I’m practicing my redactive poetry:

Friday Welcome Melange

My talented coworkers have offered their own examples of redactive poetry today. The first comes from my nemesis and City Editor John Bertosa who used the Gettysburg Address to create a gothic riff on Jonathan Swift.

A new proposal –
We ground our poor
To add here for the living so nobly

It is the great task we take
That cause full of devotion, highly.
These shall not have died in vain.

Keeping with the theme of Illinois politicians, education reporter Sandra Klepach used Barack Obama’s victory speech. I like how she maintains the tone and adds a subtle twist.

Who doubts that America is the dream
Of our founders?
Answer this, nation. Thank the women
Young and old, rich and poor
We led cynical and fearful and doubtful
Hands of history
Working women, tonight we rode home
We will get there
This can change more

Copy editor Cheryl Sadler went the extra mile and turned my previous blog post into a haiku.

The whipping, I loved.
Dinosaur. Sculpting. Chisel.
Glenn Beck adventure.

Editorial Page Editor Michael C. Butz reworked Wilco’s “I Am Trying to Break your Heart.”

An American assassin
hiding out in the big city
Let’s forget about the cross-eyed strangers
Stop smiling

I want to glide, dreaming
Baby, hold on tight
I’ve been drinking

I don’t believe I said hello
I’d always thought you’d love me
What was I thinking

I am trying to break your heart
Drinking down the avenue
I let go of
the man who loves you

Meanwhile, I tried to turn Finnegan’s Wake into a carefree sex romp:

Eve brings us by a short sea on this side the scraggy isthmus
all the time, bland old isaac had to be seen
What clashes here of wills
What chance, What true feeling
(O my shining stars and body!)
you will rise, you must
none so soon, toofar
he swiftly stook it out again
that ought to show you what a chap he was
Annie with goodly grasp and overalls
to rise in undress – eyeful, with a burning bush
the first was he to bare arms and His crest of huroldry, horrid, horned.
His archers strung, handling his hoe.
you’re going to be fined again!
this municipal sin business

Brandon Baker reworked The Roots' “The Good, the Bad and the Desolate” from the High School High Soundtrack. (I now have just cause to add an Okayplayer tag to the blog.)

Dedicated to the cats that vocalize
Try to rise
Speaking through the mic, wise, realize
Respond when I make use with Hip-Hop that’s authentic
I represent revolutionary masters of ceremonies
Enslaved by the soundwaves, skills amaze
Insight, analytic, ‘cause I live it: Lyricism
Keep your styles, dissect ‘em
Class is in session, I’ll have all you guessin
Begin with the pen, rhyme radioactive waves on Fridays
Your style’s older, you ain’t makin’ a quota
A rap you might not see again

Cassandra Shofar has repurposed a Thomas Merton quote about the cosmic dance.

When we alone, chance
We see migrating birds
Autumn descending
A grove of junipers
Rest

When we see, a moment
Children
We know love
Our own hearts
The poet

When we hear, old land
A quiet pond
A solitary splash
Such times
Awakening

The turning, inside
Values the newness
The emptiness
The purity
Vision

Themselves, evident
All these
A glimpse
The cosmic
Dance

Finally, Tricia Ambrose turned to her favorite children’s book, Love You Forever by Robert Munsch, for inspiration.

Mother,

back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Baby,
quiet, crawled, sang

Boy,
strange friends, strange clothes, strange music.

Mother,
back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Son, mother, song

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Please forgive the overwhelming use of italics in this post. I wanted to differentiate between poems and my interruptions.

Textual scholars have compiled an amended version of Finnegans Wake.

Good, this will give Joycean scholars something to discuss and the rest of us something to ignore.

It’s Friday. Behold the melange.

Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon spent 30 years pouring over drafts of James Joyce’s least comprehensible work. Their research lead to 9,000 alterations in the amended Finnegans Wake.

In an interview, Rose said, “Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.”

