What's the appeal of pic related?
Only a few of us can actually read the book, and even fewer people understand what the fuck Joyce was talking about.
All I know is some guy posted here a few months ago that on Thanksgiving Day he went to a used book store and read aloud from Finnegans Wake and cried at its beauty right there in the store. I called him a weirdo or something and asked him why he wasn't with his family and friends on that day and he gave me a lecture about not judging people or something.
Wait a second, why was the store open on Thanksgiving? Wouldn't it be closed? God damn, man, I've been trolled. Trolled again. I hate online.
>>7523842
Just read it loud, you will understand
>>7523847
I remember that thread. Why did you feel the need to do that though? You came into a thread just to insult what was for him clearly a very meaningful existence and tell him that he should have spent the day doing something that you think is good. Tbqh his anger at you was warranted and from the way you've written this comment it is apparent that you are still an asshole.
>>7523930
I may have been an asshole to that guy, but it just seemed so pathetic to me. I am not an asshole generally.
>>7523842
Joyce realized he was circling the drain and he wanted to write one last book, but he realized he was famous enough that people would eat up whatever he shat out, so he said "fuck it" and wrote an entire novel of random bullshit. Show it to all the people who worship Joyce like the second coming of Christ and all the high school English teachers who lap up vapid bullshit like mother's milk, and you've got a classic.
>>7523947
Abstract nonsense would be a fair criticism, but to call Finnegans Wake vapid is just stupid.
People here shit on the Wake all the time, but I love it. I've read it all the way through three times, once blind and the other times with various supplemental texts.
It's the end of modernism. It's absolutely insane, and it's brilliant. It's chock full of puns and dick jokes, along with like 14 languages. It's an exegesis on tons of classical Myths through the mind of a dreaming man (maybe).
The appeal is usually:
James Joyce wrote it, and he is one of the best writers of all time.
It has a reputation as an insanely difficult book, which attracts a certain type of reader.
I wish more people would take the time to read it. Finwake.com is good for basic annotations, and I enjoyed Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake the most out of all the texts I've read about FW.
>>7523958
It's not like no one ever thought of it before. It's just that none of them were famous authors. If you're cynical enough to see the forest for the trees, there's really nothing that enthralling about it.
>>7523968
>It's not like no one ever thought of it before.
Possibly, but they didn't spend 17 years writing it, nor did they likely have Joyce's level of talent.
>>7523968
>>7523968
I suppose the appeal is in its incomprehensibility, if you read it you don't start expecting to understand it but if you get anything at all from it or even just enjoy it then the feeling is that you have achieved something, its almost like a game.
I used to be convinced that it was all the stories from the old testament, but not so sure anymore it means anything.
Anything you want to find in there is in there. If you look hard enough and preform enough mental gymnastics you can make any connection you like.
It is what you make of it, the more effort you put in, the more you get from it, exponentially, if you are too cynical to put any effort you will just see it abstract bullshit written by some blind savant has-been.
Joyce predicted people would be studying the wake for centuries, and made fun of and ridiculed future scholars in the wake because of this.
Apparently he wasn't happy with it himself and just wanted to be done with it near the end so possibly could have held an opinion similar to yours on the book.
>>7523935
Not the other guy, but your reaction seemed fair and just and probably helped everybody in the long run.
The way you describe it, his crying was likely forced or had to do with some other shit going on his life. You get the feeling that as he cried publicly, he enjoyed the feeling of people witnessing his tears, which of course indicate how intelligent/in touch with his emotions he is. Because it is Finnegan's Wake, he gets the double whammy of implying those who read it critically are joyless academics who can't see the beauty right in front of them. Of course, the audience was critical readers, not people like our Thanksgiving poster who treat the most difficult read novel as a fucking tone poem.
Then, he has the audacity to go on /lit/ and post an "off my chest". He did frame it in that responsibility-absorbing way, right? He wasn't "bragging" about crying in public (after not getting the reaction he wanted), he was getting it "off his chest", thereby sidestepping the very small courtesy of explaining why the post matters, right? It couldn't be that he just wanted to milk his little performance for another circlejerk of sentimentality that would make the end of Final Fantasy game seem like the Brothers Karamazov?
But he isn't interested in actually reading the book, or reading the book with kind of careful attention it requires to understand seriously. I'm not even defending it; it seems like a waste of time if you're not already very familiar with where he's coming from, and while I find those who've made sense of it commendable, I only feel that way in the sense that there must be some inherent value in climbing Kilimanjaro, even if that effort would have been better spent making a movie or curing malaria or stripping copper wire out of Detroit's ruins. He just wants to look super sensitive. Which is to say, he's shopping for victim status without the trouble of being victimized. I will bet you that dude is a white, straight, het, cis male who takes his social justice issues very seriously, but also is very envious of blacks for having the special dignity associated with overcoming oppression. Because no black dude, or no anybody who has to deal with this sort of shit, would go through the trouble of creating new ways of being victim (i.e. being victimized by one's own sensitive psyche) when they already know that actually being a victim blows.
He believes that strange narrative that just being a victim and having something to overcome is valuable in itself, and if pressed would be forced to admit his logic would demand that we should oppress everybody, if only to create better and wiser people through racism the way the pressure under the crust of the earth turns coal to diamonds. He probably believes that artistic ability isn't a combination of talent and a lot of hard work, but something that naturally springs from Pain (tm), as opposed to what actually springs from hardship (PTSD, mostly).
