'one joke' and finnegans wake

I'd definitely like to try tackling it. It's about 3 years ago to the day that I last attempted it.

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.