Episode 028: CSI: Dublin (123:11-125:23, end of Ch05)

August 13, 2026 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 028: CSI: DUBLIN

PAGE 123:11-125:23 | END OF CHAPTER 5 | 2026-08-13

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

[Music: Instrumental of “The Alphabet Song (Variation On)” with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series. Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 28, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 123 to 125 to conclude Chapter 5 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.
[Music: “Breakfast,” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]

Adam Seelig: Finnegans Wake is a production of One Little Goat Theatre Company. One Little Goat is filming and recording all 17 chapters (roughly 30 hours) of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake before live audiences in various locations, screening and releasing them along the way, with the aim of completing the entire book for its 90th birthday, May 4, 2029. One Little Goat Theatre Company is an official charity in Canada and the United States. To help us produce this first-of-its-kind filmed reading series — of which we’ve filmed 8 chapters so far, with 9 more to go — please visit OneLittleGoat.org to make a charitable donation. Your donation enables us to bring this production to audiences and helps support the outstanding artists who make it possible. To be the first to hear about our live tapings, events, and screenings, please join our mailing list, also at OneLittleGoat.org.
[Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: The popular TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has franchises in several cities, including CSI: New York and CSI: Miami. Now Prepare to add CSI: Dublin to your watchlist because in today’s concluding excerpt from Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake we open with a highly technical, microscopic, forensic analysis of The Letter on par with the police-procedural lab montages of CSI, for which the show is so famous (and so famously mocked). In lieu of CSI: Miami’s Horatio Caine and his laboratory of forensic scientists, today’s excerpt gives us the fictional critic Duff-Muggli and his ludicrous “dectroscophonious photosensition under suprasonic light control […] at a millicentime the microamp” (123:12-15). Duff-Muggli’s forensic examination of The Letter is not exactly helped by the psychosexual analysis of “Tung-Toyd” (123:20), suggesting Jung and Freud, also mentioned earlier in the chapter (Ep026), who may be as tongue-tied as Duff-Muggli is deaf-mute.

And yet we’re getting closer to solving the mystery at the heart of Chapter 5; that is, the mystery of who in fact wrote The Letter. “The unmistaken identity of the persons in the Tiberiast duplex came to light in the most devious of ways.” (123:30-31) Hold on: “persons” who wrote The Letter, plural; not “person” who wrote The Letter, singular? Let’s read on: “The original document was in what is known as Hanno O'Nonhanno's unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort.” (123:31-34) This is true. The Letter back on page 111, as we heard in our podcast episode about “The Letter from Boston” (Ep025), is indeed punctuationless, aside from the big brown tea stain at the end. And while it was written in what may appear like an unbreakable code or “unbrookable script”, we’re about to decode it by holding it up to light, in this case the light of a candle or “a lit rush” (123:34) — a ‘rushlight’ is an improvised candle made by dipping a rush in grease; it’s also older English slang for cheap liquor or moonshine.

So while the Wake’s techniques for analyzing The Letter are a century behind the fancy forensic lamps of CSI that find the invisible evidence of body fluids, hairs and fibers, holding The Letter up to a primitive light source still leads to a breakthrough in our investigation, revealing four holes “made by a pronged instrument.” (124:2-3) A four-pronged instrument: sounds like a fork. Perhaps the fork of a professor, “Brotfressor Prenderguest” (124:15), poking at the letter paper with his fork at the breakfast table. But the professor is a “deeply religious” man (124:12); he wouldn’t harm The Letter. So perhaps the four punctures are from the beak of Belinda the Hen who plucked out The Letter from the litter.

*The Professor at the Breakfast Table*, O.W.Holmes, 1903 (Fisher Library)

Spoiler alert: if you do not want the identity of The Letter-Writer revealed until the very last line of today’s excerpt, please jump ahead to Richard’s reading and then feel free to come back. For the rest of you who are fine to solve the mystery now or already know it, I’ll carry on.

