Thinking about tackling this behemoth Veeky Forums. The question is: Would I enjoy it without the help of any other text? Did Joyce want it to be confusing and uncomprehensible for the most? Would reading it aloud help me savour at least the musicality of it?
I read everything else from Joyce btw, if that is of any help.
Dude just fucking read it already and stop making these threads
Oliver Lee
By ''dude'' you mean the whole of Veeky Forums? I barely post here. I dont want to go into a 600 pages book I know I won't get anything from.
Michael Morales
you can read any piece of literature and not get anything out of it. what you pull is from your own ability to close read, extrapolate, and comprehend what the letters on the pages mean.
finnegans has a 'skeleton key' online. read the book with it if you like. make a decision. safety is overrated. go into it.
Aaron Torres
>Would I enjoy it without the help of any other text? Yes, but only if you don't have a stick up your ass.
>Did Joyce want it to be confusing and uncomprehensible for the most? He was expecting certain people to understand certain parts depending on what their nationality/background was but for no one to understand the whole thing at once.
>Would reading it aloud help me savour at least the musicality of it? Yes, but figuring out how to pronounce it properly would be hard.
>I read everything else from Joyce btw, if that is of any help. It does.
Jacob Turner
>the musicality of it
...
Hudson Reyes
says he barely posts here, yet hes memeing like a madman
Xavier Gutierrez
It's overrated memey gibberish. I don't think there's anything to gain by reading it.
It turns out that this detailed information on the book cover's source material is available on the back cover of Penguin's edition.
James James
What are all the best Joyce-related memes? "Arse full of farts", "Deal with him, Hemingway!", etc.? What else is there?
Evan Phillips
>If you see Kay, >Tell him he may. >See you in tea, >Tell him from me.
From Ulysses.
Also the entirety of Finnegans Wake is a meme. He spent nearly twenty years figuring out puns like Pennis in the sluts maschine.
Josiah Torres
Somebody post that "teehee what am I referencing now?" pic
Jace Brown
Pennis
Jordan Davis
He's got a pure culchie accent. I can't believe he was from Dublin
Hunter Flores
Took some digging
Nathaniel Taylor
I doubt there's a single meme out there that doesn't already appear in Finnegans Wake.
Zachary Ortiz
He wasn't originally from Dublin. His family moved there when he was like 6 or 7 I think.
Nathan Hernandez
Joyce said: 'If the universe were to be destroyed and only Finnegans Wake remained, we would be able to reconstruct the whole of it through the book''
How could he write something so dense, his genius is astounding.
''Another point, in addition to the original sand, pounce powder, drunkard paper or soft rag used (any vet or inhanger in ous sot's social can see the seen for seemself, a wee ftofty od room, the cheery spluttered on the one karrig, a darka disheen of voos from Dalbania, any gotsquantity of racky, a portogal and some buk setting out on the sofer, you remember the sort of softball sucker motru used to tell us when we were all biribiyas or nippies and messas) it has acquired accretions of terricious matter whilst loitering in the past.'' This piece is taken from chapter 5. I am albanian and I understand this paragraph completely for the uncomprehenseable words are in albanian, it is just unbelievable he could do something so coherent in such an obscure language. I got goosebumps reading it. And every single paragraph, sentence or word sends you to a unique and magical universe. What a madman.
Matthew Hall
Joyce was trolling.
Hunter Rodriguez
>only if you don't have a stick up your ass See? This is why it's worth making these threads.
Aaron Sanders
good meme
Joshua Collins
>Pennis in the sluts maschine. Is it worth reading the book if you've alredy seen what must be the highpoint?
Isaiah Price
It's great that no matter how long I stay away, I can be sure the same questions are being asked by a new flock of sheep.
Anthony Phillips
Translate words, pls.
Justin Lee
Her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.
