Random List: 10 Great Live Albums

I've been exceedingly busy lately with the tail end of my internship, graduation preparation and a job hunt, so I've watched few movies and even started to write about even fewer. However, I have had my iTunes playing nonstop as I work and fill out endless cover letters, and I've been itching to say something about the music I've been loving lately. A great deal of my recent listens have been live albums which, when great, can leave studio albums in the dust; there are even bootlegs for artists I play more than their official product. The following 10 official releases are some of the live discs I spin most often. I don't claim these to be "definitive" picks, though I've encountered few other records than can match them. So take a look at some of my favorites and see if you spot anything familiar.


10. Ramones, NYC ’78

It’s Alive gets a lot of love, but it was primarily re-recorded in a studio, and it shows: the playing lacks the true speed of a Ramones show, and the absence of a proper remaster has left it sounding enduringly quiet and static. Far better is this belated release of da Brudders a week after It’s Alive’s London show, back in NYC playing to a packed Palladium. The setlist is the same, and of course the playing the is the same (the Ramones sort of built their rep on being the opposite of one of those improvisatory, free-form bands). But damn if the actual sound of the Ramones live doesn’t immediately set this apart from its more celebrated sibling. Blistering through nearly 30 songs in under an hour, NYC ’78 is lean, mean, and damn fun. The Ramones were still the poppiest pogo-ers around at this time, and though they played as if trying to set their instruments on fire through sheer friction, this is still a remarkably catchy, light set. Imagine someone playing a sock-hop at the wrong speed.

9. Van Morrison, It's Too Late to Stop Now

Van Morrison's reputation as an unpredictable, volatile live performer predated Axl Rose's petulant no-shows by decades. When everything came together, however, few could touch Morrison's energy. It's Too Late to Stop Now captures the mystic at his peak, leading the Caledonia Soul Orchestra through his impressionistic sketches of overwhelming emotion. No white man sang the blues like Van, which he makes amply clear from his growls on the bombastic opening "Ain't Nothing You Can Do." But when he slows down and explores the contours of his elastic range, he moves beyond blues, folk, jazz, rock, anything. Have a gander at his rendition of "Listen to the Lion" for a masterclass in hooking a crowd: after yelping and scatting with thunderous energy, he performs a live version of a fade-out, falling to a hush that gradually dissipates into silence, which is held for a few beats until someone in the audience snaps out of the trance and generates a wild wave of applause. But that's only the most obvious example of his hypnotic power, each song on the album is effortlessly heart-stopping. Morrison initially struggled with fame, but here it fits him like a glove.

8. Queen, Live at Wembley Stadium

If the Ramones’ New York show displays rock at its most stripped-down, Queen’s most grandiose statement parades the full theatricality the genre can attain. A marathon-length tour through the many, many hits of this great band, Live at Wembley Stadium admittedly can feel like an all-too-typical “greatest hits” live show. Yet it has a visceral edge underneath its absurdly oversized production and necessary taped overdubs that serves as a reminder of the band underneath all the studio trickery, the band that used to proudly announce in their album sleeves that they used no synthesizers. Give a listen to the run-through of “Tie Your Mother Down” and remember that, when you strip away the pomp, these are still four immensely talented musicians who know how to write great hooks. It’s still hard not to choke up when Mercury defiantly states they’ll keep playing “until we fucking well die,” but soon they’re off on another great song, and it’s easy to forget, if only for a moment, that he’s no longer here.

7. Otis Redding, “The Ultimate Live Otis Redding Show”

Cobbled together from various live documents of Redding to form the last disc of Rhino’s superb 4-CD box set, this is not a strict “album” in a real sense. I also do not “care” at all. Plenty of “proper” live albums are made from cutting up whole tours into one flowing CD, and plenty of “proper” live albums don’t sound half this good, nor a hundredth as vital. Redding died before he could write enough material to hold the kind of epic show he clearly had in him, so this 22-song extravaganza is the closest we’ll come. Compiling shows from different parts of his all-too-brief career, the disc cannot disguise its multiple sources. But regardless of the size of the venue or the audience, the pure intensity of Redding’s performance and the crowd’s response links everything.

