Smooth of my slate

• Come, smooth of my slate ....: this long footnote is entitled THE LETTER in Joyce's drafts. In this letter, Issy "describes her youthful, manic, self-centred, flirtatious exuberance; her thoughts of suicide; her relationships with boys and her father; and her thwarted attempts to write and pass herself off as intelligent." (Luca Crispi, How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake (Madison, Wisconsin, 2007), p. 232) → compare this with the correspondence and relationships between Stella & Vanessa and Jonathan Swift

• slate: a writing slate, like the ones pupils would have used in school in olden times