"I promise I'll make it worth your while."

(208.27-210.22)  Upon leaving her house and heading out, ALP must've made a good impression, for one of the washerwomen says that she was crowned "chariton queen."  As she went on to "meander by that marritime way in her grasswinter's weeds," a chorus of "drouthdropping surfacemen" were in awe of her and said that she either got a facelift or had been doped.

The other washerwoman then asks, "But what was the game in her mixed baggyrhatty?"  ALP carried her bag -- which is the one ALP obtained from her son, Shaun the postman -- on her journey like Santa Claus.  She embraced her daughter, Isabella (here "Isolabella"), and ran with her reconciled sons, Shem and Shaun (here fashioned after the original Romans, Romulus and Remus, as "Romas and Reims").  From the bag, ALP gave gifts to these three, as well as all of her other children.  

The rest of the passage begins a long catalog of all of the gifts given by ALP.  This part is fairly easy to read (for the Wake), and entertaining to boot.  Some of the more interesting and fun gifts (and recipients) I found in today's reading include "for sulky Pender's acid nephew deltoïd drops, curiously strong;" "a brazen nose and pigiron mittens for Johnny Walker beg;" "a papar flag of the saints and stripes for Kevineen O'Dea" (combining paper flag, papal flag, and the stars and stripes); and "a seasick trip on a government ship for Teague O'Flanagan."  It looks like there's a full boatload of more gifts coming in tomorrow's reading . . .

"Hustle along, why can't you?"

(206.29-208.26)  Today's reading consists mostly of detailed descriptions of ALP.  It's pretty straightforward (as far as I can tell), and I really don't have much to add to Joyce's text at this point.

The passage begins with ALP bathing, grooming, and clothing herself.  As with the rest of the chapter to this point, the language often carries two connotations:  one for ALP the woman, the other for ALP the river.  After she's ready to go out, she has her "boudeloire maids" go to "His Affluence, Ciliegia Grande and Kirschie Real," to make an appointment to visit.  She grabs the mailbag she got from Shaun, and goes forth from her "bassein" (or, river basin).

The description is interrupted here by the other washerwoman, who asks her counterpart to pick up the pace.  Resuming, we hear ALP described as "a bushman woman, the dearest little moma ever you saw."  To support this description, we get a full report on what she wore as she stepped out of the house.  Again, there's not much to add to Joyce's description.  I like the word he uses here for "ear":  "laudsnarers."  McHugh points out that "Laut" is German for "sound," so here Joyce is using "sound snarers," which is great because . . . that's what ears do.  I also enjoy the description of ALP's riding coat:  "her blackstripe tan joseph was sequansewn and teddybearlined, with wavy swansruff" particularly for the word "teddybearlined."  Along with her outfit and accessories, ALP carries a coin in each pocket, which "weighed her safe from the blowaway windrush."  The washerwoman wraps up the description of ALP's ensemble by noting one of its key features with more river language:  "the rreke of the fluve of the tail of the gawan of her snuffdrab siouler's skirt trailed ffiffty odd Irish miles behind her lungarhodes."

Oh, and by the way, I was also glad to see another reference to Manneken Pis here, when ALP asks His Affluence's wife if she can spare her husband for a second:  "a request might she passe of him for a minnikin."

"Never stop! Continuarration! You're not there yet."

(204.21-206.28)  As the eighth chapter of the Wake progresses, the two washerwomen's interactions start getting a bit more amusing and testy.  Toward the beginning of today's passage, one woman asks, among other things, why ALP was "frickled" (freckled) and whether she had wavy hair or "was it weirdly a wig she wore."  All these questions start wearing at the other woman's patience, and the two have a tenser exchange:  "O go in, go on, go an!  I mean about what you know.  I know right well what you mean.  Rother!"  This leads into a digression in which the women discuss their work, including whose garments are whose and what state the clothes are in.  For instance, one says, "That's not the vesdre benediction smell.  I can tell from here by their eau de Colo and the scent of her oder they're Mrs Magrath's.  And you ought to have aird them."

After the women shake themselves from this digression, one of them resumes the story of ALP, picking up just after HCE's fall.  Once the news got out, the woman says, even the snow that fell on HCE's hair was against him.  Everywhere -- "in cit or suburb or in addled areas" -- HCE's image was turned upside down and even the idle cornerboys mocked him.  He was in bad shape, but ALP stood by him.  As one woman says, ALP "said to herself she'd frame a plan to fake a shine, the mischiefmaker, the like of it you niever heard."

What was ALP's plan?  She obtained "a shamy mailsack" from her son, Shaun, and then "consulted her chapboucqs."  Before this washerwoman details the rest of the plan, however, the other woman begins to laugh at the story, which prompts her to ask whether her companion really wants to hear the story at all.  They then begin to bicker in an amusing passage:

O but you must, you must really!  Make my hear it gurgle gurgle, like the farest gargle gargle in the dusky dirgle dargle!  By the holy well of Mulhuddart I swear I'd pledge my chanza getting to heaven through Tirry and Killy's mount of impiety to hear it all, aviary word!  O, leave me to my faculties, woman, a while!  If you don't like my story get out of the punt.  Well, have it your way, so.  Here, sit down and do as you're bid.

The passage ends with one of the women scrubbing "the canon's underpants."  We'll accordingly have to wait until tomorrow to get more of the story of ALP's plan to avenge her husband.

"Push up and push vardar and come to uphill headquarters!"

(202.4-204.20)  Today's passage was another challenging, yet fascinating one.  And once again, after going through the process of moving from overwhelming confusion to the point where a dim light of understanding went on, I realized that sometimes the more challenging the Wake gets, the more rewarding it ends up being.  Done with discussing ALP's children, the washerwomen move on to the subject of ALP's own promiscuity.  One says, "She must have been a gadabount in her day, so she must, more than most."  She went all the way from the river's source to the ocean, one woman says, "[c]asting her perils before our swains."  But, one asks, who was ALP's first lover?  The short, but completely vague, answer is, "Someone he was, whuebra they were, in a tactic attack or in single combat."

It turns out that ALP herself doesn't really know the man's identity:  "She sid herself she hardly knows whuon the annals her graveller was, a dynast of Leinster, a wolf of the sea, or what he did or how blyth she played or how, when, why, where and who offon he jumpnad her and how it was gave her away."  One woman says that the man was "a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees."  

But the other disagrees:  "You're wrong there, corribly wrong!"  She continues, "It was ages behind that when nullahs were nowhere."  This begins a brilliant passage in which the women (as pointed out by Campbell and Robinson) roughly trace the course of the Liffey backward toward its source.  At the same time, they're also tracing ALP's personal progression back from a sexually active adult to a blossoming young woman to an innocent child.  They move immediately back in time from the lieabroad of a Curraghman to "county Wickenlow, garden of Erin, before she ever dreamt she'd lave Kilbridge and go foaming under Horsepass bridge."  Back in "the dinkel dale of Luggelaw" (where McHugh says Saint Kevin spent some time), she had a romantic encounter with "a local heremite, Michael Arklow."  Entranced by ALP, Arklow "plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it."  This is Akrlow both dipping his hand in the stream and running them through ALP's hair.  Aroused, Akrlow "had to forget the monk in the man so, rubbing her up and smoothing her down, he baised his lippes in smiling mood, kiss akiss after kisokushk (as he warned her niver to, niver to, nevar) on Anna-na-Poghue's of the freckled forehead."  This encounter profoundly moved ALP, who thereafter rose two feet higher in her own estimation "[a]nd steppes on stilts ever since."

