I am trying to read 'Finnegans Wake'

I always feel there are some books or some authors that I "should" be reading, but nibbling away at the book list in my head is an endless process. Over the last year or two I finally read a couple of Thomas Pynchon books (one of them, Vineland, for the reading group here) and now I am reading Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, a work I have never attempted before. 

After I did a bit of background reading on the Internet, I tried the first chapter but felt utterly lost. Oz Fritz had an extra copy of the book A Reader's Guide to 'Finnegans Wake' by William  York Tindall, and he kindly sent it to me. It has been very useful. 

I got through the first chapter switching back and forth every few pages between the two books, but it seemed like a clumsy and unsatisfactory way to read a book. For the second chapter of the Wake, I tried reading Tindall's chapter first, then reading the Wake chapter all the way through. I found that way I (more or less) felt like I knew what was going on and I also could relax and enjoy the puns. So I will see if that approach works for the subsequent chapters.

I participated in Free Comic Book Day yesterday and picked out four titles. I also  finished The Infinite Mistress by D. Scott Apel. I think it is fair to say I try to read a wide variety of books. 

Back in Dublin with Peter Quadrino

 

Sandycove, Dublin. Peter Quadrino photo

In  new post for his Finnegans, Wake! blog, Peter Quadrino posts "So This is Dyoublong? Living Inside the World of the Wake: Part 3," explaining, "Continuing my American-spectator-in-Ireland, wandering psychogeographical exploration of Finnegans Wake and relevant sites, jumping around the map of Dublin and the Emerald Isle, recalling my time staying there a few years back."

Peter has lots of photo illustrations. If you want to read the posts in order, here is part one, and here is part two. 

Maybe Night followup: New recording, new reading groups

 The video recording of the Maybe Night panel discussion of Finnegans Wake is now available, above. Among the folks I know from the blog are Bobby Campbell, Eric Wagner, Peter Quadrino and Oz Fritz, so I know RAW fans are well represented. Also present at the beginning of the video are Igor Belokrinitsky, Lorenzo Peyrani, Alexander Logvinenko, Amy and Richard Harte. Other folks appear later on.

Note that when you check out the official Maybe Night page, there are two new online Finnegans Wake discussion groups that are beginning. The Winter Wakeans, "the world's slowest Finnegans Wake reading group," is scheduled to do four pages each winter, from 2026 to 2234. That is not a misprint. That seems a bit slow to me, so instead I am going to participate in the Finnegans Wake 2026 Readalong. Here is some information, and here is the actual schedule. It looks like you can participate regardless if you have a physical copy of the book or an ebook.

The Maybe Night page I link to has various other links and contributions, check it out. 

Maybe Night to return

 

Bobby Campbell has announced the return of Maybe Night. It is the third annual winter solstice celebration of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and it's set for Dec. 21. 

MAYBE NIGHT 2025 is our 3rd annual virtual celebration of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake :))) (The nocturnal equivalent of Bloomsday's commemoration of Ulysses)

We will once again engage the COLLIDEORSCOPE on December 21st at www.maybeday.net/night

We will also be broadcasting a live panel of illustrious Joyceans discussing Jeems Jokes' enchanted chop suey! Join us for this the first official meeting of the international Winter Wakeans Reading Group!

Let this serve as a clarion call for FW and/or Joycean art, video presentations, writing, and whatever else besides!

(I recommend sending in links to your creations, but you can also send things to be hosted on the Maybe Night site directly)

The idea is simple: Make something cool • Share it • Explore the others!

You can contact us at weirdoverse@gmail.com

Approximate deadline for submitting Maybe Night offerings is December 15th

Also! As always, do please feel free and encouraged to create and post Maybe Night content using your own ways and means. A decentralized and self-organizing Maybe Night would be just the thing to wake the Finnegans up, up, and away to ever greater glory!

More here. 

Today is 'Maybe Night'

The second annual celebration of Maybe Night organized by Bobby Campbell is today. 

If you are just tuning in, Maybe Night is the winter solstice celebration  of  James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, particularly as it influenced the work of Robert Anton Wilson. Maybe Day is the July 23 celebration of the work of Robert Anton Wilson, which has gone on for several years now.

Finnegans Wake scholars will be participating in a live broadcast on YouTube at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Here is the link for the panel discussion livestream. 

For more Maybe Night material, from Bobby and others, please see the Maybe Night website

Maybe NIght reminder and classical Christmas music

 

A reminder from Brian Dean of the RAW Semantics blog that Maybe Night is coming on Dec. 21 for all you Finnegans Wake/Robert Anton Wilson fans. Maybe Night information here, and also see my interview with Bobby Campbell.  Brian says, "Btw, if anyone wants a hi-res version (eg to print a greetings card for your grandma or local church): [see this link].  (Use your browser's controls to zoom & pan)."

