luka

Well-known member
so what i know from looking it up is that this thunder, the 6th thunder, as well as beginning with my name (LUKE, the artist. looshoofer is Luke's Hoofer, his winged ox or bull) is about doors

Lukke doeren - Dan. 'close the door'
hoofer moyporter - Fr. fermez la porte, 'close the door'
toory zoo: Ger. Tuer zu, 'shut the door'
sakroidverj: Rus. zakroj dver' , 'shut the door'

looshoofer as roland mchugh points out is also Lucifer

and is also
doer and done, actor and act at once. un and ur (zero and one)
but what i've just noticed is the porter doesn't just refer to the famous pint of porter please but
also to the porter in Macbeth and the knock, knock occurs right at the end of this thunder
(while also giving a nod to k-punk)

Knocking within. Enter a Porter

Porter

Here's a knocking indeed! If a
man were porter of hell-gate, he should have
old turning the key.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of
Beelzebub? Here's a farmer, that hanged
himself on the expectation of plenty: come in
time; have napkins enow about you; here
you'll sweat for't.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock! Who's there, in the other devil's
name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could
swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there? Faith, here's an
English tailor come hither, for stealing out of
a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may
roast your goose.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock; never at quiet! What are you? But
this place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-porter
it no further: I had thought to have let in
some of all professions that go the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire.

Knocking within
Anon, anon! I pray you, remember the porter.

Opens the gate


here is the confirmation for the macbeth reference a few pages beforehand

"for a burning would is come to dance inane"
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Joyce's stuff is notorious for misprints, bootleg versions and so on. Scholars argue over spelling mistakes, punctuation and all sorts in both the original and 'corrected' texts so it's just some academic's take on how it should be presented. I doubt anyone outside that world would be able to tell the difference without someone pointing it out. People argue over stuff like where the full stops should be in certain sentences in Ulysses.

I can imagine that for the sort of person who gets obsessed with things like this, each of his books is like the Qu'ran and ceases to be the original text, with its integral magickal potency, if so much as a single letter is out of place.
 

Numbers

Well-known member
In case you haven't read it yet, there has been an entertaining long-read in the NYTimes about John Kidd: an academic once famed as the greatest Joyce scholar ever, who started talking to birds and then disappeared. I am fond of people able to lose their minds about the correct punctuation of two periods in a book hundreds of pages long.
 

luka

Well-known member
i was just having a chat with the grapejuice guy about leap years in the wake.
joyce was born in febuary on a leap year and they have some kind of special significance
for him (http://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com/2012/09/quadra-sent-him-and-trinity-too-1.html
432 was also a leap year)
but my suspicion is that leap years appeal to him because they point to the basic inadequacy and arbitrariness of numerical systems and divisions. that all the numbers in the wake, all the numerical mysticism of 1s and 0s, 2s, 4s and 12s, of 108 and 432 is being sent up. useful as structuring devices but failing to account for reality. the blueprint maybe mathematical but in practice there is always a slight deviation, an imbalance, and it is that very deviation and imbalance that history emerges from.

heronboneMay 9, 2016 at 11:10 AM

Something quite extraordinary just happened and it ended with 432, which was also, as puck would have it, a leap year

(2016 was a leap year.)

What forces combined and clashing? And in what ratio?
What hodgepodge system of imbalanced and misaligned energies toppling into future? And what could nudge the Whole into harmony?
 
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luka

Well-known member
https://archive.org/stream/WyndhamL...dham Lewis - TimeandWesternMan-Book1_djvu.txt

essential reading. pertains especially to the ondt and the gracehopper. lewis gets cast as one of the sets of twins with joyce being the other half of the dyad.
.

I have said to myself that I will fix my attention upon those things that
have most meaning for me. All that seems to me to contradict or threaten
those things I will do my best to modify or to defeat, and whatever I see
that favours and agrees with those things I will support and do my best
to strengthen. In consequence, I shall certainly be guilty of injustice, the
heraclitean ‘injustice of the opposites.’ But how can we evade our destiny of
being ‘an opposite,’ except by becoming some grey mixture, that is in reality
just nothing at all?
 

version

Well-known member
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has been described as many things, from a masterpiece to unreadable nonsense. But it is also, according to scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland, almost indistinguishable in its structure from a purely mathematical multifractal.

The academics put more than 100 works of world literature, by authors from Charles Dickens to Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Mann, Umberto Eco and Samuel Beckett, through a detailed statistical analysis. Looking at sentence lengths and how they varied, they found that in an “overwhelming majority” of the studied texts, the correlations in variations of sentence length were governed by the dynamics of a cascade – meaning that their construction is a fractal: a mathematical object in which each fragment, when expanded, has a structure resembling the whole.

