10:52 AM View

I  started listening to a podcast extolling the wonderfulness of Finnegans Wake.  Alas, they try too hard.  They don’t answer the basic question:  how can something that appears to be gibberish subjective rambling, in fact be writing of the highest skill?  What’s to stop a no-talent hack or a lazy wannabe writer from doing the same?

Joyce was a skilled writer.  His earlier writings proved it.  So maybe that is why he was able to get away with Finnegans Wake, if get away with it is what he did…. But there are parts of FW that seem to be skillfully done:  perhaps enough to perpetuate the other gibberish and obscurity.

I read a paragraph a day of FW for the wordplay.

Finished reading Dostoevsky’s The Devils (The Possessed).  Good novel.  I found it hard to keep track of the characters because of the Russian habit of giving them two names.  On the good side, the novel anticipated the purges of the Russian revolution; depicted accurately the strength of progressives; depicted its self-destructiveness; and the weakness of conservatives; and the malign influence of woman on politics.

I got to stop being provoked.  Boarding the train at a crowded Sanyang platform.  A woman tried to shove her way around me, and so I blocked her with my hip.  She later walked past me to get off the train — I was standing by a door  — and she gave me an icy stare.  Today as I was recording myself driving for AKICDV, I swore at a driver right turning into traffic without looking.  I then said something about Chinese drivers. I put it into today’s AKICDV because why not?  I got to tempt fate!  I have to depict myself accurately.  And I like to elbow people who can’t wait for me to get off the train or get out of the elevator,