No, he didn’t. But that would be awesome. What Rose actually said:

Because of the difficulty of the language of Finnegans Wake, the syntax is not immediately apparent and the syntaxical coherence of the book was effectively lost when it was brought into print. This coherence has been fully restored in the new edition and results in what can be called the first definitive edition of Joyce’s final masterpiece.

Actually, the syntaxical coherence was lost when Joyce wrote the book; and you couldn’t restore its coherence with a decoder ring and a babelfish.

Moving right along: We didn’t write anything about Dr. Seuss’s birthday this year. (It was Tuesday.) As consolation, I offer Shirley Hughes’s top 10 picture book characters. (No Dr. Seuss characters make the cut, but Babar does.)

I have nothing to say about Charles Pellegrino that hasn’t already been said. I will grit my teeth when he receives a six-figure advance for his next book.

Finally, The New York Times explains e-book pricing.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald

P.S. For the record, Tricia’s absolutely right. It was jarring to have to stop every few pages of Moby Dick and write my thoughts. By the second day, I decided to only blog between chapters. It felt like less of an interruption, then.

If anything, I underestimated the physical challenge of trying to read for 13 consecutive hours.

6:23 a.m. I’m awake, and not at all pleased with myself. Wish I would have promised to eat a lot of waffles today instead of reading Finnegans Wake.

John Bishop’s introduction begins, “There is no agreement as to what Finnegans Wake is about, whether or not it is ‘about’ anything, or even whether it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, ‘readable.’”

Imagine being the publisher who receives a query letter from James Joyce’s hypothetical literary agent. What would it say? “Hey, I’ve got this book. I’m not sure what it’s about, or if it’s even readable, but it’s by the guy who wrote Ulysses. We can discuss movie rights later.”

6: 34 a.m. Sir Tristam, violer d’amores, fr’ over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war … What the hell is an isthmus?

6:41 a.m. Some of these coinages must have occurred when James Joyce passed out at his typewriter.

6:45 a.m. Caligulate is an incredible verb. If Tricia ever flips out, runs for empress and appoints her horse as a senator, I’m going to tell her to quit caligulating.

6:46 a.m. Great, now I lost my spot and need to start over.

6:54 a.m. Agog and Magog and the round of them agrog.

6:59 a.m. Beginning to suspect Finnegans Wake is the greatest practical joke ever conceived.

7:02 a.m. The jinnies is jillous agincourting all the lipoleums. And the lipoleums is gonn boycottoncrezy onto the one Willingdone … I’m not certain, but I think this might be pornographic.

7:19 a.m. These paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries and whiff now whafft to us, fresh and made-of-all-smiles as on the eve of Killallwho politic ditto, we can trade places get lifted in the staircases …

Fleppety! Flippety! Fleapow!

7: 25 a.m. First cup of coffee. If anyone ever tells you how good Finnegans Wake is, punch them in the throat.

7:28 a.m. Thank you, James Joyce, for supplying a word I so sorely needed. Henceforth, I will refer to all of Dave Jones’s columns as meandertales.

7:34 a.m. Did he just say “golden youths that wanted gelding?” That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, not in the same way that the rest of this doesn’t make sense; but what golden youth wants to be gelded?

Honestly, I’m just glad to have understood five consecutive words.

7:41 a.m. “And they all drank free” would be a wonderful way to end any story. It could replace “and they all lived happily ever after” as the standard closing line.

By the by, I’m on page 22. At this rate, it will take about 35 hours to finish Finnegans Wake.

7:45 a.m. With lipth she lithpeth to him all to time of thuch on thuch and thow on thow.

You know, that actually made sense. Maybe something’s kicking in.

7:47 a.m. Nevermind.

7:59 a.m. Coworker previously suggested reading the difficult passages aloud. Throat is now sore after reading aloud for 90 minutes.

8:04 a.m. When they make the inevitable Finnegans Wake movie, I bet Christopher Walken plays Humphrey Chimpden.

8:09 a.m. “A baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint.”

This must be a metatextual comment. It is too coherent to be otherwise.

8: 13 a.m. If this reporting thing doesn’t work out, I’m becoming a lustsleuth. Doesn’t that sound cool, lustsleuth? I think that’s what Kenneth Starr should have been called.

