As previously announced, our third volume of Waywords and Meansigns will include a number returning contributors from past years. Whereas we formerly focused on very large pieces – each contributor to our project set an entire chapter of Finnegans Wake to music – contributors are now focused on much shorter passages, a page to a few pages in length.

I spoke to our returning contributors, about the process of revisiting Finnegans Wake. Here are some of the highlights:

Kevin Spenst:
There are many things that can be done with a mouth. None of them as fun a literary challenge as Finnegans Wake. For my second incursion into the Waywords Meansigns project, I collaborated with Hitori Tori, an electronic musician whose digits dial up all manner of frenzied altered states. As I read, Jules whipped up a pentatonic scale of unique sounds perfectly improvised for the text. I hammed up a British accent and Hitori Tori layered it into a full sonic sandwich of texture and time.
 
Peter Quadrino:
I jumped at the opportunity to engage in another creative exploration and interpretation of Finnegans Wake. This go-round was very different than the first, though still lots of fun… Instead of 88 pages, we took on three, allowing us to plunge into the material, study the meanings, references, and context… Unlike the first reading where the goal was just to make it all the way through the selection, this time we recorded many takes for each section, with different inflection and emphasis. With so many repetitions, [Scott Rhodes, Luke Sanders-Self, and I] eventually started memorizing passages like “A spathe of calyptrous glume involucrumines the perinanthean Amenta” and reciting them aloud in the most ridiculous voices… Letting those kind of lines seep into your mind, you start to feel the incantatory magic of the Wake’s language. It affects the way you see the world, the way you hear language, it proliferates the Joycean perspective of epiphany. It’s extraordinary, to say the least.

Greg Nahabedian:
Finnegans Wake reads a lot like a graphic score. The text jumps off the page and in contrast to your typical prose novel has a musicality of its own. I couldn’t ignore the opportunity to set a portion of it it to music for a second time.

Mr. Smolin:
What drew me to this incarnation of the Waywords and Meansigns project was the self-contained conciseness of the selections. Having had the experience of creating epic music for an entire chapter in the second edition… it was great having stricter limits. As before, though, composing for Finnegans Wake, even on that smaller scale, presented the challenge of setting to music what is already music.

Maharadja Sweets:
With each reading or creative approach to Finnegans Wake I learn more and am allowed to access it a little better. The poetry of the book is so rich and dense that the book seemingly never exhausts itself — so a fresh creative approach always presents surprises and learning.

Jemba of Janken’s Henchmæn and MonkeYear:
Everything started with a strange message from a total unknown Twitter page. Someone was writing to my band’s account something about a full transposition of the Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and I was thinking about the foolish plan this guy, supposedly a guy, was making. I accepted, but not with my band. I decided to go on and try out making music with Ale… we managed to let music tell us what to do. It was something different from the canonic composition. We set three hours of music down and 78 pages, less or more, with synthetic voices and electronics. Derek after a year came to me asking for a new last finnegadventure and I totally accepted. This project is so sick.

Graziano Galati:
I return to this project over and over again, and listen and experience this text almost on a daily basis. Being far from finished, myself, where once I cursed Joyce for this infernal text, I thank the gods that he had the genius to create it, so dense, so subtle, and so outrageously sophisticated for anyone, or hardly one, to study and through which to somehow measure my life.

Chelidon Frame:
I’ve decided to participate again in the project because I wanted to explore deeper what I started to scratch with the first edition… The track starts with the narration itself, with some concrète objects providing an accompaniment, then it builds around a circular guitar riff on top of what are layered different noises, glitches and drones, always in a recurring fashion. Those sounds are then processed with some EQs and effects, to enhance different aspects and qualities of the material, trying to give the whole piece a “crescendo” feeling. The voice doesn’t fade away after the reading is concluded, but returns as a decoration, reverberating throughout the whole piece.

Aleorta:
When I heard word from Derek about the possibility of an edition of shorter excerpts from Finnegans Wake I got straight to recording the song section of the ‘Ondt and the Gracehoper’ fable. I wanted to mould the sound to themes of the words, and worked backwords from “Holy Salmartin, why can’t you beat time?”, creating a tempo that can’t settle itself “in time” but exponentially increases throughout the piece, burning itself out at the end. I thought that this would convey the beautiful (at-least-)double meaning of the line: the inabilities to both beat time musically, and temporally (time will always win).

Annette Perry (collaborator with Conspirators of Pleasure):
It was intriguing to find out that I was a human contributor whereas the voice on the previous piece was electronic and programmed.  So the human feeling I had was that the text seemed initially impenetrable but actually the words said aloud feel natural, funny and over-the-fence-gossipy.  The random asides offering cooking tips, life advice, philosophical wisdom, character building and assassination felt like pricking pomposity and being joyously pompous at the same time.