But before Arklow, "[t]wo lads in scoutsch breeches went through her."  These two lads -- Barefoot Burn (I wonder if this is the Scot, Robert Burns?) and Wallowme Wade -- had their encounters (which aren't described in any detail) before ALP, the person, hit puberty ("before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler") and before ALP, the river, had reached a point where she could support large ships ("a bulgic porterhouse barge").  And before that, she was playfully licked by a hound when she was "too faint to buoy the fairest rider, too frail to flirt with a cygnet's plume."  Finally, when she was just a slight trickle at the river's source, "she laughed innocefree with her limbs aloft and a whole drove of maiden hawthorns blushing and looking askance upon her."  All in all, these two pages serve as reminders of Joyce's brilliance.

"We won't have room in the kirkeyaard."

(200.4-202.3)  Yesterday we left off with the washerwomen discussing how ALP donned a luxurious gown, and today we pick up with them recounting how she was "brahming" (or singing) love songs (that sometimes tilt toward the bawdy end of the spectrum) to HCE.  HCE, however, was unmoved by ALP's songs, because he was "as deaf as a yawn."  ALP walked out of the house, but instead of exacting some kind of revenge on HCE for ignoring her attempts to arouse him, she instead stood in the doorway, smoking a pipe and making signs to every woman that walked by to come into the house.  One by one, she would show the women how to perform a striptease and offer them a silver coin.  According to the washerwomen, then, ALP was "[t]hrowing all the neiss little whores in the world at him" to "hug and hab haven in Humpy's apron!"

The women then change the subject from ALP's procuring of prostitutes for HCE to the contents of ALP's letter.  In this telling, the letter consists of a poem or song written by ALP, the first verse of which is, "By earth and the cloudy but I badly want a brandnew bankside, bedamp and I do, and a plumper at that!"  The song goes on to explain that ALP is waiting for HCE "to wake himself out of his winter's doze and bore me down like he used to."  In the meantime, she looks for work from a lord or knight so that she can feed her family, and she ends the song by expressing her desire to leave her bed and breathe the salty air on the beach.  If you read the "bankside" of the opening verse literally, this is a song of the river waiting for the winter to end so that the snow will thaw and the flowing water of spring will cut deeper riverbanks and enable the river to run to the ocean.  If you read "bankside" as "backside," however, it's a song of sexual frustration, with ALP wishing to be more attractive so that either HCE will become interested in her again or she will be able to leave the marital bed and seek new pleasures down by the ocean.

The third subject of today's reading is ALP's children.  One washerwoman asks how many children ALP had.  No one seems to know for sure, but the most prominent theory indicates that she has 111.  Some say that she had these children "wan bywan bywan" (one by one by one, or 1-1-1), and that she can't remember half of their names.  "They did well to rechristien her Pluhurabelle," one woman says.  It seems that another theory is that ALP had a number of litters of children, ranging from twins and triplets to octuplets and nonuplets.  In regard to this unbelievable number of children, one washerwoman references perhaps my favorite philosopher in saying, "We won't have room in the kirkeyaard."

"Tell us in franca langua. And call a spate a spate."

(198.3-200.4)  As chapter eight of the Wake progresses onward, it quickly becomes clear that the depth of ALP's character is going to be explored almost as much (if not equally as much) as HCE's.  The two washerwomen concede that despite his faults, HCE did work to make a living:  "He erned his lille Bunbath hard, our staly bred, the trader.  He did.  Look at here.  In this wet of his prow."  And just as HCE isn't all bad, ALP isn't all good.  "Shyr she's nearly as badher as him herself," one woman says.  In fact, one woman alleges that ALP ordered women to entertain HCE, or, as it's said in the text, to "tickle the pontiff aisy-oisy."  The woman goes so far as to call ALP a "proxenete," which McHugh identifies as someone who negotiates a marriage, or, in French slang, a bawd.  Another story is that ALP could be seen sitting before her window pretending to play a dirge on a fiddle, even though she didn't know how to play the fiddle.

The conversation turns back toward HCE, who is said to have become "as glommen as grampus" at some point and driven to be a hermit by the troubles of the world.  He sat somber on his seat, engaging in a hunger strike, dreaming incessantly (is the Wake the result of his endless dreaming?), and belching for "severn years."  During this period, ALP was greatly concerned about HCE.  She "darent catch a winkle of sleep," and cooked meals (variously featuring eggs, Danish bacon, green tea, black coffee, and ham sandwiches) for him.  The ungrateful HCE would cast the meal aside, stare at ALP, and call her a so-and-so.  Undeterred, ALP would whistle for him.

Today's reading concludes with the aristocratic ALP, casting sparks from her fan and sporting fireflies in her frosty tresses, clothed in a luxurious jade gown.  This is an abrupt stopping point, but we're in the middle of a four-page paragraph, so I'll hold off on going further until tomorrow.

"As you spring so shall you neap."

(196.1-198.2)  Chapter eight of Finnegans Wake does indeed pick up where chapter seven left off:  ALP.  Its opening lines, formatted in the shape of a triangle (ALP's symbol) tell us all we need to know about the chapter's content:

O 

tell me all about 

Anna Livia!  I want to hear all

The chapter starts out as two women having a conversation as they wash HCE's clothes from opposing banks of the river.  (They must be at a narrow part of the river, for their heads bump when they stoop across the river to cross.  One woman says, "And don't butt me -- hike! -- when you bend.")  Naturally, their conversation meanders back and forth between ALP and her husband.  Also prominently featured in their dialogue are a torrent of river names, both famous and obscure, that keep the river theme prominent in the reader's mind.

The chapter begins with the recounting of and adding to the rumors surrounding HCE.  They begin by referring to the nefarious conduct that the three soldiers reported HCE engaged in with respect to the two young women in Phoenix Park:  "whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park."  With this in mind, it's clear that HCE's reputation is as foul as his clothes.  "He's an awful old reppe," one says.  "Look at the shirt of him!  Look at the dirt of it!  He has all my water black on me."

Talk soon turns to the marriage between HCE and ALP.  Much like Joyce's own marriage, rumors abound about the legitimacy of their vows:  "Was her banns never loosened in Adam and Eve's or were him and her but captain spliced?"  In other words, did they receive a proper Catholic wedding (in Adam and Eve's, the church referenced on the book's first page), or were married in a civil service?  Regardless, it appears that HCE (represented by the hill of Howth) and ALP (represented by the flowing river Liffey) consider their marriage valid (as did Joyce in regard to his own marriage):  "Flowey and Mount on the brink of time makes wishes and fears for a happy isthmass.  She can show all her lines, with love, license to play.  And if they don't remarry that hook and eye may!"

The talk also touches on HCE's status as immigrant/invader.  It's unclear whether he gained material wealth from ALP after he "raped her home" or whether he's broke, with "[n]ot a grasshoop to ring her, not an antsgrain of ore."  Thus, even though one woman says, "I know by heart the places he likes to saale, duddurty devil!" and "I know he well," it seems at this early point in the chapter that neither woman has the full and accurate story of HCE and ALP.  Nevertheless, as that same woman says, "But toms will till."

"all that has been done has yet to be done and done again"

(192.5-195.6)  Today brings the conclusion of the Wake's seventh chapter, which has detailed one of HCE's sons, Shem.  The passage begins with the final two paragraphs of Justius/Shaun's address to Shem.  He discusses the gifts Shem has squandered (such as "all the hamilkcars of cooked vegetables, the hatfuls of stewed fruit, the suitcases of coddled ales") and the indulgences granted him (such as "to give you your pound of platinum and a thousand thongs a year" and "to let you have your Sarday spree and holinight sleep").  As Shem continues to recount his "hornmade ivory dreams," the people will "wallow for a clutch of the famished hand."  Addressing what seems to be one of his bigger complaints, Justius asks, "Where is that little alimony nestegg against our predictable rainy day?"  It seems that Shem, like the prodigal son, has squandered this nest egg.  Justius concludes the paragraph by ordering Shem to take his medicine.