The beginning and middle of Chapter 5 attribute The Letter to the Wake’s female protagonist, Anna Livia Plurabelle, a woman, wife of HCEarwick, mother of Shaun, Shem and Issy. The opening describes “her untitled mamafesta”, a mother-wife’s defense of her much maligned husband (104:4). The middle of Chapter 5, on page 111, gives us The Letter itself, albeit strangely unpunctuated and unsigned, and it too appears to be the product of a woman: it’s addressed to another woman named Maggie or Margaret; it includes details like “wedding cakes” that typically (and certainly last century) fall within a woman’s purview; and two pages later we hear commentary about what she writes, or “schwrites”, in The Letter, culminating in a 100-letter thunderword focused on Women and Literature. But now, at the end of Chapter 5, attributing The Letter to ALP seems increasingly doubtful. Our previous episode’s excerpt, for example, concluded by asking, provocatively, if “the vaulting feminine libido” of The Letter was perhaps “sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?” (123:8-10) And if so, perhaps that male is one of ALP’s sons: “Formelly confounded with amother.” (125:11-12) But that son couldn’t possibly be the do-gooder Shaun; it would have to be the good-for-nothing Shem: “a sigh for shyme (O, the petty-bonny rouge!)” (124:27-28) He sounds not only devious, but, in his rougey redness, devilish — precisely the kind of character capable of epistolary deception. No wonder The Letter wasn’t signed. It’s the work of a fraud, and Shem is far from faithful. As we’ll hear today: “he remains years most fainfully” (124:31-32).

Shem is “the Penman” behind The Letter, much to the disgust of the Wake, which can’t help but spit invective on him at mere mention of his name: “kak, pfooi, bosh” (125:22-23).

Thus The Letter of Chapter 5, ostensibly written by ALP in defense of HCE, is actually penned by their disreputable son, Shem. Our chapter, which began with an Eve in defense of Adam — “Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve” (104:1-2) — ultimately ends with Cain. (Not, mind you, Horatio Caine of CSI: Miami, but his biblical forebear.)

We’ve reached a turning point in our novel: the next two chapters, 6 and 7, will focus on the relationship and, in the spirit of Cain and Abel, conflict of brothers Shem and Shaun.

Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 123 line 11 to the end of page 125 for the conclusion of Chapter 5. The performance was filmed and recorded at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto on October 21st, 2024 with a live audience. We’ll open with a musical introduction, which I wrote for piano trio with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums. The title of this short piece is “Breakfast”.
[Music: “Breakfast,” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]

[Richard Harte reads Finnegans Wake 123:11-125:23]

[123] Duff-Muggli, who now may be quoted by very kind arrange-
ment (his dectroscophonious photosensition under suprasonic
light control may be logged for by our none too distant futures
as soon astone values can be turned out from Chromophilomos,
Limited at a millicentime the microamp), first called this kind of
paddygoeasy partnership the ulykkhean or tetrachiric or quad-
rumane or ducks and drakes or debts and dishes perplex (v. Some
Forestallings over that Studium of Sexophonologistic Schizophre-
nesis, vol. xxiv, pp. 2-555) after the wellinformed observation,
made miles apart from the Master by Tung-Toyd (cf. Later
Frustrations amengst the Neomugglian Teachings abaft the Semi-
unconscience, passim) that in the case of the littleknown periplic
bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched
mariner (trianforan deffwedoff our plumsucked pattern shape-
keeper) a Punic admiralty report, From MacPerson's Oshean
Round By the Tides of Jason's Cruise, had been cleverly capsized
and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedeker of the every-
tale-a-treat-in-itself variety which could hope satisfactorily to
tickle me gander as game as your goose.
The unmistaken identity of the persons in the Tiberiast du-
plex came to light in the most devious of ways. The original
document was in what is known as Hanno O'Nonhanno's un-
brookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctua-
tion of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this
new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent
query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out the piquant

