The book took 17 years to write, but there are book clubs that continue to meet, going at a rate of 1 or 2 pages per weekly meeting, and going back to the beginning every time they reach the end.
"The last sentence of the book ends midsentence and then it picks up at the front of the book. It’s cyclical. It never ends."November 14, 2023
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It kind of makes you question the whole concept of Western Civilization. All that, for Finnegan's Wake?
They're basically a gaming guild. They share an esoteric, fantastical passion. The person with all the computer tabs open, chasing down each Joycean obscurity, is like a theorycrafter, telling people which interpretation of the data is the most effective.
I would think, though, that if you aren't a Latin rite Catholic you're never going to get all of Joyce.
The book is just the excuse for the social event. Wine, snacks, and conversation is what really matters.
Joseph Campbell wrote a skeleton key to the book.
I think I’ll stick with Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels.
I believe Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo wrote a story that similarly has "a book that has no beginning or end".
Is it worth it? Is there enough meaning to justify the effort?
I read Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."
Hated it, start to stop, without reservation.
Having read “Portrait of the Artist” as a young man (hee), I was never convinced that his longer books would have anything to say that was worth deciphering.
I always knew that there was someone somewhere who had actually made it through Finnegan's Wake. So now there's proof....I read and re-read The Dubliners. Joyce really could write. His other stuff was over my head. I bet he'll be the last writer whose prose AI improves upon.
I love this:
Person A: I spent 17 years reading and analyzing Finnegans Wake:
Person B: I would think, though, that if you aren't a Latin rite Catholic you're never going to get all of Joyce.
I have now seen into hell.
That sounds like a cool thing to do. Joyce lends himself to this kind of thing because he's bad on plot and interesting characters and good on complexity, symbolism, word play, and interesting stand alone sentences and paragraphs.
I don't think there's ever been such a great writer who was such a bad novelist. He's the anti-story teller.
It’s good that they found each other.
That really is the way to read the Wake. I did plow through it once, but at too fast a rate. Reading it at one page a day is a "retirement project" I'm looking forward to. Campbell's Skeleton Key is handy for keeping your bearings (i.e. what the hell is even happening on this page?), but Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop is the best interpretive book I've read about it.
Gen. Patton: Joyce, you magnificent bastard, we read your book!
How Crazy Etcetera
Ah Joyce. Really once I finished Ulysses I didn't have enough gumption to address FW. We did a Cliff's Notes kinda overview of it in English Lit. It fit into my professor's category of Reflexive Fiction that he was trying to make into a thing, along with selected Borges and other works.
Conspiracy Theory (1997) Mel Gibson Julia Roberts focuses on obsessively buying more copies of Catcher in the Rye
Yikes. I mean, I'm not one tell others how to spend their time, but, my God.
i tried middlemarch got about halfway through out,
Sounds kinda vortexy to me.
We read Portrait of the Artist with the up-and-coming Gary Haupt Ph.D., who jumped out of his seventh-floor hotel room shortly after.
I always hoped that our lack of appreciation for the book didn't contribute to his decision to end it all.
I spent a semester in grad school focused on a page in this dense tedious book.
I had read Ulysses twice in college and twice after, but a couple of years ago I listened to the audiobook read by an Irishman and it was a totally new experience. I'd be interested in hearing Finnegan's Wake, but I don't think there is an unabridged copy.
Dungeons and Dragons for the profoundly immature.
......but I may be repeating myself!!
Probably the oldest book club in the world, with many branches around the world, meets every Saturday morning to read a portion of their Book. Every year, the club completes the reading of the book and starts all over from the beginning. They even celebrate a holiday in honor of the completion and restarting of the reading of the book. This past year, that day was marked by tragedy.
This is the book that never ends
Yes it goes on and on my friends
Some people started reading it not knowing what it was
And they'll continue reading it forever just because
This is the book that never ends
Yes It goes on and on my friends....
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Notice that in the article nobody actually says they enjoyed reading Finnegan's Wake. The author gives them plenty of opportunity to say that but they don't. To the contrary, quite a few gently mention that they didn't get a lot out of it.
