Would you rather read The Obamanation's posting history or "Finnegans Wake"?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Finnegan's Wake is a book with a continuing plotline, I would be very confused reading Obamanation's posting history with no context, it would be very confusing.

That doesn't change that the Twilight series has more literary value than Finnegans Wake.

Neither Meyer nor Joyce won the Nobel Prize, so they've got that in common?

I haven't won a Nobel Prize for my posting history either, so I guess all three of us have that in common.

Well hypothetically a million monkeys with typewriters would eventually type out a Nobel Prize winning work.

To get something of equivalent value to your posting history would require 999,999 less monkeys.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

Finnegan's Wake is a book with a continuing plotline, I would be very confused reading Obamanation's posting history with no context, it would be very confusing.

That doesn't change that the Twilight series has more literary value than Finnegans Wake.

Neither Meyer nor Joyce won the Nobel Prize, so they've got that in common?

I haven't won a Nobel Prize for my posting history either, so I guess all three of us have that in common.

Well hypothetically a million monkeys with typewriters would eventually type out a Nobel Prize winning work.

To get something of equivalent value to your posting history would require 999,999 less monkeys.

They tried that. The monkeys just typed the letter s over and over and sh**t everywhere.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

BRTD, do you like anything else by Joyce?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

BRTD, do you like anything else by Joyce?

The only other book of his I've even heard of is Ulysses, which I understand is also very dense and difficult to read. So I've never bothered reading anything of his in its entirety.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

BRTD, do you like anything else by Joyce?

The only other book of his I've even heard of is Ulysses, which I understand is also very dense and difficult to read. So I've never bothered reading anything of his in its entirety.

I'm sorry, not having read Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--neither of which is really that difficult to get through for anybody with a decent grounding in English literature--is one thing, but never having heard of them...?

I really have to ask on what basis you're criticizing the Wake so harshly.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The answer is basically that I've heard of Finnegans Wake before but basically forgot about it and was only reminded of it yesterday because I was reading TV Tropes at work and stumbled across the article on it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The answer is basically that I've heard of Finnegans Wake before but basically forgot about it and was only reminded of it yesterday because I was reading TV Tropes at work and stumbled across the article on it.

The TV Tropes article on Finnegans Wake really isn't sufficient exposure to Finnegans Wake to have what I or most other people who have actually studied Joyce in any degree of detail would consider an informed opinion on it, and although I will admit that it's a somewhat amusing parody of the Wake's style, it's not an especially accomplished one.

[tik 🪀✨]

A terricolous vivelyonview this; queer and it continues to be quaky.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Also the reason I've never heard of his other works is probably because I think of Jack Kerouac as "the guy namedropped in that Jawbreaker song" and can quote more Rainer Maria lyrics than anything from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem (although I can't quote ANY Rilke at all...)

I can see Finnegans Wake as a band name actually...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2014/mar/26/finnegans-wake-james-joyce-in-pictures

[Antonio the Sixth]

Also the reason I've never heard of his other works is probably because I think of Jack Kerouac as "the guy namedropped in that Jawbreaker song" and can quote more Rainer Maria lyrics than anything from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem (although I can't quote ANY Rilke at all...)

These are not typically things one brags about.

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

You know what, I've changed my mind. I'd rather read "Finnegans Posting History"

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Also the reason I've never heard of his other works is probably because I think of Jack Kerouac as "the guy namedropped in that Jawbreaker song" and can quote more Rainer Maria lyrics than anything from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem (although I can't quote ANY Rilke at all...)

Even an unsophisticated tool like myself knows who Jack Kerouac is without hearing it in a song.

[DemPGH]

I'd rather read the nutrition panels on a hundred cereal boxes before Finnegans Wake because at least I'd learn something. That's the book that begins and ends halfway through the same sentence? A complete waste of time. Probably as bad as the "Planet X" rubbish. Some people think it's "intellectual," though, to make up complete and utter meaningless babble. 

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

That's the book that begins and ends halfway through the same sentence? A complete waste of time.

I feel like saying this is somehow or other revelatory about you but I can't quite put my finger on precisely how.

What kind of literature do you like?