Also, my latest Substack newsletter has a few music recommendations, for those of you who like the kind of old-fashioned Christmas music I like. (I listen every year to Handel's "Messiah," Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," Renaissance Christmas music, Christmas carols from English cathedrals, etc.) My rationale for linking to it here is that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea both loved classical music, so perhaps some of their fans might be  interested. 

Bobby Campbell on Maybe Night

Bobby Campbell, who has been putting together Maybe Day celebrations for years on July 23, last year created a smaller spinoff celebration, Maybe Night. Bobby recently announced that Maybe Night will return on Dec. 21 this year. 

More information at that link, but I also asked Bobby to take a couple of questions about Maybe Night, and he immediately agreed.

RAWIllumination:  Last year, you launched Maybe Night, a midwinter spinoff of your Maybe Day program. Were you happy with it? Is that why you are bringing it back? 

Bobby Campbell: I was indeed quite pleased with last year's Maybe Night event! It's pretty niche subject matter, so my expectations were rather reasonable to begin with, but I was delightfully surprised that we were able to connect with so many Wakians out there in the world.

The plan was always to make it an annual event, understanding that it would start small, but ideally growing into something that can exist on its own without my organization. Following the Bloomsday model. Same for Maybe Day actually! How likely that actually is, IDK, but it's fun to have an excuse to play around with this stuff.

RAWIllumination: Is Finnegans Wake one of your favorite books? Do you want to encourage people to read it, and explore how it influenced RAW?

Bobby Campbell: Finnegans Wake is for sure one of my favorite books! Though it's such a categorically different kind of text that I almost don't even consider it comparable to other books. I think of it more like a data repository, or a code base, or even a grimoire.

So far as recommending FW to others goes, I can only attest that I have found it a tremendously rewarding reading experience, and specifically for RAW fans, that once you get into it, it becomes patiently obvious why RAW made it such a central part of his work. That same whimsical current of satori inducing synchronicity that pervades Wilson's works is fully present in FW.

If you're the type that likes going down rabbit holes, this one is a triple black diamond!

RAWIllumination: If people want to participate in Maybe Night, what should they do?

Bobby Campbell: To participate in Maybe Night as a contributor simply create any type of media (writing, visual art, music, video, etc) related to Finnegans Wake and/or James Joyce and send to weirdoverse@gmail.com on or before December 15th.

(Your contribution does not need to be new or exclusive to Maybe Night, I'm happy to signal boost pre-existing works!)

I recommend sending in links to wherever your creations normally live, but if you don't have a platform I'm happy to host it directly on the Maybe Night site.

I'm also interested in anything related to Terence McKenna, Grant Morrison's Invisibles comic book series, and of course, Robert Anton Wilson!

To participate as a reveler, simply tune in to www.maybeday.net/night on or after December 21st 2024 and we will have a presumably robust program of hypnagogic delights! The current plan is to share a live stream of our winter solstice Maybelogues panel discussion starting at 1PM EST.

Or, of course, do your own thing!

Oz Fritz on Finnegans Wake, the Book of the Dead and the Bardo

Oz Fritz has a new blog post up, "Joyce, Crowley and the Book of the Dead," which argues that the Egyptian Book of the Dead is a big influence on Finnegans Wake (Oz does a good job of documenting that this assertion is true). 

There's also a lot of discussion about the Bardo, a topic Oz often returns to. Oz doesn't use labels on his blog posts, but if you search for "bardo" in the text box on the upper left, you'll get pieces that will tell you more. The first post that popped up in my search was "How to Conquer Death on the Internet Part II," and the first subsection in that post is entitled, "What Is the Bardo?" 

At the end of the new post, Oz writes, "Stay tuned for the next episode which will go into some of the Bardo/Book of the Dead influences found in the work of Robert Anton Wilson who was deeply influenced by both Joyce and Crowley." We'll be reading, Oz. 

Oz Fritz on Finnegans Wake and Aleister Crowley

 

Oz Fritz, who has been doing good work in the Lion of Light discussion group at Jechidah, put a post up last month on his own blog that I somehow missed, "Folds and Overlaps between Aleister Crowley and Finnegans Wake."

"This essay intends to point out some of the parallels between Finnegans Wake, Magick and Thelema alongside references to Mr. Crowley, himself," Oz explains. He then points out several apparent references to Crowley in Finnegans Wake. Oz says the essay will be continued. 

