Le Finnegan au Francais

This French blog casually poses the question,

27. Les divinateurs consultés par Saddam Husayn sont capables :
◊ d’expliquer comment Lance Armstrong a gagné 777 tours de France en buvant de l’eau plate
◊ d’expliquer où crèche le tigre helvète
◊ de réciter Finnegan’s Wake de James Joyce à l’envers et en hindi (Vincent d’ ?)

According to Google, that little teaser translates as,

27. The divinateurs consulted by Saddam Husayn are able:
◊ to explain how Lance Armstrong gained 777 turns of France by drinking plain water?
◊ to explain where crib the tiger helvète?
◊ to recite Finnegan's Wake of James Joyce to back and in hindi (Vincent of?)

It's quite possible this computerized translation lacks a little of the Gallic finesse of the original. Allow me to poeticize a la poing, pour le flavour Français:

27. Some crud about Saddam:
◊ some crap about cycling
◊ tigers explain card games in hell
◊ I do not understand the name of the book I'm smugly making reference to, please Fist out my foolish French eyes in vengance, my superior Brit neighbour from over the water

(The final choice is the correct answer, btw.)

(Vincent of?)

Over-reactive Fists

"So what," some say, "that the internet is stuffed full of fools pretending to have understood a book which they in fact don't, just in order for them to show off? Why not just leave them to their lameness?"

Their questions come to me like a plague of apostrophies, black shapes burying my eyes under a darkness of the deepest existential despair. So what, indeed. Why the hours of research, I ask myself. Why all the googling. Why the reading and the rooting. Why the sweaty, sleepless nights, staring into an earth of ignorance through my laptop screen. Why the naming, and shaming, and blaming?

Other questions come too, buried here in the blackness, echoing around this lonely cave of correctness - of titular truth - that I occupy alone, all alone. Who chose I, Fist, as Unapologetic Master of the Mutant Apostrophe? Is it the Shade of Joyce that speaks through me? Or Madness - the ghost of his schitzo daughter - wrecking her revenge upon one the few literarti of this ignorance-infested world?

And, yet,

clutching a copy of the Koran, he said that "the law compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet"

I find that I, Fist, am no deliverer of death, just like the apostrofisteds, and so spare them a link from this post, just this time, in an offering of peace.

The Return of the Fist

When your city has been blown to smithereens, it gives you a new and deeper perspective on life and the importance of apostrophe's. Two weeks ago, for example, I might have told Matty, who spends his time upon this war-torn earth writing bitter whinings about celebrity photos, this:

"Matty, your profile lists one of your favourite books as Finnegan's Wake. However, that book doesn't exist. James Joyce in fact wrote a book called Finnegans Wake, you terrible fool. Please correct your error then jump in front of a bus."

Now my message is much more humane, and considered.

"Matty, I thank the fates and stars and gods that you are alive, and weren't blown to smithereens along with half of this war-torn world recently. For now you still have time upon this earth to do precious work. I mean, to correct the apostrophe you've added to Finnegans Wake in your profile. After that, may I suggest you tour London on the buses for a month or so, just to see see what happens?"

In other other news

He "had a machete in one hand, but dropped that to thrust his fist down the leopard’s mouth."

Who did? Daniel M’Mburugu, a 73 year old peasant farmer Kenyan, reports MSNBC news, when he killed the leopard that was attacking him.

Are you think what I'm thinking? That one less leopard is one less leopard coat of spots, with its messy mass of punctuation marks that make no sense?

Still in other news

How perverse. The little Scotty dog is, once again, same as any day, made happy by a tennis ball. Once again it curves above the park, till his squat legs catch it up, for him to return, wearing it like a yellow comedy nose. The ripped-red of half a bus, a wall dotted with blood - just distant shapes in black and white. Or, some other time and place, the rubble of a broken building - just a new space to sniff and pee. How perverse, that today, like me, he does not care for a mistaken apostrophe.

Time instead for my sister's birthday party. Enjoy your weekend.

In other news...

...I'm alive.

Shapes of Life

"For more than four decades," claim the BBC, "Jack Rosenthal wrote rueful, often comic accounts of the events that shape our lives."