Jaxson Price
Sot- Today Ftofty- Cold (wordplay, it sounds like lofty) Od- Room (he says odd room while using the albanian for 'room') Cheery- Candle, telling the candle is spluttered in the chair but also setting the mood of the room: 'cheery' Karrig- Chair Darka- Dinner Disheen- Doubled Voos- Big kind of plate, like casserole, or a vase to hold food Gotsquantity- 'Got' is glass Racky- Raki, liquor albanians drink, alongside most of the balkans, Portogal- Orange Buk- Bread Sofer- Eating table Motru- Sister, ''motra'' Biribiyas- Biri is son, or kid and Biya (Bija) daughter, when I read the two put together it was quite funny and witty Nippies- 'nipi' Nephew Messas- 'mesa' Niece
Justin Moore
Something I forgot. When he says 'ftofty od room', 'ftoft' is cold, and he uses it to make it sound like 'lofty'. 'Lofty' means extending high in the air; of imposing height; towering. North Albanian traditional houses are the 'kullas' (it's worth mentioning that he uses the northen dialect as opposed to the now official southern-middle one), which are high tower-like buildings located in the mountains. (pic related) So he tells you it's cold using the albanian word for it while making a wordplay in english to give the nature of the vernacular architecture. Now tell me that isn't genius.
Wyatt Roberts
Forgot pic
Jace Morales
It is genius, but these fags don't appreciate actual genius and would rather jerk off to Ernie Memmmmmeingway's manchildish tales of crusty old man semen.
Jaxon Gutierrez
Thanks. Knowing this obscure shit makes the book amazing.
I understood the words in my language too.
t. Serb
Gavin Brown
>So he tells you it's cold using the albanian word for it while making a wordplay in english to give the nature of the vernacular architecture. What's the point of compressing a sentence down into wordplay in order to communicate something when decompressing it takes longer to explain than simply telling you the original sentence?
Hudson Wood
Then he should have said that directly. It's not my job to reenact the author's philological research.
Justin Davis
Because it's meant to be a dream of the collective unconscious, and nothing is straightforward in dreams.
Thomas Morris
This.
Read his other stuff if you want conscious thought.
Michael Johnson
>Let me explain the five-star rating. When I was teenager I was ludicrously shy. I was the son and heir of a shyness that was criminally vulgar. My all-conquering shyness kept Morrissey in gold-plated ormolu swans for eight years. Any contact with human beings made me mumble in horror and scuttle off to lurk in dark corners. But I developed this automatic writing technique in school to ease my mounting stress whenever teachers were poaching victims to answer questions, perform presentations or generally humiliate. I would start out composing a piece of surrealist free-association prose, usually violently satirical. As the teachers (or pupils or other humans) closed in around me, my prose would lapse into soothing gibberish. Sometimes I wrote a stream of pretty sounding words (I was a rabid sesquipedalian in my teens)—zeugmatic, antediluvian, milquetoast, mugwump. Luscious lovely words! Sometimes language broke down into neologisms or gibberish—boobleplop, artycary, frumpalerp, etc. Nervy, throbbing syllables. I came to associate collapsed language with an inner space where I went to hide from the imagined humiliations of interacting with others. Once I escaped the imprisonment of my inner conscious (over a four-year period known as The Torture Years), I always used nonsense writing as a means of getting through difficult situations—where others might doodle, for example, I would write Joycean Jabberwocky. Still do, usually on the phone. So this book, to me, is The Little Book of Calm. Except it isn’t little, and it makes people shit themselves. Me? I love this magnificent beast. Unless you suffer from similar deep-seated psychological wounds that threaten to gradually consume your entire adult life, don’t read this.
Adrian Hill
how the hell did you decipher this
Xavier Gray
It's my mother tongue.
Sebastian Lopez
>shy
It's sound a damn lot more than just shyness, he describe persecutory thoughts and his coping mechanism seem to be some kind of mania
Matthew Cook
We should group together and decipher using our various nationalities.
Is there french in this shit?
Josiah Gomez
Yeah, I actually read the whole thing because I had to. I was entering a prestigious PhD program and focusing on Toole because I loved The Neon Bible. To my shame, though, I'd never read Confederacy. 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 Bach." Finally, though, I had to dive into it, and let me tell you it was tough going. Louisiana State'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 valve 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 Confederacy, 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 about Ignatius. It had surpassed all of Toole's other works in my estimation. The Neon Bible, the book months earlier I would've named as my favorite of all time, the best book ever written, was now #2 to Confederacy. 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 Ignatius, what are his 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'!
Anthony Stewart
There are about 40 languages used if I remember correctly. So yes, a big part is in french.
Oliver Smith
That'd actually be a good idea senpai.
Angel Rogers
About 6 months into doing a solo run through and I'm surprised at how fun it is. Really, you just need to have patience and a sense of humor.
(The "chapter notes" at the beginning of the book are really useful for staying on track with all the crazy shit going on.)
Joshua Cox
>And that's the he and the she of it
If I just strait stole this expression and used it in my book do you thing anyone would notice?