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.