Mark André ’s Reviews > Finnegans Wake > Status Update

The teatimestained terminal (say not the tag, mummer, or our show’s a failure!) is a cozy little brown study all to oneself and, whether it be thumbprint, mademark or just a poor trait of the artless, it’s importance in establishing the identities in the writer complexes (for if the hand was one, the minds of active and agitated were more than so) will be best appreciated by never forgetting ... it was a habit ...

These ruled barriers along which the traced words, run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again in compeirative safety seem to have been drawn first of all in a pretty checker with lampblack and blackthorn. Such crossing is antechristian of course, but the use of the homeborn shillelagh as an aid to calligraphy shows a distinct advance from savagery to barbarism.

You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy. You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means.

she was, after all, wearing for the space of the time being some definite articles of evolutionary clothing, ... suddenly full of local colour and personal perfume and suggestive, too, of so very much more and capable of being stretched, filled out, if need or wish were, of having their surprisingly like coincidental parts separated don’t they now, for better survey by the deft hand oi an expert, don’t you know?

Erect, beseated, mountback, against a partywall, below freezigrade, by the use of quill or style, with turbid or pellucid mind, accompmied or the reverse by mastication, interrupted by visit of seer to scribe or of scribe to site, atwixt two showers or atosst of a trike, rained upon or blown around, by a rightdown regular racer from the soil or by a too pained whittlewit laden with the loot of learning?

Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of person- alities infflcted on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone imwary enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed to happen along.

The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput.

Wherefore let it hardly by any being thinking be said either or thought that the prisoner of that sacred edifice, were he an Ivor the Boneless or an Olaf the Hide, was at his best a onestone parable, a rude breathing on the void of to be, a venter hearing his own bauchspeech in backwords, or, more strictly, but tristumed initials, the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld, . . .

Well, even should not the framing up of such figments in the evidential order bring the true truth to light as fortuitously as a dim seer’s setting of a starchart might (heaven helping it!) un- cover the nakedness of an unknown body in the fields of blue ...

It was when I was in my farfather out at the west and she and myself, the redheaded girl, firstnighting down Sycomore Lane. Fine feelplay we had of it mid the kissabetts frisking in the kool kurkle dusk of the lushiness. My perfume of the pampas, says she (meaning me) putting out her netherlights, and I’d sooner one precious sip at your pure mountain dew than enrich my acquaintance with that big brewer’s belch.