"Is it not divinely deluscious? But in't it bafforyou?"

(146.26-148.32)  Today's reading brings us to the end of Isabel's answer to the tenth question of chapter six of Finnegans Wake.  By the end of yesterday's post, I was wondering where Isabel was going, if anywhere.  While the first part of her answer was cyclical (as I discussed in yesterday's post), she does end up in an interesting place.

The passage picks up with Isabel apologizing for the affront to the suitor she delivered at the end of yesterday's passage.  "Ever so sorry!" she says.  I think that at this point she takes a more positive turn away from the cycle of building up and tearing down her suitor.  She's a flawed, often self-centered young woman ("I beg your pardon, I was listening to every treasuried word I said fell from my dear mot's tongue . . . .  Only I wondered if I threw out my shaving water."), but she is, indeed, tender and loving.  She wants to be physically intimate with her beloved, but senses his distraction, first with a winged animal passing by, and then with an audience consisting of the 12 men and 28 young women we just encountered earlier in the chapter.  (The 28 women are here named alphabetically -- one for each letter of the alphabet, along with the Greek letters "Ph" and "Th" (as noted by McHugh) -- and Isabel names herself as the 29th young woman:  "And Mee!")

There's a lot going on here with innocence and experience (as Blake might term it) or purity and depravity.  Isabel often speaks as someone who is sexually experienced but sometimes lets hints drop that she might tend more toward the chaste end of the spectrum.  The nervous and distracted suitor seems inexperienced and says as much, but Isabel doesn't fully believe him:  "Of course I believe you, my own dear doting liest," she says.  Ultimately, all this doesn't matter, though, at least for the most part.  Isabel reaches the point where she's fully accepting of her suitor:  "As I'd live to, O, I'd love to!"  And, in the end, she pledges her devotion to him and brings the two of them into a union:  "With my whiteness I thee woo and bind my silk breasths I thee bound!  Till always, thou lovest!  Shshshsh!  So long as the lucksmith.  Laughs!"

At the end of Isabel's monologue, then, we can see that her answer is both very affirming and very Joycean.  In a way that turns traditional gender stereotypes on their heads, the man is the often-irrational, cripplingly-emotional wreck, while the woman is the sometimes-calculating, but strong and comforting pillar.  While the suitor passively looks to Isabel for security, Isabel makes the choices and is the force that binds the two together.  Much like previous chapter hinted at the ways in which Molly Bloom is a manifestation of ALP, this question establishes Isabel -- ALP's daughter -- as a kind of sister to Molly.  In many ways, Isabel's monologue parallels Molly's, and each ends with an affirmation.  I'll refrain from belaboring the point here, so I'll just say that, once again, it's impressive how much Joyce could pack into just a couple of pages.

"I mean to make you suffer, meddlar, and I don't care this fig for contempt of courting."

(144.20-146.26)  In this passage, Isabel's (identified at one point here as "isabeaubel") response to this chapter's tenth question continues.  As her monologue progresses, a pattern emerges.  She addresses one of her lover's concerns or sources of insecurity, she says something to upset him further, and she apologies and professes her affection.  The passage picks up with her saying, "Listen, loviest!  Of course it was too kind of you, miser, to remember my sighs in shockings . . . ."  She begins with a loving address to her suitor, then thanks him for remembering the size of her stockings and/or her sighs in her states of shock.  Of course, this loving address is rendered ambiguous by her also calling her beloved, "miser," which could mean exactly what it says, but it could also stand for "mister."  Isabel takes pride in her appearance, and it at least seems that the suitor is understanding of that, if not necessarily encouraging of the fact.

This expression of affection takes a turn for the worse, however, when Isabel goes into fairly graphic detail when describing a perhaps hypothetical scene where she engaged in "unlawful converse" with a Mr Polkingtone at the behest of a Mother Browne (who may or may not be, or at least be a counterpart to, the gossip Father Browne, who we encountered in the scene with the Cad's wife).  Isabel once again apologies ("I'm terribly sorry, I swear to you I am!") before placing the blame for the whole thing on the conniving Browne (and suggesting that the suitor himself may occasionally flirt with Mother Browne).

