Scholars, Students, Teachers and Addicts: Welcome Back!
Sep 5th, 2008 by finnegan
While I may be flying a bit blind here as your humble webmaster, I must admit I have made an assumption about you, the end users, the real stars of this site.
I assume that the traffic spikes in late summer and fall of each year directly correlate with school studies resuming, and that a significant portion of you are visiting this site to supplement coursework on literature, Joyce specifically, or the Wake itself, if you’re lucky enough to have a course solely devoted to the Wake.
I’d like to ask a favor. Could you take a moment to shoot me an email telling me about yourself, your studies, how and when you became interested in the Wake, and your thoughts on this site? My email is bobgerman at the domain bobgerman dot com. I’m really interested in the backstory of each and every one of you, and I might use information you provide to improve the site, if good ideas come up.
I’ll start. I’m a reader. I LOVE to read. I read everything I can get my hands on, at least when I can fit it into my schedule. I came to the Wake after reading several in-jokes along my literary travels about readers getting lost in it. Lost in a book? What a concept? I was hooked by the very first page. But I’ll tell you, what REALLY hit me was when I combined reading the book with listening to it. It helped me to really grasp the dialect.
Thanks for reading, and I hope to hear from each of you soon.
I am a retired professor, poet, aspiring novelist. All my life I have drawn inspiration and courage from the spirit of modernism Joyce represents. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago, I gave a paper roughly along the lines of FINNEGANS WAKE being the ignored elephant in the tent of modernist and contemporary literary studies. It was a tree that fell in the forest with a thundering crash heard only by the mouse that had chewed on the last miniscule rootlet holding it aloft, me! I discovered this site by Googling “mildew lisa,” in case I needed it in German for the first sentence of my novel, THE GOAT’S MIRROR, which I have been revising for the past several years, latest revision prompted by a lingering winter cold which for the last two weeks has kept me from the shed behind my house where I can build a fire in my woodstove and consider my opening gauntlet and other options, but the rose-tinted scales that brighten my assessment of my accomplishments deteriorate during a layoff like this–I’m a former long distance runner, the kind of fellow who used to believe that if he missed a day’s ten mile run, he’d fall out of shape and never recover (great fan of Stephen Dedalus running an oval for Simon’s stopwatch with his arms stiffly at his sides!)–and this anxiety, the need to return to the foul rag and boneshop where I’ve been farting around, as I say, for a year or more, has carried over to my noveleering. I am immensely gratified by your site, sat and listened to a fellow reading page one (technically page three) of the WAKE, and tingled in ecstasy, a mouse in blue cheese!
AH! I am awaiting moderation. In Africa it is said that with an intensification of moderation, patience, one can cook an elephant in a part!
Holy Crumb (the eponymous Robert and I were both born on August 30, and hail from adjoining Philadelphia neighborhoods, I think) where the hell are the comments. All three are me! But I find reading the Wake has gotten easier with age. You spend a lifetime transcending anxieties about meaning, meaningfulness, when its all a recirculus vicus and riverrun.
I come to this site frequently and having even made a few revisions. It would be such a great tragedy if it were to go away. Keep up the good job. I’m a physics grad student that started reading FW about 4 years and just finnished reading all the words last year.
Hey,
A friend of mine wanted to read this book but she didn’t feel she had the fortitude to do it alone so we started a book club to pool our collective ideas as we read through it. We have plowed through the first two chapters and are currently working on the third. It is diffcult.
Hey All!
I love books and everything to do with them. I’ve never actually visited this site until now. While I was back in university, my prof talked about this site (as a group annotated version of Finnegans wake) so now, years after graduation, I’m following up on my promise to my dear teacher. I’m here to enjoy the words and hopefully to help out! I am a computer guy on the side, so I might be interested in finding out how to best use this great resource we have here.
This jumperoo the proper! We’ve got the software any time great young man was some weeks good old, and even though she or he is too smallish for this, they fit in into the cushioned cinema seat which includes a rolled-up umbrella as the increaser automobile but some major text books under an individual’s your feet. He very quickly became into it in addition to ended up being lunging such as guru. She’s nowadays hunting for several weeks unwanted but still savors it.
I was really quite defeated by ‘Ulysses’ about five years ago so tried ‘Wake’ instead. Obviously it is not easier. However, with the Skeleton Key and fact that most respectable folks would have no real ability to judge my progress through ‘Wake’ became liberating. Some days I just underline HCEs and some days I am pulled into long passages. O foenix culprit!