Finnegans Wake commentary and fanboyishness

Finished the first chapter. Whatever that means. Here's where Finnegan wakes: the strange word means whiskey/water of life in Gaelic. Finnegan wakes at his wake when a fight breaks out and whiskey spills on him.

Have you whines for my wedding, did you bring bride and bedding, will you whoop for my deading is a? Wake? Usgueadbaugham!
Anam muck an dhoul! Did ye drink me doornail?
(24:12-15)

Compare that last line to the closing stanza of th'actual diddy:
"Thanum an Dhul, do you thunk I'm dead?"

I sat in Pitt Bradford's library for a few hours today reading comics. Eventually, I checked out the Joyce section and found Joe Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, the first major criticism of the book to come out after its publication. He took a dozen or so pages to break down the basic meaning of the first four paragraphs of the book, which turned out to blow my mind. I'd compare it, if you'll use yer imagernation, to a decent pair of goggles. FW is this big damn pond, which is all well and good and pretty and complex, but if you get yourself even a simple pair of dollar store goggles, you can dip your head under the water and see the other 99.9% of the pond. It's all right there, you just need to take the time to look.

But most the time you need to take a lot of time to look. And the more I check this damn book out, the more it seems like Joyce was one of the foremost poetic and scholastic geniuses of the human race, and the more it turns out you can spend time ad-freaking-infinitum looking at all the references, cross-meanings, allegories, moral/social/philosophical/theological/geographical/cultural
connotations. Lots of times the same passage has intentionally conflicting meanings, because Joyce was a chummy bastard.

I'm just about nowhere in my understanding of the book so far, but the sandgrain of what I do know is impressing the goldurn heck outta me. I think I'm gonna buy a commentary on the text or find a free one online and trod a bit more carefully through the rest of the book over the next few years. I'm still not into a thorough scholastic reading of the text--even though at this point I'm sure it'd be worth my while, no matter how many decades it took--I'd like to have a better understanding of the poetic wordplay he completely 0wnz throughout the book.

Army[at]Love, &c. (I can't make the [at] sign?)

"Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhur-
thrumathunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun"
(23:5-7)

And just as I had bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn-
tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk memorized.

I found some interesting commentary on the so-called thunderwords (apparently 100 letters apiece--you can count 'em) here:

"There are ten thunders in the Wake. Each is a cryptogram or codified explanation of the thundering and reverberating consequences of the major technological changes in all human history. When a tribal man hears thunder, he says, 'What did he say that time?', as automatically as we say 'Gesundheit.'" -- Marshall McLuhan

"It took months of concentrated effort to begin to winkle out the thousands of words in the thunders; now, several of them have yielded thirty or more pages of words, each word denoting or alluding to a theme in the episode or an associated technology. Prior to our discovery of the thunders and their significance, Marshall McLuhan looked up to Joyce as a writer and artist of encyclopedic wisdom and eloquence unparalleled in our time.... After, he recognized in Joyce the prescient explorer, one who used patterns of linguistic energy to discern the patterns of culture and society and technology." -- Eric McLuhan

I thought it was neat. Each of em's a chaotic confluence of thunder-words from foreign languages the world over, which are then processed into Joyce's native Hiberno-English, then punched in the face and kicked in the mud by a poetic genius who I'm more and more convinced knew exactly what he was up to. The link has each of the thunderwords, there for the taking. Don't lift too hard--you'll hurt yourself.

So I read a bunch of things in the last few days. One of em was good, one was bad, one was okay, and one I'm pretty sure defeated me. The good one and the okay one (hah!) is Rick Veitch's new series, Army[at]Love. I bought the first issue after hearing the premise, which I immediately discounted as too crazy to make work, which is really the thing Veitch lives to do, bless his soul. The premise, which is so above and beyond the kind of absurd Swift was going for in "A Modest Proposal" that I'm still not sure it'll work, even after being proved wrong (wrong, mind you) in his American road-trip-slash-9/11 homage-slash-dialogueless graphic poem Can't Get No (readitreaditreaditdammit) and his "let's write a story about the evolution of American cultural and technological identity in the first half of the 20th century and write a story explaining the history of the cold-blooded comics industry in the first half of the 20th century and let's blame it on...a satirical Supermanesque alien who isn't really an alien and let's make it the same fucking story" The Maximortal. No kidding.

