'one joke' and finnegans wake

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.