6. King Crimson, Absent Lovers: Live in Montreal 1984

Recorded at the last show of King Crimson’s brief ‘80s revival, Absent Lovers shows the band at the pinnacle of their Brian Eno/Talking Heads-inspired pop-prog rock. Densely layered polyrhythms roll almost casually off Bill Bruford’s drum heads, and somehow Tony Levin can find the throughline of the various time signatures with his bass and Chapman stick. To either side are the warring guitars of Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, the latter playing most of the chords while Fripp runs down his usual laser-beam solos. It’s hopelessly complex, tribal African polyrhythms bent into some kind of futuristic digital speak, and yet Crimson has never been as danceable. Don’t believe me? Listen to Levin absolutely tear into the bassline for “Sleepless” and try not to groove along. Hell, you can even nod your head to “Lark’s Tongue in Aspic.”

5. Miles Davis, The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel

My love for Agharta should be well-established, but it’s not good primer fare. “What, and this is?” you might say of this eight(!)-disc collection of Miles at the titular Chicago nightclub. But these seven sets capture Miles in rapid evolution, his Second Great Quintet flexing in its two-night gig and offering dynamically different renditions of the same tracks. The Quintet had released one album by this point, but in these shows you can hear the band coalescing, even laying down the foundation for the upcoming upheaval in Miles’ sound. Miles’ role as the simultaneous bandleader and principal rhythm player (always guiding his band to where he wants them, but from behind like a general) shines here. He allows his young supporters (especially Wayne Shorter) to truly stretch the boundaries, only to come in and gently but forcibly shift them into new sonic areas. Not long after, he’d really send his players into uncharted territory, but the relatively tame work found in these discs is nevertheless ground zero for understanding the upcoming phase of Miles’ career.

4. James Brown, Live at the Apollo

I remember being confused and bored with this when I bought it around the age of 15 based on the hype. Where were all the hits? Finally, a few years later, I actually—*gasp*—listened to the damn thing, and suddenly everything became clear. Capturing Brown at a crucial juncture that saw him too popular a live act to contain but too modest a chart performer to truly ignite, Live at the Apollo truly announced Brown’s arrival. From the overblown introduction that brings the singer on-stage to the frenzied rendition of “Night Train” that closes the show, Brown and his backing band The Famous Flames are in control of the crowd, who shriek as loud as anyone watching The Beatles around the same time. Brown sounds like a preacher possessed here, his gospel-trained howls filled with sweat and lust that drives the audience wild. He’s already a consummate showman, drawing out his “Lost Someone” into nearly 11 minutes of teasing and wailing that borders on the perverse; this bluesy, lethargic number could beat out hardcore punk for sheer force and energy. When Brown runs through a list of cities in “Night Train,” he sounds as if he’s listing off conquered lands, with the unspoken assertion that the world is next. Listening to the Hardest Working Man in Show Business here, you almost want to go out and get a white flag.

3. Charles Mingus, Cornell 1964

Only recently unearthed, this impromptu concert at Cornell University showcases perhaps Mingus’ best line-up in a magnificent set. Rolling out with two solo showcases—one for pianist Jaki Byard and one for Mingus—the album then moves into knotty jams that pit saxophonist Clifford Jordan and multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy in disharmonious unity as Mingus and longtime drumming partner Dannie Richmond hold down the rhythm with a groove that belies the complexity of their playing. Highlights are pretty much the whole damn thing, be it the roaring version of “Fables of Faubus” (complete with wry musical quotations) to Mingus’ fond send-off for the soon-departing (and soon-departed, tragically) Dolphy. Bonus points for trumpeter Johnny Coles’ fresh tone, compared to his illness-affected playing heard on the various live releases of the subsequent European tour. This snapshot of a band firing on all cylinders is sadly poignant in retrospect, with Dolphy’s impending death and the deep psychological impact it would have on Mingus. The master jazz composer wouldn’t sound so on top of his game for nearly another decade after this. Then again, he’d hardly record at all in the coming decade.

2. The Who, Live at Leeds

Released as a response to the increasing theatricality of The Who’s songwriting, the back-to-basics Live at Leeds showcases The Who at its most primal. Opening with a thudding warm-up trill by John Entwistle, the band then launches into molten slabs of maximum R&B that doesn’t let up until a gloriously catastrophic run-through of “My Generation.” Remastered and released on a deluxe edition, the show now comes with the very Tommy material the original LP sought to counterbalance (I’m not knocking Tommy, by the way). However, the packagers wisely split off the Tommy material from the now-complete set of bruising hard rock that surrounds it, allowing for a full disc of uninterrupted sonic fury. The live Tommy is intense too, but hearing Townsend slash through power chords and Daltrey scream bloody murder as Entwistle elegantly holds down the bottom end while complimenting Moon’s mad percussion attacks is as good as rock gets….