Here's an interesting bit: "Incidentally, Joyce used Cabala, a fundamental technology for the construction of higher bodies or brains. By Gematria, the Cabalistic transposition of letters into numbers, HCE adds to 18; Ulysses has 18 episodes."

Giordano Bruno wrote a book called The Curse of Cabala; the Yale University Press published a translation into English. The blurb says, "The Cabala of Pegasus consists of vernacular dialogues that turn on the identification of the noble Pegasus (the spirit of poetry) and the humble ass (the vehicle of divine revelation). In the interplay of these ideas, Bruno explores the nature of poetry, divine authority, secular learning, and Pythagorean metempsychosis, which had great influence on James Joyce and many other writers and artists from the Renaissance to the modern period."

Dr. Who and Finnegans Wake

This is something I apparently missed a few months ago: An episode of The Lost Doctor that paid tribute to Finnegans Wake. From hotpress.com:

"The latest edition of an alternative Dr Who audio adventure will be played outside Barney Kiernan’s old pub on Little Britain Street as part of 2023’s Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin.

"‘Lost in the Wake’ written by Lee Ravitz, is the latest part of the audio series The Lost Doctor – which conjures a wholly imaginary other trajectory for Dr. Who, on the premise that the UK theatre maverick Ken Campbell was chosen for the role, rather than the original BBC's Dr. Who, Sylvester McCoy. An experimental actor, writer and director, Ken Campbell has been described as a "one-man dynamo of British theatre." He starred in the 1980s sitcom In Sickness and in Health, and an episode of Fawlty Towers, as well as movies like The Tempest, Breaking Glass, Letter to Brezhnev, A Fish Called Wanda and Creep (2004). He died on August 31st, 2008.

"The 'Lost in the Wake' episode of The Lost Doctor features the characters of James Joyce (played by Roddy McDevitt), William Blake, and Aleister Crowley among others, in what's been described as a "dreamlike" homage to Joyce's complicated meisterwerk, Finnegans Wake,. The episode will officially premiere upstairs at The Stags Head, Dublin, on Thursday, June 15th.

"As those familiar with Joyce's most iconic and influential book will know, Barney Kiernan’s pub plays a key role in the ‘Cyclops’ chapter, in Joyce’s Ulysses – but the building has been dormant for several years now. Producer Tommy Calderbank is hoping to build a campaign to save the literary landmark."

More here. 

I may be late on this, but note that you can still listen to the Wake episode and other episodes. 

PQ on being in the Guardian

Peter Quadrino (photo from X)

I had missed it when I wrote yesterday's blog post, but Peter Quadrino has weighed in about being featured in the Guardian's article about the Gerry Fialka reading group for Finnegans Wake. Excerpt: 

"I am honored to be a part of this celebration of Wake reading groups around the world. The author, Lois Beckett, did a great job covering the oddity of one-page-a-meeting reading groups dedicated to Joyce's bizarre night-book. To look at a global newspaper and see the front page with all the wars and turmoil and then have this article appear next to all of it feels like a celebration of the eternal forces of creativity and imagination. Poetry, the realm of the mind, the joy of art, language and humanity, remains undefeated."

More here. 

Finnegans Wake reading group finishes first pass after 28 years

Gerry Fialka. (Creative Commons photo by David Healey, source.) 

Two familiar names pop up in the  Guardian's article about a Finnegans Wake study group in Venice, California, that has completed its first survey of the book after 28 years.

Peter Quadrino, 38, joined Fialka’s group around 2008 or 2009. He would drive up three hours from San Diego, where he lived, to attend the meeting. “If you’re really interested in Finnegans Wake, it’s kind of hard to find people who will talk about it with you.”

Because Joyce spent 17 years of his life working on the book and then died not long after it was published, “He didn’t really get to explain it,” Quadrino said. “It’s up to us to figure it out, and figure out why he was so devoted to it.”

When Quadrino moved to Austin, Texas, in 2011, he did not want to stop reading, so he put up fliers around town, put some ads in the newspaper, and started his own Texas-based group. Twelve years in, Quadrino’s group is now about halfway through Finnegans Wake, putting them on track to complete the whole thing in about 24 years.

Joyce scholar (and RAW scholar) Eric Wagner has said one of his favorite maxims is "slowness is beauty." I looked closely at the photo accompanying the article but I didn't see Eric. 

Gerry Fialka, the guy who organized the group, did a long interview with Bobby Campbell that I wrote about a couple of years ago.   Fialka worked for Frank Zappa for years and has done other interesting things, see this Wikipedia bio. 

Just to be clear, Gerry's group hasn't finished but has begun again on studying the Wake. 

