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 readingThe beginning of Chapter I.7 — all about Shem the Penman — tells the brief story of Shem asking the “first riddle of the universe” to all of his brothers and sisters. The riddle is the title of this post, and it’s written in straightforward English there. The “brothron and sweestureens” take turns guessing, but none can get it right, so Shem has to tell them the answer: “When he is a […] Sham.”
This post looks at the riddle as it recurs throughout Finnegans Wake, considering what it implies about masculinity and art.
Continue readingMy dad died last week.
I’ve been thinking of life and death in terms of Finnegans Wake and its exploration of fatherhood. Read on for a few brief thoughts on this subject, intermixed with a memorial for my own father.
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 reading
The Suspended Sentence 