Once upon a time, a former poet laureate said something either very stupid or very brave.

Billy Collins said, via The Wall Street Journal:

“Lyrics just don’t hold up without the music,” Collins said, adding that when his students argue for the literary merit of song lyrics, “I assure them that Jim Morrison is not a poet in any sense of the word.”

If we’re being literal, this is balderdash. Lyrics fit the definition of a poem — an arrangement of words, written or spoken, traditionally a rhythmical compositions, sometimes rhymed, expressing experiences, ideas or emotions in a style more concentrated, imaginative and powerful than that of ordinary speech or prose. (Definition comes from Webster’s. A secondary definition says a poem is “anything suggesting a poem in its effect.” Which means, we know it when we see it.)

If Collins is saying that modern poets are trying to do something different than modern lyricists, then he may be correct. (But I think he’s being arrogant and making lazy generalizations.)

I’ve already said where I stand on the poetry-lyrics grouping. Let’s link to some smarter people.

Jenny Hendrix of The New Yorker says:

Poetry and music have a long history together, from Greek rhapsodes  to medieval troubadours. The first poems may well have been lyrics themselves. And yes, to some extent, the more we define what is poetry and what it isn’t, the more of an uncommon, niche experience it becomes.

Kristen Hoggatt of The Smart Set says:

Many song writers would argue that they are writing poetry when they write a song, while many poets are equally adamant that they are doing no such thing. Perhaps this is because songs are so popular. Lyricists simply make too much money, and attain too much validation by hearing their life’s work as someone’s mobile ringtone. Poets have to write for years, getting published by small presses that year after year become slightly less small, teach as an adjunct, teach as a faculty member, teach as a faculty member with tenure, and once they’re finally published by Poetry Magazine or The New Yorker, they’re ready to retire. Lauren Hill (sic) considers herself a poet. Eminem considers himself a poet. Both these figures have a large fan base that would confirm their poet status, but to many people who consider themselves “real” poets, these figures are just too cool, too popular to exist in the world as a bestselling musical artist and a struggling lover of words.

Slight tangent, Collins’s comment also indirectly lead me to this Venn diagram.

While I don’t agree with all of the author’s categorizations — read “We Real Cool” and tell me Gwendolyn Brooks ain’t hip-hop — I think presenting anything as a Venn diagram makes it better.

I was readying a post about Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, but Tricia blew it up with the idea of character soundtracks.

Like it, love it, want to play.

For the characters in Rebecca:

Rebecca — "Poison" by Bell Biv Devoe. "Cold Hard Bitch" by Jet would be fun theme music, also.

Maxim — "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails (or Johnny Cash, if you prefer); "Beast of Burden" by The Rolling Stones.

Mrs. deWinter — "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga. Kidding, kidding... then again... eh, never mind. Let’s say "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" by Poison.

Mrs. Danvers — I appreciate Tricia’s suggestion of "Evil Woman," but I’ll take a more sympathetic tact and suggest Billie Holiday’s "Left Alone."

All right, Tricia, what would be the soundtracks for Anna Fitzgerald, Lucie Manette and Edward Rochester?

Bonus points if you can make an unnecessary Wu-Tang Clan reference.

By the way, Tricia, we now have another preferred author in common. I been loved me some Stewart O’Nan.

In my review of Snow Angels, I wrote, “O’Nan is Monet with a pen. He has the eye. He sees (and writes) little details that make every scene real. Nerdy girls do not become beauty queens when they take off their glasses. Children cry when they spill milk and cry harder when told to stop. People slowly destroy themselves and can’t change even when they realize what they are doing.”

(Yes, I know it’s overwrought. I wrote it in 2008. It was a different time.)

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

If you can’t tell from my unnecessary Wu-Tang Clan references, my goal is to turn The News-Herald Book Club into the definitive literature blog for hip-hop heads.

I’ve quoted The Rza’s Tao of Wu and reviewed Adam Bradley’s Book of Rhymes, which explains how MCs use poetic techniques when writing their lyrics.

Now, I add Paul Edwards’s How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC to the reading list for the studious hip-hopper.

How to Rap is (as the title implies) a book that suggests ways aspiring MCs can hone their craft. What makes it interesting is Edwards doesn’t give his own advice. Instead, he’s interviewed more than 100 artists and compiled their suggestions.