The cycle repeats itself, with Isabel once again flirting with her beloved.  She recognizes that he's in agony, and that she's a cause of that agony.  "I mean to make you suffer," she says.  At the same time, she says she's "tender" and wants to nurture him back to happiness:  "Yes, the buttercups told me, hug me, damn it all, and I'll kiss you back to life, my peachest."  She soon takes her answer to the next proverbial level by beginning to seduce him.  This is maybe going too far for the suitor, though.  Isabel says, "If I am laughing with you?  No, lovingest, I'm not so dying to take my rise out of you, adored.  Not in the very least."  Of course, you get the sense that she actually is mocking him here, as she puts on some airs of modesty while still speaking at least somewhat immodestly.

Today's reading ends with an extended affront to the suitor.  "And because you pluckless lankaloot," Isabel says, "I hate the very thought of the thought of you."  She goes on to say that she's soon to marry a French engineer who is as "loopy" on her as she is "leapy" for him.  She describes the moment they fell in love, when he carried her off a boat and onto a beach in a manner reminiscent (as explained by McHugh) of King Mark and Isolde.

Where is Isabel's answer heading?  We'll find out tomorrow when we finish the answer to the tenth question.

"as hapless behind the dreams of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk"

(142.8-144.19)  Today's reading includes three more short sets of questions and answers, and one short question and the beginning of its lengthier answer.  Question seven asks, "Who are those component partners of our societate . . . ?"  The question continues with identifiers of these partners, and (as pointed out by my secondary sources) a close reading reveals that there are 12 partners here and that they're linked with the 12 months of the year and the 12 apostles of Christ.  These 12 men (I'm assuming they're men, based on the apostles link) are variously the 12 men attending Finnegan's wake and 12 men drinking at HCE's pub.  They're assigned 12 attributes based on words ending with "-tion," such as "unify their voxes in a vote of vaticination" and "condone every evil by practical justification and condam any good to its own gratification."  In the answer to the question, the component partners are identified as "The Morphios!"  As McHugh notes, "Morphios" encompasses both Murphy, the common Irish last name, and Morpheus, the god of sleep.

Question eight asks simply, "And how war yore maggies?"  It soon becomes (relatively) clear that this question refers to both maggies in the generic sense of young women (such as the two young women in Phoenix Park) and in the specific sense of the maggie, HCE's daughter, Isabel.  The group of maggies are described in two string-phrases.  The first consists of 14 linked phrases:  "They war loving, they love laughing, they laugh weeping, they weep smelling, they smell smiling, they smile hating, they hate thinking, they think feeling," and so on.  The second string-phrase consists of a 14-word "word ladder," in which one letter is changed to form a new word:  "as born for lorn in lore of love to live and wive by wile," and so on.  (I'm guessing we're supposed to count "cometh" as the final word in the ladder, even though the "h" at the end of the word is an extra addition).  The answer finishes by singling out Isabel from the other 28 (14+14) maggies:  "yeth cometh elope year, coach and four, Sweet Peck-at-my-Heart picks one man more."  Isabel, the 29th maggie, appears during a leap year and elopes, leaving her father and instead pecking at the heart of the husband she has picked.

I like Campbell and Robinson's idea that the ninth question describes the Wake itself.  It asks what a human being in HCE's situation, sleeping through the night, would "seem to seemself to seem seeming of."  In other words, what would his dreams seem like?  The question itself is dense, but well worth unpacking, as it contains fascinating references the Wake, literature, and the Bible (among other things), including the passage I quoted in this post's title, which designates HCE "as hapless behind the dreams of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk."  Here, HCE is equated with King Arthur and Prince Hamlet, while Hamlet's (already bombastic and gloomy) Denmark is devolved into a land of din and murk.  Anyway, there's a lot of stuff to savor that in the question, but I also love the answer to the question:  "A collideroscape!"  So, HCE's dream -- and the Wake -- is a type of kaleidoscope, but it's also a collision landscape (phrases like "camelot prince of dinmurk" are perhaps best described as a "collideroscape").  And, when faced with the task of reading the Wake, we're presented with two options:  collide, or escape.  It might hurt to go up against this book, but I think collision is the better option.

