Thursday, April 18, 2013

of Alle



But why have I mentioned those portmanteaus I wonder, looking back at my last post, when you already know about them, you can pick up Finnegans Wake tomorrow and see them, you can work it out for yourself by page twenty, or it is mentioned in every overview, it is mentioned every time the Wake is mentioned, "Joyce uses portmanteaus," they say very casually in newspaper articles, "in Finnegans Wake AS WE ALL KNOW," and not only in articles about the Wake itself but in traffic reports and news of the world; weather announcers tell you that we are expecting a cold front from the north over the next few days and also that James Joyce uses portmanteaus in Finnegans Wake, it is mentioned by very tiny children, it is mentioned by intoxicateds in gutters, it is mentioned by tourists who come to Las Vegas from Phoenix and commit domestic violence in hotel corridors, it is mentioned by the people who drown in Lake Mead where the descending pillow of the water has left a ring of bathtub chalk on the rocks, it is probably well known by the homeless man who tells me he is planning to write a paper on Marxism as soon as his back stops hurting him; so there was no reason to describe it; but any criticism is fanfiction with a non- in front of the fiction, it is a nonfiction fanfiction and sometimes there are these compulsions to spell things out again and again, impressed with your own urge to state the obvious because the obvious happens to be the thing that has occurred to you (if it has occurred to thousands of other people as well then that's not your fault, you didn't force them), and for you you can read I, meaning me, you do not have to understand this word to refer to your own self (meaning I to you) if you prefer to resist statements of the obvious in your own works, or even if you do something else, which very politely I will allow that you do or may do or not do as it pleases you perhaps, amen and thank you.

So someone might have thought at some point in say the last two or five seconds or so, "Therefore fanfiction is also criticism, ipso facto, kew ee dee," which, again, is obvious, like everything else in this post so far, it is as obvious as the sun in the sky, which is clear here, as usual, very blue, fairly hot, good beach weather but no beach, different locations cutting nature in different ways, sand but no sea if you're in Nevada, sea but no sand if you're far away on a ship, and chaos too, writes Elizabeth Grosz in her book Chaos, Territory, Art, is cut across in different ways by different artworks or ideas, a common material but a different slice, steaks and chops from the same butchered animal, all cuts partaking of the nature of meat but not identical; chaosmos, says Joyce somewhere in the Wake: "Chaosmos of Alle," which I then saw again as a description of Hélène Cixous' Neuter.


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