Class Notes 1/22 & my page selection & MORE

Notes from Class on the 22nd of January

Google Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico
Wiki - "Vico’s major work was poorly received during his own life but has since inspired a cadre of famous thinkers and artists, including Benedetto Croce, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell[citation needed], Samuel Beckett, Isaiah Berlin, Giovanni Gentile, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Julius Evola, Edward Said, Marshall McLuhan, Thomas Berry, and Robert Anton Wilson. Later his work was received more favourably as in the case of Lord Monboddo to whom he was compared in a modern treatise.[7]"

Rachel has read The Following Story, and I'm only a few pages away from Part II (guess what I will be doing the rest of my Friday night). We are to read this super short book once over the weekend, and then for a second time at the end of the semester then blog about the difference between the 2 readings. I love it so far and I think everyone will love it. People who were in the major author class will appreciate how Nooteboom is very well acquainted with Nabokov and Transparent Things.......mysterious mental maneuver.......

Finnegans Wake page 13 "It is well known. Lokk for himself and see the old butte new. Dbln. W. K. O. O. Hear? By the mausolime wall. Fimfim fimfim. With a grand fenferall. Fumfum fumfum."

See Jennie Lynn's blog regarding sign and gesture beneath language.
See James the rat's blog, rapture.
See Zach's blog with the water genie writing example read in class.

Blogs and assignments to do:
-read The Following Story this weekend......it is a short quick read. Just takes a couple hours or so.
-blog examples of words you thought were in the lyrics to a song but really weren't
-blog an inventory of your bedroom when you wake up.....see Christina's blog on this.
- ****By Monday choose the page that you will own of Finnegans Wake and blog your choice**** -also blog the 29-32 words you will memorize on that page.
-also blog an example of a proliferation, multiplication, explosion, long list of, an inventory like the way the water genie talks from Finnegans Wake.

My Finnegans Wake page choice (at random) to own is page 183 and a part of 184. I have yet to choose exactly what I want to memorize, tough choice on those pages.......

As I read my page of Finnegans Wake eating a rosemary chicken quashed
sweet qutatoes meal at the table by myself with a glass of red wine (malbec)
Sutter walked in the room, says, if you ever ask why I love you just remember
this moment and that book you have in your hand.
Ha. (don't worry he loves me even when I read lowbrow Twilight). Here is an asterisk: We have been using the term "read" to explain what it is that we are doing with Finnegans Wake. After all, it is what you do with any other novel. But
to "read" F.W. is beyond misleading. First of all, it is a book that near
impossible to read, as Joyce intended it to be, and I doubt that anyone [living]
could read F.W. from cover to cover as you do with other books. If we all had a
Jesuit education then maybe we could read it. Secondly, and probably most
miportantly, is that Finnegans Wake is not meant to be read, in the
traditional sense. Ulysses, Joyce's first epic work, can be read cover
to cover like a book. Ulysses is the book of the day, as therefore can
be read in the conscious way in which we read a book--Sounding the words out in
our head, reading alound to ourselves, following a plot (in this case to the
minute over the 18 hour day). Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, is the
book of the night, a dream book, and thus we cannot be expected to read it
consciously, nor should we try. Rather, as in a dream, we must read this book
subconsciously and that is something I am trying to learn how to do.

And on page 79 of Finnegans Wake I might have found something in the water genie's style,
"...a homelike cottage of elvanstone with droppings of biddies, stinkend pusshies, moggies' duggies, rotten witchawubbles, festering rubbages and beggars' bullets, if not worse, sending salmofarious germs in gleefully through the smithereen panes-..."
By writing like the water genie we are instructed to write the opposite of what nearly every English teacher or otherwise has taught us. Rhythm with proliferation creates a stylistic flow.

We listened to The Ballad of Tim Finnegan which is available in my previous blog. This is where Joyce got his material.....he went to the lowbrow Irish drinking song and wrote a very highbrow complicated book. Ballad of Tim Finnegan - "a gallon of whiskey at his feet and a barrel of porter at his head"
Finnegans Wake page 6 "He's stiff but he's steady is Priam Olim! 'Twas he was the dacent gaylabouring youth. Sharpen his pillowscone, tap up his bier! E'erawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again? With their deepbrow fundigs and the dusty fidelios. They laid him brawdown alanglast bed. With a backalips of finisky fore his feet. And a barrowload of guenesis hoer his head. Tee the tootal of the fluid hang the twoddle of the fuddled, O!"

There are more links on page 6 to the Ballad of Tim Finnegan.
The Ballad is of death and resurrection, Tim Finnegan rises after whiskey is accidentally poured on his head, a phoenix rises from the ashes and begins anew, and Finnegans Wake starts with a sentence fragment and the beginning to that sentence is the last sentence, so to end is to begin again.

We were given groups today. Each group assigned a theme of the class. See Dr. Sexson if you need a group.