The 10th question asks, "What bitter's love but yurning, what' sour lovemutch but a bref burning till shee that drawes dothe smoake retourne?"  Written as a kind of late-middle English (English professors would scoff at that, I know) lover's lament, this question seems to be answered by a woman (is it Isabel?) who flirts teasingly with her beloved as she makes herself up in front of her mirror.  She mentions the possibility of her man having another lover and talks of her own suitors.  Since this goes on for another four pages, and since I've already had a lot to say today, I'll delve deeper into her answer in the coming days.

"must begripe fullstandingly irers' langurge"

(140.8-142.7)  Moving along in chapter six of Finnegans Wake, we have three more questions and answers in today's reading.  The fourth question of the chapter asks about an "Irish capitol city . . . of two syllables and six letters."  The city in question has "a deltic origin" (note the "d") and "a nuinous end" (note the "n"), and is known for its public park, its brewing industry, its thoroughfare, and its devout, yet hard-drinking population.  

Of course, the answer to this question is Dublin, but we get four different answers in the text.  The four cities given are "Delfas" (Belfast), "Dorhqk" (Cork), "Nublid" (Dublin), and "Dalway" (Galway).  Tindall reasons that each of these four answers comes from one of the four old men, or four judges or magi, who have appeared earlier in the Wake.  Their disparate answers are in keeping with their previous incarnation as representatives from the four corners of Ireland and, by proxy, the four points of the compass.  This passage situates the Wake firmly in Dublin while also establishing the book as a universal one that takes place across the globe, as well as across history.

The fifth and sixth questions combine to form a kind of complementary pair.  The fifth asks what "slags of a loughladd" (or, as McHugh translates from Danish and Anglo-Irish, what sort of Scandinavian) would perform any number of odd-jobs necessary for keeping up a pub in suburban Dublin.  These jobs range from "emptout old mans" (emptying the dregs from not-quite-finished glasses of beer) to "nightcoover all fireglims" (putting out the candles at the end of the night), and one of the job's requirements is "profusional drinklords to please obstain."  The answer given (possibly once again by Shaun) to this job listing is "Pore ole Joe!"

With poor ol' Joe established as the pub's handyman, the sixth question asks, "What means the saloon slogan Summon In The Housesweep Dinah?"  The "Tok." that opens indicates that this answer is given by Kate, whose "Tip." we first became acquainted with when she gave us the tour of the Wellington Museum way back in the Wake's first chapter.  Kate says that now she has to "beeswax the bringing in all the claub of the porks to us," or, in other words, she has to wax the floor because of all the mud brought in to the pub.  Kate's answer goes on to list all the minor household problems that she's called upon to handle or expected to anticipate, such as "who bruk the dandleass" (who broke the candles?) and "who eight the last of the goosebellies" (who ate the last of the gooseberries?).  The final complaint recalled by Kate goes back to the waxing that she was summoned in to do with this question:  "whatinthe nameofsen lukeareyou rubbinthe sideofthe flureofthe lobbywith" (what in the name of St. Luke are you rubbing the side of the floor of the lobby with?).  Kate's answer shows she's a feisty one:  "Shite!  will you have a plateful?"  She punctuates her answer with "Tak.", which McHugh translates as Danish for "thank you."  Well done, Kate.

"a farfar and a morefar"

(138.20-140.7)  In this passage, we get the much-anticipated conclusion to the first question of chapter six, as well as that question's answer and two other sets of questions and answers.

The first question concludes in much the same fashion as its run throughout the opening pages of this chapter, wrapping up with references to HCE's incarnation as Tim Finnegan the builder with phrases like, "stutters fore he falls and goes mad entirely when he's waked."  And what answer is given to this first question?  "Finn MacCool!"  This ties HCE (and his other incarnations) with the great figure from Irish legend.