But medicine for what?  In the next paragraph -- which begins, "Let me finish!" -- Justius asks Shem to lean in so that he can tell him a secret, or "tell you a wig in your ear" (recalling HC Earwicker, the earwig).  This secret, which been passed down to Justius through a number of sources (enumerated here, much like the chain of people who spread the rumors about HCE) comes out with Justius's final words:  "Sh!  Shem, you are.  Sh!  You are mad!"  With Justius's part of the dialogue finished, "He points the deathbone and the quick are still."  Following this action, there is an invocation:  "Insomnia, somnia somniorum."  McHugh translates this Latin as, "sleeplessness, dreams of dreams," which is a great summary of the Wake itself.

Now we get Shem's response, delivered in his persona of Mercius (the Mercy to Shaun's Justice).  Mercius begins with a more apologetic tone:  "My fault, his fault, a kingship through a fault!"  He admits his kinship to Justius and his abandonment of his home:  "I who oathily forswore the womb that bore you and the paps I sometimes sucked."  This conciliatory tone feels appropriate, for Mercius states that the brothers are at their final hour:  "now ere the compline hour of being alone athands itself and a puff or so before we yield our spiritus to the wind . . . ."  Although they may be facing their respective ends, Mercius realizes that this is all part of an unending cycle.  History has not happened yet, nor has it yet inevitably repeated itself:  "all that has been done has yet to be done and done again, when's day's woe, and lo, you're doomed, joyday dawns and, la, you dominate."

The stalemate between these brothers, which has been detailed in both the previous chapter and this one, cannot continue.  Mercius realizes this, and he notes that something is drawing toward both of them:  "our turfbrown mummy is acoming, alpilla, beltilla, ciltilla, deltilla running with her tidings, old the news of the great big world, sonnies had a scrap, woewoewoe!"  Their mother, ALP, is coming in response to her sons' dispute, which is old news that's been repeated since the beginning of time.  In an exhilarating passage, Mercius traces ALP's journey in her incarnation as the River Liffey, "little wonderful mummy, ducking under bridges, bellhopping the weirs, dodging by a bit of bog, rapidly shooting round the bends," and so on.  She is "as happy as the day is wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia."

At the conclusion of Mercius's reply, "He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak."  So, whereas Shaun brings wields death and causes the quick to be still, Shem wields life and causes the dumb to speak.  And what do they say?  "Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!"  "Quoi" is French for "what," so this would indicate that the formerly speechless are now repeating "what."  As the previous chapter ended on the subject of Shem, it looks like the next chapter's "what" will be the final subject of this chapter, ALP.

"another thing occurs to me"

(190.10-192.4)  Today we pick up with Justius/Shaun discussing Shem's intended professional vocation.  His "birthwrong" was "to fall in with Plan."  He was supposed to stay in Ireland -- "our place of burden, your bourne of travail and ville of tares" -- and take a secure job, perhaps with Guinness, or maybe with the church.  Instead, Shem "beat it backwards" and became "an Irish emigrant the wrong way out."  Instead of being a good "nationist," Shem became a man of the world, the "Europasianised Afferyank!"

Justius then moves his focus toward Shem's brother, who is another version of Justius/Shaun.  The brother, "Immaculatus" or "Altrues," is as high and good as Shem is low and bad.  He was a "handsome young spiritual physician" destined to be Shem's counterfoil and "a chum of the angelets."  Shem, however, killed his brother because, as Justius tells Shem, "he mussed your speller on you or because he cut a pretty figure in the focus of your frontispecs."  Just as Adam is a version of HCE, the warring brothers Cain and Abel are versions of Shem and Shaun.

Shifting gears again, Justius asks Shem if he ever read "of that greatgrand landfather of our visionbuilders, Baaboo, the bourgeoismeister," if he ever thought of "that hereticalist Marcon and the two scissymaidies," and if he ever heard of "that foxy, that lupo, that monkax and the virgin heir of the Morrisons."  These three are all incarnations of HCE:  the father, the heretic brought down by two young women, and the clever husband of ALP.  The language from today's passage recalling the archetypal roles of the Wake's family unit functions to bring this chapter toward its conclusion, and tomorrow I'll read through its final pages.

"your new Irish stew"

(188.8-190.9)  In yesterday's passage, Justius/Shaun called upon Shem to make his confession.  In keeping with the tone of the chapter, however, in today's passage Justius begins a new dissertation on Shem's history instead of allowing Shem to deliver his confession.  The reading begins with Justius's twisting of the priest's familiar invocation ("Let us pray") when he says, "Let us pry."  He then recalls how Shem was brought up the right way but has become an self-centered outcast, a "condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch."  Much like Lucifer, whose fall was rooted in pride, Shem "will neither serve not let serve, pray nor let pray," and has founded a "disunited kingdom on the vacuum of [his] own most intensely doubtful soul."

Justius goes on to tell Shem that Shem was given a set of working genitals ("a handsome present of a selfraising syringe and twin feeders") in order to "repopulate the land of your birth and count up your progeny by the hungered head and the angered thousand."  Instead of carrying out this mission, however, Shem "thwarted the wious pish of [his] cogodparents."  Justius then discusses the multitude of eligible women in Ireland that Shem spurned.

Justius begins the next paragraph with more choice epithets for Shem:  "Sniffer of carrion, premature gravedigger, seeker of the nest of evil in the bosom of a good word."  Shem is now described as a type of prophet who "cutely foretold . . . death with every disaster, the dynamitisation of colleagues, the reducing of records to ashes, the levelling of all customs by blazes, the return of a lot of sweetempered gunpowdered didst unto dudst."  But, Justius tells Shem, Shem never considered that the more prophecies and atrocities he dreamed up -- "the more carrots you chop, the more turnips you slit, the more murphies you peel" -- the more gas or hot air he let out into the world:  "the merrier fumes your new Irish stew."

"It is looking pretty black against you"

(186.19-188.7)  The police officer we met at the end of yesterday's passage is now identified as Petty constable Sistersen.  The narrator explains that Sistersen was sent to save Shem "from the ligatureliablous effects of foul clay in little clots and mobmauling on looks."  He encountered Shem "reeling more to the right than he lurched to the left, on his way from a protoprostitute."  Upon Shem's addressing Sistersen, it became pretty clear that Shem was pretty drunk, and the narrator accordingly notes that Sistersen "was literally astundished over the painful sake, how he burstteself, which he was gone to."

Perhaps reflecting Shem's drunken, low state, the language on the first half of page 187 gets looser and makes less and less sense as one progresses through it.  Eventually, the narrator gives up:  "We cannot, in mercy or justice nor on the lovom for labaryntos, stay here for the residence of our existings, discussing Tamstar Ham of Tenman's thirst."  In other words, we can't sit here for the rest of our lives talking about Shem.

This leads immediately into a dialogue, in which Sistersen -- now called "Justius" (after the "mercy or justice" in the preceding sentence) -- first addresses Shem, now called (in a stage direction), "himother."  The juxtaposition of the law-upholding Sistersen/Justius and the law-flaunting Shem provides us with a pretty big clue that Sistersen/Justius is a form of Shaun, and this clue is confirmed when we learn that Justius is addressing "himother," or his other twin, Shem.

