Finnegans Fisted

100 Fact's

2005-08-10T11:56:00.000Z

Lists of one hundred facts are always fascinating, right? For instance, here are some juicy morsels from Landismom's List:

23. I love gardening, but hate weeding.

...zzz...

27. I watch too much TV.

Now, Fist Fans, if you feel your head nodding down, lolling, and about to crash down upon your computer, down into a boredom-induced doze, down into one hundred years of blank, dreamless sleep - don't worry. I have a Landismom Fact that will certainly wake you up. A Fact that will make your eyes pop out from your head, and steam parp through your ears - if you're anything like me, that is.

Ready?

46. I've read Joyce's Ulysses twice, but never Finnegan's Wake.

What, not even the title?

Harry Hope and the Prisoner of the Tower

2005-08-08T21:10:00.000Z

Harry, at Harry's Hope Saloon, apart from being blessed with the ability to express strange and unidentifiable noises phonetically, has been blessed to come across this "quite accidently." It seems he more deeply appreciates it than others, by comparison, in fact. I do hope he had a lovely Fourth of July.

Poor Harry - fearless war hero and braveheart, true American - feels misrepresented by the Freedom Tower. He believes the name to be embarrassing. Perhaps he'd prefer the name Free'dom To'wer, as, after all, one of his favorite novels is Finnegan's Wake. Time to awake Harry Hope.

Le Finnegan au Francais

2005-07-29T15:41:00.000Z

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

2005-07-26T10:21:00.000Z

"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

2005-07-18T19:57:00.000Z

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

2005-07-10T21:42:00.000Z

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

2005-07-09T11:31:00.000Z

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...

2005-07-07T09:50:00.000Z

...I'm alive.

Shapes of Life

2005-07-06T10:58:00.000Z

"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

2005-07-05T20:25:00.000Z

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

2005-07-03T22:36:00.000Z

"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

2005-07-03T00:52:00.000Z

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

2005-07-02T13:43:00.000Z

"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

2005-07-01T12:11:00.000Z

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.

Beware

2005-06-30T21:48:00.000Z

"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

2005-06-30T01:31:00.000Z

"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

2005-06-28T23:24:00.000Z

"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

2005-06-27T22:52:00.000Z

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

2005-06-27T13:23:00.000Z

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

Smartly dressed, presumably.

Stumped

2005-06-26T22:00:00.000Z

"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

2005-06-26T17:52:00.000Z

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

2005-06-25T00:32:00.000Z

"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!

2005-06-24T21:45:00.000Z

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.