1. Jerry Lee Lewis, Live at the Star Club, Hamburg

...Except for this. Perhaps the greatest rock ‘n’ roll album full-stop, Jerry Lee Lewis’ Live at the Star Club, Hamburg is perfect down to its choice of venue. In virtual exile back home over his notorious marriage to his cousin, Lewis heads to the club that helped mold The Beatles to remind a world threatening to move on from the old Sun Records stars that he was still the meanest rocker around. Damned if he doesn’t prove it too: bursting out of the gate with furious piano playing that never lets up and not so much singing as hollerin’ like a drunk hillbilly itching for a fight, Lewis threatens to outpace his backing band at every turn. In fact, he even harasses one of the Nashville Teens during “What’d I Say?” Careening through licks and beating the keys until they threaten to break, Lewis is a madman. It’s a borderline shambles of a performance, which makes the last-second mastery Lewis pulls out of the air to guide every song all the more thrilling. Highlights are impossible to choose: it's all one flowing, rambling document of the forgotten demanding to be remembered. After listening to this album, no one could ever forget.

50 Book Pledge #11: George R.R. Martin — A Storm of Swords

My favorite aspect of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, judging from its first three installments, is its respect for consequences. A Clash of Kings compounded an instantly complex series by charting the outcomes of A Game of Thrones' actions as they rippled out across Westeros and realms beyond. Fortunes rose and fell, and new players emerged to capitalize upon the deaths and victories, while others were instantly doomed by same. A Storm of Swords packs more into its hefty length than both its predecessors combined, but it maintains the series' sense of unstoppable inertia, of each action provoking reactions that have the effect of making horrible situations even more ghastly. I would say it also means that the uplifting moments spread out too, but nothing good seems to happen in Westeros these days.

A Storm of Swords travels down some shocking narrative paths—even for this grisly, no-one-is-safe series—but what makes it so wonderful (easily the best of the ASOIAF books I've read so far) is how skillfully it maintains character growth and how farsighted it is in its plot upheavals. Even when characters don't get as much to do, Martin clarifies them like never before; Catelyn Stark, for instance, spent most of book two and the start of this installment getting on my nerves. Impetuous and internally guilting her son for not listening to her every word when he replaces his father as Lord of Winterfell, Catelyn does little in the aftermath of A Game of Thrones, and what does is typically stupid, ill-planned and ultimately disastrous. Yet Martin, without forcing the point, subtly casts Catelyn as a reflection of Cersei Lannister. Cersei is not a POV character, so she's typically been defined up to this point by people who hate her, which has only been slightly balanced by Jaime becoming a POV character this time. But having to put up with Catelyn consistently doing the wrong thing out of concern for her family helps clarify some of Cersei's behavior, especially as she finds herself in over her head back at King's Landing.

Martin continues to excel with his outcast characters: Arya Stark's struggle to escape various forces continues to toughen her, while the bastard Jon Snow faces temptations out in the wild that force him to decide who he really is. Sansa's growth from an infuriatingly naïve twit to a disgusted, all-too-world-weary young woman trapped by decorum and the violence underneath it have transformed the series' worst character into one of its most compelling. Sansa does the least of any character, but that is because she is powerless to move, and the rosy chivalry of her thoughts in A Game of Thrones has given way to unending terror and a hatred she can only just suppress. But, as ever, the star is Tyrion, who rose so very high in A Clash of Kings and now falls so very low because of it. His act of bravery at the climax of the previous book should have won him accolades and acceptance. Instead, it incapacitated him long enough for his considerable progress at King's Landing to be entirely reversed. It all goes to hell for Tyrion in this book, and by his final POV chapter I don't know whether to feel pity for what his resentful family has foisted upon him or scared to see what he'll do next.

