Some Notes on πΉππππππππ ππππ
returning after many a moon
βOnly a fadograph of a yestern scene.β βFinnegans Wake
Started rereading Finnegans Wake, a couple pages a day of that metagrobolizing conpundium or smorgascalembourg. I was so young the first time (high school?), i figured i would recognize more of the infused foreign words this time around. Itβs like trying to follow a conversation through a door when you canβt quite make out the exact words...
β...solve and salve lifeβs robulous rebusβ
With Finnegans Wake my memory is also jogged. Why did i start reading it? I was investigating the quark model, in subatomic physics, & heard that they got the name from βthree quarks for Muster Markβ in FW. So i wanted to see for myself. This particular edition, with a gray & maroon dust jacket, also means something. There were, for whatever reason, several copies of it at Half Price Books at a decent price; one i bought for myself (my first reading of it was as a library book if you can believe it-- i kept renewing my checkout all summer), one i donated to the free library at Chumleyβs, my favorite coffeehouse, & a third copy i gave the poet Robert Trammell for his 50th birthday.
βcinnabar with flagrant marlβ
Books to recreate the magic of first books...
βBut soon weβll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumperyβ
β...there is another way of handling the novel, with a readerly focus not on obstruction but on flow. To read Finnegans Wake by, as it were, defocusing oneβs readerly attention, much as one does when looking at one of those βMagic Eyeβ pictures that used to be so popular ten years ago or so. Read after this fashion the novel moves considerably more rapidly, with its organising principle not one of compacted verbal pointillisme but rather of drunkenness, where words gets slurred and people utter unintentional malapropisms and yet still get broadly understood...β --Adam Robertsβs introduction to Pervigilium Finnegani
Narrative through a dense distortion fieldβ¦texture as message, as weather. Meaning as residue, as seed. A suspicion of language. Crossroads everywhere. Agency as metaphor. We name the local with universal words.
A frieze of mostly incoherent shapes, defaced as if by time. A picture of history you can hold in your hand. Only partly decipherable, as intended. It wasnβt written for you, but for one who has gone over. Never to return.


For my last re-reading, in 2022, I bought my first audiobook: Barry McGovern's reading of the complete Wake. Even with frequent pausing for (personal) re-reads of the text, it worked splendidly to keep me moving forward instead of deep-diving into the bottomless turf never to surface again.