To learn more about Waywords & Meansigns, visit www.waywordsandmeansigns.com. Join the mailing list to keep informed about the project, or just stay tuned to the Joyce Centre’s blog for more updates!

A few weeks ago we announced many of the contributors to the third volume of Waywords and Meansigns, our international project setting Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to music.

This project has been ongoing for a few years. We began by producing two unabridged musical editions of Finnegans Wake, with each chapter being performed by a different musician or musical group.

While we are now focused on much shorter passages – each contributor is taking a single page, give or take a few lines – we are pleased to announce that many of our contributors from previous years are also taking part in our third volume. (You can also read more about the direction we’re headed, in my previous post on the Joyce Centre’s blog.)

It is quite fun to hear our contributors from previous years returning to the same book, but with new approaches and depth. Railroad Earth fiddler Tim Carbone returns as part of a duo called Cedar Sparks, working with Lewis & Clarke’s Lou Rogai to evoke a pastoral scene reminiscent of the foggy Irish countryside, complete with the loveliest fiddle you’ll ever hear. The Conspirators of Pleasure combine “a very reasoned voice” – the reading of Annette Perry – with “a very unreasonable soundtrack”.

Trumpeter Gareth Flowers builds gentle and flowing dreamscapes while Neil Campbell showcases his “advanced mumbling techniques” with four multi-tracked voices. Hayden Chisholm, having released a new album last year called Finn Again Wakes, reveals the hours upon hours he’s dedicated to reading the Wake aloud. Having utilized an entire demented orchestra for his previous contribution, composer Steve Gregoropoulos returns as a one-man band, playing everything from mandolin and guitar to clarinet, violin and drums.

Returning contributors also include Joyce scholar and musician Hinson Calabrese, DJ and writer Steve Fly, artist Kio Griffith, musician and visual artist Belorusia, Shakespearean actor William Sutton, Simon Ross of cel and SIKS, and many more.

It’s going to be wonderful, weird, and fun. We can’t wait to share all these new sounds with you.

To learn more about Waywords & Meansigns, visit www.waywordsandmeansigns.com. Join the mailing list to keep informed about the project, or just stay tuned to the Joyce Centre’s blog for more updates!

With collaborators from around the world, Waywords & Meansigns set James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to music unabridged. Twice. But Finnegans Wake being the expansive, and addictive, book that it is, we decided to organize one last hurrah!

In our two previous releases, we focused on the book’s epic arcs and massive trajectory, with each contributor reading and performing an entire chapter. For 2017 contributors are invited to take much shorter passages of the book — a page, a few pages — to set to music. This will allow for a new kind of depth, as well as variety, as dozens upon dozens of people from around the world dig into their short passage.

As always, our contributions come from all kinds of people — musicians, artists, poets, scholars, weirdos, passionate Wake-heads, those totally ignorant of the Wake, and anyone generally adventurous. Unlike the previous two editions this will be an “incomplete edition” (as opposed to an unabridged edition). People can continue to contribute individual passages well into posterity for the “incomplete edition”, but as far as we can anticipate, this Spring will see the final large group release of Waywords & Meansigns.

It seems the nature of the Finnegans Wake to demand an endless supply of readers and readings. This risks, perhaps, creating an endless ocean wherein listeners get lost in the wake(!) but as our two original editions – these two behemoths of wild wonderful hours upon hours – reach and inspire new ears in future years, it is our hope that this “incomplete edition” will be a vehicle wherein listeners are in turn encouraged to become readers, singers, shouters, and whisperers of the book that keeps demanding, inspiring, confusing.

We’re really excited about our 2017 contributors, including avant-psych rockers Kinski, Eyeless in Gaza’s Martyn Bates, the Joyce Centre’s beloved Here Comes Everybody Players, a straight reading from jazz vocalist Phil Minton, and much more. Visit the artist page on our site to see the current list of contributors, with many more to be announced.

Waywords & Meansigns has been, and continues to be, great fun. I never imagined we would sustain so much interest from contributors and listeners alike – thank you for your continued support of our weird little idea.

To learn more about Waywords & Meansigns, visit www.waywordsandmeansigns.com. Join the mailing list to keep informed about the project, or just stay tuned to the Joyce Centre’s blog for more updates!

We look forward to seeing you all over the course of the coming weeks and months!

5 September

Dr Oona Frawley (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)

‘The Terrible Beauty of Memory: Ireland’s Decade of Commemorations’

3 October

Felix Larkin

‘Harped History: Joyce, 1916 and Revisionism’

7 November

Catriona Crowe (National Archives of Ireland)

TBC

5 December

Terence Killeen

‘A Portrait Without Perspective: Scenes From a Life’

This programme is being supported by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the UCD Decade of Centenaries Awards.