Martin leaves space between his climax and his denouement, and never more so than here, where the grisliest, most stunning action occurs just past the halfway mark. But if the shocks more or less abate by the end of A Storm of Swords, the story certainly doesn't, and the sense of dread that hangs over this series has never been more pronounced. The last two books ended on dour notes, but typically a few characters still held out hope. A Storm of Swords ends in near-total despair, where even the one character who enjoys a small victory is still left to the enormity of his situation. A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings pushed Westeros nearer and nearer to the brink, but the wholesale slaughter of A Storm of Swords appears to have finally pushed this series over the edge. I am both eager and terrified to see where it lands.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: Double Comparatives

I believe I was lucky enough to find such a pertinent segment to practice double comparatives, a grammar point we often have to teach, but I had never managed to find the right scene. The movie is sensational! I strongly recommend it.

GRAMMAR TIP:


Double comparatives are used to describe a cause-and-effect process. Remember: When BE is used in double comparatives, it is often omitted.


A. Before watching the segment, match the cause with its effect.



1. We ask the machine to make more food.


2. The machine emits more radiation.


3. We make bigger food.





( ) These molecules could over-mutate more.


( ) The food is better.


( ) The machine takes more clouds




B. Now connect both sentences, using double comparatives. Make all the necesary changes to make it correct. There are more than only one possible answers.



1. __________________


2. __________________


3. __________________




C. Now watch the segment and check your answers:

WORKSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS

Answer key:

A. 2, 3 ,1


B.


1. The more we ask the machine to make, the more clouds the machine takes in

2. The more radiation it emits, the more these molecules could over-mutate.

3. The bigger, the better

The Beat Hotel (Alan Govenar, 2012)

I know so little about the Beat Generation. All I was taught in school were excerpts of On the Road and a shambles of a class reading of "Howl" in college. So in the dark am I regarding the nuances of the movement that The Beat Hotel, Alan Govenar's slight but engaging documentary, was more educational than all my English-department forays into the Beats put together. Offering a fondly recalled overview of the dingy Parisian roach motel for ex-pats, The Beat Hotel helped clarify the links between the Beat and Lost generations and how the former is the more harrowed, paranoid iteration of the latter. Anecdotes are touching, amusing, even a bit frightening (usually the ones involving William S. Burroughs), while the remembrances of the surviving witnesses of this time period are all universally the best kind of old person, the type who have just aged into great storytellers. It's overlong (despite only being 80 minutes long), but the movie does do a service to a still-underappreciated moment in our literary history. Besides, it made me run out and go buy Naked Lunch after finishing.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

John Carter (Andrew Stanton, 2012)

Unfairly, if inevitably, compared to a number of science fiction films which gutted Edgar Rice Burroughs’ source material, John Carter admittedly doesn’t feel like anything new. Its narrative of an embittered veteran transported to another world where he becomes a just warrior fighting for natives naturally calls to mind Avatar, and some setpieces look almost uncomfortably close to similar sequences from Star Wars movies. The very nature of the story places the film in the past, its pulpy, gung-ho dialogue wholly at odds with contemporary cynicism.

Yet if Andrew Stanton doesn’t reinvent the genre with his first foray into live-action filmmaking, he does at least offer up one of the few truly thrilling, giddy adventure epics of the last decade, maybe even since the third Indiana Jones installment. Though clearly meant to launch a franchise—and thus weighed down by all the overcooked mythology and origins that define the first entry in a planned series—John Carter features enough coherent action and empathetic characterization to make one of the few overstuffed blockbusters I’d love to watch more than once.

A cold open on Mars is ill-judged, piling on expository details about a war between Martians that saps the energy out of the staged visualization of this conflict. The sudden cut back to Earth in the 1880s is jarring, and the way Stanton sets up the story, beginning with Burroughs’ stand-in learning of his uncle John’s death, only muddles the film further. By the time the movie goes into a flashback from Carter’s journal, I was nearly ready to check out.

Then, it just kept getting better. The brief flashback of Carter, a Confederate vet turned prospector looking for enough gold to live his life outside anyone’s influence, introduces more easily followed character motives and actions. It is here that we get a first taste of the excellent editing, with Carter’s attempts to escape recruiting Union officers leading to a hilarious stop-start montage complete with music cues that never get to take off as the screen cuts instantly to each new recapture.

