Shadow Dancers.

My favorite time to wake up, owing to my ability to fall asleep with little effort, is during the ambiguous hours of midnight until sunrise. A stretch where time exists only to my spatial opposites of our ever turning world. Though in theory time still exists, the only metronome that suggests linearity is the tree blown across the house in intervals and the shadow dancers on my wall that creep in through the shades.

The light that is not turned away by the slats I find to be drained. The luminescence is wan and alien by either reproduction or imitation, and is oddly invariable, oddly sterile like florescent tubes on a hospital bed. The dance resumes as my consciousness shifts. My eyelids slide as an act of the dream, not in spite of it, and the lines of dream are drawn formlessly on my walls. To call it truly waking would be to assign a daytime term to a dreamtime process.

As conshiftiness occurs, I am softly aware of my surroundings. The dance continues as I roll onto my back and note the ceiling. The shift progresses and the geometric lines above me hinder the process. There is something hidden within the folds of the ceiling, presumably old ductwork that heated the house before it was split into apartments. An ancient heat register that has been roughly painted over looks down on me from its skewed perch. My rational mind attempts to understand the lines. They are absurdly off. Architecturally bunked. Dimensionally awry. In the league of poorly executed handy work are a number of cockeyed pipes running water this way and that, hot and cold, out of one wall and into another. A complex system of interconnected portals feeding the rest of the house.

On one wall the dark shapes of posters and pictures are illuminated harshly by the digital blink of an diode. Two of the posters have names invisibly hanging off of them. The names are slightly askew, from lack of use, as they used to be part of a memory palace. Clarence White is on the left, Robert Fripp on the right. In fact, now that I think about it, Scotty Moore, John McGlaughlin, and Les Paul are attached furtively to three other objects in view. Frank Zappa is under me. T Bone Walker is in the closet.

I pull the comforter up over my cold shoulder and turn another 90 degrees. I see a green blanket draped over the back of my wife. Again my eyelids slide in time with the dancers on the wall. The shift reverses, I bury my head and wiggle closer to her. My room was just a stop on my dream journey, possibly to fill up. And now the conshiftiness is creating poorly built palaces surrounded by a moat guarded with snapping turtles and inside the walls there is a dance going on. Hand in hand, they slowly turn in the wan light of the few beautiful ambiguous hours.

Giambattista Vico in Finnegans Wake.

For the record, my page in Finnegans Wake is 452 not chosen entirely at random.

The Italian philosopher Vico. Sexson has implored us twice to look him up, and for good reason. Joyce, as claimed by Wikipedia, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Vico and one doesn't have to go far to find those traces. Vico proposed the idea that civilization develops in reoccurring cycles.

There are very obvious connections with Joyce's work and this principle. The theme of eternal return that we have discussed in relation to Finnegans Wake, and the structure in which the book is written lend themselves nicely to ideas of cyclical formation. Vico is referenced by name in Finnegans Wake on page 452. Joyce seems to understand that linear structure is difficult to let go of, the absence of a definite beginning and end is a scary concept. To this he writes,

The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin. Still onappealed to by the cycles and unappalled by the recoursers we feel all serene, never you fret, as regards our dutyful cask.

Cycles, agains, from the end back to the beginning, but if the cycle never stops then how is the real end known, the true beginning? Do we start at age 35? Do we start when our parents die? Or do we start when we realize that to end is only to begin? Who knows. I shrug to that.

Regarding Vico, Joyce said, "My imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung." A source of imagination from the imagination machine himself!

Finn Begin.

I think that if I were a word, I would be quite upset at James Joyce for making me work so hard. Portmanteau - This means the blending of words and their meanings to form a new word with a hybrid meaning. Joyce is all about this. In other literature (I'm thinking of Through the Looking Glass) portmanteaus are somewhat surprising and unique. However, here in Finnegans Wake, wordplay, wordmashing, and wordbashing are the rules not the exception.