I’ve read a lot of books about writing—Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, Stephen King’s On Writing and Barbara Drake’s Writing Poetry, among others—and none of them allow the masters of the field to speak for themselves. The closest literary equivalent I could think of is Frank Conroy’s The Eleventh Draft, which invited authors like Doris Grumbach and Barry Hannah to discuss their creative process. (This Guardian article also does something similar.)

Edwards has a master’s degree in postmodernism, literature and contemporary culture from the University of London. His interviews cover all facets of U.S. hip-hop. He talks to lyrical godfathers Kool G Rap (who writes the foreword) and Big Daddy Kane, multiplatinum artists will.i.am and Nelly, and underground wunderkinds Royce Da 5’9’’, Crooked I and Pharoahe Monch.

If you don’t know who any of those people are, you probably won’t care about How to Rap.

That’s one of the few knocks I have on Edwards’s book. If you don’t care about hip-hop as a fan, it has nothing for you. But if you have even a passing interest in the genre’s creative process, it would be worth cracking the cover.

However, many rappers—like athletes—have learned to speak almost exclusively in clichés. For example, several of the interviewees stress how you need to write music the listener can “feel.”

Well, duh. But how?

Fortunately, some give very specific advice that all writers, not just MCs or songwriters, would be wise to follow.

“Try to elevate your mind, no matter how that may be. For some people it could be reading books, for other people it could be meditating, for other people it could be being hands-on with whatever they want to learn about,” Crooked I recommends.

My favorite suggestion comes from RBX: “Practice, practice, [expletive deleted] practice, practice, practice, and practice, then you go practice some more.”

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

John Edgar Wideman has abandoned major publishers for the independent hustle.

Wideman has received the MacArthur Genius grant, two Pen/Faulkner awards and was a National Book Award finalist. He has written more than 20 books, both fiction and nonfiction, mostly for Houghton Mifflin.

His newest book, Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind, will be self-published through print-on-demand service Lulu.com.

This is a surprising move if it is about the money. Simply put, major publishers still offer the most returns. There is a growing self-publishing scene, and it may eventually become as lucrative as the majors (at least, for authors of Wideman’s caliber and cache.) But, right now, the major publishers are still your best bet to make money.

However, Wideman indicates this has more to do with him wanting control over marketing strategies.

“I’ve been thinking about alternatives for a long time. I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach,” he said in an interview with Publishers Weekly.

There is a third possible explanation for Wideman’s decision. Briefs is, as its title implies, a collection of short stories. Those are difficult sales, even for a recognized author. It might be possible that Wideman had trouble placing it, so he went the POD route. (I want to clarify that I don’t have any evidence for this third hypothesis. I don’t know that Wideman had difficulty finding a publisher for Briefs. It’s just another possible reason for his partnership with Lulu.)

Either way, I don’t question the man. He’s a MacArthur-certified genius.

On to the next one: Peter Hedges, writer of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, listed his five favorite book-to-movie adaptations. (No, Tricia, Rebecca did not make the list.)

Next: I don’t follow college basketball, so this is my March Madness.

Finally: I received The Tao of Wu for Christmas but didn’t read it until yesterday.

“I believe death is the biggest hustle there is. It’s the biggest scam — because you can say what you want about it and nobody can prove you wrong.”

Thank you, Rza. I forgive you for Digi Snacks.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

We’re talking about poetry again.

Not because I know poetry, but because people who do know poetry keep saying interesting things.

Elisa Gabbert, of The French Exit, calls out publications that publish mediocre poetry from recognizable poets.

Here’s what I’d like to see more of in submissions: IDEAS. Why don’t poems have more ideas? So many poems I read are essentially just descriptions. So you went outside. It was beautiful. Or not. I don’t care how creatively you describe it, if it didn’t trigger any thoughts beyond “Hells yeah I am going to describe this,” it’s not a poem. It’s just showing off to yourself, or as Matt Rass used to say, “masturbating to language.”

Love it. Every last word of it. In fact, it’s not just poets who get caught “masturbating to language.” How much of Moby Dick is Herman Melville describing the scenery? The same could be said of James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. An entire generation of American authors decided “Hells yeah I am going to describe this.” Yes, they had some ideas ensconced between the chapter-long descriptions, but not enough to justify their exhaustive exposition.

