Beware

"Information overload reduces IQ more than smoking cannabis," concludes Mike: an apparently nice man who writes the apparently nice blog Real Gem. "Beware unchecked infomania."

Only apparently, Mr Fist? A quick check of Mike's profile info suggests the story is worse than that. The info-heavy "everything" is one of his interests, and there amongst his favourite books, that false gem "Finnegan's Wake". Uh oh.

"Information overload reduces understanding of Finnegans Wake to nil", he should have written instead - just as Joyce might have, at his most poetic. "Beware an internet fisting."

Beware.






UPDATE! Mike has not only corrected his ghastly blunder, but also linked to me. Brilliant. See the Comments below, his profile under "Awoken" in the sidebar (my first one, awrh) and his nice blog for more.

Barbarian at the gate

"As art declines, will civilization follow?" asks Ben Shapiro. O dear. Art in decline. Civilization to follow. How so, exactly?

"The rise of rampant subjectivism," explains Ben, which "dictates that rigorous rules be cast aside ... it shouldn’t be the standard."

Quite so. Only barbarians flout the rules and standards of our civilization. Which surely include punctuation in writing, such as Ben's comment that:

"The “literature” of James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake is over 700 pages of nonsensical drivel."












Barbarian?

Finnegan's Wal-Mart

"Reading, say, Gravity's Rainbow or Moby Dick cover to cover allows one a certain sense of superiority over the average person in line ahead of you at Wal-Mart," explains blogger Matt, nailing the exact reading ethos Pynchon and Melville both had in mind. By contrast, he goes on, "Finnegan's Wake is a bizarre, comic, frustrating, beautiful enigma of a novel that ... begins to gradually assume a strange and marvelous elegance."

That gradual process ended rather abruptly for Matt last October, after 8 posts in about 3 weeks on his Finnegans Wake reading blog, having Finished Section 1. Then what?

A couple of weeks later, and Matt was instead finding "high adventure in the wal-mart bargain dvd bin ... rummaging through ... a haphazard collection of DVDs, mostly of dubious quality, which can be had for the modest sum of roughly five bucks." A good thing for his sense of superiority that he at least got a few of the film names right.

Inside or Out

Xarn, reveals the What High School Stereotype Are You? quiz, is an Outsider:

The overwhelming levels of stupidity and pain around you have finally taken their toll on your will to live. You probably came from a dysfunctional family, in which you were mistreated, ignored, or misunderstood. Poor you.

It's really not your fault that you can't stand society. Life is cruel.

Hells bells, that's rum. Still, one thing I definitely do understand about Xarn - and which I just can't ignore - is a certain painful and stupid apostrophe, which appears inside his own profile.

(It turns out that I'm a blonde, incidentally.)

Being a bit smart

"To be honest," boasts Sarah Carey, "I knew I was being a bit smart mentioning Finnegan's Wake."

Smartly dressed, presumably.

Stumped

"Such extraordinary innovative talent" - write Hal Duncan's publishers about his forthcoming novel - "that it causes a sharp intake of breath and wonder."

So far so good.

"Twenty-one years ago," they go on, "Macmillan discovered such a work with THE WASP FACTORY by Iain Banks. Now, in VELLUM by Hal Duncan, Macmillan is proud to have discovered another Scottish writer destined to make similar impact."

Being compared to drivel-merchant Banks would instantly make me scrape out my own eyes in disgust, and then, on reasoned reflection, slice both of my arms clean off, just to fully ensure that I never wrote anything ever again. (Although, if you've only got one remaining arm, what do you lop that one off with?)

Yet Duncan remains not only intact, but also writing. For instance, in this 9,463 word blog entry from the 1st of March, he describes how, in the history of literature in the twentieth century,

the Modernist monster proceeded to rampage through the literary establishment [...] in the end, it was such a damn FREAK that the resulting backlash of horror and incomprehension left it out on the frozen wastes. The Modernist experiment and the post-Modernist fall-out left all but the most intellectual, academic audience recoiling in horror [...] Take your Finnegan’s Wake and get the hell away from me, ya goddamn loon

I'll quite happily get the hell away from you Duncan, just as soon as you correct your punctuation, apologise to the Joycean shade, and reduce your arms to stumps.

Good luck with the book, too.



UPDATE! Duncan has since corrected his hideous error. See Comments for more.

Here's History

So! You think this blog is brilliant, and just can't wait for the promised future of fisted Finnegans. But then you start to wonder... What inspired Fist to redeem the ignorant? Here's the backstory behind my genius.

In James Joyce's short-story Araby, his main character whose name I've forgotten has a crush on some chick. He's desperate to buy her a present to impress her, but gets to the Araby market too late to do so, and finds that anyway it's not the glittering gala of gifts his fantasies had led him to think it was. It's tawdry tack.

Surface and expectation mismatch with reality - as is so often the case when crushes, excitement, markets and one hundred year old short-stories are involved. The character gazes up into the space of the market rafters as night falls, symbolic of his ignorance of both the ways of his world and the female focus of his fantasies, and the ways looking and wanting can deceive. The character finally experiences a moment of clarity:

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

Those who say their favourite book is "Finnegan's Wake" are due an epiphany like Joyce's character in Araby. For it is vanity that drives them into believing they understand a book which they in fact don't, and in this world that lacks a genius like Joyce to witness them, there is a vacuum of derision waiting for a blogger to abhor and fill.

I first did something like that a couple of months back (here) and the first response was barely concealed anger -

'LIGHTEN UP' you should.

Question: Has the wife been nagging you a lot lately?

- and then explaining that outburst, an objective correlate of anguish:

I might be grouchy for 2 good reasons.

1. I've just returned from seeing a good friend in hospital with some serious cancer of the throat. He's got two kids and they were there too.

2. I've tweaked my lower back to the point of being a friggin' cripple. Hurts to even sit.

Seems a long way from a young man waking up to himself as a day ends, doesn't it? But that's the backstory that inspired this blog.

First Finnegan Fisted

"Never mess with me, not ever," warns poet Pat Reynolds. "I will crush you."

Unlikely, because Pat is a character from Achewood, a daily web cartoon far more involved, intelligent, successful, broad, artistic, popular, knowing, clever, and funny (and no doubt more lucrative, too) than anything I've ever done.

Jealous? Don't be silly. Angry. There's no - no - excuse for the Apostrophe of Evil contained in Pat's Profile. Which just got fisted*.






* - linked to.

Guide to this Blog, that Book, and More!

Finnegans, not Finnegan's. So what?

So this. Finnegan's Wake would mean the book was about some guy called Finnegan's funeral. Uh uh. Instead Finnegans Wake is an instruction to anyone called Finnegan to "Wake Up!" So, the book is meant to be a bit like an Espresso shot. And so is this blog.

Finnegans Fisted: the blog. So what?

So this. Is your name Finnegan? Then wake up! And do you think James Joyce would really write a book called "Finnegan's Wake"? Then wake up, too! It's important.

The sidebar. Whats that all about?

Bloggers or blogs that are "Asleep" think James Joyce wrote a book called "Finnegan's Wake". So they don't understand the book at all! My message to them is: "Wake Up!"

Bloggers that are "Waking" used to think James Joyce wrote a book called "Finnegan's Wake." But I educated them, and then they changed their blog, blogger profile, or whatever.

Bloggers that are "Awoken" used to think that James Joyce wrote a book called "Finnegan's Wake,", too, and again I edcuated them, and again they made the change - the life-changing change. But, on top of that, they thanked me! How? By linking to me, ideally with this button:



Why Fisted?

Because I am a blogging Fist elsewhere.