[124] fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university
sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made
by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type,
were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please
stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, and
following up their one true clue, the circumflexuous wall of a
singleminded men's asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl
a ssan dspl itch ina, — Yard inquiries pointed out ——> that they
ad bîn "provoked" ay ∧ fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é's Brèak
— fast — table; ; acùtely profèššionally piquèd, to = introdùce a
notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ' ' fàç'e'] by pùnct! ingh oles
(sic) in iSpace?! Deeply religious by nature and position, and
warmly attached to Thee, and smearbread and better and Him
and newlaidills, it was rightly suspected that such ire could not
have been visited by him Brotfressor Prenderguest even under-
wittingly, upon the ancestral pneuma of one whom, with rheuma,
he venerated shamelessly at least once a week at Cockspur Com-
mon as his apple in his eye and her first boys' best friend and,
though plain English for a married lady misled heaps by the way,
yet when some peerer or peeress detected that the fourleaved
shamrock or quadrifoil jab was more recurrent wherever the
script was clear and the term terse and that these two were the
selfsame spots naturally selected for her perforations by Dame
Partlet on her dungheap, thinkers all put grown in waterung-
spillfull Pratiland only and a playful fowl and musical me and
not you in any case, two and two together, and, with a swarm
of bisses honeyhunting after, a sigh for shyme (O, the petty-
bonny rouge!) separated modest mouths. So be it. And it was.
The lettermaking of the explots of Fjorgn Camhelsson when he
was in the Kvinnes country with Soldru's men. With acknow-
ledgment of our fervour of the first instant he remains years most
fainfully. For postscrapt see spoils. Though not yet had the sailor
sipped that sup nor the humphar foamed to the fill. And fox and
geese still kept the peace around L'Auberge du Père Adam.
Small need after that, old Jeromesolem, old Huffsnuff, old
Andycox, old Olecasandrum, for quizzing your weekenders come

[125] to the R.Q. with: shoots off in a hiss, muddles up in a mussmass
and his whole's a dismantled noondrunkard's son. Howbeit we
heard not a son of sons to leave by him to oceanic society in his
old man without a thing in his ignorance, Tulko MacHooley.
And it was thus he was at every time, that son, and the other
time, the day was in it and after the morrow Diremood is the
name is on the writing chap of the psalter, the juxtajunctor of a
dearmate and he passing out of one desire into its fellow. The
daughters are after going and loojing for him, Torba's nice-
lookers of the fair neck. Wanted for millinary servance to
olderly's person by the Totty Askinses. Formelly confounded
with amother. Maybe growing a moustache, did you say, with
an adorable look of amuzement? And uses noclass billiardhalls
with an upandown ladder? Not Hans the Curier though had he
had have only had some little laughings and some less of cheeks
and were he not so warried by his bulb of persecussion he could
have, ay, and would have, as true as Essex bridge. And not Go-
pheph go gossip, I declare to man! Noe! To all's much relief
one's half hypothesis of that jabberjaw ape amok the showering
jestnuts of Bruisanose was hotly dropped and his room taken up
by that odious and still today insufficiently malestimated note-
snatcher (kak, pfooi, bosh and fiety, much earny, Gus, poteen?
Sez you!) Shem the Penman.
[End of excerpt]

Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading the concluding pages of Chapter 5 from Finnegans Wake, recorded live at the Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto on October 21st, 2024.

Join us for Episode 29 when Richard begins Chapter 6 of Finnegans Wake. This podcast series is taking a break between chapters to focus on the film production and editing of future chapters, so please note that the exact date of the next episode’s release is to be determined, and we’ll then resume our fortnightly podcast releases every other Thursday. In the meantime, to be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast?

[Music: “Closing Credits (Ch05),” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]
For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and the complete films of Chapters 1, 2 and 3 visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website. One Little Goat Theatre Company is a nonprofit, artist-driven, registered charity in the United States and Canada that depends on donations from individuals to make our productions, including this one, possible. If you’re able, please make a tax-deductible donation through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org. Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support! And thank you to the artists for this episode: Richard Harte; Sound by William Bembridge; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig; Music arranged and performed on the piano by me, with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums, recorded at Ghost Town Studio in Toronto. A big thanks to John Shoesmith, Special Collections Librarian, to David Fernández, Head of Rare Books and Special Collections, and to their colleagues at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, as well as to our wonderful live audience. Thank you to the team at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie. Thank you for listening!

