Some Notes on 𝐹𝑖𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑊𝑎𝑘𝑒

returning after many a moon

“Only a fadograph of a yestern scene.” —Finnegans 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. It’s like trying to follow a conversation through a door when you can’t quite make out the exact words...

“...solve and salve life’s robulous rebus”

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 “three quarks for Muster Mark” 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 Chumley’s, my favorite coffeehouse, & a third copy i gave the poet Robert Trammell for his 50th birthday.

“cinnabar with flagrant marl”

Books to recreate the magic of first books...

“But soon we’ll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery”

“...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 one’s readerly attention, much as one does when looking at one of those ‘Magic Eye’ 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...” --Adam Roberts’s introduction to Pervigilium Finnegani

Narrative through a dense distortion field…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 wasn’t written for you, but for one who has gone over. Never to return.