8:45 a.m. Those many warts, those slummy patches, halfsinster wrinkles, shimmy shimmy ya shimmy yeh shimmy yay …

I can understand how some people become obsessed with this book, because it is not completely gibberish. There is a comprehensible nucleus. Of course, it’s smothered underneath a triple serving of style-over-substance. I can safely say that I will glean nothing more than some cool coinages from my one-day read-a-thon.

8:56 a.m. The next correction we print in The News-Herald should read, “Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.”

9:33 a.m. Lost some time because my wife made Frenchtoaststicks. LuvFrenchtoaststicks. Seckoned Cup of Cawfee.

A board of experts from the Modern Library ranked this book as the 77th greatest novel since 1900. This happened around the time when people felt compelled to make Top 100 lists for everything. (Top 100 movies, Top 100 songs, Top 100 things that make you go hmmmm…) Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” was ranked Number 78. I have read “Kim.” I enjoyed “Kim.” Though I am admittedly not even a sixth through Finnegans Wake, I feel comfortable saying that this is not better than “Kim.”

“Kim” had a plot. “Kim” had characters. “Kim” did not require a ouija board and a decoder ring to translate. “Finnegans Wake” certainly has poetry. It has language and style. What it does not have, however, is a reason for me to continue.

This verges on the emperor’s new clothes.

9:48 a.m. I’m telling my wife that we should name our first son Posidonius O’Fluctuary Lea.

10: 13 a.m. “Bladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapapornanennykocksapastippatappatupperstrippuckputtanach, eh?”

OK. I give. Call it a third-round knockout. I made it to page 90 (of 628) before being struck a fatal blow.

Perhaps it is my inability to translate multilingual puns. Perhaps it is the amount of time it took me to decipher the portmanteaus. But I have failed, inexcusably failed. It took less than four hours and two cups of cawfee for me to surrender.

This is easily the most self-indulgent thing I have ever read. However, it is also a work of intelligence. I could be glib and say it is book of random words smashing together, like an omnilingual Jabberwocky forced into a blender, but it isn’t. Joyce is clearly trying to make, or obfuscate, a point. However, it is not compelling enough of a point for me to want to decipher it.

A book—actually, any story—is a symbiotic creature. It needs a teller and a listener. They are in it together. The storyteller must give something so the audience will follow. Likewise, the listener must be willing to sacrifice something if the story is of merit.

But Joyce asks too much. He wants readers to decode his cobbled language of the night, so they can hear a story with few decipherable characters or plot points. I respect, and even appreciate, some of the poetry here. (“The viability of vicinals if invisible is invincible.”) But the language does not overcome the detriments of this text.

Consequently, Joyce is alone.

--Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

A couple of our readers — or a single reader with two e-mail addresses — called me on my no-person-in-the-history-of-the-universe-has-ever-read-Finnegans-Wake comment.

They claim to have finished the indecipherable prose. Even my co-blogger, Tricia Ambrose, said she waded through the monster. Her description: “He puts words together in a way that seems like they make sense, but they don’t,” which would make Joyce the Irish literary equivalent of Lil Wayne.

But I call shenanigans. To disprove them once and for all, I have purchased a copy of "Finnegans Wake" and will read it this Saturday in a cram session of Irish literature and whiskey.

And — because I do it for you, readers — I will blog the entire experience and provide it to you Monday, so you can read it while you should be working.

It’ll be like Bill Simmons blogging through the Super Bowl. That is, if the Super Bowl made absolutely no sense (like last year’s.)

Just purchasing “Finnegans Wake” was an ordeal. I went to five different bookstores in Lake County before I finally gave up and ordered it.

It was nowhere, not at big chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble or tiny secondhand dealers littered throughout the county.

I requested it at one store and the clerk responded with the seeming non sequitur, “So you like Chinese food?” Then, he checked the store’s stock and replied, “I’m sorry, we don’t have any copies of Finnegan’s Wok.”

At another, the clerk asked me who had written “Finnegans Wake.” By then, I had already been to four stores and was feeling snarky, so I said, “Shakespeare.”