[Music fades out] [End of Ep028]

Mentioned: CSI: Dublin, forensics of The Letter, Duff-Muggli, Jung and Freud, rushlight, four holes in The Letter “made by a pronged instrument”, fork, beak of the hen, The Letter as written by ALP (female), The Letter as forged by one of her sons (male), do-gooder Shaun vs. good-for-nothing Shem, Shem the Penman, ALP/Eve in defense of HCE/Adam, Shaun/Abel and Shem/Cain, turning point in novel, transition to relationship and conflict of brothers, synopsis.

Resources: Transcript for this episode, including the text of Finnegans Wake.
Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce: there are many free copies of FW to read online or download, e.g. finwake.com
James Joyce Digital Archive, “Chicken Guide” to Finnegans Wake provides a ‘plain English’ paraphrase of each chapter by Danis Rose.
Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Edmund Epstein, A Guide through Finnegans Wake. University Press of Florida, 2009.
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles, University of California Press, 1977.
John Gordon’s annotations on his Finnegans Wake blog.
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (4th edition). Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
Raphael Slepon, fweet.org
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Episode 027: The (Dirty) Book of Kells (119:10-123:10)

July 30, 2026 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 027: THE (DIRTY) BOOK OF KELLS

PAGE 119:10-123:10 | CHAPTER 5 | 2026-07-30

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

[Music: Instrumental of “The Alphabet Song (Variation On)” with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series. Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 27, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 119 to 123 from Chapter 5 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.

Will you be in Toronto on Tuesday, August 11th? If so, join us at the Winchester Street Theatre for a very special live taping of Book II Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake. For more details and to reserve a seat, please visit One Little Goat Theatre Company’s website at www.OneLittleGoat.org
[Music: “Breakfast,” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]

**Tunc page from *Book of Kells*. “*Tunc crucifixant cum eo duo latrones*” (“Then they crucified two thieves with him,” Matthew 27:38.)**

Adam Seelig: The Book of Kells is, with all due respect to the works of James Joyce, Ireland’s greatest literary treasure. An illuminated Celtic manuscript of the Gospels that dates back over 1,000 years, the Book of Kells was found, after being stolen and stripped of its gold-crusted case, in a pile of dirt. This medieval theft and discovery is recounted in the medieval Irish chronicle known as the Annals of Ulster, which describes the Book of Kells found “under a sod”, much like the Ardagh Chalice mentioned earlier in Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake (Ep025). Of course this is all highly reminiscent of The Letter at the heart of this chapter, found by Belinda the Hen in a heap of litter.

A hundred years ago, Sir Edward Sullivan published his scholarly paean to the magnificent Book of Kells (1914). Sullivan’s publication, which included photographic plates of the illuminated medieval manuscript, became one of James Joyce’s favourite books. As Joyce wrote to his friend Arthur Power, “In all the places I have been to, Rome, Zurich, Trieste, I have taken it about with me, and have pored over its workmanship for hours. It is the most purely Irish thing we have, and some of the big initial letters which swing right across a page have the essential quality of a chapter of Ulysses.” Never short on ambition, Joyce wanted Finnegans Wake to be his Book of Kells: stylistically singular and instantly recognizable by any page. As he wrote to Power, “Indeed, you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations [of the Book of Kells]. I would like it to be possible to pick up any page of my book and know at once what book it is.” (Ellmann 545)

In today’s excerpt, our littery letter, this incomplete missive discovered on a dirty tea-stained scrap of paper, this (if you’ll allow me a little Yiddish) this bisl of an epistle will receive the Book of Kells treatment à la Edward Sullivan. Here is Sir Edward’s full-throated appreciation for Ireland’s glorious manuscript:

**Sir Edward Sullivan’s intro to *Book of Kells* (Fisher Library, University of Toronto)**

Its weird and commanding beauty; its subdued and godless colouring; the baffling intricacy of its fearless designs; the clean, unwavering sweep of rounded spiral; the creeping undulations of serpentine forms that writhe in artistic profusion through the mazes of its decorations; the strong and legible minuscule of its text; the quaintness of its striking portraiture; the unwearied reverence and patient labour that brought it into being; all of which combined go to make up the Book of Kells, have raised this ancient Irish volume to a position of abiding preeminence among the illuminated manuscripts of the world.