Read Hermann Hesse's The "Glass Bead Game" for some insight into what intellectual cultism is about. The Glass Bead Game was published in 1943 as "Das Glasperlenspiel" (sometimes also as "Magister Ludi"). The book is an intricate bildungsroman about humanity's "eternal quest for enlightenment and for synthesis of the intellectual and the active life" I wrote in my notes from one of the lectures. Bottom line: Don't waste your life playing head games. Live. I think Joyce's FW fits in that class of things.
Ulysses was okay, anyway
and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
stumbling on a truth that it's not enough to say yes, but you must say yes to that yes. Sort of a signature effect. It's not a repetition.
The function also of a wedding band next to the ring.
Gerry ffialka
Mr Sam Slote
Peter Quadrino
Sabrina Alonso
Winona Livia Phillabaum
all them at finnegans wakeroo
The man who discovered the quark deserves some respect. A Nobel Prize (in Physics, or at least Literature) would've been nice. Truly we live in a fallen world.
"It’s cyclical. It never ends."
Venice, CA is evidently the Mecca of OCD. The town is fully of them -- complusive weightlifters, complusive "health food" devourers -- any activity you can think of taken to a monomaniacal extreme, so why not these Finnegan's Wake loonies?
What we have here is an interesting reversal of avoidance. Some OCD readers dread not being able to fully understand a given text in all it nuances. If the reader feels he has not acquired that perfect understanding, he will be compelled to read the same material over and over again. Each time he finsihes with what he deems imperfect understanding he not only starts over but his shame and anxiety increases, thus the compulsion beomes more and more desperate.
The dedication to this single work by the Venice group is an example of insane genius. By attempting to understand an incomprehensible work, as OCD readers they are doomed to repeat the experience, which is to be expected, but they aren't nessessarily doomed feel bad about it.
I thought it was about the Quran.
It still pisses me off to see Muslim women in liberal CA walking behind their husbands in Costco wearing burqa lite.
Take your 7th century bullshit elsewhere...
I once bought Joyce's Ulysses in a vain quest to read it over a summer break of my college years. Still don't know where that unread book ended up, just recall missing its presence in my backpack one day shortly after that summer started. Strongly suspect it went into the laundry hamper with some dirty clothes and became an independent entity from that point forward. I think that may be a measure of the greatness of a literary work: can one not read a great book and still be influenced and impressed by it?
My great grandpa O spent quite a long while as a farmer in Venice, CA. He grew artichokes.
I think it’s great when people do deep dives into obscurata (probably not a word). Little grace notes in a flatulent culture.
Perfect city for this type.
I tried reading FW at varsity but gave up after a few pages, plus skimming further into the book. It literally made no sense.
Since then my opinion about FW is that it's Joyce having a huge laugh at all the high-minded literary critics, professors of English and ordinary fans who adored his earlier works and praised him to the skies as a genius, He decided, "Ok then. Let me write some endless, absolutely nonsensical piece of shite and then see if they praise that?".
But thanks for the Quark. From First year theoretical physics to Joyce was trippy.
Just like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" where it begins with "Isn't this where..." and ends with "...we came in?"
"I tried reading FW at varsity but gave up after a few pages, plus skimming further into the book. It literally made no sense.
Since then my opinion about FW is that it's Joyce having a huge laugh at all the high-minded literary critics, professors of English and ordinary fans who adored his earlier works and praised him to the skies as a genius, He decided, "Ok then. Let me write some endless, absolutely nonsensical piece of shite and then see if they praise that?".
I don't think Joyce would have devoted 17 years of his life simply to prank the critics. FW is truly what is meant by the term "a work of genius." A work of genius is not just the best of something (books, music, painting, poetry, etc.) in the same way other examples of the same things are good or excellent. It is a wholly new thing--a unique work of creation, so ahead of or outside of what others have accomplished in the same field that it is often deemed incomprehensible...until it is.
For most, FW remains incomprehensible, and will likely always be so.
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