And, despite my love for Wu-Tang Clan, I have to acknowledge that about 65 percent of their discography is “masturbating to language.”

On an unrelated (or, at most, barely related) note, I want to thank Patrick Gillespie of Poemshape for responding to my post. He made a point during his reply that is worth revisiting.

He said: A poor poet, but brilliant marketer, will probably be far more successful than the brilliant poet (we see it all the time). However, marketing also goes where the money is. If a publisher sees money in a writer, they will market him or her.

Then, I said: This is true, but it also leads us to a circular argument. Marketing tends to follow money and money follows marketing. Yes, poetry would be more lucrative if it were better marketed; and publishers would market it better if it appeared more lucrative. A few extraordinary types — Gillespie listed Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss — might slide through, but that’s about it. But even Silverstein and Seuss don’t apply to this discussion because neither of them are current poets.

Finally, Bloomsbury has refused to learn its lesson. They, once again put the image of a white woman on the cover of a book whose heroine is described as having brown skin. This would have been a post by itself had Bloomsbury not done the exact same thing last year.

Bloomsbury has already apologized and said it will issue the book with a new cover — just like they did before.

If Bloomsbury does this again, I’ll be convinced that it is for the free publicity.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

I almost titled this post Revisiting the Nonfiction of Fiction, but I have two problems with that headline.

One, I don’t know if either of our readers are committed enough to remember the original Nonfiction of Fiction post, which discussed Dave Eggers’ What is the What.

Two, who would click on anything titled Revisiting the Nonfiction of Fiction?

Everything about that title bores me, and I wrote it. You can bold it, italicize it — nothing makes it interesting.

Instead, I went with the unpretentious Chevalier on Jane Austen and Dinosaurs, even though it’s factually incorrect for reasons that become clear by the end of this post.

I’ve now wasted four paragraphs without explaining the purpose of this post. Let me take it from the top: I read Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures and it’s another one of those let’s-turn-history-into-fiction novels.

I already explained in my Eggers post that I don’t care for the tactic, but it bothers me less in Chevalier’s case, because there is no charity attached. (Not that I think the Valentino Achak Deng’s charity is an unworthy cause. I just question using a fictionalized account of your life to promote it.)

Instead, Chevalier only wants us to enjoy her story and once more ponder how unfair the Victorian era was to women.

Chevalier writes the story of Mary Anning, Elizabeth Philpot and their friendship. Anning is a fossil hunter in the early 1800s who discovered the first complete skeletons of an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur (neither of which were dinosaurs, rendering my headline incorrect.) Anning is a working class gal with little formal education. Yet most of the paleontologists of the day sought her specimens and advice.

Philpot is another fossil hunter. She is older, richer and from a more respected family than Anning, but the two became friends because of a shared hobby.

Chevalier said it was Philpot and Anning’s friendship that drew her to the source material, but she doesn’t emphasize it. Instead, her focus meanders between the fossils, sexism, science vs. faith, and the romantic mishaps of the characters.

Though there’s no hard evidence for it, Chevalier decides to link Anning in an ill-fated romantic relationship with Colonel Birch, one of her collectors.

(Chevalier explains in her afterward: “Of course, I made up plenty. For instance, while there was gossip about Mary and Buckland and Mary and Birch, there was no proof. That is where only a novelist can step in.”)

More than anything, Chevalier seems to want to write Anning’s life as a Jane Austen novel, one in which the heroine does not get her man. Chevalier echoes her tone and language, and her version of Elizabeth Philpot shares some attributes with Elizabeth Bennet. Both struggle with a culture that marginalizes women and both suffer from presumption. Philpot’s relationship with Birch is very Bennet-Darcy.

That’s interesting; because Philpot, who Chevalier writes as a pragmatist, makes a point of disparaging Austen and her happy endings. I’m not suggesting Chevalier has a problem with Austen. Not every opinion espoused by a fictional character is one the author endorses. If anything, I wonder if Chevalier felt the need to differentiate between Austen’s stories and her own.

It’s true that Chevalier’s story is more firmly based in reality. There are no improbable marriages in Remarkable Creatures, but that doesn’t make it better than a weel-written, if frivolous, love story.

Chevalier is a good writer. Her language flows; but her focus meanders, and she’s unable to build any momentum. If we were to break out the old Jason Lea Rating System [seen below], I’d rank it as a 3. Remarkable Creatures will not be anyone’s favorite, but it would be too harsh to call it bad.