Carter manages to find his sought-after cave of gold, only to come into contact with a materializing, humanoid alien who inadvertently sends the man to Mars. The sense of bubbly cheek that defined Carter’s escape attempts carries over to the red planet, as the Earthling discovers that the difference in gravity makes him strong enough to lift boulders and light enough to leap hundreds of feet in the air. Though still bewildered at his whereabouts and so vicious that his first response to seeing aliens is to try to kill one, Carter’s joy at his newfound powers is infectious. In such moments, the burdensome narrative trivialities melt away into pure feeling, something so absent in silly adventure films these days.

In fact, I had a better grasp of character with these figures from literature I’ve never read than I’ve gotten off some adaptations of well-known material. Kitsch, who at 30 years old looks so much younger that I almost didn’t buy him as a veteran even a few years after the Civil War’s end, doesn’t just stand around looking rugged. Sarcastic and weary, Kitsch plays around with the same sort of exasperated gallows humor that made Bruce Willis so memorable as John McClane. He finds just the right balance between an old-school hero, so ready for an adventure, and a more modern protagonist, tired of senseless fighting  Mark Strong, playing a calculating villain who can literally steer others, gets to probe beyond Burroughs’ depictions of Therns (as I understand them), replacing a elitist Martian sect with a more apocalyptic parasite that conquers worlds by gently guiding its own inhabitants into self-annihilation. Strong’s bread-and-butter is the calm but menacing evildoer, but he’s rarely been so icily removed, even as his character has never enjoyed so much power.

Best of all, though, is Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, a princess who moonlights both as a brilliant scientist and a fearsome warrior. All by her lonesome, she nearly replicates the highly advanced technology of the Therns before she is sabotaged, and when she is saved by Carter for the first time, she responds not with girlish eyelash-fluttering but with analytical curiosity of his mysterious powers. Dejah plays like Marion Ravenwood if that character hadn’t turned into a helpless wuss after the first act. To be sure, the princess still needs saving eventually, but Dejah embodies the film’s freewheeling, optimistic spirit. It is she who has the majority of the can-do dialogue, and as Carter slowly comes around to her cause, one gets the feeling that it is her conviction and passion more than her attractiveness that woos him.

These characters overcome the thick narrative trappings that hamper them, and their universally understood desires and goals ground the action, which is spectacular. So much has been said (to my utter disgust) about the film’s budget, but to look at the action sequences, which are coherent and clearly planned to a tee, it doesn’t seem as if that money was just thrown around. As Brad Bird’s animation background made the stunts in the latest Mission: Impossible film at once ludicrously outsized yet fluid and understandable, so too does Stanton’s familiarity with micromanaged visual plotting suit him well. Carter’s massive leaps and the scale of the fights, which always seems to involve combatants numbered in the hundreds, never less, might have been pure havoc in the hands of a lesser director. Just imagine a shaky-cam, hurriedly edited presentation of Carter’s gravity-defying jumps, all whip-pans and jump cuts so that everything emerged a blurred frenzy. If Stanton received a great deal of cash to finance his film, at least he was nice enough to let the audience see what it bought.

What further infuriates me of all this fetishizing of the film’s budget (apart from how it indulges the worst, most facile and sneering elements of “criticism”) is how people purporting to be film fans have practically delighted in ensuring that bold filmmaking and daring studio risks won’t happen again, as if they’d ever been that common. Stanton’s film may not be masterful, but it is visionary, and Disney trusted a filmmaker whose previous commercial success did not prevent him from being a big risk with a quarter of a billion dollars to launch a franchise of uncertain profitability. For some to latch onto its supposed cash problems recalls the cynical response to Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. The petty reporting on that film helped contribute to the end of an era of studio faith in talented directors; I wonder what message Disney has received for, in its own isolated way, trying to bring some of that trust and boldness back.

Avatar: Order of Adjectives

Avatar is a revolutionary movie with wonderful visual effects and a great story. I simply loved it and used the Na'Vis physical characteristics to practice the use of order of adjectives.


A. Watch the movie segment from the movie Avatar and put the adjectives below in the correct order. The scene shows the Na'Vis, the people who inhabit Pandora, and their relationship with nature. Take a look at the chart below to choose the correct order.

Types of adjectives:


Opinion: It explains what you think about somethig (other people may not agree with you). Examples: silly, beautiful, horrible, stupid)


Size: A size adjective tells how small or big something is. Examples: large, enormous, tiny, little.