The next handful of questions run considerably shorter than the first.  They don't get much shorter then the second one, but what it lacks in verbosity it makes up for in obscurity:  "2.  Does your mutter know your mike?"  Maybe, in one sense, this is Shaun (aka Mick, aka Mike) being asked if his mother knows him.  Again, though, it's not that clear.  Anyway, the answer has Shaun recognizing both his father ("that pontificator and circumvallator") and his mother ("Ann alive").  Shaun's answer becomes a bit of an ode to ALP (McHugh indicates that it is based upon the song "The Bells of Shandon") that is one part laudatory and two, or three, parts bawdy:  "If Dann's dane, Ann's dirty, if he's plane she's purty, if he's fane, she's flirty, with her auburnt streams, and her coy cajoleries, and her dabblin drolleries, for to rouse his rudderup, or to drench his dreams."  The ode is (of course) heavy on the river imagery, and it concludes that if the venerated authors of the law ("hot Hammurabi" and "cowld Clesiastes") could "espy her pranklings," they would "renounce their ruings, and denounce their doings, for river and iver, and a night.  Amin!"

The third question returns to a theme that's appeared a number of times already in the Wake:  Dublin's motto, "Obedientia civium urbis felicitas," or "Citizens' obedience is City's happiness."  The questioner asks, "Which title is the true-to-type motto-in-lieu" for what might be a Wakeian version of Dublin's city seal.  A number of examples of what the motto is not are listed.  Shaun (assuming, consistent with the last question, that he's the one being questioned) answers with a play on the motto:  "Thine obesity, O civilian, hits the felicitude of our orb!"

The questions, at least so far, almost serve as a sort of early mid-term examination on the Wake's themes and personages.  After a long opening salvo, they're rolling in now.  We've got three more coming tomorrow.

"heavengendered, chaosfoedted, earthborn"

(136.20-138.20)  Tomorrow we get to the end of the first question of the sixth chapter of Finnegans Wake, so today's post will be the last in which I list my top five favorite items from that question's catalog.  Without further ado . . .

• "he crashed in the hollow of the park, trees down, as he soared in the vaguum of the phoenix, stones up" -- There's a lot of interesting dualism here:  crash/soar, hollow/vacuum, tree/stone (two dueling elements appearing throughout the Wake).  These all combine to illustrate HCE's fall and rise in Phoenix Park.
• "once diamond cut garnet now dammat cuts groany" -- This comes near the end of a brief series of items touching upon the Irish legend of Diarmuid and Grainne.  This is an Irish tale that I hadn't really known about until today, so chalk this one up as another example of the Wake's tendency to educate and illuminate.  Here, in a sort of twist, it's Dairmuid, the entranced lover, cutting Grainne, the entrancer.  The diamond/garnet bit also emphasizes the "stone" theme noted above. 
• "theer's his bow and wheer's his leaker and heer lays his bequiet hearse, deep" -- This item plays off of and references the scene in the Wellington Museum from early in the Wake.  Here are relics from the days when HCE was above ground:  his bow, his liquor, and his hearse.  As noted by McHugh, "bequiet hearse" recalls the "big wide harse" -- or big white horse -- in the Wellington Museum, and "deep" echoes the "tip" that continually punctuated that scene.
• "Hugglebelly's Funniral" -- Here's another reference to Huckleberry Finn.  Of course, Huggle-belly is also HCE, and "Funniral" also could also be read as "fun-for-all" and "funny-ral."
• "wanamade singsigns to soundsense an yit he wanna git all his flesch nuemaid motts truly prural and plusible" -- In this passage, we not only get a summary of HCE's mission, but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- a summary of Joyce's mission.  He, after all, wants to make sing-songs/signs that appeal to our sense of sound and are sound (in the sense of strong) to our senses.  He's also trying to get all his fresh, newmade words ("mots" is French for "words") as plural (i.e., having as many forms and meanings) as plausible.  Of course, this being Joyce, that second clause could be read with a prurient bent, but I'll leave that to you for now . . .

"a part of the whole as a port for a whale"

(134.20-136.20)  Yeah, I know I've been slipping here.  It's been busy, but I'm still committed to seeing this through within a year.  Anyway, back to business.  I'm working my way through the first question of chapter six of Finnegans Wake, and once again I'm going to give my top five items from that question's catalog.

