RubDub

"Many of the disputes in the Wake involve assaults on and defences of language.  The most important division is that between male, patriarchal language that is always seeking to impose order on diverse materials and female language that revels in heterogeneity and ridicules authority.  By transmuting the philosophical problems of historical (or any) writing into a gender division, Joyce finds a point of vantage that includes colonial oppression, the canonization of authority and the authorizing of canonicity, the relationship between fully formed language and the inchoate sounds from which it is derived and over which it is constantly reasserting itself.  Ultimately, he also finds here the comprehensive figure for self-division, for a broken world in which the masculine and the feminine are separated, the first made dominant over the second, with the consequent and subsequent neuroses, rebellions, maimings and nightmares.  Still, the Wake does not offer a reconciliation between masculine and feminine language or divisions.  Were there to be such, then (the implication would seem to be) there would no longer be history or narrative.  For then we would not have to suffer any longer the consequences of the fall into language.  We would be redeemed back to that original directness of knowledge that preceded language, the mark of our inescapable secondariness.  The secondariness of language is reproduced in every other form of secondariness that the world knows, most particularly the secondariness of female against male and thereafter all varieties of oppression of which this is the most basic and enduring."

From the Introduction to Finnegans Wake, page xvi.  Written by Seamus Deane.

Spend all day at work wondering what I was going to blog about.  Almost cut finger off cutting potatoes because I am preoccupied with blog.  Get home from work.  Decide what to blog.  Run upstairs to retrieve picture.  Run back down.  Scan both halves of picture.  Realize new computer does not have photoshop.  Run upstairs to retrieve USB stick.  Run back down stairs.  Dump photos onto USB stick.  Run upstairs to turn on old computer with Photoshop.  Knock over garbage can full of pencil shavings.  Retrieve vacuum to clean up mess.  Clean up mess.  Put vacuum away.  Struggle with ancient computer trying to insert USB stick in USB port on back of computer.  Knock Lava Lamp off table.  Somehow Lava Lamp does not break.  Pick up Lava Lamp.  Can't find the top piece of Lava Lamp.  The little hat thingy.  Desperately look for it.  Why it is so important to do so escapes me right now.  Locate Lava Lamp hat behind some junk.  Retrieve yard stick to gain access to Lava Lamp hat.  Retrieve Lava Lamp hat.  Calm down.  Photoshop both halves of picture together.  Poorly.  Dump onto USB stick.  Run downstairs to upload pictures.  Run back upstairs to retrieve forgotten USB stick.  Run downstairs.  Create perfect blog post.  Fall asleep exhausted and angry.

Just wanted to let all of you know the lengths I go to to bring you this blog.  All three of you.     

Bombay.  The 70's.  Photo from National Geographic.  Do not know what issue.  Sorry.  I spend a good part of my days cutting pictures from National Geographic.  And eating pickles.  Sorry about the weak photoshopping.  

 On my last trip to Paris I picked up this magazine in some store near the Picasso museum.  I wish I had bought more volumes.  They had piles and piles and piles of them.  The pictures are from inside.  As I don't understand French I have no idea what is going on, but I think it's better that way.  Do yourself a favour and go to Paris.  You will not be disappointed.  I approve of Paris.  But don't go to a bar and order a beer at the bar and then go sit at a table or you will be reprimanded.  Stupid Canadians.  Don't let that stop you though.  Viva la France!!

Sorry Michael.  He knows why. 

 Pretty much the best drawing I've ever done.  Maybe the best drawing ever in the history of the world.  It's on a piece of folded computer paper.  The best ones always are.