or how we might proceed - but those aren't reasons not to do it

We could probably do Book 1 on a section by section basis. That'll be untenable later on but it's a way to start.

From googling it seems the twitterfeed is on page 458. Anyone have any thoughts on that page?

From Chapter 3, Episode II. Good episode. With the crackling and the chawing and all that.

If you’ve been enjoying the #Bloomsday Words & Music on @BBCRadio3 this afternoon, listen out for our programme on Tuesday: we get caught up in Finnegans Wake. @DrMatthewSweet with Eimear McBride @FaberBooks, @FinnFordham @NellLybeck https://t.co/gJlhOOe1bs

— BBC Free Thinking (@BBCFreeThinking) June 16, 2019

Listening to this last night

Very nice account of a reader's journey with it.

https://lithub.com/finnegans-wake-at-80-in-defense-of-the-difficult/

An excellent piece on Wake reading as communal act, and also as almost a cult-like dimension of it:

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/on-finishing-finnegans-wake/

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/breaking-james-joyce/

Her other essay weaves her life with Joyce's (and also shows that the 27 year reading of FW was roughly 13 years spent on 2/3 of it!) It could be too much for anyone but her but I really liked it.

I saw the movie (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059179/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0). I needed the subtitles, but I think I got all the allusions.

"One joke" could be a poorly-told knock-knock joke, or it could be a masterful telling of "The Aristocrats." I haven't tried to read FW, but I assume it's towards the Aristocrats end of this spectrum.

Hoping to actually crack it open next month. To begin with, 10 pages a day.

This Chapter by Chapter outline is useful:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xcWkYWL03CEC&lpg=PP1&dq=Oxford+World%27s+Classics+edition+of+Finnegans+Wake&pg=PR35&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

Will look for PDF of it or a web friendly version.

web-friendly version = the twitter finnenganswakebot (sadly long defunct)

there is a bsky version but it only has nine entries

Sorry I meant a PDF/web version of the chapeter outline. Feel like I need that more than having puns being explained to me.

I once had a really old copy given to me by an old English prof who used the copy in a class he took on the novel taught by Marshall McLuhan. I think it disintegrated or something.

Started it this week and I think I will finish it in 2/3 weeks.

Its fine to just read the words with that outline I posted to keep your head above water. Its very funny in that low-level laughter way. Laughing at the sounds is what keeps me turning the pages. Do wonder if that will hold.

A lot of it is words just sorta misspelt, or broken down.

I talked to a professor who specializes in FW once and admitted that I found the book pretty intimidating. He snorted and said “be afraid! I’ve spent 50 years programming myself to read that book”

Was not the response I was hoping for tbh

I think if you love music -- and you take music to be a set of sounds -- then that's a way of approaching it cold.

But yes if you want to understand it like a novel with plot, character, psychology you may need secondary sources and so on to get going.

Woke up today and I think I forgot how to read pic.twitter.com/cKacbsRrjR

— Travel Through Stories (@travelstoriesyt) April 1, 2025

writing that <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< reading that

reading should be more involved than writing tbh

maybe the translator should accept some of the blame

Working my way through Spenser's Faerie Queene, and a lot of it's multilayered meaning, archaic spelling/punning, and sing song style reminds me of the Wake.

Interesting...

The book and the page I posted about does lack the music of the Wake but it was inspired by it. Will read it but I suppose it must've been a few orders of magnitude more of a challenge than the usual.

Mans not hot. https://t.co/m6qPKqKV50 pic.twitter.com/2CuHaor0VP

— Kevín (@KevOnStage) April 13, 2025