Furniture and Memory - Gordon's FW Plot Summary

(*click this image to enlarge, it works this time!) Bedroom Image from page 34 in Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary by John Gordon, "Excessively neat as this may seem, its rationale is firmly based on the author's understanding of psychology, and it has a precedent in the ancient art of memory:" (Gordon 35)

"Such a system, which Joyce would have encountered through his readings in Giordano Bruno, might have first taught him to consider the extent to which a person's environing circumstances may be both palimpsest of past associations and prompting of future mental acts, the extent to which 'memories [are] framed from walls', as conjured by a reminiscensitive' observer. In making if the furniture of his own little room an everywhere, our dreamer simply follows suit. Like everything Joyce wrote, Finnegans Wake begins in a richly particular here and now."

- John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, page 36

Dream

Here are two dreams I had in one night.

#1 - I was sitting on the red couch in the interview room where the selected person on the show What Not To Wear sits to watch the secret footage of their bad outfits. Stacy and Clinton were excited about having me on the show and I was so thrilled to be getting $5,000 dollars to shop in New York and get a new wardrobe. Stacy was in the middle of saying something to me and in my ear a loud whisper said, "SAM" and I woke up and looked around, alert, nervous, and startled. Sutter and my two dogs slept soundly.

#2 - I was dreaming that Sutter woke me up to put more water in the humidifier next to the bed, then I woke up from the dream and wondered if I had already changed the water, then I really woke up from the dream within a dream and checked the water in the humidifier, which was fine. Which dream was a dream and which was reality, I'm still not entirely sure.

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?

Intersting and Helpful Links

Good site:
http://www.themodernword.com/Joyce/joyce_works_fw.html

FW Annotined:
http://finwake.com/

Eternal Return:
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Eternal_return#9

Class Notes 1/27: Finnegans Wake with Ben

Books on Finnegans Wake: Joyce's Book of the Dark by John Bishop is a good one.

Finnegans Wake page 613 the page we spent 40 minutes with, this is as far as we got, barely half a page! Click on the image to enlarge it to read the notes (I think that will work). The idea I understood, or meaning was the Eternal Recurrence talked about in Monday's lecture. All this has already happened! Every morning when we wake up and start our day there is a regeneration of the universe. Ben linked this back to Vico's cyclical ideas, especially recourso, cycle back and start over which of course Joyce drew from this idea.

This is a picture of my Finnegans Wake book after class today, keep in mind I had not marked in it bfeore class:

Then with 10 minutes left in class Jennie Lynn performed/recited the last few pages of Finnegans Wake for the class. Talk about intimidating! It was beautiful and moving.
Special thanks to Ben and Jennie Lynn for a captivating, enrapturing, and inspiring introduction to Finnegans Wake. Hopefully now for each of us in the class owning a page of Finnegans Wake is a task we approach with recklessness and abandon, rather than fear and loathing.

P.S. Jennie Lynn inspired me to start memorizing my section and this is what I've got kind of memorized from page 183, "You brag of your brass castle or tyled house in ballyfermont? Niggs, niggs, and niggs again. For this was a stinksome inkenstink, quite puzzonal to the wrottle. Smatterafact, Angles aftanon browsing there thought not Edam reeked more rare. My wud!" It is 40 words, but it would be cool to get the whole page.

Making a Holiday and Holyday & Ben's Lecture, Notes 1/25

Class Notes 1/25/2010

HW

-choose one page of Finnegans Wake to own/work with

-memorize about 30 words from the page, go to Brianne's blog to get some tips on memorizing

Talked briefly about Bloomsday in class. Bloomsday is June 16, 1904 and it is the single day in which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. Underlying the plot of Ulysses is Joyce's way of commemorating the first day spent with his wife, Nora Barnacle (incidentally, the most ordinary, boring, uneducated of all women you could ever not hope to meet which thusly attracted Jamesy to Nora). Ulysses, in its grander perspective, is the glorification, the immortalization, the singing, of an ordinary day. Leopold Bloom does things such as go to the butcher's, a funeral, the bar, and the brothel; but all of these normal, ordinary things are made great in that they are played to the tune of Homer's Odyssey and Bloom, the sad and often pathetic protagonist, is made heroic in the fashion of Odysseus.

James Joyce's birthday is Feburary 2nd. In addition, February 2nd is also the Aztec New Year (and the last one, so enjoy it), the Purification of the Virgin, a very special wedding anniversary, and Groundhog's Day. We will remember Bill Murray's classic role supported by the beautiful Andie MacDowell in Groundhog's Day the movie. Bill plays tv reporter Phil Conners and he absolutely hates having to go to Punxsutawney (not to be confused with Yoknapatawpha) on assignment to cover the event. But when he realizes that he's going to have to relive this most boring day every day, he finds ways to make it special amidst a culture that has so apparently reduced holiday to ordinary. Punxsutawney becomes his "memory theater" (which we can use to memorize F.W.) and he begins to orchestrate the day so that Groundhog's Day becomes adventurous and romantic in the same way the Ulysses made June 16th an Irish holiday where everybody gets rip roaring drunk and follows the path of Poldy Bloom starting at #7 Eccles Street.

