Last week I went into the forest and read Finnegan's Wake. Well, I guess read is the wrong word. You don't read Finnegan's Wake, Joyce's seminal modernist work. You simply allow it to wash over you as if viewing an endless stream of artwork in the ultimate European gallery. You allow it to climb inside your mind and rustle around for a while, attacking countless houses of meaning, a display of pure aesthetic mastery.

In the Wake, Joyce is totally unrepentant with his assault on his audience. He assaults language and pre-determined  Wendell NC  meaning in all its forms. He attacks the totalitarian world of the signifier through a beautifully constructed artistic artifice, made up of half and quarter meanings, diffusions, dislocations, and glimpses of agreed-upon written form. All of this goes on against the backdrop of the infinite rhythm which is understood largely through the language of music. The words and sentences from the Wake play out inside your mind like a wondrous, disjointed symphony, written in a key to which our ears have yet to become accustomed.