Peter Quadrino goes to Dublin

The view from Vico Road

"This past summer, in the midst of a breakup from a long-term relationship and needing to go far away, I embarked on my first ever trip to Ireland. I ended up spending much of the past few months in and around Dublin."

So writes Peter Quadrino, aka PQ, who many RAW fans will recognize as a blogger who has been immersed in the works of James Joyce for many years. You'll want to read his latest blog entry, "So This Is Dyoublong?" Living inside the World of the Wake, Part 1"

"I grew up in New York City where famous sights like the Manhattan skyline, Verrazano Bridge, and Statue of Liberty were familiar aspects of home. An out-of-towner visiting a place like New York City for the first time would instantly recognize many of the landmarks and sights from the background or setting of the worlds of NYC-based films and tv shows. With Joyce's Dublin though, the city is not merely the setting for Finnegans Wake---so much of the book is about the landscape itself, the ecology, the littoral life of the coastal zone, the street grid and its voices, the layers of historical events that shaped the place. Dublin in the Wake becomes the universal city, a city rendered into text with so much mythical depth and detailed density it makes you contemplate all cities."

"On days when I wandered around in what seemed like a James Joyce theme park (a phrase I'm borrowing from former Dublin resident Robert Anton Wilson), casually walking down Westland Row, past Finn's Hotel, down to St. Stephen's Green, past the Shelbourne Hotel, over to King Street past the Gaiety Theater, back towards Grafton Street, up past Trinity College (all places that appear throughout Finnegans Wake) and then along the River Liffey, the river of life, the universal river Joyce anthropomorphized as Anna Livia Plurabelle in the Wake, I'd stop to stare at the varying ripples along the surface of the waters ... "

More here. 

'Finnegans Wake Made Easy'

Emma MacKenzie as Anna Livia; Photo: Debra Weiss

[I have to work tomorrow, but some of you may be able to catch this. Announcement from the Consulate General of Ireland in Boston. Registration here.  Online performance  3 p.m. Thursday, March 11, U.S. Eastern Time. The Management.]

Join The Here Comes Everybody Players for an hour of humor, wordplay, mythology and history laced with music and some of the stories and themes of James Joyce’s most ambitious novel, including:

- The pirate queen, Grace O’Malley (aka The Prankquean) and her adventures at Howth Castle

- Anna Livia Plurabelle, the great feminine power and personification of Dublin’s River Liffey

- St. Patrick’s conflict with the Druids of Ireland - as we approach his feast day

- two of the famous 100-letter “thunderwords”

… and much more!

Some of the mysteries of the book will be introduced by Finnegans Wake scholar, Katherine O’Callaghan of U. Mass, Amherst. For those who have some familiarity with Finnegans Wake, the fun will be to hear some great sections in full voice. For those who've never been exposed to Joyce’s most radical and complex work, it should prove enjoyable and revelatory.

Directed by Cathal Stephens

Arranged and adapted by Donal O’Sullivan and Cathal Stephens, with literary advice from Katherine O’Callaghan

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Week 21

By Eric  Wagner
Special guest blogger 

Well, my Joyce experiment for the chapter one exercise in Prometheus Rising went OK. Reading the list of alternative names of Finnegans Wake on pages 104 through 107, I recalled the first time I met Robert Anton Wilson. I had written to him in 1986, and we began corresponding. In 1987 he planned to fly from his home in Ireland to do a speaking tour of the United States, and he sent me his itinerary, which included Dallas. My friend Jai Jeffryes had moved to Dallas the previous year, so I decided I would kill two birds with one stone. I would visit Jai and meet Dr. Wilson. Bob gave a talk on Friday night and then he had a seminar on Saturday. At one point during the seminar he passed a copy of Finnegans Wake around, and he had each of us read one of the alternative names for the Wake on pages 104 through 107. In the book a hen picks a letter out of a dump. The letter corresponds with the Wake. Joyce calls the hen Belinda after the Belinda in Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”.  

This week I noticed that few pages later on page 112 Joyce give a nice introduction to Finnegans Wake in this short paragraph:

You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample   jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the  poultriest notions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly! The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from  the sack of auld hensyne.