This is the wondrous tone that the Wake will adopt, and of course parody, in today’s excerpt, which scrutinizes practically every letter in The Letter with tremendous enthusiasm. As the Sullivanesque analysis will urge us at one point, “look at this”! (120:9) It will also introduce all kinds of symbols and sigla to represent our protagonists, HCE and ALP, and their children and environment. So lively is this description of the various letters and sigla of The Letter that I think of today’s excerpt as a ‘dance of letters’.

Some of my favourite moments include ALP represented as a triangle or delta, a most fitting symbol for our riverrunning female protagonist; the letter “W” described scatologically as a seated tuches “floprightdown” (120:32); and the confusion of the letters “P” and “K,” resulting in “thence your pristopher polombos, hence our Kat Kresbyterians” (120:2) instead of Christopher Columbus and Pat Presbyterians.

**P/K (or P/Q) split in Celtic language**

This swap of letters “P” and “K” might at first appear simply playful—or perhaps I should say clayful—but as is always the case with the Wake, it points to so much more: in this case, the P/K split, also known as the P/Q split, in the history of the Celtic language. The Wake plays with this P/K motif throughout the novel, so I’ll take a moment to describe it. Roughly three thousand years ago, Celtic language pronunciations went in two directions: the Irish and Scots inclined toward “K” or “Q” or “hard C” enunciations, while the Welsh and Cornish took to “P” as their plosive of preference. This elocutionary difference can still be found today in, for example, traditional Celtic names. Where the Irish use “Mac” with a “hard C” to mean “son of” in a traditional surname like MacDonald or McDonnell (i.e. son of Donnell), the Welsh used “Map” with a “P” to signify “son of,” such that Map Rhys (i.e. son of Rhys), which evolved into “Ap Rhys,” which in turn evolved into today’s “Preece” and “Price.” (For those wanting to dive deeper into these linguistics, I’ll link in the podcast transcript to Brendan O Hehir’s book A Gaelic Lexicon for Finnegans Wake.)

And throughout this dance of letters we’ll hear some turns of phrase that match Sir Edward’s verbal felicity, my favourite in today’s excerpt being: “here keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again” (121:15).

The Wake’s analysis of The Letter goes on to describe “four shortened ampersands” (121:36-122:1), correlating to the four ampersands that indeed appear in The Letter back on page 111 (Ep025), and these four marks will transform briefly, surreally into a heated card game between ‘the four of them,’ those recurring old men we’ve encountered in previous chapters representing the four compass points of Ireland, with Belfast in the north, Cork in the south, Dublin east and Galway west.

We then return to The Letter, now compared explicitly to the Book of Kells, with specific reference to the Tunc page of the illuminated Celtic manuscript, of which I’ll post an image in the podcast transcript because some of the descriptions of The Letter could also apply to the Tunc page; look, for example, for the “three squads of candidates […] in their three ballotboxes” (122:26) on the Tunc page.

But “the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells” (122:22-23) also points to something darker lurking in The Letter, reminding us of the mystery that haunts Chapter 5 right up to its very end, i.e. who in fact wrote The Letter; who is behind it?

The Tunc page is named for the first and most prominent word on that particular manuscript page, which reads, in Latin, “Tunc crucifixant cum eo duo latrones”, “Then they crucified two thieves with him”, from Matthew 27:38, which some will recognize from the King James Bible — “Then were there two thieves crucified with [Jesus], one on the right hand, and another on the left.” — and others will know from St. Augustine’s “Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.” — an elegant formulation so admired by Samuel Beckett that it figures in a little play he wrote called Waiting for Godot. (No doubt Beckett in writing Godot was also thinking of his hero Joyce’s allusions to the Tunc page in the Wake.)