Age: It tells you how young or old something or someone is. Examples: primitive, ancient, new, young, old.


Shape: It describes the shape of something. Examples: round, rectangular, flat, square.


Color: It describes colors. Examples: yellow, reddish, pale, pink, turquoise.


Origin: It describes where something comes from. Examples: lunar, French, eastern, Brazilian.


Material: It describes what something is made of. Examples: metal, cotton, paper, marble.


Purpose: It describes what something is used for. These adjective often end with ...ing. Examples: sleeping (bag), roasting (tin), frying (pan).








1. Na'Vis are a race of (extraterrestrial / intelligent/ tall) humanoids who inhabit the (dense / lush / jungle) moon of Pandora.


2. Na'Vis have a (blue / bright / smooth) skin, accentuated with (thin/darker/cyan) stripes.


3. Their bodies have feline-like characteristics, such as (long/elegant/sweeping) tails, (beautiful/pointed /blue) ears, and (golden/large/ hypnotic) eyes.


4. They have a (v-shaped/upper/ wide) back.


5. They have developed a (evolved/ nervous/ complex) system.


6. They make use of (primitive/ effective/ wooden/ killing) weapons, such as a bow and arrows.

WORSHEET

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - AVATAR



Answer key:


1. (intelligent/tall/extraterrestrial) / (dense/lush/jungle)

2. (smooth/bright/blue) / (thin/darker/cyan)

3. (elegant/long/sweeping) /(beautiful/pointed/blue) / (hypnotic/large/golden)

4. (wide/v-shaped/ upper)

5. (complex/evolved/nervous)

6. (effective/primitive/wooden/killing)

Finnegans Wake: Book I, Chapters 1-4

From the very first page of Finnegans Wake, I knew I was in for a rough ride. Beginning in the middle of a sentence that will eventually be completed by the other fragment closing the book, the Wake plunges into a dense mire of language that collides various tongues into an idioglossia of puns and references so obscure as to be their own words, a sort of twin-speak warping of Dublin's geographical makeup that makes the esoteric written atlas provided by Ulysses seem as easy to read as a star map.

It's heady stuff, a gnarled (if flowing) run of portmanteaux and wordplay that seems to delight in instantly alienating the audience. The first chapter (and the next three) read like the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses, that book's most challenging, obscurant part. With fewer resources handy for the first-time reader than I had for Ulysses, Finnegans Wake proved an instant struggle. It took hours, whole hours, to read even one chapter.

With a couple of pushes in the right direction by a few resources, I even managed to get something of a grasp of the "narrative": starting with a retelling of the comic Irish song about Tim Finnegan, a hod carrier who falls from a ladder to his death, only to be revived by whiskey, Finnegans Wake instantly complicates and expands upon the ballad to become the story of Ireland, maybe the world itself.

The "protagonist"—if he can be called such—who amusingly takes Finnegan's place when he resurrects but is urged to stay dead by his mourners, is tavern owner Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who will go by many names in the shifting dreamscape of the book. This being a book of dreams, HCE is at once vaguely aware of his humble reality yet a vast force in the subjective, fantastical realm of sleep, not merely a god but seemingly all gods. HCE is then shown to be running in a local election, only to be undone by a scandal of some vaguely sexual nature that, true to the shifting textures of this dream book, is never clearly stated and transfigures constantly until some minor sexual misconduct has become distorted through gossip until, by the fourth chapter, HCE is on trial for various misdeeds foisted upon him by hearsay and conjecture.

Now this was more familiar ground. Those familiar with some of Joyce's preoccupations might see some of ol' Parnell in HCE's treatment: Parnell was certainly aiming higher than this modest (literal) everyman, but both were undone by sexual shenanigans and the court of public opinion. HCE's indecency somewhat recalls the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses, in which Leo Bloom and a lame girl named Gerty MacDowell engage in an implicitly stated explicit act that suggest both parties have participated in arousing the other and getting off on it. It's unclear what HCE does in Phoenix Park, and one won't get a clearer view from his gossiping pub patrons, who distort the already thin story until HCE is turning into different people, even different species, and doing all sorts of mischief. The more they speculate, the more HCE's non-native Irish heritage, stressed by puns that play on Norwegian and Dutch words, appears to come to the fore, eerily reminiscent of the race-baiting fury that informed the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. Joyce has swapped Bloom's Jewishness for some vague nationality, but both men's everyman qualities serve to bring out the hatred and rejection in empty racial nationalism. I can't point to any specific passages that made this clear, but something in the book's tone changed when the 12 patrons ( later, the trial jury) seem to turn to xenophobic distrust of HCE; it makes the absurdism of the man's metamorphoses and expanding list of ills nightmarish, not airy and silly.

