“Dear Hewitt Costello, Equerry, were daylighted with our outing and are looking backwards to our unearly summers.”
book of the day
finnegans wake
It was St. Patrick’s day at the library, but I swear I wasn’t thinking of that at all. I was upstairs shelving in fiction where it gets very heavy at the ends of the “J’s” and the start of the “K’s”, literarily heavy, all James Joyce and Franz Kafka. As I do, compulsively, frequently, and appropriately, I pulled a book off the shelf to take a look. Something about Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, called to me. I think it was the nice old edition we have.
Oh my. This book is splendid! Out amidst the stacks and stacks of books all screaming about their own wonderfulness, but all roughly enough the same with their stories and characters and normal English and all that, I finally open a lauded book and it is MADNESS. I cannot even begin to dare to formulate any real opinion about this thing by looking at the first page. Do you know how rare that is?
You may have read every word James Joyce ever wrote and this is nothing to you. Surely I have opened Ulysses several dozen times and thought how wonderful I might be if I would read such a thing. But today I am here without agenda. There is no way I will read Finnegans Wake. If I didn’t decide to tell you about it I doubt I would have fully worked my way through a whole sentence. A whole sentence… here, let me share a random one with you from the first page of this book:
“Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.”
You can’t see my Google spell check light up like a four alarm fire here, but it has. In fact, I think that sentence just broke my spell check, and more power to it. That spell check and I have never gotten along. And if you’re thinking I only chose that sentence because it was especially fulsome, you are mistaken. I chose it because it did not contain the word
“bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk”
which is a word that I seriously did not want to have to type. The jokes on me though. I typed it anyway.
It wasn’t so bad.
I took Finnegans Wake downstairs with me to admire on my dinner break, or, as it turns out, to blog about, but certainly not to read. But who needs to read it when I’ve already extracted such joy from it?
So, I wish to you, a late happy St Patrick’s day from “out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.”
Well, I may read it just a little…
“Suck it yourself, sugarstick!”