Well, I don't remember reading his account of mad-eyed teenagers lost in the Amsterdam red light district, work in a wing-mirror factory waiting on Monday, fourteen pints and a fight the next Friday, ambling from Police stations with stolen popcorn, hilarious, amphetamines and stowing away on ferries, foodless for three days before being puked up onto parental lawns, singing a melody from the sixties about the dreaminess of stars, with a soaking book of poems wedged under an arm, and howls of hope butchered from their hearts forever. And now it's too late for those events, and the shape of those lives, to meet his pen: "Jack Rosenthal died last weekend aged 72."

The BBC likes cosy little fictions about the Nation, such as Jack's - they're necessary to imply a common experience, which means the common fee we pay that funds the institution seems fair. So it's fitting that whatever berk I partly pay to copy-edit their webpages has Jack's favourite book down as the non-existent Finnegan's Wake, by James Joyce.

Finnegans Fisted: The Cruch Quiz

Have you learnt the all-important lesson that Finnegans Fisted is here to teach? Test your knowledge in this quiz. Good luck!

Question 1

Which of the buttons below is the name of a book written by James Joyce?

A Civil Request

"I don't object to people who disagree with me, but I despise uncivil language" says Bill from the blog under the lobsterscope, who also lists one of his favourite books as Finnegan's Wake.

Bill seems like a reasonable fellow, so I'll offer him a decent deal. In return for him editing out that objectionable, disagreeable, despicable, uncivil apostrophe of ignorance from his profile, I *******-well promise to flush away, like a **** down a sewer, this ****-load of cussin'.





UPDATE! Bill agreed!

Spelling it out

Pagan witch and blogger Elfwreck Chaoist seems to have abandonned blogspot - where she records one of her favourite books as Finnegan's Wake - and moved over to LiveJournal. There she writes at a Joycean linguistic pitch posts such as her Guided Meditation for Stress:

Picture yourself near a stream.

Birds are singing in the crisp, cool mountain air.

Nothing can bother you here.

No one knows this secret place.

You are in total seclusion from that place called the world.

The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity.

The water is clear.

You can easily make out the face of the person whose head you're holding under the water.

There now, feel better?

Not really. I'd prefer to picture such ignoramuses with a fist romping up through their butt, lower intestine, liver, lungs, throat, and then from within their skull, punching the apostrophy they hallucinate off the surface of their eyes*. But I can't picture what Elfwreck might look like, so I guess she's cast some kind of spell over me, one more powerful than that of literature, or my imagination.




* figuratively speaking.

In other news

"Probably the greatest thing that's ever been organized, in the history of the world ever," announced Chris Martin of pop-act Coldplay on TV just now.

I know what you're thinking. He's discovered Finnegans Fisted. Turns out it's something else entirely different.

Entirely different? Well, I'm in the business of swotting away apostrophies of ignorance from Finnegan's Wake, as if flies from the faces of impoverished Africans. That's a similie, which functions as a symbol, containing the twinned messages for society of: "Make Poverty History" and "Do Apostrophie's Properly."

That's the sort of worthiness and properness my dreary English teacher always insisted Literature was about. Therefore I'm a Writer and I make a Contribution. Brilliant news, just like Live8. (Or maybe not?)

Which fister of poverty is up on the stage, beamed out across the world like a blog, next? He's singing "you won't fool the children of the revolution", and his name is Pete Doherty, and he looks like this:



Correcting mistakes world-wide aswell.

Make a vineyard of the curse

Straight Dope claim they've been fighting ignorance since 1973. "It's taking longer than we thought," they add.

I wonder why? Judging from their long, deluded answer to FoNiXWeRx's query ("I hearded recently that "Finnegan's Wake" was written as a big joke... Should I be ashamed at having pored day and night over Finnegan?") Straight Dope is part of the problem, not the solution. What a missed opportunity to straighten out the ignorant.

Worse to come, if that's even possible. In their small-print disclaimer, Straight Dope's advice for all our hands is: "accuracy-wise, you'd better keep your fingers crossed."

Wrong wrong wrong. Keep your fingers curled up tightly in a fist, ever-ready to ram through the internet's dark holes of ignorance: holes where bunches of apostrophies dangle like dark, red grape's, grape's ready to turn into the flowing wine of bloody truth, like a well-fisted haemorrhoid.