The movie Backrooms made a splash this month, turning a massive profit on a meagre budget of less than ten million dollars. The film is noteworthy because it was made by a twenty-year-old Youtuber, who was also responsible for a series of short videos about the titular extradimensional space.
This post suggests that Finnegans Wake can be read as a kind of “backrooms,” a maze that underlies reality.
Continue readingI’ve recently returned to my re-reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I’m finding the final chapter more interesting than ever before — and funnier! I’ve laughed out loud several times reading it, including one scene that I’ll discuss here in this post, a scene in which a strange character repeats himself. I compare it below to a recurring gag on my favorite television show, The Sopranos, and I reflect on the significance of Joyce repeating a moment from his own life, enshrining it in art in a way reminiscent of what William Wordsworth called a “Spot of Time.”
Close readings of Joyce, reflections on life, and fragments of pop culture — all this and more on today’s post!
Continue readingI’ve recently been rewatching the classic TV series The Twilight Zone from the 1960s, and I felt like commenting on one episode that speaks to the storytelling tendency of the human mind, a subject addressed by Finnegans Wake: “The Lonely” (Season 1, Episode 7). This is also a timely episode because it comments on artificial intelligence and human “companionship” with robots.
Read on for my thoughts, with an awareness that there will be spoilers for this episode. You may want to hunt it down and watch it first before reading.
Continue readingIn Chapter V of Portrait, Stephen converses with the dean of University College Dublin, who is English, and reflects on their different relationship to the language they speak:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
The passage speaks to Joyce’s relationship with English and with language in general (important for Finnegans Wake, of course), as well as the Celtic Revival movement that, in Joyce’s day, sought to restore the Irish language (a movement with which Joyce largely disagreed).
This post considers the idea that a language can “belong” to a person in this sense, and it tries to grapple with what Joyce is doing to this idea by writing Finnegans Wake. I even discuss the Bad Bunny Superbowl halftime show controversy — which makes this my most topical post yet!
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The Suspended Sentence 