Incidentally, Joyce's intent as a writer certainly was not to be 'intellectual'.

[DemPGH]

That's the book that begins and ends halfway through the same sentence? A complete waste of time.

I feel like saying this is somehow or other revelatory about you but I can't quite put my finger on precisely how.

What kind of literature do you like?

Incidentally, Joyce's intent as a writer certainly was not to be 'intellectual'.

Might be a little early modern snobbery on my behalf.

Actually, I like: non-fiction mainly, but sometimes well researched historical fiction; generally literature with a linear beginning, middle, and end (and that's certainly the case with movies); often detective fiction. I particularly like the point on the spectrum where history and capital-L literature meet. For instance, Shakespeare is a rich reservoir of Tudor propaganda for obvious reasons - it tends to range from bombastic to subtle, in my readings of it. I'm currently sifting through the Henry VI plays, which I've heretofore largely not looked a great deal at.

Indeed, you could enlighten me, and probably others could as well, as to Joyce's intentions, meanings, milieu, etc. In my somewhat limited exposure to that era I've not been terribly enthralled. I've experienced a little bit of it and said, that's enough of that, thank you very much.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Indeed, you could enlighten me, and probably others could as well, as to Joyce's intentions, meanings, milieu, etc. In my somewhat limited exposure to that era I've not been terribly enthralled. I've experienced a little bit of it and said, that's enough of that, thank you very much.

This might not make you much better-disposed towards it but Joyce's intent with Finnegans Wake was mostly comedic. He wanted it to be seen as a 'work of comic prose' rather than a novel. The sense of humor that went into it wasn't entirely just trolling people--although that was part of it--it involves puns, too, so many of them that pretty much every other word in the book is punning on something else. Normal English prose can't sustain that concentration of puns so Joyce is forced to write in an almost impenetrably macaronic style to accommodate them. It begins and ends in the middle of the same sentence possibly in part to make a philosophical point about time, but it's unclear how seriously Joyce took that philosophical point. The fact that Joyce thought that this exercise would be a good use of several years' worth of his time, towards the end of his life no less, was an extreme manifestation of the tendency that he had throughout his writing period--and this, I think, you will find sympathetic, at the very least--to react against the type of over-romanticiziation that went into most if not all nineteenth-century Irish literature. (The one time he met William Butler Yeats, whose writing period overlapped with his but who was almost a generation older than him and had very different sensibilities, Yeats was cordial if not effusive towards Joyce, but Joyce had a very difficult time standing Yeats's presence and eventually said something along the lines of 'I wasn't baptized by a [Inks]ing druid' and left.) Joyce went about reacting against this by focusing like a laser on playing with the form in which his psychologically acute but generally pretty naturalistic (and to many people therefore kind of boring) content was expressed (you see this in his religious beliefs, too--he probably didn't believe in God but he kept going to church for, he said, primarily aesthetic reasons). In Dubliners the form is only slightly odd--he's allergic to quotation marks, uses an at the time weird form of third-person narration that behaves psychologically like first-person (it's become more common since then partially due to his influence), things like that; in Portrait of the Artist it's a little odder but to the contemporary reader still seems conventional relative to the extremes of his later work; in Ulysses it becomes experimental to the point that many people find the book very difficult to get through; in Finnegans Wake it becomes experimental to the point that everybody finds the book very difficult to get through. It's I suppose possible that Joyce took the intentions of his own work progressively less and less seriously as time went on--unlike the amount of effort he put into it, which he always took very seriously--but the only book that he was open about considering primarily an exercise in (a very abstruse and, yeah, I guess you could say overly intellectual sense of) humor was the Wake.

It's worth noting that one of the last books he ever read was Flann O'Brien's first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, the plot of which involves at least three threaded plotlines that take place in different universes and the idea of fiction just having too many characters. Joyce really liked At Swim-Two-Birds.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

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I've never read Finnegan's Wake and couldn't finish At Swim-Two Birds but I have to admit cringing a lot of the some of the scenes in the latter. Despite being written about 70 years ago and set in part at a university which has since moved location, the sheer Dublin-ness of certain moments was just...