Tag Archives: Shem and Shaun

Fights All Over Cuxhaven

Among the catalogue of rumors about HCE in I.3 comes this sentence:

A wouldbe martyr, who is attending on sanit Asitas where he is being taught to wear bracelets, when grilled on the point, revealed the undoubted fact that the consequence would be that so long as Sankya Moondy played his mango tricks under the mysttetry, with shady apsaras sheltering in his leaves’ licence and his shadowers torrifried by the potent bolts of indradiction, there would be fights all over Cuxhaven.

The most interesting thing I learned from the annotations is that Cuxhaven is a real place! It’s a German port where an air-raid was conducted in World War I. On an initial read, I assumed it was a made-up name meant to sound like “cucks haven,” which is an appropriate name for the fallen world in Finnegans Wake.

Read on for thoughts about this haven for “cucks,” which I connect to the idea of the deathbed.

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On the Deathbed

I recently underwent minor surgery, during which I had to be put out. Everything went fine, and I am perfectly well recovered now. Looking back, my overall impression of the experience is dominated by how much waiting I had to do. I got dressed in my hospital gown and lay down in a bed and waited.

While waiting, I remarked to the editor of this blog — I was extremely fortunate to have her by my side through the entire ordeal — that one day (hopefully far in the future) I would be in a hospital bed just like this, except it would be my deathbed.

Read on for some thoughts about the deathbed in Finnegans Wake and the need to accept our mortality.

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The Ballad That Hosty Made

At the end of II.3, as HCE cleans up his tavern, he hears the approach of the people singing the ballad that will destroy him. This is a version of the song that ends I.2, which was created and sung by Hosty (a variant of the Cad, the other side of HCE — from the Latin hostis, meaning stranger, foreigner, or enemy). Of course, the ballad is different now, so much later in the dream.

Read on for a few of my thoughts on one excerpt of this ballad. This will be a pretty brief close reading post, less ambitious in scope than some of my others. Perhaps as time goes on, I will make more frequent brief posts like this.

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Nightly Redistribution of Parts and Players by the Puppetry Producer

This post will discuss Thomas McNally’s illustrated edition of The Mookse & the Gripes, which adapts a set piece in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. But mostly the post will be a self-indulgent reflection on my own relationship to this text, complete with pictures of puppets I made of these characters with my daughter about six years ago. Like McNally, we too were inspired to create new works of art. And, since I’m me, the post descends into an anti-AI rant. Enjoy!

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