Jason Lea Ranking System:
5 - Wu-Tang Clan
4 - Delonte West YouTube interviews
3 - Celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms
2 - Olive Garden commercials
1 - New York Yankees

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. In light of Delonte West’s recent personal and legal struggles, it seems tactful to take him off the scale. Likewise, the Olive Garden commercials that offend me no longer air, so it’s a dated reference. It may be time to revise the ranking system.

Everything I know about poetry, I learned from hip-hop.

Without knowing it, I learned the figurative trope of antanaclasis. Same goes for kenning, metonymy and assonance.

Antanaclasis is when a person uses the same word twice, but the word’s meaning changes with each repitition.

For example, Vince Lombardi once said if someone isn’t fired with enthusiasm, they’ll be fired with enthusiasm.

Cam’ron taught me antanaclasis when he rapped, “Get him a Mauri flow, from the Mauri show/[Mess] around, y’all gonna be up on the Maury Show.”

In fact, Cam’ron’s entire style is derived from assonance and antanaclasis. Of course, I didn’t know that as a 17-year-old. I just knew he liked to repeat vowel sounds and words with different denotations. (No man has wrung more meaning from the words “China” and “white.”)

I knew that Pimp C was using “Whitney” and “Bobby” as slang for cocaine and marijuana, respectively. I didn’t know that scholars called that metonymy or that it’s a poetic technique that dates back to Sophocles.

No, I learned that when I read Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop by Adam Bradley.

Bradley is an assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College who earned his doctorate from Harvard University. He analyzes rap lyrics for their use of poetic techniques.

The associations Bradley makes are stunning but appropriate.

Just in the introduction, Bradley notes that Ice T’s “6 ‘N the Mornin’” uses the same cadence as Langston Hughes’s Sylvester’s Dying Bed.

Not impressed, you say. Everyone knows Hughes has influenced every “black” genre of American music since the blues.

OK, he also associates the tradition of kenning, in which two poets would compare their virtuosity by assuming cumulative titles, to the Smoothe da Hustler and Trigger tha Gambler hit “Broken Language.” Raekwon with James Baldwin. “Rapper’s Delight” and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Bradley does it all in his Book of Rhymes; and, as silly as some of these juxtapositions seem, Bradley makes them work.

Book of Rhymes would best serve someone who loves hip-hop but doesn’t know poetry or vice-versa. Honestly, if someone is well-versed in both, Bradley’s text will be unnecessary.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Bradley’s hip-hop cred is solid for a Harvard grad. He references artists as diverse as Immortal Technique and Kool Moe Dee. However, he botches at least two facts in his book.

One, it was Big Boi, not Andre 3000, who proclaimed he was “cooler than a polar bear’s toenails.”

Two, Notorious B.I.G. did not end the story rap “N---- Bleed” by crashing his Range Rover. It was his pursuer’s Range that got towed because it was double parked by a hydrant. (That’s a serious detail to someone who memorized almost the entirety of Life After Death in 1997.)

I present to you the Espresso Book Machine: the latest gadget that readers will love/loathe.

It’s the book-equivalent of those DVD-producing kiosks that are supposed to replace video rental stores. The EBM can print, bind and trim a 300-page book in four minutes.

The EBM was created by On Demand Books and can create any of the 2,000,000 books in the ODB library. Apparently, it’s being sent to libraries and bookstores. (I haven’t seen one in action yet.)

Upon learning of the EBM, I thought of two immediate uses for it. One, this thing is perfect for out-of-print books. Remember Google’s plan to collect orphan books? The EBM would make hard-to-access info even easier to read. Some people would rather not peruse 300-page technical manuals on a computer monitor. The EBM offers a way to turn these texts into books.

Naturally, Google and ODB are three steps ahead of me and have already formed a partnership.

Secondly, schools could benefit from the EBM, as well. High schools need to replenish their supplies of Jane Eyre and The Odyssey after age deteriorates them. The EBM would allow them to print their own copies. Granted, EBMs are too expensive (they cost about $100,000) to be cost-effective now; but this may be an option in a decade.

Schools could use EBMs specifically because many of the books read in English class are public domain, so no one will need to wrangle with a publisher for rights.