Army[at]Loveis a commentary about the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story takes place 5 years hence in Afbaghistan. After years of increasing mortality rates and decreasing morale, the government creates a Morale and Motivation branch to research ways to increase progress and overall good faith among soldiers on the battlefield. So the story opens up with US soldiers under fire: a woman soldier is on a cell phone with her husband in the States, telling him where his belt might be hidden. The tech guru of the squadron is a mentally retarded boy. By page 10, two soldiers are seeing if they can reach the ultimate orgasm by doing it while under heavy fire. Veitch is incredibly excited about the series--he said someting along the lines of he's going to have a chance to develop these characters in more intricate and, uh, good ways than in any story he's done before. After the first issue I can't say I'm too excited with the characters BUT! I can't impress on anyone enough how Veitch can pull oranges out of a Mac if he put his mind to it, so I'm gonna keep reading the series as I collect precious income. Assuming, of course, I find an English comic shop in Ibaraki Prefecture. Otherwise, I'll download the torrent and send Rick the money.

The second thing was Yoggoth Cultures and Other Growths. It's a two-fer-one of Alan Moore Lovecraftianesque goodness: the first story being inspired by him, the second being produced by him and Bryan Talbot. The first story is illustrated by Juan Jose Ryp--a fucking phenomenal artist in the hemisphere of Geoff Darrow--apparently from an aborted novel Moore started called Yuggoth Cultures. Never heard that, but he writes enough, so I believe it.

The second story is by Moore and Talbot. It's a wee intro to a would-have-been series that never took off for whatever reason, about a girl whose sorcerer father, the King of All Birds (of all sorcerer-folk, like) was murdered by seven usurper sorcerers. The rule is one usurper kills one Lord--not seven--so the daughter goes to seek revenge. Kill Bill with a creepy, necropolyptic theme about it. I didn't like it, and I can count the Moore stories on my thumb that I didn't like, so that's saying something. Still, the series never took off, and it was the first issue, so that's indicative of my disinterest. Apparently Yuggoth Cultures is coming out with some more issues, but since Avatar Press is the publisher, it just might be a variant cover, or typeface. Not sure.

The last thing I read--or tried to--was Iain Sinclair's novel Slow Chocolate Autopsy. I never heard of him either, except that's more than likely due to my being American, and him being pretty exclusively English. I got into him because Alan Moore said "Iain Sinclair, I think – yeah, let's go out on a limb – the finest writer currently working in the English language". I forgot the part where he said "Pure signal is like [See Spot Run] – yes, you can understand everything on the page, but there's nothing much there worth understanding. Noise – or something approaching noise – is like a page of James Joyce, a page of Ian Sinclair – where there is such a density of information that it almost becomes incoherent, but it is full of information." Reading Sinclair is nothing like reading Joyce insofar as with the Wake, I know I'm supposed to skim (unless I'm nutty) because it's supposed that I just want to get the general idea. Sinclair, however, writes in very short, very real sentences. With real words. That mean real things. Like these. But more poetic, like. So I can understand everything I'm reading (even though the guy's vocabulary is ef'ing uncanny), but after a while I'm not sure I know I'm reading. Compounding this, Slow Chocolate Autopsy centers on a character who is stuck in London, but he's not stuck in time. And he's not the narrator--at least some of the time. So I'm on chapter 4 and the only thing I can say for sure is that this guy, this Norton, accidentally killed Christopher Marlowe when the latter fell on a sharpened stick he meant to terrorize some other bloke with. And in another chapter, he might be a speed freak who's very good or very bad at soccer. Heckifayekno.

Nonetheless, I think I see why Moore says Sinclair is as good as he is: Moore's prose is a delightfully mysterious mix between simple and complex. NOT in the way Hemingway fleshes out complex stories with simple prose, NEITHER/NOR in the way Falkner writes really convoluted prose to show off to someone or other. (Haven't read H. in years; never read Falkner; opinions based on schoolmates'.) Moore writes simple prose and complex prose about simple ideas and complex ideas. At the same time. (Is anyone still reading?) Sinclair does the same thing with his prose, as near as I can tell. I'm not smart enough yet--or patient enough, regrettably--to vouch for his mastery of the simple/complex story juggling thingy. But I bet Moore thinks he does, and that's good enough for me, for now.

But damn do I wish I could read that book.

Feed the child. Feed him sugar still.

I'm gonna start to paste excerpts of Finnegans Wake at the top of my entries, because too many people in the world will never skim this book, and this is the perfect book to skim. Read it out loud--the words roll off your tongue in a cool way.

