logicians lothe and poets love

Alright. So my "page" in Finnegans Wake was chosen at random in class the other day when the list was being passed around, i just opened the book to 427, and I thought oh, that's strange 4/27 being my birthday. then in my head I was thinking for Joyce it would be 27/4 right? day-month year. A couple days later I just happened to open up to page 274, and i went 19 lines down, 88 letters into that line... and there is the word born, pg.274 19 88 my birthday, 27/4/1988.

I have awoken.

in rapture

I, for a long time now have been wishing for more hours to the day. I do not regret any day really, rather I long for their lengthening. This applies here too. I really wish I had more time to do homework- My first through 12th grade, even several years into college self would kick my own ass for saying this- but I have been infected. As much reading as I consume I find myself in turn consumed. I speak here in limitations, though there seem to be no limits to this curse, because I am (can) only speak of Samuel Beckett in respect to time. I know we are in the middle of Finnegans Wake and it need not be mentioned the devour-power of that book, or the lecture (again-rapture) Ben Lubner gave us and will continue to give us tomorrow.
But Beckett has shanghied me and I see no end in sight. This was my first experience with Beckett, i've never read Gudot ( i dont think i even know how to spell it) Dr. Sexson initally really turned me off this book, i was telling people how horrible it was before i even read it, but i found it to be everything the contrary. It is though horrible. I must add this. But morbidity does not weigh heavy, though the text is itself beyond dense.
Its not really even possible to convey my infatuation with this book. I have never in my life. Never in my life, underlined as many passages, noted as many pages, and found myself as consumed between his mere periods (.) as i have with Beckett. I will post many if not all of these passages at another time. As with Nabokov, i am compelled to simply rewrite the book in its entirety, but i will limit myself to a select few. for there are many times when I would really stop, to laugh, well up(nearly) with tears as Doug has, or literally gasp because i felt as though i am granted admission to a radiance of poetics, unsurpassed by my knowledge.
You know those little quips they print on tea-bags. or in fortune cookies (this book is compiled of them!) -though often will-breakingly morose-
We should be reading Molloy in our tea, or at the end of a meal that (in Montana) will inevitably make you ill!
I don't want to sound like I'm just making shit up here. Maybe its because I went from Haroun (and a John Irving novel before that) to Molloy. but I am truly in rapture with this book with this writer.
between this an Lolita, i can't really recommend any more books to people (unless i know they'll get them)

-to add

of course just after i published my last blog, and just before i'm about to close down the library, I read yet another blog that I wish i had time to talk about. but because I have no time and it speaks better for itself than i can.
for what its worth: a shout out to jennie-lynn. I dig that mudra

Musings while at work

To start, I would have to say that by and large the reasons why I regard Dr. Sexon's classes so highly, are not limited to himself and teachings alone, but that we are subject to such a plethora of awesome literature, and I use the term outside of the language of chaos, meaning I am indeed in awe. And this applies in equal part to what books we are assigned as to the blogs of my peers. and i mean this of all the blogs, but It is hard to speak to each one.
Sam and Rio for example- I don't even know where to begin.
But reading a couple of the most recently posted
Doug- To start: i've been there. To continue: I'm both honored and enticed that you'd share your experience, that something that's very intimate, but I feel that this class, if any is the proper place to be so. You're able to convey something that is almost impossible to put into words the term 'experience' is undermining for what actually takes place. I like that you mention the Bhagavad Gita. Is this still a text for capstone? (i wish i was in that class) because when reading this I would say i felt the experience more as clearly as i had read it. When Arjuna is speaking with Krishna, to show the Man that all is already written, he shows his true self, as self that encapsulates all things of the past things of the future, all is written and all is destined. -This being a rough summary of what is said. ( i would really advise reading it) but the idea at hand is much the same as I would suspect Doug's vision, and the idea of the eternal return in General. The mass of the cosmos is entirely infinite, cyclical, it is the Mobius strip and it is the forever fractal. To quote the Bhagvad Gita:
If the radiance of a thousand suns Were to burst at once into the sky That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one... I am become Death, The shatterer of Worlds.

Or to return to our old omnipotent buddy Ovid:
All things change, nothing is extinguished... There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; teh ages themselves glide by in constant movement.


- To James: I honestly could not distinguish where Finnegan began, and again where it fin. I'm not sure if this was intend, maybe i'm just loosing it from trying to read this book and being numbed by work, but your retelling of tossing around Finnegan made me laugh (out loud-i and the rest of the cal library did notice this), think, and actual open up the book to see where your voice came in. I've had very similar experiences, but i dont think i could have conveyed them quite the same.

Makin' copies

Ok, so when we were asked to write a blog in the "iff" style, i remembered an old clip from SNL
I have found though, that due to copyright it is almost impossible to view any SNL clips online. But i have found a way...sort of,
This is arguably from one of the best known clips from SNL days- when they were funny- and when Rob Schnieder was funny...sort of. so check it out, the "Richmeister, or Makin' Copies
follow my directions

click this link: Richmeister- Makin Copies
then without actually clicking on anything, drag the mouse over to the clip on the right. do not click, just listen.

كتاب

this is arbitrary, but on page 88 when they discuss the Pages of cup
"our pages are organized into Chapters and Volumes. Each Volume is headed by a Font, or Title, Page; and up there is the leader of the entire "Library", which is our name for the army- General Kitab Himself"
anyways, being a proud student of MSU elementary Arabic, Kitab is one of the words i actually know- it means Book.
that's it.

كتاب

Harun and the sea of blogs

I can't believe another semester has stared, I'm still trying to catch up on my Nabokov and keep up with the continuing blogs, but now that we have all this fresh material I fear my attention is deviating. So many of the class mates have already begun to blog or have finished the book (I'm close but...) and already we're awash with new ideas and insights. In relation to Sam's blog specifically, and I'm sure on a lot of people's minds is this distinction between highbrow and low.

Sam ask if the label is based on who you are. And i think that may be true,
but I also believe that it might be more in depth that it is not only Who you are, but How you are. How you choose to look at a text. And this obviously can vary form person to person, but i can also very within the person individually, we can choose to which pair of glasses we wear when reading any text, as we looked at in lit crit, we saw an array of text through an array of filters (feminists, Marxist...) and beyond that, and more relatable to this class we struggled, but succeded in observing texts through a slideshow of lenses ranging from literal (literally) to Anagoic (which interestingly enough comes from the Greek word to climb or ascend)
Now whether or not all works of literature are worthy (see Dan Drown) , or would even appear under the agangoic spectrum (or even the one below that if I could remember its name) We can see that even some of the most pedantic works can be considered High Brow when observed keenly. Take for example the film Dumb and Dumber, dumb-no doubt, but radiantly brilliant when explored and exposed. And as Sam has showed us, our first example of "lowbrow" as already been exposed by the author and his critics to be far more than a children story.
Now I know that there are exceptions to this rule, and there expectational examples as well Finnegan's Wake clearly one of them. "learned reader (whose eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald head)" -V.N.
But my understanding of it, which could very well be just wrong entirely, is that its not a matter of the book belonging to an esoteric circle, rather the circle of readers, or a subculture-circle of readers, a distilled audience should be esoteric in their understanding.


note: the picture above is, I think a type of broccoli but its more importantly a natural fractal. For whatever reason -tune in turn on...maybe?- fractals are the visual image I always conjure when trying to understand this concept of the anagogic ladder, because the concept is so far from anything linear, instead its ever evolving and in many ways indefinable...its hard to explain. natty psychedelic literature I guess.