Finnegan's wake

riverrun

>Emperor's New Clothes of literature.
Yeah I'm sure that's why Ezra Pound and Joyce's brother ripped on it, and why a lot of people considered Joyce's literary capabilities squandered.
>"Only the intelligent understand it," you see.
I understand a bit of it and don't consider myself very intelligent. I know enough not to dismiss its reputation as a great novel as a fucking conspiracy. I'm smart enough to not believe in educated members of a discipline that can be held hostage by the fear of seeming incompetent.

I literally can't imagine being this pseud

Well not exactly science, but you could be reading about any sort of non-fiction.

This is really the reason why I’ve stopped reading fiction for the most part: it’s pointless. You could be spending your time learning about the world around you.

But Pynchon has mathematics, engineering, all sorts of stuff so I come back to Pynchon every now and again

I mean breathing is pointless for you

i already understand and have studied those. like i said, this is the final boss FOR ME

>this is the final boss
nah m8 this is the boss the game makes you think is the final boss, but then there's another boss right after

which

Read it out loud. Like Shakespeare, it has an incantatory quality.

My diary, desu

past

what did Joyce mean by this?

the boss that seems at first glance like "this is the final boss???" and then he gets more real than anything you've faced yet
the bible

Then your final boss is weak sauce

>pointless
Pleasure is pointless, fun is pointless, happiness is pointless and not killing/raping people/generally being inside the law is pointless because they don't advance your knowledge, which is the be all and end all of existence.

That sounds retarded, right? That's you. You're retarded.

bible is not literature

Not at all. Reading is different. Pleasure is not pointless but spending all day getting absorbed into an imaginary world is childish to say the least

Laugh at this man

You could have just said that reading is not your thing, my man.

...

Oh I love reading though :/

You could be browsing reddit

The newspaper isn't literature, user

Then are mathematics? How about philosophy? Economics?

Point is, stories and immersion are a big part of what makes literature what it is. If you seek only information and "knowledge", then literature isn't really your thing. Nothing wrong with that, it's just that you're on the wrong board. There's Veeky Forums, Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums for that.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

for best effects, read it out loud in an affected irish accent. it makes a lot more sense

i've heard it said that the only way to really "get" the book is to have it read aloud by a group

ulstria, monastir, leninstar, and connecticut

Taking into account that even if you read it aloud in a group numerous times there'll always be stuff left that went unnoticed. The only dude who really "got" the book died two years after publishing it, and with him our chance of us listening to the explanations that he was more than happy to offer to anyone who asked.

And all those Skeleton Key To Finnegans Wake books and the like are crap.

I didn't even get Ulysses: the post

>And all those Skeleton Key To Finnegans Wake books and the like are crap.
Don't lay your trip on me, man. I never regretted reading Burgess's guide.

I never regretted going to see a local band where a friend of mine played bass, doesn't make the band any less crap (it really, really was crap, oh my lord)

"the way the river runs" / "the shape of the river"

He just meant "along the course of the river"

Why the hell is it uncapitalized?

unexpected kek

There's an entire book between the end and the beginning the beginning and the end. The work is recursive.

I made a thread about this book couple of days ago with zero reply, but anyways, I'm re-reading ulysses and will be reading finnegans for the first time in a couple of weeks, I'll read this before: Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn.

Its a 40 pages book, here a paragraph about it

>"Probably the best-known phrase in the book is "incoherent transactions", apparently referring to theft, which occurs three times. [...] A more recent mention of the phrase is in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire; the narrator sees McDiarmid's (the author of it) prose as a precursor to Finnegans Wake, a comparison Nabokov also made in a draft note."

if you want to read more about it

ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Striking_and_Picturesque_Delineations.html

I browse Veeky Forums regularly, but literature comprises all books, just so you know.

I have talked about various sorts of miscellaneous topics on here, you’d be surprised how many people are browsing that are reading some very interesting non-fiction.

‘Immersing’ yourself is definitely not necessarily part of a book, it is part of SOME, and that is an important distinction.

youtube.com/watch?v=A6POvrw1ty4

>being able to recount all of this

Should "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress" be read before or after?

>Ctrl+F
>No results found:
>'s
>Yeah, I actually read the whole thing because I had to. I was entering a prestigious PhD program and focusing on Joyce because I loved Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses. To my shame, though, I'd never read the Wake. I'd never even tried, as hard as that was to admit. It was this huge blind spot and area of vulnerability for me. Whenever it'd come up with my colleagues I'd just smile and nod, smile and nod, hoping they wouldn't ask me anything specific about it. "The musicality of it," somebody would say, and I'd say, "Oh God, yes, it's like Beethoven." Finally, though, I had to dive into it, and let me tell you it was tough going. Joseph Campbell's guide helped a lot. Reading it out loud helped. I listened to other people read it, read online commentaries. Eventually it started to make some sort of sense. It was like I was learning to read for the first time again, and in a way this was enjoyable. I got better at reading the book. Soon I was reading entire paragraphs without trouble, getting the puns, laughing at the jokes. I could sort of follow the story, it was like a blurry picture resolving into clarity, or like I was drunk and I was sobering up, I could actually understand it. As I became more and more adept at reading the Wake, I began putting myself to the test, initiating conversations with my colleagues about it, but specific passages this time, specific parts of the book. You can probably guess what happened. After a number of these conversations it became blindingly obvious that I understood the book a lot better than they did, they who I thought were the experts. It eventually became sort of embarrassing for them and I stopped trying to talk about it. And at the end of the day I would pack my things, catch the bus home, and settle into my apartment to read the Wake. It had surpassed all of Joyce's other works in my estimation. Ulysses, the book months earlier I would've named as my favorite of all time, the best book ever written, was now #2 to the Wake. So majestic, so ambitious, so wide-ranging, erudite, glorious, incredible was it that I couldn't believe that it was the work of one man. Best of all, the heart of it isn't complicated at all. What did I get from the Wake, what are its lessons? First of all, be yourself. Second of all, put one foot in front of the other. And lastly, just do it for crying out loud, time's a wastin'!
Newfags

fucking newfags

Honestly if someone made a reading group I’d participate. I’ve read some challenging stuff, but I feel like it’d be impossible for me to parse this by myself.

that's the whole point, though. you just gotta keep reading it. the novel is a loop so you can just pick it up wherever when you need to when you feel like it. finnegan's wake is impossible to finish once you've started

the journey of one thousand miles starts with a single step, user

I’d start the group myself, but seeing as how I haven’t read it I don’t think I could properly structure a reading schedule.
100 pages a week seems decent for most people, but really I’d have no idea.

100 pages a week is way too ambitious. i'd do it 25 at a time maximum. if you're reading the book to finish it you're cheating yourself

i'm a pretty fast reader but finnegans wake took me i think three months to get through

Yeah, maybe I suppose. But my job gives me the ability to read like a book a week, so my view is probably skewed.

Which is why I suggested someone else start the book to get a more reasonable timeline.