Some of my favorite combinations are:

Sinduced

Tighteousness

hippohobbilies

and certainly: caligulate.

Interestingly, I took a look at Thomas' blog and saw his latest post where Caligula is mentioned on page 60 or so. That blog post is here. When I first saw the word caligulate, I first thought of Caligula who was a Roman emperor who is known for his rampant acts of debauchery including killing and incest. What could this word mean then? Is it just the verb form of the man Caligula, or is it a combination with maybe "calculate" or something similar?

Actually, I'm not entirely sure that the real meaning would do me any good. I suppose it is the feeling that I receive that makes all the difference. For example, when I was younger I absolutely hated the word 'basin'. I'm not quite sure what it was about it that incited so much anger, yet anytime I saw the word in a sentence or anything it would affect the way I felt. Nothing good could ever contain the word basin. Isn't that what aesthetics is all about anyway? The feeling and movement of consciousness through art. I will try hard to remain on the tension film while "reading" this book.

And today in our "Random Google Image Search Matchup" we have the word Caligulate.

A Defense of Highbrow.

On Friday, Dr. Sexson talked about some spatial logics of literature in terms of seasons. There is plerosis (the filling up) of certain stories (we talked about romance and comedy) which is placed in the first half of the year (spring / summer). Then there is kenosis (the draining out) that certain stories embody, placed in the second half (autumn / winter). We juxtaposed the writings of Joyce and Beckett in these terms as Finnegan's Wake tries to include everything and Beckett's writing takes everything out of the story.

Dr. Sexson has a way of presenting things that makes stuff sound good. Finnegan's Wake? I tried to sell that one to my mom last year, she didn't buy it.

"But mom - just listen to this language, the way the sentences flow, it gives you the chills."

"What's the point?" she said, scrunching up her nose.

I wanted Dr. Sexson to explain it to her. I think she would like it then.

But this Highbrow literature stuff is difficult to sell - to anybody really, even lit majors. How many of us are going to get through Finnegan's Wake this semester (or ever)? Sexson predicted none. He, of course, is challenging us all to rise to the occasion... the very painful... arduous ... extremely fruitful occasion. And Beckett? Like I said, Dr. Sexson makes things sound enchanting and absolutely delightful, but honestly I was a little depressed after he lectured about the disturbing nature of his writing. The inevitable question arises. Why? Why read a novel that is dark or disturbing or depressing or something that has a pedophile as the main character?

I was reading The Western Canon by Harold Bloom today and it hit me...

"To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.

All that the Western Canon ca

n bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality."

On a personal side, as we begin to read the difficult, arduous works of Joyce and Beckett I am going to attempt to truly receive the aesthetic power that is contained in these novels. I found the words "how to endure ourselves" extremely powerful and moving.
So how do I trick my sister into reading Lolita? I'll just pull out this quote the next time she asks why anyone would want to read about pedophilia.


On a different note entirely, Samuel Beckett used to drive Andre the Giant to school when he was a kid. Pretty sweet.

The evidence here.

Hello all.

First of all, I hope that everyone had a great relaxing vacation, was able to take a few more naps and to clear the mind.

Concerning the definitions of 'high brow' and 'low brow', I don't believe that the term 'depth' has anything to do with it. A 'high brow' work of literature (or art) may expect the reader to understand references to other obscure pieces that may not only make the meanings of the piece richer, but might possibly be entirely necessary for the most basic understanding of it. Whereas a 'low brow' work does not have such high expectations of its readership. While reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories, I ran into a passage that struck me. On page 86 Iff describes the Old Zone and mentions that there is little demand for the ancient stories that reside there, but it is said that all of the stories originated from that area.

All stories are retellings of other stories. Even our lives are displacements of fantastic tales. A highbrow piece of literature may make closer, more specific references to classic tales (commonly mythology) and a lowbrow piece may only nod in that direction. They both however, deal with the same thing. Rather than the black and white of 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' I think we'll find a great grey area that holds terms such as 'common threads' and 'themes'.