**“Christ and the Two Thieves Crucified” (bronze, multiple artists, 1570) (Metropolitan Museum of Art**)

Two thieves: one saved, one damned. So something sinister is at play in The Letter, and what ostensibly sounded like a full-throated, sunny appraisal of the tea-stained epistle turns out to contain plenty of shade. Keep an ear out, for example, for some of these words and phrases when you hear Richard reading today’s excerpt:

— “this, for instance, utterly unexpected sinistrogyric return to one peculiar sore point in the past” (120:27-28);
— “one of them as wrongheaded as his Claudian brother” (120:36-121:1);
— “skelterfugue” suggesting subterfuge (121:28);
— “the third person is the person darkly spoken of” (122:31);
— “imperfectible moral blindness” (122:35-36).

Negativity and suspicions have been creeping in all along, to the point where today’s excerpt will leave us hanging with doubts. Could it be that “a big thick dhee” (i.e. a man!) is behind The Letter (123:1-2)? (“a big thick dhee” brings to mind that Monty Python character in the Life of Brian known as Biggus Dickus.) Could it be that The Letter was written not by Anna Livia Plurabelle, a woman, but by, as the final four words of today’s excerpt suggest, “a meandering male fist?” (123:10)

Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 119 line 10 to page 123 line 10 of Chapter 5. The performance was filmed and recorded at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto on October 21st, 2024 with a live audience. And since today’s excerpt is so alphabetically lively, taking great pleasure in the very letters of The Letter, the brief opening music you’ll hear, which I wrote for piano trio with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums, offers a variation on the “ABC Song”.

[Music: “The Alphabet Song (Variation On),” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]
[Richard Harte reads Finnegans Wake 119:10-123:10]

[119] For, with that farmfrow's foul flair for that flayfell foxfetor,
(the calamite's columitas calling for calamitous calamitance) who
that scrutinising marvels at those indignant whiplooplashes; those
so prudently bolted or blocked rounds; the touching reminiscence
of an incompletet trail or dropped final; a round thousand whirli-
gig glorioles, prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights,
all tiberiously ambiembellishing the initials majuscule of Ear-
wicker: the meant to be baffling chrismon trilithon sign [E], finally
called after some his hes hecitency Hec, which, moved contra-
watchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller Δ, fontly
called following a certain change of state of grace of nature alp
or delta, when single, stands for or tautologically stands beside
the consort: (though for that matter, since we have heard from
Cathay cyrcles how the hen is not mirely a tick or two after the
first fifth fourth of the second eighth twelfth — siangchang
hongkong sansheneul — but yirely the other and thirtieth of the
ninth from the twentieth, our own vulgar 432 and 1132 irre-
spectively, why not take the former for a village inn, the latter
for an upsidown bridge, a multiplication marking for crossroads
ahead, which you like pothook for the family gibbet, their old
fourwheedler for the bucker's field, a tea anyway for a tryst
someday, and his onesidemissing for an allblind alley leading to
an Irish plot in the Champ de Mors, not?) the steady monologuy
of the interiors; the pardonable confusion for which some blame
the cudgel and more blame the soot but unthanks to which
the pees with their caps awry are quite as often as not taken
for kews with their tails in their or are quite as often as not

[120] taken for pews with their tails in their mouths, thence your
pristopher polombos, hence our Kat Kresbyterians; the curt
witty wotty dashes never quite just right at the trim trite
truth letter; the sudden spluttered petulance of some capItalIsed
mIddle; a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused
drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons: that ab-
surdly bullsfooted bee declaring with an even plainer dummp-
show than does the mute commoner with us how hard a thing it
is to mpe mporn a gentlerman: and look at this prepronominal
funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and pudden-
padded, very like a whale's egg farced with pemmican, as were it
sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a
night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering
from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepep-
percast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors,
omissions, repetitions and misalignments: that (probably local or
personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted ma-
jesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse: those super-
ciliouslooking crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there
and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens: and
the geegees too, jesuistically formed at first but afterwards genu-
flected aggrily toewards the occident: the Ostrogothic kako-
graphy affected for certain phrases of Etruscan stabletalk and, in
short, the learning betrayed at almost every line's end: the head-
strength (at least eleven men of thirtytwo palfrycraft) revealed
by a constant labour to make a ghimel pass through the eye of an
iota: this, for instance, utterly unexpected sinistrogyric return to
one peculiar sore point in the past; those throne open doubleyous
(of an early muddy terranean origin whether man chooses to
damn them agglutinatively loo — too — blue — face — ache or
illvoodawpeehole or, kants koorts, topplefouls) seated with such
floprightdown determination and reminding uus ineluctably of
nature at her naturalest while that fretful fidget eff, the hornful
digamma of your bornabarbar, rarely heard now save when falling
from the unfashionable lipsus of some hetarosexual (used always
in two boldfaced print types — one of them as wrongheaded as