Justius begins the dialogue by boasting of his "brawn."  "I'm the boy to bruise and braise," he says.  He then addresses Shem directly, saying, "Stand forth, nayman of Noland."  (The pitting of Justius/Brawn vs. Shem/Noland recalls Giordano Bruno and indicates that Shaun and Shem are both Bruno of Nolan and thus confirm Bruno's theory of a whole embracing diametrically opposed opposites.)  After this direct address, we get a parenthetical that I think sheds some light on this chapter:

(for no longer will I follow you obliquelike through the inspired form of the third person singular and the moods and hesitensies of the deponent but address myself to you, with the empirative of my vendettative, provocative and out direct)

Justius says that he will now move from addressing Shaun in the third person to addressing him in the second person.  This is interesting, because it's actually the first time Justius has addressed Shem.  I think this statement indicates that Justius not only is a form of Shaun, but also is a form of the narrator in this chapter.  The narrator in this chapter has consistently referred to Shem in the third person, which would explain why Justius notes the shift in the parenthetical.  If Shaun is actually the chapter's narrator, it explains the particularly harsh tone toward Shem (beyond Joyce playfully denigrating the figure most clearly aligned with Joyce in the Wake) throughout the chapter.

Justius goes on to say, "Shem Macadamson [son of Adam, the first man, and another version of HCE], you know me and I know you and all your shemeries."  Justius then calls upon Shem to make his confession, noting that "[i]t is looking pretty black against you."  In a reference to the restorative powers of their mother, ALP, who is represented by the River Liffey, Justius says, "You will need all the elements in the river to clean you over it all."  It will be interesting to see what becomes of this latest clash between brothers. 

"a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal"

(184.11-186.18)  Once again, the Wake throws me a curveball.  Today's passage was as tough to plod through on the first go-round as yesterday's passage was "easy."  Most of the challenge today came from the fact that there's a lot of foreign words here (yeah, I know, maybe a majority of the Wake's words are foreign, but today there was a lot of French and Latin).  One paragraph on page 185, for example, is written primarily in Latin.  It's days like these that McHugh's Annotations (and the Google Translate app, for what McHugh doesn't get to) is absolutely necessary for people like me, whose foreign language proficiency comes from two years of high school German, two years of high school Latin, a semester of college Italian, and a good number of hours of having sat through Latin masses and French films.

Today's reading starts off with Shem -- "our low hero" -- cooking eggs (because he's his own valet "by choice of need").  There's a lot of detail about the ingredients he mixes in with his eggs and the variety of egg-based dishes he makes, but one of the key lines of this section is found in a parenthetical:  "the umpple does not fall very far from the dumpertree."  This variation of the saying, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," calls to mind Shem's father, HCE, who is also Humpty Dumpty (another cracked-up egg).  So, like father, like son here.  

But it's not all cooking and singing for Shem.  He's got his detractors, and we learn that two of them, "Robber and Mumsell, the pulpic dictators," once "boycotted him of all muttonsuet candles and romeruled stationery for any purpose."  With his writing material sgone, Shem "winged away on a wildgoup's chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit's waste."  So, once again, we get a parallel between Joyce and Shem, as Joyce, who found Ireland antithetical to his vocation as a writer, fled for the European continent to engage in the solitary pursuit of that vocation.

How does Shem make these writing materials?  The narrator tells us in Latin as a sort of jab in the direction of any "Anglican ordinal" who might be listening in.  The Latin paragraph, as translated by McHugh, basically says that Shem . . . get ready for it . . . shat into his hands, put his excrement into an urn, urinated into the urn, mixed up the waste, chanted a psalm, baked the mixture, and let it cool.  When his work was complete, he had indelible ink.  (This paragraph begs the question, how much of this paragraph is Joyce having fun, and how much of it is Joyce writing from experience?)

The narrator compares the ink Shem produced from his body with the "obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United States of Ourania" that Shem produces with his pen.  Here's another Joyce-Shem parallel:  During the time that Ulysses was banned in the United States as obscene, it wasn't protected by copyright and was accordingly pirated until it began to be lawfully published.  Shem used the ink to write a work akin to Finnegans Wake, which Shem "wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body."  The work written on his body "slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history," just like the all-encompassing Wake.  Eventually, Shem made his "last public misappearance," where, "circling the square" (both walking around the public square and amazingly transforming a square into a circle), he fell under the watchful eye of a blond cop, who seeing the tattooing on Shem's body, thought that the the markings were ink.  The narrator says that the blond cop "was out of his depth but bright in the main."

"pure mousefarm filth"

(182.30-184.10)  Today our attention shifts slightly away from Shem and focuses upon Shem's house, which is known, appropriately enough, as the "Haunted Inkbottle."  This passage, which is one long paragraph, is actually fairly easy to read (once you've taken some time to digest it) and, as with much of the Wake, pretty entertaining.

The narrator rates the Haunted Inkbottle as "the worst, it is hoped, even in our western playboyish world for pure mousefarm filth."  This is the place, after all, where Shem, "the soulcontracted son of the secret cell groped through life at the expense of the taxpayers," so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that it's the worst, or as the narrator adds, "a stinksome inkenstink."  Much of the paragraph is devoted to the narrator's catalog of items littered on the warped flooring, soundconducting walls, support beams, and shutters.  Among these cataloged items are full works of literature ("burst loveletters" and "telltale stories"), fragments of literature ("alphybettyformed verbage," "once current puns," and "quashed quotatoes"), food remnants ("doubtful eggshells," "amygdaloid almonds," and "rindless raisins"), and garters from a secondary catalog of women (which includes "schoolgirls," "merry widows," "ex nuns," and "super whores").

Quite a mess, right?  If you can stand the "chambermade music" (another reference to Joyce's collection of poems, Chamber Music) of the house, the narrator says that one might -- "given a grain of goodwill" -- stand a fair chance of seeing Shem himself.  Here, Shem is described as "Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego."  At night, he shakes "betwixtween white or reddr hawrors," and at day he's terrorized "to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom," while he's "writing the mystery of himsel in furniture."  As the chapter progresses, the narrator (and Joyce, by extension) seems to paint a gloomier and gloomier picture of Shem (and Joyce, by extension).

"this rancid Shem stuff"

(180.34-182.29)  The description of Shem's lowness continues with the narrator explaining how Shem used to "boast aloud alone to himself with a haccent on it" that he he had been kicked out of all the "schicker" (McHugh notes that this is based on the German "schick," which means elegant or stylish) families that had settled in Dublin from surrounding countries and lands.  Why was he kicked out of these families?  "[O]n account of his smell which all the cookmaids eminently objected to as ressembling the bombinubble puzzo that welled out of the pozzo."  Or, in other words, because he smelled like the abominable stench that came out of the toilet.  What's worse is that instead of doing something respectable before getting booted from those households, he spent his time studying "with stolen fruit how to cutely copy all their various styles of signature so as one day to utter an epical forged cheque on the public for his own private profit."  His scheme was ruined, though, when the Dustbin's United Scullerymaid's and Househelp's Sorority got rid of him altogether.

The narrator's description (or take down) of Shem is again interrupted by an advertisement, this time apparently placed by Joyce himself.  "Jymes," the advertisement states, "wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes."  More specifically, he's looking for ladies' undergarments "to start city life together."  Say what you will about Joyce, but he wasn't timid about making himself the butt of the joke, and he relished in his own reputation for lewdness.

Getting back to Shem, the narrator says it's hard to tell exactly how many forgeries he's sent out into the world.  Regardless, the narrator asserts that Shem never would've been able to write a word if it weren't for the "light phantastic of his gnose's glow as it slid lucifericiously within an inch of its page."  In one sense, this means that Shem has a wicked gnostic muse, and, in another, it means that he's got a Rudolph-like nose that illuminates the page on which he writes.  "By that rosy lampoon's effluvious burning," the narrator says that Shem "scrabbled and scratched and scriobbled and skrevened nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met."  He'd also draw "endlessly inartistic portraits of himself" in the page margins.  The narrator says that these self portraits feature Shem as a handsome, talented, rich, and well-dressed man.  Predictably, the thought of Shem's delusions of grandeur elicit a hearty "Puh!" from the narrator.

"Positively it woolies one to think over it."