Finnies wake is simply the extent of maximalism.
If the wake didn't exist you would be asking whats the point of the second hardest book.
whats the point asking that question. There must be a boundary.
>>7523935
I don't know all the context, but I want to say about having a "pathetic" experience with literature.
When I was younger I had to take care of my sick grandmother, and she was dying over the course of 3 years, her body essentially melting in front of me.
I never cried at her funeral, or another funeral since then. Suffering I had got too close too and it hardened me up.
But when I read Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, just on random recommendation, I burst out crying half sad half happy at the way it made me think of my grandmother. I can go back still and it makes me cry every single time.
You never know what book is going to have your number in a way you can never anticipate.
If you read a lot some day you will find a work that bitch slaps you so fucking hard you cry like a bitch.
Sometimes seeing words on a page can be more impact than a real event.
>>7524026
Lmao, jeez, you really went for the throat. Essentially, that's how I viewed it. It seemed like a douchey move. Sorry. I don't know the guy personally, and maybe I was something of a douche myself, raising my eyebrow at his emotional experience, but I don't know, sometimes we give each other shit here on the old /lit/ board.
>>7524026
>>>/tumblr/
>>7524026
got damn man that was too real
I remember being 17 or 18... I was really into Robert Anton Wilson at the time and he raved about Finnegans wake and Joyce's schizophrenic daughter... "The difference.." Jung said "is that you're diving, she's sinking, James".
So I go to the library and pull it off the shelves... The librarian looked into my bloodshot eyes and smirked as he handed me a copy. I sat at a nearby table and tried to find something comprehensible in the text to no avail. What the fuck is this? I returned the book and left the library feeling retarded and stopped reading for 3 years. I still remember the librarian laughing at me as I ran out the door.
>>7523842
Learn at least another language. The more languages you know, the better you'll get it, and see why people who get it are so fanatical about it.
Also, pay attention to the words and the text. The majority reads for plot and/or prose passively, just soaking the text like a sponge soaks water an sliding along the text without a single effort on the part of their attention. This book requires active attention, that is, you must be really engaged, and willing to concentrate and reread sentences in order to see the jokes and "understandable" sequences buries beneath layers of transmuted words (There's a plot, and it's possible to get it, once you understand how sentences and words are constructed). The only other book I know that demands active attention or you'll miss the point is Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson.
And don't believe /lit/ autists who say that it's too complex for plebs or that only pretentious people like it. I showed the book to normies, both male and female, who think that reading Harry Potter is a feat. We had great laughs and great time.
Have you heard the sentence "a book is a mirror: when a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out?" This book is a perfect litmus test.
you need to be highly intelligent to understand it
>>7524036
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/S7139785#p7141662
here family
I'm 50 pages in and while I enjoy it I'm not following any sort of narrative. Am I supposed to be? I like the play on words, puns and jokes but fuck if I know what is going on if anything.
>>7524594
To say shortly, HCE, the main protagonist, commits a "crime" in the park, but someone see him, and then the whole town stars shit talking about him and his family. A lot of the texts is just different people talking through various mediums about what HCE did, and how horrendous it is.
In the latter half a trial happens, and the the end and a new beginning.
The whole affair evolves around Vico's theory of history, hence four big parts of the book, and the whole victim hunt follows his history theory (hence the trial is in the third part, which symbolizes the human part of history, while hearsay is in the first, which stands for the mythological time)
Oh, it was the Fourth of July. My bad.
>>7524542
>thinking it was thanksgiving
>its even worse
>I read Finnegans Wake to myself out loud on the 4th of July 'cause I was hiding from the patriotism in this little second hand bookstore
>hiding from the patriotism
>>7524542
>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/S7139785#p7141662
Thank you
What makes it even more contemptible is the reaction that encourage him. /lit/ is a worthless dumping ground of scourched emotion, but the one thing that makes it better than other places is the lack of sentimentality. Well, here's to being proved wrong.
>What a superb post
What a shitty and fake sounding superlative
And when someone calls out the bullshit:
>What a fucking Postmodernized boor you must be, eh? I mean, he wasn't giving a groundbreaking intellectual analysis of it (the theme of Finnegans Wake breaking down barriers between Joyce and the reader is a recurrent one in scholarship), but it was clearly heartfelt and insightful enough.How about turn off the 4chan part of your brain for just a second one of these days? Cynicism can't be applied to everything.
Boor is a shitty insult.
Ain't it weird how people start waxing old english the second they get in a corner?
>>7526307
>Ain't it weird how people start waxing old english the second they get in a corner?
It's weird that people go to one extreme or another ;^)
>>7526396
It reminds me of when black people slip into ebonics when they're mad.
>>7526412
even when they were raised by honkies in the suburbs.
Yo I'm drunk af
>>7526468
cool. watchu drinkni?
>>7526463
i'll take that if you accept that white people who never were 18th century englishmen talk like that when they scurred too
Boor is a 16th Century Dutch and Low German insult. I doubt if Elizabeth busted that one out with any regularity.
>>7526534
Good catch, but you get my point.
Also click on post numbers to quote them in posts send pie
>>7526542
Apparently Marge Simpson's maiden name Bouvier comes from the 13th C. French 'bovier' or Boor.
I associated it at first with a Tennessee Williams play...
>>7526545
>Also click on post numbers to quote them in posts send pie
You figured it out!
>>7526548
A student is only as good as the teacher who takes time to train him, your grace.*
*recited en francais