[121] his Claudian brother, is it worth while interrupting to say? —
throughout the papyrus as the revise mark) stalks all over the
page, broods [F] sensationseeking an idea, amid the verbiage,
gaunt, stands dejectedly in the diapered window margin, with
its basque of bayleaves all aflutter about its forksfrogs, paces
with a frown, jerking to and fro, flinging phrases here, there, or
returns inhibited, with some half-halted suggestion, [F], dragging
its shoestring; the curious warning sign before our protoparent's
ipsissima verba (a very pure nondescript, by the way, sometimes
a palmtailed otter, more often the arbutus fruitflowerleaf of the
cainapple) which paleographers call a leak in the thatch or the
aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat, indicating that the
words which follow may be taken in any order desired, hole of
Aran man the hat through the whispering his ho (here keen
again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin
again); those haughtypitched disdotted aiches easily of the rariest
inasdroll as most of the jaywalking eyes we do plough into halve,
unconnected, principial, medial or final, always jims in the jam,
sahib, as pipless as threadworms: the innocent exhibitionism of
those frank yet capricious underlinings: that strange exotic serpen-
tine, since so properly banished from our scripture, about as freak-
wing a wetterhand now as to see a rightheaded ladywhite don a
corkhorse, which, in its invincible insolence ever longer more and
of more morosity, seems to uncoil spirally and swell lacertinelazily
before our eyes under pressure of the writer's hand; the ungainly
musicianlessness so painted in sculpting selfsounder ah ha as
blackartful as a podatus and dumbfounder oh ho oaproariose as
ten canons in skelterfugue: the studious omission of year number
and era name from the date, the one and only time when our
copyist seems at least to have grasped the beauty of restraint; the
lubricitous conjugation of the last with the first: the gipsy mat-
ing of a grand stylish gravedigging with secondbest buns (an in-
terpolation: these munchables occur only in the Bootherbrowth
family of MSS., Bb — Cod IV, Pap II, Brek XI, Lun III, Dinn
XVII, Sup XXX, Fullup M D C X C: the scholiast has hungrily
misheard a deadman's toller as a muffinbell): the four shortened

[122] ampersands under which we can glypse at and feel for ourselves
across all those rushyears the warm soft short pants of the quick-
scribbler: the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accu-
sative hole in which it ends itself; the aphasia of that heroic agony
of recalling a once loved number leading slip by slipper to a
general amnesia of misnomering one's own: next those ars, rrrr!
those ars all bellical, the highpriest's hieroglyph of kettletom and
oddsbones, wrasted redhandedly from our hallowed rubric prayer
for truce with booty, O'Remus pro Romulo, and rudely from the
fane's pinnacle tossed down by porter to within an aim's ace of
their quatrain of rubyjets among Those Who arse without the
Temple nor since Roe's Distillery burn'd have quaff'd Night's
firefill'd Cup But jig jog jug as Day the Dicebox Throws, whang,
loyal six I lead, out wi'yer heart's bluid, blast ye, and there she's
for you, sir, whang her, the fine ooman, rouge to her lobster
locks, the rossy, whang, God and O'Mara has it with his ruddy
old Villain Rufus, wait, whang, God and you're another he
hasn't for there's my spoil five of spuds's trumps, whang, whack
on his pigsking's Kisser for him, K.M. O'Mara where are you?;
then (coming over to the left aisle corner down) the cruciform
postscript from which three basia or shorter and smaller oscula
have been overcarefully scraped away, plainly inspiring the tene-
brous Tunc page of the Book of Kells (and then it need not be
lost sight of that there are exactly three squads of candidates for
the crucian rose awaiting their turn in the marginal panels of
Columkiller, chugged in their three ballotboxes, then set apart for
such hanging committees, where two was enough for anyone,
starting with old Matthew himself, as he with great distinction
said then just as since then people speaking have fallen into the
custom, when speaking to a person, of saying two is company
when the third person is the person darkly spoken of, and then
that last labiolingual basium might be read as a suavium if who-
ever the embracer then was wrote with a tongue in his (or per-
haps her) cheek as the case may have been then) and the fatal
droopadwindle slope of the blamed scrawl, a sure sign of imper-
fectible moral blindness; the toomuchness, the fartoomanyness