(178.8-180.33)  The narrator's unflattering description of Shem picks up with Shem holed up in his "compound" amidst the fallout of Bloody Sunday, now "that bloody, Swithun's day."  The doorways of Chapelizod were smeared with the blood of Irish patriots, "the blood of heroes" ran down the streets in rivers that mixed with tears of joy, and yet Shem, "our low waster," never came out of hiding to join the mob of "slashers and sliced alike."  Even while people filled the air with song, children went to school, and women crossed rainbow bridges, Shem only ventured to look out of his "westernmost keyhole" with a telescope to gauge the situation outside.  While he was in the act of doing this, however, he "got the charm of his optical life" when an unknown person pointed "an irregular revolver of the bulldog with a purpose pattern" at Shem from point blank range.

"What," the narrator hears us asking, was Shem "really at . . . for he seems in a badbad case?"  The answer is that he became an alcoholic and drug addict, and a megalomaniac to boot.  He began putting a seven-letter honorific title after his name and sat in his room "making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" (Joyce's Ulysses, which was originally published with a blue cover and prominently features Dublin's Eccles Street).  He set to writing, with "every splurge on the vellum he blundered over" becoming to him "an aisling vision more goreous than the one before."  In his reveries he eventually envisions himself singing on stage as women throw their undergarments at him.  But, in actuality, Shem's in a very poor state.  The narrator lists Shem's numerous ailments, from "the fumbling fingers" to "the bats in his belfry," and notes that he was so down low that "it took him a month to steal a march" and "he was hardset to mumorise more than a word a week."  

So, even though Shem was getting his ideas from other sources, it still took him forever to even write a single phrase.  This is Joyce once again parodying himself and nearly two decades that it took him to follow up his "usylessly unreadable" Ulysses with Finnegans Wake.

"How is that for low, laities and gentlenuns?"

(176.19-178.7)  So far, the dominant theme of the seventh chapter of Finnegans Wake has been Shem's lowness.  In today's reading, the narrator continues to expound upon that theme.  It's "notoriously known" that on Bloody Sunday, Shem "in a bad fit of pyjamas fled like a leveret for his bare lives."  He hid out in "his inkbattle house," where he moaned feebly with "his cheek and trousers changing colour every time a gat croaked."  We're told that the general populace was against Shem.  He fled from the fighting "pursued by the scented curses of all the village belles."  Later, at a the mention of "the scaly rybald," a chorus of ladies would exclaim, "Poisse!" (which McHugh links to "poisson," the French word for "fish," and "poisse," the French word for "bad luck" or "ponce").

Shem, the narrator explains, thought as highly of himself as everyone else thought lowly of him.  The narrator points to one particular occasion in which Shem was (again) "drinking heavily of spirits" and talking to his "heavenlaid twin," Davy Browne-Nowlan (once again recalling Giordano Bruno, "the Nolan").  This time, Shem put himself on equal terms with Shakespeare ("shaggspick" or "Shakhisbeard").  And while he acknowledged his numerous attackers and detractors, Shem felt it was possible that he would "wipe alley english spooker [in a sense, every English speaker], multaphoniaksically spuking, off the face of the erse."  One can't help but compare Shem here to Joyce, who, in the face of numerous and various types of opposition, wiped the conventions of the English novel off of the face of the Earth.

"Hops of Fun at Miliken's Make"

(174.5-176.18)  The description of Shem picks up today with the fact that he disliked straightforward and fair arguments.  Any time he was called upon to settle an argument, he would rub shoulders and shake hands with whomever had last spoken, then proceed to agree with every word the next person uttered.  After that person had spoken, he would give the same encouraging treatment to the next speaker, and ask him (the speaker) how he (Shem) might be able to please him and whether he needs another drink.

The narrator next tells of a night "as very recently as some thousand rains ago" when Shem when out drinking with two groups of revelers, or "rival teams of slowspiers counter quicklimers."  This night resembled a soccer ("soggert") or rugby ("ruggering") match, with Shem as the ball that was left drunkenly abandoned after everyone else had their evening's fill.  Once again, the narrator says, there was hope that people "might pity and forgive him, if properly deloused," but there was no such luck for Shem:  "but the pleb was born a Quicklow and sank alowing till he sank out of sight."  

The end of the match (in which Shem is the actual loser) is proclaimed:  "All Saints beat Belial!  Mickil Goals to Nichil!  Notpossible!  Already?"  To commemorate the match, we get a brief song, which looks to be called "The Ballat of Perce-Oreille," obviously recalling "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly."  The lyrics to this ballad are relatively straightforward and detail the history of man, from the Garden of Eden, through the falls of Satan and Man (and Humpty Dumpty), up to the life of HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, Isabel, the 28 girls, the 4 old men, and the 12 men at the wake.  Take for example, this line dealing with HCE (as mountain), ALP (as river), and Shem and Shaun (as sons):  "But the Mountstill frowns on the Millstream while their Madsons leap his Bier."

Today's reading ends with the narrator recounting how Shem was never included in the children's games.  This leads into another detailed, albeit brief, catalog, this time listing a number of games.  McHugh notes that most of the games are listed in Norman Douglas's London Street Games.  While some of these seem to have no connection to the Wake, I'd be willing to wager that we'd find they reference something in particular by the end of the book.  Take, for example, "Battle of Waterloo," which references the battle between Wellington and Napoleon that has featured so prominently up to this point, or "What's the Time," which references HCE's encounter with the Cad and the time-space debate from chapter six.  Others are purely Wakeian, such as "Hops of Fun at Miliken's Make," which echoes the song "Finnegan's Wake," and "Henressy Crump Expolled," which reference's HCE's downfall (and, as McHugh notes, Henry Crump, the fourteenth century Irish theologian who was convicted of heresy).  These are pretty high-level children's games.

"with a meticulosity bordering on the insane"

(171.29-174.4)  I went a little long on today's passage because it ends with a paragraph that stretches for almost a page and a half.  I was going to cut off the reading in the middle of that paragraph, but I got on a roll.  Besides, it can't hurt to go over to make up for lost time.

Anyway, the reading picks up with the narrator continuing to explain Shem's "lowness."  Now there's an example of an encounter Shem had with a girl who attempted to shoot Shem with her "coldblood kodak."  (The camera girl here calls to mind Mr. Bloom's daughter Milly, who works in a photo shop in Ulysses.)  Upon seeing the girl with the camera, the "cowardly gun and camera shy" Shem is said to have darted away.  The girl apparently knew Shem was "a bad fast man by his walk on the spot."  

The narrative is then interrupted by an ad for Johns butcher's shop, which is called "a different butcher's," perhaps to differentiate it from a butcher's shop that Shem might patronize.  This brief paragraph is notable for it's last lines:  "Feel his lambs!  Ex!  Feel how sheap!  Exex!  His liver too is great value, a spatiality!  Exexex!  COMMUNICATED."  (The "spatiality" links this particular butcher's with Shaun's philosophy from the previous chapter.)

Returning to Shem, the narrator adds that around the time of the kodak incident, the general public hoped that Shem would "develop hereditary pulmonary T.B." and commit suicide.  But despite his poor shape, Shem refused to take his life, leading the narrator to lament, "With the foreign devil's leave the fraid born fraud diddled even death."  Shem did, however, try to cable his brother for help, but his brother refused (in keeping with Shaun's answer to the previous chapter's eleventh question).