• "Dutchlord, Dutchlord, overawes us" -- This is a fairly straightforward one, taking off from the refrain "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" from the "Deutschlandlied."  Joyce's reworking for the Wake emphasizes the rumors of HCE's Dutch heritage, as well as his awesome presence in life and death.
• "his great wide cloak lies on fifteen acres and his little white horse decks by dozens our doors" -- McHugh notes that Irish patriot Daniel O'Connell -- known as "The Liberator" and called "hugecloaked" in Ulysses -- killed a man in a duel on the Fifteen Acres in Phoenix Park.  The "white horse," McHugh explains, was a symbol of William III that adorned the homes of loyalists in Dublin.  Thus, our attention is once again turned to HCE's dual natures of defender and invader.
• "O sorrow the sail and woe the rudder that were set for Mairie Quai!" -- McHugh equates "Mairie Quai" with "Amerikay," which appears in a song Simon Dedalus sings in chapter two of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  That song tells of a young lover who must flee to America, and it parallels this line, which looks forlornly at the ship that takes the immigrant away and (by implication) looks wistfully back at the motherland.  This, of course, most definitely does not parallel Joyce's attitude as a willful and steadfast exile from his native country.
• "the night express sings his story, the song of sparrownotes on his stave of wires" -- McHugh identifies this as another callback to Portrait.  Just a few pages before Simon Dedalus' song, Stephen is "travelling with his father by the night mail to Cork."  As the morning approaches, Stephen looks out the window while, "silently, at intervals of four seconds, the telegraph-poles held the galloping notes of the music between punctual bars."  This makes me wonder -- is Stephen, who is feeling dispossessed at this point in Portrait, hearing the song of HCE while riding the train? 
• "go away, we are deluded, come back, we are disghosted" -- Here, McHugh notes that "deluded" can be read as a substitute for "delighted," while "disghosted" can be read as a substitute for "disgusted."  We delight in HCE's departure, but are filled with disgust when he returns.  On the other hand, his death might be caused by our misunderstanding (or delusion), while his return exorcises our demons and makes us whole again.  Such depth.

"he pours into the softclad shellborn the hard cash earned in Watling Street"

(132.20-134.20)  It's round four of the journey through the first question of the sixth chapter of Finnegans Wake.  In keeping with recent practice, here's my top five items from the catalog.

• "sponsor to a squad of piercers, ally to a host of rawlies" -- Most of the items I picked out today tie into major themes that we've already seen throughout the book.  Here we get the war/insurgent theme, but most significantly, there's the reference to HCE's incarnation as Persse O'Reilly ("pierce" "of rawlies").
• "is unhesitent in his unionism and yet a pigotted nationalist" -- This embodies HCE's dual nature as Irish invader/defender.  We also have an instance of Joyce building depth in the book by referencing events both external and internal to the Wake.  The misspelled "unhesitent" and "pigotted" recall the Parnell-Pigott rivalry in Irish political history.  They also recall the book's previous references to this rivarly, and thus incorporate the HCE-Cad feud from earlier in the Wake.  
• "hallucination, cauchman, ectoplasm" -- McHugh translates "cauchemar" as French for "nightmare," so this item highlights the dark spiritual side of HCE.  Personally, this item jumped out at me because I associate ectoplasm with the Ghostbusters.
• "cumbrum, cumbrum, twiniceynurseys fore a drum but tre to uno tips the scale" -- Here we get the two young women (the "twiniceynurses") and three soldiers (the "tre" against HCE"s "uno") from the scene of HCE's fall in Phoenix Park.  We also get Joyce's bawdy wordplay, as McHugh notes that "nurse" is a slang term for "prostitute" and "drum" is a slang term for "brothel."
• "moves in vicous circles yet remews the same" -- Vico's cyclical theory of human progress/history almost always is lurking in the background of the Wake, and it's brought to the foreground here.  HCE is continually progressing, but it's a circular progression.  He constantly renews, yet remains the same.

"Up Micawber!"

(130.20-132.20)  It's round three of our trek through the first question of the Wake's sixth chapter.  Once again, I'll jump straight into my top five items from today's portion of the catalog.