“All of the examined works showed self-similarity in terms of organisation of the lengths of sentences. Some were more expressive – here The Ambassadors by Henry James stood out – others to far less of an extreme, as in the case of the French 17th-century romance Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus. However, correlations were evident, and therefore these texts were the construction of a fractal,” said Dr Paweł Oświęcimka from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, one of the authors of the new paper Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-range Correlations in Narrative Texts.

Some works, however, were more mathematically complex than others, with stream-of-consciousness narratives the most complex, comparable to multifractals, or fractals of fractals. Finnegans Wake, the scientists found, was the most complex of all.

“The absolute record in terms of multifractality turned out to be Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The results of our analysis of this text are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical multifractals,” said Professor Stanisław Drożdż, another author of the paper, which has just been published in the computer science journal Information Sciences.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...actal-structure-of-finnegans-wake-james-joyce
 

version

Well-known member
At one point you describe the Warren Commission Report, which is twenty-six volumes long, as the novel that James Joyce might have written if he had moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.

I asked myself what Joyce could possibly do after Finnegans Wake, and this was the answer. It’s an amazing document. The first fifteen volumes are devoted to testimony and the last eleven volumes to exhibits, and together we have a masterwork of trivia ranging from Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental records to photographs of knotted string. What was valuable to me most specifically was the testimony of dozens and dozens of people who talk not only about their connection to the assassination itself but about their jobs, their marriages, their children. This testimony provided an extraordinary window on life in the Fifties and Sixties and, beyond that, gave me a sense of people’s speech patterns, whether they were private detectives from New Orleans or railroad workers from Fort Worth.
 
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other_life

bioconfused
if i take up reading this fucking book and am, constantly going back and forth between it, wiktionary, and an anagram scrambler, to make sense of what the fuck he's saying
am i going to lose my mind?
 

other_life

bioconfused
listened to mckenna's take on it finally... getting very tempting...
worried that this is going to do my head in more than trying to grapple with the Tanakh, but at least it seems rippingly funny.
 

luka

Well-known member
If you try and cross reference every word then I don't think you'll go mad but I do expect you'll burn out fairly quickly. I rarely look anything up. I'm happy to miss most of its meanings provided I get the broader sweep of the thing.
 

other_life

bioconfused
If you try and cross reference every word then I don't think you'll go mad but I do expect you'll burn out fairly quickly. I rarely look anything up. I'm happy to miss most of its meanings provided I get the broader sweep of the thing.
was feeling this way about it. it's supposed to be a 'night book'/dream, after all?
still gonna read some introductory stuff + ulysses (just watched the 1967 film last night/this morning... molly's soliloquoy made me cry). burgess's 'joysprick', 'alchemy and finnegan's wake', 'lots of fun at finnegan's wake: unravelling universals', 'wake rites: the ancient irish rites of finnegan's wake', and 'the books at the wake'. particularly psyched for the alchemy and irish ritual ones
 

luka

Well-known member
Me too or I'd never get it done. I'm sure other life reads way quicker than me but the idea of reading 6 books about reading the wake before reading the wake still seems a bit bonkers to me! Books about the wake are always good though.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
This was also exactly T S Eliot’s (and Pound’s) advice about reading “difficult” literature. Although Pound’s claim that all the tools for reading the Cantos were there on the pages themselves was pushing it a bit.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I feel like all the tools might have been there for people they could have expected to be reading them in the early 20th century - namely, people with classical education who had grown up in a religious society.

I've noticed lately that books from that era often slip in and out of French as if anybody reading it should be able to translate with ease. It makes me feel like an uncultured yob for not knowing anything beyond oui and ennui.

Then again, I read an Eliot essay on Dante recently in which he advises to read it first without hoping to understand all the allegorical meanings and much less the arcane historical references. I guess if something isn't good enough to stand without its allusions it isn't good enough at all.

T. S. Eliot, Dante (2nd edn., London, 1965)

In my own experience of the appreciation of poetry I have always found that the less I knew about the poet and his work, before I began to read it, the better. … At least, it is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship.

What is surprising about the poetry of Dante is that it is, in one sense, extremely easy to read. It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Ulysses is just one of many huge books I've always put off reading, though less for it's length than the suspicion that most of it will go over my head.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Then again, I read an Eliot essay on Dante recently in which he advises to read it first without hoping to understand all the allegorical meanings and much less the arcane historical references. I guess if something isn't good enough to stand without its allusions it isn't good enough at all.

Seems spot-on to me. Every communication a human being ever has, they're always struggling to understand things that aren't made explicit by their interlocutor, trying with difficulty to piece together links so that they might understand the whole and enter the world of the other (if of course they are interested in bothering with such close listening) - so art that laboriously tries to make everything transparent and understandable, is unreflective of the complexity of the human experience.
 
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