Finnegans Wake

[Bekah]

That's a fine article - I think Chabon captured it at some point,  as it looped around and ate it's tail. 

Bekah

On Jul 4, 2012, at 3:27 AM, Otto wrote:

> What to Make of Finnegans Wake?
> July 12, 2012
> Michael Chabon
> 
> (...)
> I got my first real glimpse of that beast in the Burger Chef
> restaurant that used to occupy the basement of the Cathedral of
> Learning, at the University of Pittsburgh, in my senior year, when a
> classmate in Josephine O’Brien Schaefer’s Ulysses seminar tossed a
> paperback copy across our table and dared me to open it to any page
> and make head or tail of what I found there. At that moment I was
> feeling surprisingly equal to the challenge. Under the captaincy of
> Professor Schaefer I had sailed undiscouraged between the wandering
> rocks of Ulysses, clear through the book’s later chapters, in which
> sense and intention lay in ambush and rained flaming arrows of
> rhetoric on us as we rowed madly past them. So it was with a traveled
> optimism that I accepted my friend’s throw-down that morning, opened
> the book to its first page, and wondered, as readers around the world
> have done since 1939, at the problem posed by its first sentence, with
> its beautiful first word. A word unprecedented, enigmatically
> uncapitalized, with a faintly Tolkienesque echo, to my nerdish ear, of
> Rivendell and Rohirrim.1 Indented and dangling, mid-page,
> mid-sentence, a sentence twisting like an inchworm from its filament:
> 
>    riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of
> bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth
> Castle & Environs.
> 
> So: a river, running past Eden or some Eden analogue, swerving and
> bending as it made its way to Howth Castle and its surroundings, i.e.,
> Dublin on the Liffey, a city whose geography I knew well enough by now
> to be able to recognize at once the name of Howth, the castle hill on
> whose slopes Leopold Bloom had proposed to Miss Marion Tweedy. Maybe,
> I considered—having played Mr. Antrobus, a modern Adam, in my high
> school’s production of The Skin of Our Teeth—in this book Joyce did
> for the story of Adam and Eve what Ulysses did for the Odyssey,
> transposing it to contemporary Dublin to ironize the indignities and
> intricacies of twentieth-century life and consciousness.
> (...)
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/what-make-finnegans-wake/