Big in Finland

For that Finnish-speaking Finnegans Wake enthusiast in your life, here’s a treat in time for Christmas. It might have been as much as a year ago that I was asked to contribute an essay to an anthology on Finnegans Wake entitled What Does Finnegans Wake Mean? In Finnish. Obviously I jumped at the chance. I’ve seen my illustrations in print a few times now, but I think this is the first time something I’ve written has been published. It’s very exciting, of course, but also disorienting to see my name above an essay I can’t read. I wish I could read the whole book, as the scraps that I’ve taken the time to transcribe into Google Translate have seemed very promising. Each of the essays is also illustrated with one of my pictures! Many thanks to the editor, Ville-Juhani Sutinen! If you do read Finnish, you can take a look at the publisher’s website here.

Page 155: what is the time, pace?

The Mookse and the Gripes continues. As I mentioned, this page actually goes before the previous post.

Page 158: Nuvoletta in her lightdress

And we’re back! What a warm time we were in there. It feels great to finally post something here again, and to instantly fall into my old bad habits by posting out of sequence (there’ll be at least one image before this one). I’m going to try to finish the Mookse and the Gripes this week.

Thank You For Your Patience

To be honest with you, it’s been a little daunting to return to this project after such a long absence. In addition to the time away, I’ve been rethinking my approach to the project in a way that’s forced me to change the way I work on it. Rather than tackling it a page at a time, I’m now trying to plot an entire chapter all at once.

Well, it’s been a long time (I’ve actually avoided checking exactly how long since I last posted a new image), but I’m hoping to finally get the first new page up today. But in the meantime, I’ve been gearing myself up by collecting an assortment of Wake-related music. So if you were looking for help putting together the nerdiest mixtape of all time, then your prayers are answered!

1. The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly

I looked everywhere for a version of the Ballad of Persse O’Reilly with full musical accompaniment, but in the end I think your best bet is this version sung by Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners:

2. Nuvoletta

This is a song by Samuel Barber adapted from the Mookse and the Gripes:



More Wake-related tunes after the jump...

The Book Notes Page

I’ve finally reorganised the book notes page, adding more online resources and some book recommendations, so that it might actually be useful to some of you. Thanks to everyone who suggested something! More links will appear when/if I get round to it.