This wagrant wind's awalt'zaround the piltdowns and on every blasted knollyrock (if you can spot fifty I spy four more) there's that gnarlybird ygathering, a runalittle, doalittle, preealittle, pouralittle, wipealittle, kicksalittle, severalittle, eatalittle, whinealittle, kenalittle, helfalittle, pelfalittelgnarlybird. (10:29-34)

and

And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there'll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care. So true is it that therewhere's a turnover the tay is wet too and when you think you ketch sight of a hind make sure but you're cocked by a hin. (12:12-17)

I finished Kevin Hiuzenga's Or Else #4 last night. He has a book out from Drawn & Quarterly called Curses, which is a buncha short stories he cartooned over a few years. Kevin Huizenga's
(high-zin-ga) a genius for the precise reason that I can't pinpoint a single reason why he rocks. That may be my lack of history with (and infrequent contempt for) lit theory, but I also have a really hard time pinning down exactly what he do in his comics that I like so much.

F'rinstance. In all the stories of H's that I've read, a suburbian Michigan...ite? onian? named Glenn Ganges is the central/anchor character, and it's no different here. The first story follows Glenn as he researches a 19th/early 20th century short story called "Green Tea" and how that story seems to intrude on his own life. Another story in the collection talks about the history of one of America's most bothersome and environmentally damaging non-native-but-introduced-by-crazy-Englishmen birds. Another one, "28th Street" is based off an olf Italian folktale called "The Feathered Ogre" in very literal ways. Another one, the most avant-garde piece, I think, is a bunch of panels depicting serene mountain-and-lake scenes from old Chinese paintings, narrated by a real transcript of a report of an abortion from an abortion clinic. Another, and probably my favorite, is a really long, really well-researched, really very good piece about a conservative Christian trying to write a strictly theological book on hell.

The book I just read of his has a bunch of mundane (but great) stories in the first half, and then sort of thematically explodes into a satire on commercialization and then sorta structurally explodes by doing just about anything with regards to panel transitions and where they take place on the page--all the while keeping it simple. Somehow. You'll have to read it.

It's great. It's so great. I mean, Alan Moore's my favorite writer because he's way into the idea of never doing the same kinda story twice, which he succeeds in for the most part. But Huizenga really goes nuts with the idea. I'm in awe of Moore's talent, but a lot of the time I can see where he got this or that idea for a story. With Huizenga, none of his stories are so bizarre that I can't understand where he's coming from, but I really can't see how he gets there in the first place. I'd be intimidated to even talk to the guy. But in the meanwhile, his books are entertaining and intelligent and beautiful all at the same time, and in a completely fresh and new way, whatever that means.

You can see the first couple pages of one of his short stories here. You can buy a few of his books somewhere near there. I can't recommend it enough. He also has a blog.

Hey, Wait...

Hey, Wait... by Jason, a Norwegian cartoonist and, as it turns out, genius. Here's his Fantagraphics page.

I guess this book is widely considered to be one of the saddest comics there is. I think I could agree with that even though I didn't get any pangs of emotion.

The story's paced in one of the most intelligent and interesting ways I've ever seen a straightforward story paced, and that may or may not be saying something. Nonetheless, I think it's pretty cool. Jason has a way of telling his stories that's beautifully concise. There are a ton of cartoonists who are expert structuralists with regards to panelling out their stories, but since Jason's stories largely physical-based, you can really see his talent shine through on every page. I don't know, it's pretty cool to me.

Anyways, the story itself is great. It really nails the atmosphere of summer when you're a kid and hanging out with your friend. Then it really nails the atmosphere of the tragedy and terror of adulthood. But I don't wanna ruin the plot, since rolling along with it is one of the reasons the story works so well.

I read some more of Finnegans Wake today. It's so good even though I can't ever ever ever possibly say why. Apparently it gets more dense...maybe I won't be so excited then. But for now, on page 11, I'm cruising at a nice speed. I think what Alan Moore said is pretty right:

"[A story is] going to be some kind of information. Now that can be factual information, emotional information, psychological information…it's gonna be some sort of information…it might be non-linear, it might be more like noise than information…sort of like James Joyce, because actually it's the noise that holds the most information."

That's from this interview. It makes sense to me, since it feels like listening to the Wake read and sorta spacing out now and again really helps to sort the story subconsciously in yer mind. If there is a story, which I think there is currently, but I'm not so sure it'll keep up.