(no subject)
Jul. 29th, 2011 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferret2 weeks into the Finnegans Wake thing. I've done some readings alone, and others with a few people.
There's this thing good readers do with difficult books where they postpone comprehension. If I don't follow an early scene because I don't understand who the characters are and what their relationships are, for example, I'll just store facts from the conversation in my brain and keep reading in the hope that later I'll be able to recall those facts when I better understand the characters.
Finnegans Wake puts an awful burden on that procedure. Occasionally in these six pages I've had some sort of payoff, where a set of facts coalesce and for a moment I say "Oh, we've had a bunch of references to alcohol and now someone's garbling Grace, so we must be at a pub." But for the most time I'm just storing random-seeming things I don't comprehend and hoping against all hopes that later something will click. Probably they won't, but I'm having fun anyway. Dear lord, the puns are amazing. So many puns. So many words overloaded with meanings.
I think I'm going to move the readings to 10:30ET this coming week. We'll see how that goes, some people have told me that 11:30 is past their bedtime.
There's this thing good readers do with difficult books where they postpone comprehension. If I don't follow an early scene because I don't understand who the characters are and what their relationships are, for example, I'll just store facts from the conversation in my brain and keep reading in the hope that later I'll be able to recall those facts when I better understand the characters.
Finnegans Wake puts an awful burden on that procedure. Occasionally in these six pages I've had some sort of payoff, where a set of facts coalesce and for a moment I say "Oh, we've had a bunch of references to alcohol and now someone's garbling Grace, so we must be at a pub." But for the most time I'm just storing random-seeming things I don't comprehend and hoping against all hopes that later something will click. Probably they won't, but I'm having fun anyway. Dear lord, the puns are amazing. So many puns. So many words overloaded with meanings.
I think I'm going to move the readings to 10:30ET this coming week. We'll see how that goes, some people have told me that 11:30 is past their bedtime.