I left my last post at page 119.9.  From this point through to the end of ‘Chapter V’ there is yet more about ALP’s ubiquitous letter. This is given through a parody of philological analysis that echoes an introduction to The Book of Kells developing into a description of punctuation which is simultaneously highly farcical and very disturbing.  The chapter critiques the very act of interpretation, prompting questions about what it is to read anything, and concludes by finally revealing the identity of the author of the letter.

FW p.120 Sketchbook DPS

FW p.121 Sketchbook DPS

FW p.122 Sketchbook DPS

FW p.124 Sketchbook DPS

FW p.125 Sketchbook DPS

The paragraph 119.10 – 123.10 begins with a description of what seems to be a flamboyant lettering style reminiscent of an illuminated manuscript. This typographic analysis serves as a self-referential armature for the kind of dense layering of allusions we are familiar with in the Wake. It progresses to include the famous system of sigla associated with the main ‘characters’ and mystifyingly associates these with key numbers (432 and 1132) recurring in the book and with Chinese pictograms. This is all done in a way that implicates much of the rest of what we find in the book into the letter we initially thought of as merely a part of the book. For me this brings book and letter into a curious relationship akin to the apparently double but actually single surface of a Moebius strip.

It is no surprise then that in this paragraph there are some key, widely referenced descriptions of Finnegans Wake, its reading and its reader:

‘; a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons;’ (120.5 – 6)

‘; and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgwiped and pudden-padded very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia:’ (120.9 – 14)

‘; the lubricitous conjugation of the last with the first;’ (121. 30 – 31)

FW p.120 sketchbook detail.

FW p.120 sketchbook detail.

FW p.121 sketchbook detail.

In this paragraph we find Joyce’s own typographic play in the form of the rotating ‘F’, with its accompanying speculations, and the hilariously, farcical passage with Roman numerals and accompanying abbreviations:

‘:the gypsy mating of a grand stylish gravedigging with secondbest buns (an interpolation: these munchibles occur only in the Bootherbrowth family of MSS., Bp – Cod IV, Pap II, Brek XI, Lun III, Dinn XVII, Sup XXX, Fullup MDCXC: the scholiast has hungrily misheard a deadman’s toller as a muffinbell)’ (121.31 – 36)

FW p.121 sketchbook detail.

FW p.122 sketchbook detail.

Further on, in a deft and audacious inversion, the letter is proposed as an actual inspiration for the Tunc page of The Book of Kells, an idea which plays with the timelessness of the letter (or a kind of temporal ubiquity) and its status as a metaphor for all acts of writing (122.20 – 23). The paragraph ends with a disturbing, bluntly gendered reading which speculates on the disciplining of female sexuality through casual male sexual violence depicted in the very style of the letterforms.

FW p.123 sketchbook detail.

FW p.123 sketchbook detail.

FW p.123 sketchbook detail.

FW p.123 sketchbook detail.

FW p.124 sketchbook detail.

The next paragraph switches tone again (though retains its themes) as we are treated to some great lampooning of scientific interpretation, complete with arcane citation, in which physics and psychoanalysis seem to be particular targets.

The topic of punctuation and the attribution of authorship is raised with the discovery of previously invisible marks which have been discovered through their exposure to ‘our worlds oldest light’ and the notion of the text being ‘pierced not punctured’. There follows a richly layered passage which brings together and further heightens simultaneously both farcical and deeply transgressive possibilities in the text. Typically, but perhaps more overtly here than elsewhere in the Wake, the reader can join different sets of dots to bring different accounts to light. The farcical reading traces the interpreters solipsistic misreading of his own accidental piercing of the letter with his own breakfast fork. There is also the incorporation into the document of the peck marks of Biddy the Hen as she unearthed it from the midden heap. The imminence of a hermeneutic nightmare is implied here in which the handling of the document and each act of interpretation is unendingly enfolded into the thing to be interpreted – a prophetic vision of Wake studies? The darker, transgressive reading is one of sexual coercion and abuse, possible thoughts or memories of attempted rape. In challenging confronting the reader to accommodate this simultaneity of farce psychological disquiet, uncomfortable questions are raised about what we choose to see in the text, what we want from it, and why. There is a sort of denouement to the penultimate paragraph of the section, a pulling back in which the letter, having been the focus of such attention and contention, appears to be almost returned to its original situation, re-covered by the status quo.

FW p.124 sketchbook detail.

FW p.125 sketchbook detail.

FW p.125 sketchbook detail.

FW p.125 sketchbook detail.

FW p.125 sketchbook detail.

FW p.125 sketchbook detail.

And so in the final paragraph of ‘Book’ I, ‘Chapter 6’ after a roundabout reassurance that the son responsible is not Shaun the Post the author of the letter is revealed to be none other than Shem the penman.

Until next time…