There are ten thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake--the first thunderclap is Henry Chimpden Earwicker (Here Comes Everybody, Humpty Dumpty) taking a nasty spill from a ladder. Each thunderclap (Joyce was terribly frightened by thunder) signifies life and death, having come full circle and ending up right where you started. It expresses, like the Aztecan calendar, cyclical time. This idea is called the Myth of the Eternal Return and it is struck upon by nearly every author worth reading. Dostoevsky uses it in the Brothers Karamazov, chapter 5 of The Wind in the Willows is titled Dulce Domum (to arrive where we started) and Nietzsche notes that "we must will endless repetition". Phil Conners figures out that by dropping a toaster in the bathtub or driving off of a cliff into the quarry he too can cause a thunderclap and will the endless repetition that is so imperative to making the ordinary extraordinary. Here is a link to a philosophy blog based out of Berkely that I found that might also be of interest: http://whooshup.blogspot.com/2009/02/groundhog-day.html

Ben's Finnegans Wake Lecture:

his FW book from 2004 is very worn, duct tape holding it together and colorful with lots of writing.

The Eternal Recurrence, Ben's favorite definition for this is from Nietzsche,

'The closest approximation of becoming to being'

the recurring theme in FW: a letter buried within chaos, nonsense, book, that explains what happened at Phoenix park, the macrocosm

forms aligned with being, fragments aligned with becoming, rendering of the two infinitesimal

Our idea of life (in the west) and reading a book is linear X----------------X

However, FW is not linear, it is cyclical, the start and the end are indeterminate, the book ends and begins again, Finnegan.

Looking at Egyptian Mythology, Book of the Dead, Sun journeys through the sky, and then at night it journeys through the underworld before it rises again.

the idea is that our lives mirror this cycle

this idea also key to understanding Finnegans Wake

constantly in a state of becoming, approximation of being.....

a journey through the underworld between 'riverrun' and 'a long the' akin to eternity, the space bar on our keyboard.

think about the book as a river, Going from source to the ocean, evaporates, travels in the clouds across the sky (underworld), rains and returns to the river.

We cannot approach Finnegans Wake the ways we approach other texts, as if it is a cumbersome thing, FW is not a code we are meant to break.

the letter buried in the book is just a fragment

so one might ask, "How are we supposed to read Finnegans Wake?"

Need to understand the shape and existence of FW as a book is incidental, it is a deceptive appearance of a book that we are supposed to read. The idea is to let the book impose its force and form and nature on you!

It makes more sense to 'read' FW in a group to dissolve the ego, also helps to have people in your group who speak different languages. Reading in a collective sense.

Decoding vs. Finding the meaning

Ben met once a week for an hour and a half with about 15 (smart) people when he was at Boston College and they would work through about half a page per meeting. Equals about 10 pages per semester.

Let the page recondition the way you think language works.

page 474 Lucan - lucid - Lucifer

like Tim Finnegan, Humpty Dumpty, Adam, Lucifer, they all have fallen, fallen bodies.

page 104 prayer, combination of prayers, plurability of prayers
allmaziful - maze, intricate, labyrinth
mamafesta - manifesto, replacing the patriarch

let the language exert its own will with a hilarity of puns

page 104-5 titles or names, shards of ourselves, figures in the novel are shape shifting, figures in history

think of when you dream, one person of face metamorphoses into another, melting into each other, same happens with words, what isn't to say that this metamorphosing isn't the true character of things?

George Luis Borges: we have all been each other

Finnegans Wake is an Intellectuals parlor game. Approach this book with recklessness & a sense of abandon......perhaps with some wine.......or whiskey......or maybe some Guinness.

Passage that we approach on Wednesday: page 613

look and see what you can't see.

RE-MEMBERING FINNEGAN by Dr. Michael Sexson

Please visit Re-Membering Finnegan by Dr. Michael Sexson
very important, high priority, worthy, notable, significant, read and see for yourself.
"Remembering Finnegan, we learn that the central question is always the same every where and in every age. Are you having fun again? Are you in the funhouse, cave, or carnival, where words become flesh again? Where everything beheld is seen as if for the first time again? Where everything done is yet the same play again?"

Also, since Samuel Beckett is around the corner, here is a link to an extraordinary collection of net resources:
http://www.samuel-beckett.net/