"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.