We now come upon the long paragraph I mentioned at the beginning of the post.  Here, the narrator says that "the tom and the shorty of it is:  he was in his bardic memory low."  (The "tom" and "shorty" here, coupled with the "trickle" and "freaksily" in a preceding phrase, recall our old friends Treacle Tom and Frisky Shorty, the two lowlifes who helped to spread the Cad's story about HCE.  Could the story about Shem that the narrator tells in this chapter be a similar type of unreliable rumor?)  Because his bardic memory -- or his authorial imagination -- was low, Shem, who was "covetous of his neighbour's word," spent his time collecting bits of overheard conversation for his writing.  Sometimes, while he was listening in on others' conversations, people would talk to Shem to encourage him to reform his life.  Thus engaged, Shem would take the opportunity to tell "the whole lifelong swrine story of his entire low cornaille existence, abusing his deceased ancestors wherever the sods were."  As he would go on and on deprecating his family and leaving out "the simple worf and plauge and poison they had cornered him about" (i.e., Shem), his listeners would lose interest and ultimately fall asleep "utterly undeceived" about Shem's "lowness."

"Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob."

(169.1-171.28)  The Wake's seventh chapter begins with the word "Shem," which pretty much gives us all we need to know about what material the chapter is going to cover.  We're told from the first paragraph that the general sentiment is that Shem is not a respectable man, and that the story of his life can't be written in black and white.  The narrator's going to make an attempt at distilling Shem into text, though:  "Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at."

After this introduction, the narrator begins by painting an unflattering physical portrait of Shem.  It's said that Shem's body is unproportional, unsymmetrical, and fishlike.  The narrator goes on to say that young "Master Shemmy," upon seeing himself for the unattractive person he was while playing with a group of other children, asked them "the first riddle of the universe":  "when is a man not a man?"  The children give a number of incorrect guesses (ranging from "when the heavens were quakers" to "when he is just only after having being semisized") before Shem tells them the riddle's solution: When he is a Sham.

And the narrator makes it clear that Shem isn't a man:  "Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs."  Shem preferred tinned salmon and canned fruit to the finest fresh fish and imported pineapples.  He abstained from meat, and eventually fled for continental Europe so that he could "muddle through the hash of lentils" rather than eat Ireland's split peas.  Once, while Shem was drunk in Europe, he said that he could flourish forever off only the smell of a citron peel.  What's worse, he didn't like, whiskey, gin, or beer.  Instead, he drank "applejack squeezed from sour grapefruice," which, when he was so drunk that he was almost vomiting, he would say was the urine of an archduchess.

This chapter's begun on an entertaining and fairly-easy-to-read note.  The secondary sources highlight the parallels between Joyce and Shem, including the facts that both were exiles, both had exceptional diets, and both likened their favorite alcoholic beverage to the urine of an archduchess.  I also saw a parallel between Shem and Stephen Dedalus (the Joyce figure in Portrait and Ulysses) in that both characters ask a group of children a riddle (Stephen's appears when he's teaching the class in the Nestor episode of Ulysses).  It goes without saying (yet I'll say) that it will be interesting to see how James the Penman further treats Shem the Penman.

"still I'd fear I'd hate to say!"

(166.20-168.14)  Shaun begins today's reading with yet another digression.  This time, he says that he's closely watching Master Pules, the infant urinating into the ditch, because Shaun suspects the "little man" of being a "secondary schoolteacher under the boards of education."  The boy, Shaun says, may be concealing his babysitter's "more mascular personality."  But, in the end, he says he'll save his "solotions" for "the proper paturience" of mothers and the education of "micturious mites" until after he finishes dealing with Margareen.

We now get the full story of Burrus, Caseous, and Margareen.  Margareen is very fond of both Burrus and Caseous.  But while the two men are "contending for her misstery," Margareen becomes involved with "an elusive Antonius."  Antonius has a personal interest in "refined chees" (Caseous) but also is "rude like the boor" (Burrus).  We thus have an "Antonius-Burrus-Caseous grouptriad."  Margareen is in the middle of this grouptriad, with love for each man (is it too low brow to call it a love triangle?), while Burrus and Caseous serve as the two base points that culminate with Antonius, who incorporates the diametrically opposed Burrus and Caseous and stands at the top of the triangle.  The idea that Burrus and Caseous represent Shaun and Shem is reinforced when the relationship of A, B, and C is equated to the relationship of eggs (X), whey (Y), and zeed (Z) in the "hyperchemical economantarchy," which contains the initials of HCE, the father of the twins Shaun and Shem.

So, this is how "qualis" can be equivalent with "talis."  Shaun takes another opportunity to congratulate himself and boast of his authority and intelligence.  He concludes his answer by going to back to where he started.  If a man who didn't fear the God of Moses, who had no reverence for the world's law, and who exiled himself from his homeland (among other things) came to Shaun in a storm begging for help, would Shaun kick him out?  Yes, even if the beggar were his own brother.  Question 11 is thus answered conclusively.

The twelfth question and answer total four words.  The question is, "Sacer esto?"  This roughly translates to (props to McHugh), "Let him be accursed?"  (This seems to refer to the beggar from the last question.)  The answer is, "Semus sumus!"  In one sense the answer says, "Shem we are."  In another, it's, "Shem the same," or, "The same we are."  It accordingly appears that Shem is the accursed one forsaken by his brother.  

Looking ahead, this leads us directly into the next chapter, which I'll start tomorrow.  (Aren't we finally getting on a roll, now?)

"I fain would be solo. Arouse thee, my valour!"

(164.15-166.19)  The story of Burrus and Caseous picks up with Shaun telling us that Margareen's appearance brings us to "a period of pure lyricism of shamebred music."  (There's a nice reference in that to Joyce's early poetry collection, Chamber Music.)  Margareen has inspired at least two songs:  "I cream for thee, Sweet Maragareen" (a less-successful, heartbreaking and "shoddy" song written by Caseous) and "O Margareena!  O Margareena!  Still in the bowl is left a lump of gold!" (a song used for toasts written by Burrus).  The lump of gold (reminiscent of butter, or margarine) in Burrus's song reminds Shaun of "a particular streak of yellow silver" that is seen in certain hairstyles and leads to a digression in which he says he intends to talk about this with certain local hair stylists.  Shaun returns to the topic of singing and complains about unskilled singers who "pervert our wise ears" by subordinating "the space-element" (the melody) to "the time-factor" (the tempo) of music.  In keeping with his general airs of authority, Shaun offers to help the novice singers fix this problem.

Once again recognizing his digression, Shaun says he'll save what he has to say "about the acoustic and orchidectural management of the tonehall" and instead "pursue Burrus and Caseous for a rung or two up their isocelating biangle."  This reintroduces geometry into the Wake:  as two equal, opposing forces, Burrus and Caseous are heading toward the same point from opposite ends.  Shaun explains that he has painted a "goulache" of Margareen entitled "The Very Picture of a Needlesswoman."  This painting (which, in order to "evoke the bush soul of females" leaves the final touches to be mentally added by "the experienced victim," i.e., love-sick men) is constructed in a kind of Cubist style by which the geometrical figures used to form the image of Margareen -- "Rhomba, lady Trabezond" -- also form "the climactogram up which B and C may fondly be imagined ascending."  So, Margareen is the unifying shape/force that draws Burrus and Caseous upward.  

Shaun, ever the renaissance man, claims to have perfected a method of reproducing these shapes for profit.  He also says that there's no doubting that he has perfectly captured the essence of Maragreen, and that he can see her type in any public garden, wearing fashionable clothes, thinking about romance, going to the movies, or babysitting an infant boy (whom she holds above a gutter so that he can urinate).

What else will we learn about Margareen?  And what does the twelfth and final question of this chapter hold in store for us?  We'll find out tomorrow, when we reach the sixth chapter's conclusion.

"we come down home gently on our own turnedabout asses"

(162.21-164.14)  The story of Burrus and Caseous resumes with Shaun contrasting the two.  Caseous fancies himself as a "caviller" (both cavalier and objector), while Burrus is a more conservative defender of the faith.  Brutus, Shaun says, comes from a "cleanly line" and was a wholesome, model boy as a youth.  Caseous, on the other hand, is described as a stinking, highjinking, priggish worm.

