Day 20.

Page 23.

A continuation of 22. Lots of rhyminess on this page. Alliterations too. Red yellow green blue orangeman. a protestant? We've been down the orange road before. It is unclear which character this is. Van Hoother?

The prankqueen and chritophere (jiminy) are acting like hosts. Drinks are free. Maybe someone has paid for everyone. 

Krissy the tiler. A new character appears. But immediately leaves to go to sea? Unclear.

Phoenisx culprit? Is someone trying to reform, but going back to their ways?

People are playing some trick taking game. Trompes with their trompes.

Some woman has shown up with a bad hairpiece/wig.

A storm outside the pub is growing. Waves hitting the streets/boardwalk/dock/whatever.

Someone is so poor, they have to eat the butt of the fish. Scraps. Also, a butt pun in halibutt.

Lots of sing-song writing at the end of the page.

The word "Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun" appears at the top of the page, as the noise grows. Another thunder word like page 4, if I recall.

A cacophony of noise this time. It's clear the party is getting loud.

This page was a much easier read than 22. I'm back in the book.

Day 19.

Page 22.

Not knowing all the tristan references or what they mean is really hurting me now.

Two Mark Twain references on the page. No idea why. But his whimsy is breaking the momentum. Back to nonsense for Joyce.

The prankqueen is chatting with jiminiy/christopher. It looks like she came into the pub looking to argue with him, though we don't know why.

Jarl von Hoother is trying to call her down. But it doesn't look like it's working.

"Four larksical monitrix." How is anyone supposed to decipher this?

Hurrican hips?

Holdfour stomachs? That's a cow reference?

Jesus. This page sucks. I was really starting to enjoy the book. If the rhythm holds, page 24 should be fun again.

I don't know who khavepaltry and naivebride are, but he's doing that boy/girl pairing again. I assume just for laughs. "Are people really reading my bile still?" I hope he's having a good laugh in hell.

The page ends with a pain in the ass description of what Jarl is wearing.

I am clearly inside the pub listening to drunk people talk about nothing. How long before I quit listening?

Day 17 and 18.

Easter weekend got away from me. I don't celebrate or anything. But it's day 18, I just realized I didn't read a page or post. Tomorrow page 22. Sorry.

Day 16.

Page 21. Nearly all one paragraph. The top is the finish of the last page.

Lots of word compilations with the initials HCE. I know HCE is a character who is coming in the story, but he hasn't arrived yet. And I don't know his/her relevance yet.

Jarl van Hoother is a new character being introduced on the page. He works in a lighthouse and has two cousin Tristopher and Hilary. And someone nicknamed the prankqueen. That's a lot to take in, in a couple of sentences. They are all coming into the pub, probably to say goodbye to Finnegan.

Mark and Wans are also present. No idea who they are, though they look like "two a poss of porterpeas." Two peas in a pod.

If I could master Joyce's sing-song misspellings, I would now start writing my review in this folderol.

If I'm reading this right, the prankqueen once kidnapped Tristopher, a misspelling of Christopher if that wasn't obvious.

Trying to decode the language here, it sounds like the prankqueen took him in for forty years (the bibical 40 years, meaning a long time) and went from mothering him to being his lover. More of Joyce's coded language about women being nurturers and whores throughout myth, and how they destabilize men.

Four owler masters. I don't know what this means.

The word luderman is used, which is lutheran and luder at the same time. Luder is the german word for minx, refering to the prankqueen, and lutheran is another religion being tacked into the story. Finnegan being at an Irish wake is probably Catholic. Therefore Tristopher's presence is probably questionable.

Also. LuderMAN as a misspelling of Lutheran toys with gender. We're talking about a male and female character at the same time and how they are joined together in the context of the story. Mark and Wans, Mutt and Jeff, are examples of these pairings.

But the prankqueen is getting a lot of screen time now. She's going to be important.

Tristopher's name has changed to jiminiy mid-paragraphy.

Finally, the paragraph ends, hinting that the prankqueen would slip out at night to sleep with other men. Though I'm not sure yet why. Peaking ahead to page 22, I can see a wall of text that I'm not going to deicpher today. So this analysis will resolve then.

Day 15.

Page 20. Feels like a milestone. Who would have thought I would make it this far into this labyrinthine book.

Page 20 introduce's another woman, charmain, possible Finnegan's sister. But it's all unclear. Even the spelliong. .Maybe it will emerge later. My guess is that charmain is jewish. Mentions of a horn, ramskin, she says hello in German, by the way. She's cooking something and Joyce makes an unfriendly remark about the melting pot.

He then compares the Magna Carta to newspapers and cro-mags. Not sure what's going on there. A quiet rebellion against information and a return to simpler ways? Or information isn't trustworthy.

Papyrus and mead are mentioned. The cornerstones of Egypt. More Myth and the lie that jews were used as slaves to build the pyramid. Is Joyce among the Victorians who got this wrong and he believes it? Or is he revealing the lie?

And if he's just mixing (melting pot) all these Myths together, this is a little too hipster, in my opinion. He could have pulled any myth for this section and he pulled Egypt, after a jewish character is introduced.

Not so much a melting pot, as a fertile crescent.

One origin system (Jewish/Biblical) flows into another (Egyptian/civilizational) and all of these metaphysical sources flatten into one tower of babel type origin story. We all came from cromags, and no one's myth is any more true that anyone else's.

This might be my crowning observation.

That no one reading of this book can stablize the "story." All myths tells the same lie of where we came from.

I can probably stop now. I get  it. I won't. But I can.

He mentions the number 70. I've learned that if he doesn't mention it again, it might not be important.

This first paragraph was a fun and good read. Easy to understand. It's getting easier.

But the last paragraph on 20 goes back to the sing-song rhythm. Nothing is being said and it's being said a lot. My gut tells me he's making reductive comments about women in heels.

At the end of the page, he calls someone a whore. Charmain? It's unclear.

So he goes from the maternal image of a good woman making food at the wake, to reducing women to roles. All within one page. I don't think he's being sexist. I think he's revealing sexism across all societies.

Day 14.

Pages 18 and 19 today.

After the dialogue between Mutt and Jeff ends, Joyce starts with more poetic myth. Some good stuff this time. Implications of inbreeding and mixing of the races, stupidity and another dick joke. Foreskin. Foresin. More cycles. Dogs death. Bitches death. Some implications of living on the surface of the earth. Is Finnegan just another animal dying unknown? Is he unimportant? Are we learning this early that his death doesn't matter? Mention of oxen and bellicose billygoats, plowing fields.

Much to process.

There are so many jokes and references to cartoons. I wonder if Joyce watched movies a lot and enjoyed the cartoon intermissions. Or were some of these phrases just part of the zeitgeist?

Orangutan and Ragnarok mentioned in the same breath? Of course both are misspelled. Not the first time I've read humans being compared to apes or that we will bring about our own end. But in the 1930s?

Once again, another animal reference.

Page 18 mentions Futhoric, the Norse alphabet. Page 19 misspells runes. He's just mentioning myth to mention it, I think. More Virgil loving Aeneas kind of writing.

Time is flat. Cycles are cycle. Myths are just stories. Death is inevitable. Finnegan is just another animal.

Feels like this could have been 50 pages. Not 600. That feeling is never gonna go away.