She checked her computer and said, “I’m sorry, we don’t have it; but I can order a book with the same name by James Joyce. Maybe it’s a remake.”

I told her not to worry about it.

The utter absence of Finnegan was baffling to me. The Random House board rated the book as the 77th greatest English-language novel since 1900. (The list was rife with Joyce. “Ulysses” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” made the top five.)

I probably could’ve ordered it from a library but that would involve me paying my Brobdingnagian late fee. (It was cheaper for me to buy the book.)

So this Saturday, I go head to head with my nemesis and finally prove that Finnegan is a fraud. Just me, Joyce and, if necessary, a bottle of Jameson’s.

—Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

PS I’m hoping this blog will get some cheap hits from people searching for “Bill Simmons” and “Lil Wayne.”

I will respond to my co-blogger’s slanderous opinion of “Oscar Wao” in due time. For now, I want to talk about a subject that is close to my heart: lying.

Everyone lies about books.

Everybody pretends to have read something they haven’t. We do it for a lot of reasons. No, wait, no we don’t. We only do it for one reason. We don’t want other people to think they are smarter than us.

Be honest. If your smarmy coworker asks you what you thought of Dave Eggers’ new book, do you say:

(A.) Oh, I haven’t read it yet. You must be my intellectual superior because you have. Feel free to bring that up whenever I try to make a cogent criticism of your work.

(B.) It was all right, but I don’t think he’ll ever top “A Heartbreaking Work.”

It’s a formal nicety. Your coworker probably gleaned all of his knowledge of James Fenimore Cooper from watching “Last of the Mohicans” on TBS, but he’ll still spend his coffee break discussing Cooper’s representation of Native Americans.

Book bluffs are simple maneuvers. They mix vague opinions and undetectable lies into an impermeable shield. For the rookies, here are some simple pieces of advice when lying to your literary frenemy.

1. Defer the subject to something else you have read.

A coworker may ask you about “Finnegan’s Wake.” This is a trap. No person in the history of the universe has ever read “Finnegan’s Wake.” In fact, James Joyce didn’t finish it. Its last 100 pages are blank, but nobody’s read far enough to notice yet. When your coworker asks what you thought of “Finnegan’s Wake,” simply say you liked it less than “Dubliners” or “Portrait of the Artist.” Then, start talking about either of them instead.

Warning: This strategy is less effective if you haven’t read “Dubliners” either.

2. Give a vague opinion.

No one will ever question a vague, middling opinion, as demonstrated by my Eggers’ example. If someone asks you about a book you haven’t read, shrug and say, “It was OK, not their best work.”

If you compliment the book too much, the person will ask what you liked about it. Similarly, they may ask what your objection is if you trash it. Keep it middle of the road and they can’t question you.

(If Mr. Know-It-All persists, tell him that all opinions are subjective and, thus, valid.)

3. The University Maneuver

If someone asks you about some classic, just reply, “I haven’t read that since college. I hardly remember it.”

If you’re feeling especially saucy say, “Oh, you’re just getting to that now. I read that as a freshman.”

Warning: Do not attempt the University Maneuver with any books that have been released since you graduated. You will only make yourself look stupid.

4. Watch the movie.

Most books have been turned into movies. (I learned this when I got lost in a Blockbuster while trying to find Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze.) Don’t feel like reading “Sense and Sensibility,” rent the movie. The same works for “Pride and Prejudice,” “Wuthering Heights,” or pretty much anything by Mark Twain.

If you can’t find a movie, don’t panic, there’s normally a BBC miniseries available on Netflix.

Warning: Doublecheck the movie’s fidelity to the source material before discussing the book. Otherwise, you'll find yourself saying, “I loved how ‘The Scarlet Letter’ took a serious issue and turned it into a carefree sex romp.”

These four tips should get you through any literary discussion with a know-it-all coworker. When in doubt, mention “Finnegan’s Wake.” It’s a guaranteed endgame maneuver… unless they counter with Tolstoy in the original Russian.

--Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com