From these descriptions, Shaun returns to a theme of the Wake.  We must learn to accept (and eventually embrace) contraries:

Thus we cannot escape our likes and mislikes, exiles or ambusheers, beggar and neighbour and -- this is where the dimeshow advertisers advance the temporal relief plea -- let us be tolerant of antipathies.

But while Shaun recognizes the inevitability of antipathies and the need to be tolerant of them, he isn't ready to fully embrace the philosophies of the likes of Nicholas de Cusa and Giordano Bruno.  But neither is he ready to take the easy way out and let a modern machine (here the "Silkebjorg tyrondynamon machine for the more economical helixtrolysis of these amboadipates") synthesize the likes of Burrus and Caseous for him.

Burrus and Caseous are incompatible, coming from separate poles.  But, "looking wantingly around our undistributed middle between males," we recognize the need for a female.  Just as Nuvoletta attempted to serve as the force that unified the Mookse and the Gripes, a woman arrives on the scene to reconcile the differences between Burrus and Caseous.  Here, at the end of today's reading, we are introduced to Margareen, a "cowrymaid . . . whom we shall often meet below."  We will see how effective a unifier Margareen is tomorrow.

"My heeders will recoil with a great leisure"

(160.25-162.21)  Before moving into the third portion of his answer to chapter six's eleventh question, Shaun makes yet another digression.  This time, he asks us to "come over and let us moremore murgessly to each's other down below our vices."  In other words, he wants us to come closer so that he can murmur to us below his voice.  Why?  Because the four old men are listening to the conversation and Shaun says they're too "foibleminded."  Shaun even seems to attempt to throw them off the scent of his answer by speaking in Esperanto that McHugh translates as:  "S is beyond the small carpet.  He reads to himself in his room.  Sometimes functions, sometimes shrinks shoulders.  Today how are you doing, my black sir?"  This could be a diversion tactic on Shaun's part, but maybe S is someone we should be keeping track of.

Shaun gives a quick summary to bring us back up to speed, recalling the time-space debate, as well as the cash-dime problem he previously touched upon.  Campbell and Robinson have a helpful note in their Skeleton Key that explicates the next, somewhat complex passage.  Basically, Shaun and the reader cannot possess a piece of cheese (which is a physical object) at the same time, but they can possess a piece of knowledge (which, for lack of a better word at the moment, is an intellectual object) at the same time.  But maybe it is possible.  And so, in order to explain what he means, Shaun begins to tell us about another pair of twins (in the Mutt/Jute and Mookse/Gripes mold):  Burrus and Caseous.

Shaun explains that Burrus (Brutus, or butter) is "a genuine prime, the real choice, full of natural greace."  Caseous (Cassius, or cheese), on the other hand is "obversely the revise of him and in fact not an ideal choose by any meals," although Burrus is jealous of Caseous.  This is the same old story that we've heard many times before, Shaun says, and it's been repeated often as HCE, ALP, the 28 girls, Isabel, Shaun, and Shem have gathered around the table for salad.  The meaning can be lost between telling and hearing ("pretext bowl and jowl"), though, so Shaun will give us a new arrangement of the story.

Ceasar became "unbeurrable from age" (unbearable to Burrus, whose name is recalled by the French "beurre," or "cheese") and was killed ("sort-of-nineknived and chewly removed").  In his place, "the twinfreer types" -- Burrus and Caseous -- "are billed to make their reupprearance as the knew kneck and knife knickknots on the deserted champ de bouteilles" (which roughly translates to both "battlefield" and "bottlefield").  This paragraph runs on for a while, so I've cut off my reading in the middle, and will resume the story of Burrus and Caseous tomorrow.

"You will say it is most unenglish"

(158.19-160.24)  With the Mookse and the Gripes at a stalemate of sorts, today's reading opens with the two figures retiring for the evening (or for good).  The "tears of night" begin to fall, and the Mookse and the Gripes are each carried away by a woman.  (The secondary sources indicate that these two women will be reappearing in a later chapter.)  The narrator says that the Mookse "had reason" and that the Gripes "got wrong," indicating that the Mookse was on the "right" side of the debate.

In the place of where the two stood, on either side of the bank, remains a tree and a stone, and Nuvoletta alone remains on the scene.  In a beautiful passage, she vanishes, sending a tear ("a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears . . . for it was a leaptear") into the stream, which has now turned into a river and is named "Missisliffi" (for both "Mississippi" and "Liffey")  The river runs on, "lapping as though her heart was brook."

This concludes the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes, which I've found to be especially entertaining and fascinating.  Campbell and Robinson give a good analysis of the fable and its place within the overall answer to the eleventh question, but my quick summary of it is that it demonstrates our tendency to become too inwardly focused and overly concerned with issues that are relatively unimportant.  We waste our time battling over trivial things, oblivious to the beauty and wonder of life that is almost waiting to be uncovered.  Within the context of the eleventh question, the fable seems to indicate that we're too caught up with our own relatively insignificant issues to offer any significant assistance to anyone in need. 

With the fable completed, the professor Shaun dismisses his class and moves on to the next subject in his answer.  He begins by patting himself on the back, saying that he has "successfully explained to you my own naturalborn rations" and calling himself a genius.  He then begins to discuss a colleague, Gnaccus Gnoccovitch, who seems to be another stand-in for Wyndham Lewis (who figured in a passage a few days ago).  Shaun says that Gnoccovitch should move to a remote island, then goes off on a digression about trees.  Getting back to his subject, Shaun takes a few more jabs at some other colleagues or associates, then spurs himself onward:  "But I further, feeling a bit husky in my truths."  This seems like a good place to stop for the evening.

"It might have been a happy evening but . . . "

(156.19-158.18)  We left off with the Mookse and the Gripes just as the great schism had been completed.  Today's reading begins with the two exchanging barbs.  First, the Mookse says that in 1,000 years, the Gripes will be blind to the world.  The Gripes counters that after 1,000 years, the Mookse will be deaf ("botheared").  The Mookse says that his side will be exalted in the end, and the Gripes says that they will be humble.  The two then finally come to verbal blows, which Shaun sums up by saying, "And bullfolly answered volleyball."

The scene shifts upward, both in narrative and in verbal style, to "Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers."  Nuvoletta -- an Isabel figure -- looks down on the Mookse and the Gripes as she hovers alone in the heavens.  Her companions are "asleeping with the squirrels"; their mother, the moon is "in the Fuerst quarter scrubbing the backsteps of Number 28" (or in her first quarter sweeping up the remains of the old mooncycle); and her father, "that Skand" (the Scandinavian HCE) is off gorging himself on "Voking's Blemish."  Nuvoletta tries to capture the attention of the Mookse and the Gripes, but the two are so caught up in their respective worldly obsessions that they're incapable of lifting their attentions to the wonders of the heavens.  After she "tried all the winsome wonsome ways her four winds had taught her," Nuvoletta realizes that there's nothing she can do.  "I see," she sighs.  "There are menner."

The world grows dark while the Mookse and Gripes continue bickering.  Their actions have grown futile:  "The Mookse had a sound eyes right but he could not all hear.  The Gripes had light ears left yet he could but ill see."  Their prophecies have come true -- the Mookse is deaf and the Gripes is blind -- but this doesn't deter them.  The Mookse still thinks of the profound depths his philosophizing might reach in the morning, and the Gripes thinks of the trouble he might be able to get into and out of if his luck holds.  Will the stalemate continue?

"I can seen from my holeydome what it is to be wholly sane."

