Introducing:
Find A Gem's Week or ...
Reading Finnegans Wake at the rate of a Page a Day (what a diary that would be!).
As the idea only occurred to me last weekend and January began on a Friday these quotations are not exactly a week's worth. But you get the idea. Will I have the time, the patience and the discipline to maintain this project? We will see. Anyway, here are some lines that have caught my eye (and ear). Lines that have that energy and delight and surprise.
It's an exercise in leisure: the sort of reading that earnest undergraduate study disallowed. Time regained as one acknowledges it's passing.
And I might as well admit right now - for every one there are hundreds more. Tug one thread and the whole fabric begins to stir. That's the way this book works. (And don't Spellcheck programmes hate Joyce!)
1.
Every evening at lighting up o'clock sharp
2.
the whirl, the flash and the trouble
3.
Tree taken for grafted.
4.
Melodiotiosties in purefusion by the score
5.
Mirrylamb, she was shuffering all the diseasinesses of the unherd of.
6.
With that hehry antlets on him and the bauble-light bulching out of his sockets whiling away she sprankled his allover with her noces of interregnation: How do you do that lack of a lock and pass the poker, please?
7.
All's rice with their whorl!
8.
Still we know how Day the Dyer works, in dims and deeps and dusks and darks.
9.
while there's leaf there's hope
...
2 comments:
Oh I like this.
I read all of Joyce as a teenager and then reread FINNEGANS WAKE several times in my autodidact phase a bit at a time as I sat in "weather towers" on various Air Force bases during my four-year hitch. I haven't read it since (the early '60s) but reread PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST every few years and always end up feeling like it's a new experience. I've tried ULYSSES but found it not so rewarding and gave up. But ever tried rereading WAKE since those early reads. Your posting about WAKE a page at a time makes me want to try that. Haven't read them in decades and don't own them, unfortunately someone took them early on, but John Lennon's IN HIS OWN WRITE and A SPANIARD IN THE WORKS, obviously influenced by Joyce as Lennon admitted but dismissed as lightweight versions I remember as actually being about as great a homage to the master as anyone else has produced.
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