• "he has twenty four or so cousins germinating in the United States of America and a namesake with an initial difference in the once kingdom of Poland" -- This references the statement (attributed by McHugh to Dillon Cosgrave) that there are 24 Dublins in the United States.  One -- Dublin, Ohio -- is about 20 miles from where I live, and it just had its annual Irish Festival last weekend.  (I didn't go, but I don't think I missed much discussion of Finnegans Wake.)  McHugh notes that the namesake with the "initial difference" is Lublin, Poland.
• "taught himself skating and learned how to fall" -- Here's an example of the Wake being relatively simple, for once.  I'm not catching any puns or double-meanings in "skating," but fall certainly refers not only to falling while skating, but also to falling through sin and the ultimate falling to death.  So, even in simplicity, there's rich depth.
• "burning body to aiger air on melting mountain in wooing wave" -- McHugh notes that "aiger air" refers to "a nipping and an eager air" in Hamlet.  He also points out that it encompasses the French "aigre," which translates to "chill" or "bitter."  I highlight this selection mostly because it incorporates the four elements -- here fire, wind, earth, and water -- which are continually popping up on these pages.  This also follows the book's shifting focuses, from HCE (the "burning body") to ALP (the "wooing wave").
• "we go into him sleepy children, we come out of him strucklers for life" -- We start out life as sleeping babies, and we go out of it struggling against death.  This selection immediately follows the "burning body" phrase, and I think this immediate proximity serves to further emphasize HCE's story, and the Wake itself, as the story of all human life.
• "Miraculone, Monstrucceleen" -- Here's a more complex one. From "Miraculone," McHugh extracts the Italian "miraculone" ("big miracle") and "culone ("big arse").  From "Monstrucceleen" he draws the Italian "uccellino" ("little bird").  This is the devious Joyce playfully accentuating HCE's dueling natures.  He's a giant miracle, and a giant ass.  And he's a monster, but he's also a gentle bird.

"he could talk earish with his eyes shut"

(128.19-130.20)  Today brings the second round of posts dedicated to the first question posed in the sixth chapter of Finnegans Wake.  As I mentioned yesterday, there's not much for me to say about the first question's list at this point, so today I'm just going to give my top five favorite entries (in the order they appear in the Wake).

•  "makes a delictuous entrée and finishes off the course between sweets and savouries" -- I like this one not necessarily because it makes me hungry, but mostly because of the way Joyce plays with "delicious" and "delictum" (Latin for "crime").  In one sense, it's highlighting HCE as a welcoming publican, and in another it emphasizes his cunningly devious side.
• "as it gan in the biguinnengs so wound up in a battle of Boss" -- This is one of at least a good handful of references to Christian prayers (here, the "Glory Be," which in English contains the line "as it was in the beginning").  That aspect of this entry got the attention of the Catholic in me, while the attention of the beer drinker in me was drawn by the references to Guinness and Bass.
• "is the handiest of all andies and a most alleghant spot to dump your hump" -- The mountain range references, which tie into the theme of the body of Finnegan/HCE as the Irish landscape, caught my eye here.  We've got the Andes, of course, but I'm most excited (yup, excited) to see the reference to the Allegheny Mountains, which I drive through and across a few times every year during my travels to the eastern side of Pennsylvania.
• "independent of the lordship of chamberlain, acknowledging the rule of Rome" -- McHugh notes that Dublin was the only place in the British Empire not subject to Lord Chamberlain's power to censor plays.  The idea that both Lord Chamberlain and the Vatican have authority in Ireland calls back to the early moment in Ulysses where Haines tells Stephen Dedalus that Stephen seems to be his own master.  Stephen replies, "I am the servant of two masters . . . an English and an Italian."
• "on Christienmas at Advent Lodge, New Yealand, after a lenty illness the roeverand Mr Easterling of pentecositis, no followers by bequest, fanfare all private" -- Here's another Christianity reference, this time a rough approximation of the liturgical year (Advent, Christmas, New Year's, Lent, Easter, Pentecost).  This ties together both the liturgical year and the human life cycle (from birth to death), and it also reminds us of Joyce's playful use of the phrase "fun for all" as a stand-in for "funeral."

"an eddistoon amid the lampless"

(126.1-128.19) So, we begin the sixth chapter of Finnegans Wake.  As we almost immediately find out, this chapter is comprised of a "quisquiquock" (or quiz) that consists of 12 questions (or "apostrophes").  These questions are answered by HCE's son, Shaun.