(154.18-156.18)  Alright, it's day two of the Mookse and the Gripes.  We left off yesterday with the Gripes asking the Mookse what time it is.  The Mookse replies with a series of orders to the Gripes, essentially telling him, "I'm not going to stoop down to your level and answer that question."  He resumes by asking, "Quote awhore?"  This could be the Mookse asking in English whether he should do something a common layperson would do (quote a whore?) or asking in Latin if the Gripes really wants to know the hour (quod hora?).

Immediately after asking "Quote awhore?," the Mookse explains what he's really up to:  "That is quite about what I came on my missions with my intentions laudibiliter to settle with you, barbarousse."  ("Laudabiliter" is the papal bull by which Pope Adrian IV gave King Henry II dominion over Ireland.)  The Mookse is here not to make friends, but to assert his primacy, whether the Gripes likes it or not.  "Well, sour?" the Mookse asks.  "Is this space of our couple of hours too dimensional for you, temporiser?"

Now the space-time conflict expands to encompass the schism between the Western and Eastern christian churches.  The Gripes refuses to submit to the Mookse:  "My tumble, loudy bullocker, is my own.  My velicity is too fit in one stockend.  And my spetial inexshellsis the belowing things ab ove."  The reply of the Gripes astonishes the Mookse, who excommunicates the Gripes and splits the church in two ("Tugurios-in-Newrobe or Tukurias-in-Ashies" -- the Church in Rome and the Church in Asia, Turkey in the West and Turkey in the East, and the Church in new robes and the Church in ashes).  The Mookse still feels secure and in the right, though:  "My side, thank decretals, is as safe as motherour's houses . . . and I can seen from my holeydome what it is to be wholly sane."

After lifting his jeweled staff to the sky and bringing down fire, the Mookse offers 133 proofs supporting his position, drawing on a number of distinguished sources (such as Euclid and Erasmus).  But while the Mookse is proving things forwards and backwards, the rascally Gripes is indoctrinating the congregation on his own side.  Today's reading ends fittingly with the two sides reaching "philioquus," or, as McHugh points out, "Filioque," the key point of contention between the Eastern and Western churches involving the procession of the Holy Spirit.

"The Mookse and The Gripes."

(152.15-154.17)  Today Shaun's answer to the eleventh question of chapter six shifts from philosophical discourse to parable.  More specifically, he begins to deliver the parable of "The Mookse and the Gripes."  The parable opens with a clear link to the space/time theme that I discussed yesterday:  "Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast . . . ."  This is another obvious invocation of one of Joyce's earlier works:  this time, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which begins, "Once upon a time and a very good time it was . . . ."  It's thus pretty clear that we're going to continue to examine the conflict between spacial and temporal interpretation, and in a sense the conflict pits Shaun versus Joyce/Shem.

Getting to the parable, though.  The Mookse is a lonely man who, in a sense, stands in for Adam, the first man.  He is also a Pope, for, deciding to take a walk, his pre-walk preparations are described using language associated with the papacy.  After setting off from his Vatican-like home, he comes upon a shallow stream that evokes ALP:  "And as it rinn it dribbled like any llively purliteasy."  On the bank of the stream, perched upon the branch of a tree, is the Gripes.  

We learn that the Mookse currently goes by the name Adrian, which McHugh identifies as associating the Mookse with Pope Adrian IV.  Adrian IV, whose birth name was Nicholas Breakspear (we've previously heard the Mookse referred to as "Bragspear"), granted Ireland to England's Henry II.  Seeing the Gripes in terrible shape, the Mookse takes a seat on a nearby stone, thus recalling the tree-stone dichotomy that's been hinted at throughout the book.

A conversation between the Mookse and the Gripes commences.  The Gripes cordially greets the pontifical Mookse and asks him to tell the Gripes everything.  The Mookse wants none of it:  "No, hang you for an animal rurale!  I am superbly in my supremest poncif!  Abase you, baldyqueens!  Gather behind me, satraps!  Rots!"  The obsequious Gripes is undeterred, however, and asks the Mookse what time it is.  This recalls the story of the Cad asking HCE what time it is (and thereby triggering HCE's downfall), and it also fits into the time-space debate.  More to come on the Mookse and the Gripes tomorrow . . .

"Imagine for my purpose that you are a squad of urchins"

(150.15-152.14)  Today's reading picks up where yesterday's left off, both in terms of the subject matter (Shaun's professorial response to the eleventh question of the chapter) and the complexity.  But there's a chance that things are starting to make a little bit of sense to me.

The bulk of this passage consists of criticism of one Professor Loewy-Brueller/Professor Levi-Brullo/Professor Llewellys, who is (at least in part) a stand-in for Professor Lucien Lévy-Bruehl (a French anthropologist) and Wyndham Lewis (a contemporary of Joyce and staunch critic of Ulysses).  An interesting side note from these two pages is Joyce's thoughts on the emerging medium of television:  "(this nightlife instrument needs still some subtractional betterment in the readjustment of the more refrangible angles to the squeals of his hypothesis on the outer tin sides)."  But more to the point is Shaun's criticism of Loewy-Brueller.  Again, this is complex stuff, but the emphasis Joyce provides when he italicizes certain words is helpful, at least at this initial stage of comprehension.  

My secondary sources zero in on how Shaun describes himself on page 149 as a "spatialist," which in one sense means "specialist" but also refers to Shaun's emphasis on space, rather than time, as the crucial factor in relating to the world.  Loewy-Brueller's foremost concern is time, as indicated by the italicized words in this passage (e.g., "temporarily," "When," "when"), and this is the heart of Shaun's disagreement with him.  As Shaun says, "the all is where in love as war and the plane where me arts soar you'd aisy rouse a thunder from and where I cling true'tis there I climb tree and where Innocent looks best (Pick!) there's holly in his ives."  Shaun is concerned with physical space, and perhaps this is the source of his lack of sympathy for the exile in the eleventh question.  That exile is where he's supposed to be.  And since the exile is in his proper place, there's no reason for Shaun to worry about the state of the exile's soul, because that's a problem for some future time.

This is all just a guess as to what's going on here.  Luckily for me, Shaun recognizes that the preceding pages "are probably above your understandings."  With that in mind, he's about to offer his "easyfree translation of the old fabulist's parable."  This parable, which promises to set forth Shaun's answer in plain(er) English, begins tomorrow.

"The speechform is a mere sorrogate."

(148.33-150.14)  Ok, we're now embarking on some pretty heavy lifting.  Tindall writes that the eleventh question and answer are the climax of the Wake's sixth chapter, and, two pages into it, it looks like he's right.  The answer alone takes up 19 pages of the Wake, and it's packed with some fairly complex philosophical and scientific references.

The question (apparently addressed to Shaun) basically asks whether the answerer would be troubled to save the soul ("shave his immartial, wee skillmustered shoul") of a Joyce figure ("a poor acheseyeld" -- an exile with achy eyes).  The short answer is, "No, blank ye!"  That answer's not going to suffice, though, so we get the aforementioned 19 pages that follow.

A lot of this strikes me as Joyce making fun of some of the more renowned thinkers of his time.  He gets a dig in at Proust, for example ("who the lost time we had the pleasure we have had our little recherché brush with, what, Schott?"), and soon after burns Einstein ("the whoo-whoo and where's hair's theorics of Winestain").  

From this, the answer moves on to a mini-dissertation on the word "Talis" ("a word often abused by many passims"), which is Latin for "such," and its counterpart, "Qualis" (Latin for "what").  Again, this strikes me as Joyce mocking the professors.  Shaun says, "A pessim may frequent you to say:  Have you been seeing much of Talis and Talis those times?"  In other words, have you been seeing much of such and such?  The passage concludes with a parenthetical:  "(Talis and Talis originally mean the same thing, hit it's:  Qualis.)"  Here's hoping more light is shed on the Talis-Qualis dichotomy soon, because I'm a bit lost at the moment.