Non-Pynchon, but also non-top-damned-ten

[Alan Joyce]

Just finished reading a week's worth of Pynchon-l digests.  Jesus, you
people write a lot.  God bless you, every one.

1) Happily, I'm currently engaged in a supplementary-text-free reading of
Finnegan's Wake, and I must be laughing maniacally at least half as often
as the "real" Joyce did while writing the thing.  Understanding the
"story" aside (I'll save that for the next reading...uh, or maybe the six
or seventh one), my mind practically splits open at every fifth or sixth
impossibly multi-leveled amalgamation of words.  As useful as McHugh's
_Annotations_ appear, methinks the poster who suggested an initial
unencumbered reading was spot-on.  Savor the word-play...

Oh, yeah, I had a question -- can any of you lunatics (academic,
blue-collar, or otherwise) confirm or deny this bit of trivia: that at one
point whilst Sam Beckett was helping out with taking down the dictation of
FW, someone knocked on the door; Joyce said "Come in" which Beckett took
down in the flow of dictation without really thinking.  When he read the
text back to Joyce, he realized what had happened and asked if he should
take it out, to which Joyce replied in the negative. 

True or not, love the story.  Can't remember where I heard it.

Oh, and Annie Dillard: only read "An American Childhood" and as a
Pittsburgher, liked it plenty.  But she can't possibly have made the
ridiculously glaring mistake of substituting "topology" for "topography"
right on the first page, can she?  Didn't she have an editor?  Or a
dictionary?

Ah, well.

Alan Joyce
caj3+ at pitt.edu