February 23, 2009
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To Thank the Academy:
Another Manic Monday–
McGee and Smee
Project MUSE –
… and interpretations, “any of the
Zingari shoolerim [gypsy schoolchildren]
may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the
sack of auld hensyne” (FW 112.4-8). …– Patrick McGee, “Reading Authority:
Feminism and Joyce,” MFS: Modern
Fiction Studies– Volume 35, Number 3,
Fall 1989, pp. 421-436, The Johns Hopkins
University Press
“The ulterior motive behind this essay ["Reading Authority," above], the purpose for which I seize this occasion, concerns the question or problem of authority. I stress at the outset my understanding of authority as the constructed repository of value or foundation of a system of values, the final effect of fetishism– in this case, literary fetishism. [Cf. Marx, Das Kapital] Reading– as in the phrase ‘reading authority’– should be grasped as the institutionally determined act of constructing authority….”
“[In Peter Pan] Smee is Captain Hook’s right-hand man… Barrie describes him as ‘Irish’ and ‘a man who stabbed without offence‘….”
Background: In yesterday’s morning entry, James Joyce as Jesuit, with “Dagger Definitions.”
A different Smee appears as an art critic in yesterday’s afternoon entry “Design Theory.”–
“Brock, who has a brisk mind, is a man on a mission. He read mathematical economics and political philosophy at Princeton (he has five degrees in all) and is the founder and president of Strategic Economic Decisions Inc., a think tank specializing in applying the economics of uncertainty to forecasting and risk assessment.
But phooey to all that; Brock has deeper things to think about. He believes he has cracked the secret of beautiful design. He even has equations and graphs to prove it.”
A Jesuit in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
“When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question?”
“Our entanglement in the wilderness of Finnegans Wake is exemplified by the neologism ‘Bethicket.’ This word condenses a range of possible meanings and reinforces a diversity of possible syntactic interpretations. Joyce seems to allude to Beckett, creating a portmanteau word that melds ‘Beckett’ with ‘thicket’ (continuing the undergrowth metaphor), ‘thick’ (adding mental density to floral density)…. As a single word ‘Bethicket’ contains the confusion that its context suggests. On the one hand, ‘Bethicket me for a stump of a beech’ has the sound of a proverbial expletive that might mean something like ‘I’ll be damned’ or ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun.’….”
At the Oscars, 2009
Related material:Frame Tales and Dickung