Chapters 2-4 all deal with this scandal and its fallout, and Joyce constantly recapitulates his ridiculous tangents in recaps that I'd swear represented the author taking pity on the reader and acknowledging that, already, we could do with a bit of catching up. At least, I'd more readily believe that if these summaries were any more legible, but I still laughed at Joyce's nominal sympathy with the audience. Or maybe this is just the incidental byproduct of basis his work on Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nuova and the theory of human history as a repeating cycle of stages. In that sense, the occasional recap is merely another, smaller reset in the larger cycle of the Wake. I still need to look into Vico more thoroughly, but being told the basics about his views is one of those key clues that clarifies so much of the larger framework of what Joyce is doing. There will always been unfathomable minutiae in Joyce's writing, but a tip like Vico's ricorsos or the Oxen in the Sun episode being about the gestation of English itself can make the hardest material at least framable.

By the fourth chapter, in which HCE, or some form of him, is put on trial, I was hooked. By devoting pretty much all of chapter three to restating and expanding upon (and restating again) chapter two, Joyce gave me enough space to settle in and get as comfortable as I am liable to get with the Wake. And I have to say, it made a difference: while I was so overwhelmed at first that only a few of the puns broke through my confusion and frustration to make me chuckle, chapter four made me laugh out loud. Be it a quick note about a witness being suspected of being a "plain clothes priest" to lewd puns, obscure and allusive enough to slip by censors but unmissable in intent, I was absolutely rolling at times. It was here that I truly surrendered to the book, despite getting Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake in between chapters three and four. Even as I read that supplement, I prioritized the flow of the ridiculousness over what was being said. I started to really get a hold of the book, even if there are still whole pages that smack dully against my face like a thrown fish.

That's not to say I had to wait that long to find something of merit, however. Even on this first page, where I already questioned the wisdom of even opening the damn book, I found something that provided a sort of early revelation of the way to process Joyce's nigh-impenetrable work. The second paragraph mentions "the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's giorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time. As a Georgia (giorgios?) boy, I'm familiar with the Oconee River, which snakes through Laurens County and our very own Dublin, GA. Skeleton Key makes reference of this connection across the pond but also alerted me to the fact that there is a Laurens County in Ireland; I did not, happily, need to be told that the country has a Dublin too.

Nevertheless, even if Joyce intended to stay within Ireland for his introduction—likely, given how the rest of the first few paragraphs contains several Dublin locales—this brief snippet kept me going despite initial doubts and fears. As much as the puns made in other languages and the various historical in-jokes, this connection to something with which I was completely familiar let me in on the true nature of the Wake: it has a plot, to be sure, and one that begins to become clearer after getting a basic grasp of what's going on, but the true delight is in its universality. One of the names Joyce uses for HCE is "Here Comes Everybody," which stresses the breadth of HCE's connections to figures past, present, historical and mythological. If the book exhibits that same range, then it must include something of the whole world. Ergo, Joyce floods the early chapters with puns in other languages, so why not include a winking reference to Dublin's New World copy?

This made me realize: Finnegans Wake is not a book to be "figured out," to be sussed from the author's intent, or the critic's. It's a strange thing: I've never read a book so obviously the work and intent of an author, that so flagrantly violates the concept of the death of the author (even 30 years before Barthes wrote his essay). Yet I've also never come across a book that so openly, encouragingly belongs to everyone. There truly is something here for everyone, even if that necessitates it not being any one discernible thing. That didn't make it any easier to read, but it did make the thing impossible to put down, even at its densest and most taxing. I decided to start writing these update posts to will myself to continue with the Wake, but finishing chapter four helped me to slip into the book with as much enthusiasm (and acceptance of ignorance) as I did with Ulysses. Who knows if it will continue to improve or, in a metatextual ricorso, I'll slip back into hissing barbarism. For the moment, though, all is well, and I can't wait to keep exploring Joyce's mad, hypersexualized, guilt-ridden dream.