Class Notes 1/29

I walked in on discussion about ladders, and DNA. Highbrow and lowbrow are connected on a ladder, they are linked, and there are spaces in between.....like middlebrow etc.

portmanteau - combining words

woid = word+void, also the very sound of woid is word with an accent.

soundance = sentence

Four Quartets, Little Gidding, Eliot

"And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph."

Dr. Sexson mentioned that for Joyce an error is a portal of discovery, references the mistake on a blog, demonic instead of demotic.......

Dr. Sexson set up FW for us in the structure of a house also the 3 Draconian Ages

Floor = FW people = Draconian Age = Language

top floor = kids = gods = hieroglyphic

middle floor = parents = heroes = aristocratic

ground floor = servants = men = demotic

Gods decline to heroes, declines to men, and bottoms out back to the age of gods.

Dr. Sexson said that the demotic language is a decline in our sense of the divine, we bottom out with Samuel Beckett.

Four Quartets, East Coker, Eliot

"In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass."

Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, Eliot

"Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now."

Issy has a blue bedroom with stars painted on the ceiling. See Kelsey's blog and FW page 148.

The Earwicker (everybody) family, composed of the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Post, and Issy.

From lecture, Joyce's Main Sources for Finnegan's Wake:

-Bible

-Ovid's Metamorphoses - each story has to do with change

-the Italian.......Dante

-the Englishman.......Shakespeare

FW - Dr. Sexson pointed out:

pg. 1 'penisolate' - penis, peninsula, pen

pg. 125 'Shem the Penman'

pg. 185 'alshemist' - alchemy, shem

Shem is into Alchemy. I will let you know more with my owning of page 183 which has turned into 183-5.

FW, also pointed out in class:

pg. 16 'eyegonblack' (Joyce's eye patch), like augenblick, German word for moment, short period of time.......in a blink of an eye!

also on page 16, 'bisons is bisons' (bygones be bygones) and notice on page 263 'bygones be bei Gunne's'

Blog assignments:

-find yourself in Finnegans Wake, not your life, but your name

-blog your dreams

-Feb. 2nd wake up at 6 am (or was it 8 am?) and then write everything that happens all day. Feb 2nd is Groundhog's Day, Joyce's Birthday, Purification of the Virgin, the Mayan New Year, a special anniversary, among many other things. Ulysses is all about one day, June 16th, 18 hours.

I suppose this might be a way of paying attention to all the things we do everyday, the divine detail, even brushing our teeth (if you do that) or feeding the dog or shaving. Making the ordinary extraordinary. For it is in the mundane, everyday, ordinary, secular aspects of our lives that we have the divine experiences, the epiphanies, the extraordinary, where else can we have it?