Meanwhile, on an unrelated subject:

BBC News asks if we are due for a wave of book piracy. The question is will bootlegging affect publishing as much as the music industry.

I used to think it wouldn’t, but I’m reconsidering that stance.

My initial thought was this: It’s easy to bootleg and disseminate a song. It takes about 30 minutes. However, a bootlegger would need days to scan in all the pages of a book.

Because of the workload required in literary publishing, the only books that would be heavily bootlegged are best sellers. That creates a big difference between book and music piracy. An experienced music pirate can find the unreleased demo tapes of an obscure garage band in about two or three minutes.

The same pirate would not be able to find books as easily.

I decided to test my theory by searching for illegal downloads of specific e-books. It took me 45 seconds to find How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. It took about two minutes to find The Life of Pi. I was not able to find The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (I can’t confirm that any of these files were valid, because I didn’t download them. They might have been fraudulently labeled, but I doubt it.)

I guess I underestimated the tenacity of pirates.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Speaking of the “ODB Library,” the Rza has released his second book, The Tao of Wu. I haven’t read it yet but highly recommend it to anyone who owes me a birthday gift.

I guess nobody wanted to Seuss-abrate yesterday.

That’s OK. If there is a casbah in heaven, I’m sure Dr. Seuss is rocking it.

People have two reactions to children’s literature. Either we marginalize it — “oh, that’s a kid’s book — or christen it with nostalgia — “I loved that book as a kid.”

I enjoy the occasional kid’s book for two reasons. One, I have the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old, a poorly adjusted one. Two, sometimes an easy read cleans the palate after wading through a 700-page epic.

I don’t have the endurance to follow “The Brothers Karamazov” with a John Milton chaser. I need a glass of water in between. When I finished “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the next book I read was Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline.” (Granted, those were the only books I had on the airplane.)

Sometimes, people don’t want soliloquies or gravitas. They want a love story or a fairy tale, a hero beating a villain and an obvious moral. They want a wise-cracking sidekick in a sidecar or a scary story that can be forgotten by the next morning.

“Coraline” reads like a bedtime story. It’s kid’s stuff, but the kind of kid’s stuff that’s meant to linger in your subconscious for awhile.

If I had to describe Gaiman in a word, it would be oneiric. He grabbed the attention of the American public by writing about an entity who was Dream personified in the “Sandman” comic book. It was an ideal marriage of man and subject matter. Even a decade after he stopped writing “Sandman,” his work still has the hazy, vaguely threatening, implausible but wholly believable tone of a dream.

His lighter fare — “Stardust,” for example — is a daydream. “Coraline” is a nightmare.

Don’t get me wrong, “Coraline” is kid’s fare — the type of story an adult will appreciate, but a child will understand. But it could frighten the young’ns.

It has a lot in common with “Alice in Wonderland.” Plucky underage heroine, check. Inexplicable descent into a dreamworld, check. Funny cat, check. Dire consequences nipping at the edges of frivolity, check. Tea, check.

Coraline is a precocious, curious girl. (I don’t think are any books dedicated to stupid, ambivalent children.) She’s bored by her busy, indifferent parents. She finds a secret door that takes her to a flat like her own, except her parents are fun... and their eyes have been replaced with black buttons... and they want to replace her eyes with black buttons... and cats talk... and annoying but innocuous neighbors are transformed into gooey monsters.

“Coraline” follows a familiar path. Girl wishes she had more excitement; girl finds more excitement; girl fights disembodied extremity; girl learns important life lesson.

It’s uncomplicated, but that’s the whole point of fairy tales.

I could rank “Coraline” on a scale from one to five, but then I wouldn’t get to use my new, superwonderful ranking system.

Jason Lea Ranking System:
5 - Wu-Tang Clan
4 - Delonte West YouTube interviews
3 - Celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms
2 - Olive Garden commercials
1 - New York Yankees (hate Yankees...)

As an adult reading “Coraline,” I would rank it with celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms. In other words, it’s good, but I wouldn’t call it special or lasting. It has a novelty that won’t last longer than sweeps week.

However, I suspect precocious, curious children (especially girls) would enjoy this as much as I enjoy Delonte West YouTube interviews... which is, to say, they’ll love it.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. OK, I'm done writing about kid's books for awhile. I mean it.

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