Interestingly enough, the question-and-answer format of this chapter, which follows the chapter on ALP's letter, invites an interesting comparison to the last two chapters of Ulysses.  In that novel, the penultimate chapter also has a question-and-answer format (albeit with considerably more than 12 questions), and that chapter leads into the long soliloquy of Molly Bloom (wife of Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses).  Here, the order is reversed.  The wife's monologue (or, in ALP's case, the letter . . . which, remember, bears significant similarities to Molly's soliloquy) leads into the question-and-answer chapter.  This is a bit of digression, I know, but I doubt this structure was completely unintentional on Joyce's part.

After nine lines of introduction, the questions (and answers) begin.  The first question is a long one.  I'm not joking -- the question itself takes up almost 13 full pages of the Wake.  For you non-math majors out there, that means that a full two percent of this 626-page book is taken up by this question alone.

The question itself is another long catalog, asking:  "What secondtonone myther rector and maximost bridgesmaker" was/is/did this whole list of things?  The answer is instantly clear:  It's HCE.  So, as with the two long catalogs we've previously encountered (the cad's insults and the titles for ALP's letter), this list deals with an aspect of HCE.  Here, it could be said, are listed his defining qualities and deeds.

The next week or so of posts here will be on the shorter side, because the list is pretty self explanatory and I can't think of much to write about it (at least for the moment).  With that said, here's a couple of the list's greatest hits (or, as the Cramps would somewhat appropriately say, gravest hits).

We get a callback to Wellington Monument right away, with "was the first to rise taller through his beanstale than the bluegum buaboababbaun or the giganteous Wellingtonia Sequoia."  Immediately following that is a reference to ALP and her incarnation as the Liffey:  "went nudiboots with trouters into a liffeyette when she was barely in her tricklies."  The Adam-Eve/HCE-ALP parallel is emphasized soon after with "thought he weighed a new ton when there felled his first lapapple."  You can get the picture:  Joyce is reiterating, reenforcing, and revitalizing all of the multiple themes of his book.

I'm particularly fond of the reference to the great Ohioan Thomas Edison:  "towers, an eddistoon amid the lampless, casting swannbeams on the deep."  McHugh notes that aside from Thomas Alva, this phrase also references Eddystone lighthouse and Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (who invented an early light bulb).  Since Joyce's light burned -- and still burns -- brighter than mine, I'll sign off for the evening on this note and let you enjoy more items from the list on your own voyage through the Wake.

"For postscrapt see spoils."

(123.30-125.23)  Ok, I'm back after a personally hectic and eventful (birthday) week.  This is my first post (and the first Wake I've read) as a newly-minted 33 year-old.  Suitably enough for the Wake, this "first post" of my Larry Bird year covers the last pages of the chapter on ALP's letter.

The reading begins with the narrator saying that the "unmistaken identity of the persons" in the letter "came to light in the most devious of ways."  But we really don't get a clear or clean version of those identities.  Instead, the letter's script is detailed, and it's noted that "it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort."  (This lack of punctuation further cements the link established in the previous pages between the letter and the final chapter of Ulysses.)  There are, however, four spots on the letter featuring "paper wounds" formed by someone or something piercing the letter.  These wounds were thought to have been caused by a Professor Prenderguest poking at the letter with a fork, but the narrator says that this can't be true because the professor holds the letter with reverence.

It's more likely that the "paper wounds" were caused by the pecking hen -- "Dame Partlet on her dungheap" -- who uncovered the letter at the dump in Phoenix Park.  The examination of the letter ends with a reference back to the opening lines of the Wake.  (The book's second paragraph is particularly recalled with, "Though not yet had the sailor sipped that sup nor the humphar foamed to the fill.")

The final paragraph of the chapter seems to set up what's coming next:  "shoots off in a hiss, muddles up in a mussmass and his whole's a dismantled noondrunkard's son."  Someone's going to be taking HCE's place, and the identity of that someone is likely in the letter.  The narrator says it's not "Hans the Curier," who must be HCE's son Shaun the Postman.  At the moment, the narrator finally tells us, "his room" (HCE's room, I'm guessing) is "taken up by that odious and still today insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher . . . Shem the Penman."

This conclusion lacked the sort of beautiful poetic prose that's closed some of the previous chapters, but I suppose that's in keeping with the more academic tone we've found in this chapter.  Come tomorrow, we'll see how the next one unfolds.