Typing this out I notice that Word only underlines nine words in this paragraph with red indicating a misspelling or a “word” unknown to the program. Joyce mostly uses short, ordinary English words in this paragraph. I have certainly felt “lost in the bush” trying to understand Finnegans Wake. It does seem like a simple jungle of words at times. I almost shout out: Bethinket me for a son of a bitch if I have the paltriest notion of what the heck he means. The quad gospellers refers to the authors of the four Gospels in the Bible, who in the Wake correspond to the four old men, the four animals in the Book of Ezekiel, the four bedposts of the sleeper’s bed, four divisions of Ireland, etc. In this paragraph I see the quad gospellers as referring to the professional Joyceans who write learned books and articles on the Wake. I think Joyce means here that anyone (the Zingari schoolerim) can find meaning (pick a peck of kindlings) in the book (the sack of auld hensyne, which combines “Auld Lang Syne” with the letter the hen pulls from the dump). Of course Joyce wanted his readers to devote their whole lives to his works, but as critic Harold Bloom noted, the more one puts into one’s study of Joyce, the more one tends to get out of it.

Note: Shortly after writing the above I unexpectedly got my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. I don’t say that studying Joyce got me the vaccine magickally; I just note the coincidence.

Finnegans Wake roundup

From artist Carol Wade: "I am delighted to announce, the premier exhibition of "riverrun", a visual response to #FinnegansWake by James Joyce. The exhibition will be held in the Waterways Visitors Center, Grand Canal Dock in conjunction with @5lampsarts" (It's in Dublin, part of the Five Lamps Arts Festival. More information here.)

From Derek of Waywords and Meansigns: "In case you haven't heard, Finnegans Wake turns eighty this year -- published 80 years ago, May 4, 1939 -- & we're celebrating with a big weekend event in Dublin, May 3rd through 5th at the Joyce Centre. I hope some of you can join us for this "Finnegans Wake-End". And I'm curating an installation at Trinity College, April 11-13, as part of the Wake Symposium there."

From PQ: "Carvings in the Claybook: A Reading of Finnegans Wake pgs. 18-19."

A 'Finnegans Wake' Pantheon

Two Finnegans Wake fans mentioned in PQ's piece: Joseph Campbell and Jean Erdman, in 1939 or so.

PQ has a new blog post up, The Pantheon of FINNEGANS WOKE (or Why Read Finnegans Wake? Testimonials from Famous Wakeans) which chronicles the various famous writers, musicians, critics etc. who have been fans of James Joyce's book. Robert Anton Wilson is one of the writers cited, and in fact part of an interview with RAW inspired PQ to write the paper that he turned onto a blog post. PQ is inviting folks to add others in the comments, and I've already chipped in.

Finnegans Wake link roundup from PQ

A photo of William S. Burroughs from Vagabond Bohemia. 

Over at Finnegans, Wake!, PQ has a nice roundup on new Wake sites, including Vagabond Bohemia, a Tumblr that has "plenty of Joyce material as well as a whole universe of artwork, plus Thomas Pynchon, Marshall McLuhan, Salvador Dali, Robert Anton Wilson, and other great explorers of the frontiers of the mind." Other Wake links are on the right side of PQ's blog. Finnegans Wake is the major Joyce work I have to tackle, but it is next.

PQ reviews Finnegans Wake book

I'm currently re-reading the Robert Fitzgerald translation of the Odyssey. That's in preparation for my plan to re-read Ulysses later this month.

So it will be later this year before I can get around to tackling Finnegans Wake. But when I do, PQ will be one of my main guides.

PQ has now written a two-part review of a book about Finnegans Wake that came out about four year ago, [I got that wrong, see PQ's comment]  Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop. Part one is here; part two is here. 

PQ's verdict? "Joyce's Book of the Dark is a masterpiece of literary criticism while at the same time an eye-opening scholarly consideration of sleep. Bishop begins with the provocative premise that Finnegans Wake is, at all times, a record of what goes on inside the body and mind of one sleeping person (that is, not just dreams, but even the extended mysterious dreamless periods) and proceeds to build upon that argument almost ad nauseam, deploying snippets from the text of the Wake relentlessly through twelve progressively groundbreaking chapters concluding with a most brilliant and original theory of what the flowing female character Anna Livia Plurabelle really represents in the book ... Many readers consider Joyce's Book of the Dark to be the finest analysis of Finnegans Wake that's ever been written and I have to agree. "

Robert Anton Wilson on Finnegans Wake. 

PQ on Dick and Joyce

PQ is a very good blogger who often writes about baseball (his contrarian prediction that the Cleveland Indians would not be all that great despite all of the team's off season acquisitions seems spot on -- the team's currently 8-10) and hip hop. For the purposes of my blog, however, PQ stands out as someone who is good at writing about fiction. In his post "Retracing Recent Ramifications of Thought, Part 1 (VALIS, Duality and Finnegans Wake)," PQ talks about duality, tying together thoughts about Finnegans Wake and Philip K. Dick's Valis to a passage in Masks of the Illuminati.

The post is from PQ's A Building Roam blog, although the content overlaps with his Finnegans, Wake! blog