[123] of all those fourlegged ems: and why spell dear god with a big
thick dhee (why, O why, O why?): the cut and dry aks and wise
form of the semifinal; and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly, but
at least, thank Maurice, lastly when all is zed and done, the pene-
lopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than
seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso —
who thus at all this marvelling but will press on hotly to see the
vaulting feminine libido of those interbranching ogham sex up-
andinsweeps sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the
uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?
[End of excerpt]

Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading pages 119 to 123 from Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake, recorded live at the Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto on October 21st, 2024. Join us for Episode 28 in a fortnight for the conclusion of Chapter 5. In the meantime, to be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast?
[Music: “Closing Credits (Ch05),” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]

For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and the complete films of Chapters 1, 2 and 3 visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website. One Little Goat Theatre Company is a nonprofit, artist-driven, registered charity in the United States and Canada that depends on donations from individuals to make our productions, including this one, possible. If you’re able, please make a tax-deductible donation through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org. Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support! And thank you to the artists for this episode: Richard Harte; Sound by William Bembridge; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig; Music arranged and performed on the piano by me, with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums, recorded at Ghost Town Studio in Toronto. A big thanks to John Shoesmith, Special Collections Librarian, to David Fernández, Head of Rare Books and Special Collections, and to their colleagues at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, as well as to our wonderful live audience. Thank you to the team at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie. Thank you for listening!

[Music fades out] [End of Ep027]

Mentioned: Book of Kells, literary Celtic treasure, found in dirt, Sir Edward Sullivan, Joyce admiring Book of Kells, dance of the letters, the letters of The Letter, symbols and sigla, P/K or P/Q split in Celtic language (Welsh/Irish), ‘the four of them,’ the Tunc page in Book of Kells, Jesus and two thieves, St. Augustine, Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Monty Python, suspicions about who wrote the letter, written by woman or man?, synopsis.

Cited: Sir Edward Sullivan. The Book of Kells. London, The Studio, 1914.
Brendan O Hehir. A Gaelic Lexicon for Finnegans Wake. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967.

Episode 026: Spill the Tea, Study in Brown (114:21-119:9)

July 16, 2026 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 026: SPILL THE TEA, STUDY IN BROWN

PAGE 114:21-119:9 | CHAPTER 5 | 2026-07-16

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

[Music: Instrumental of “The Alphabet Song (Variation On)” with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series. Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 26, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 114 to 119 from Chapter 5 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.

Will you be in Toronto on Tuesday, August 11th? If so, join us at the Winchester Street Theatre for a very special live taping of Book II Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake. For more details and to reserve a seat, please email One Little Goat Theatre Company at onelittlegoattc@gmail.com (that’s one little goat t-for-for-theatre c-for-company @gmail.com). You can also find the email address on One Little Goat’s website, www.OneLittleGoat.org.
[Music: “Breakfast,” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]

Adam Seelig: Today’s excerpt from Chapter 5 takes a closer look at that letter scrap found by Belinda the Hen in a heap of litter — the littery letter, as I’ve been calling it, which, if worthy of being called literature, is worthy of analysis. And that analysis, true to the Wake’s multifarious dream language, will be kaleidoscopic, offering us several lenses through which to view The Letter: a Freudian lens, a Marxist one, a Political one, the kinds of theoretical frameworks that many a university student has employed. So for all the art incorporated into Finnegans Wake, the novel now draws on what might be the highest art of them all: the art of bullshitting. Okay, not exactly. If bullshitting is the art of deploying sophisticated language with only a tenuous connection to the truth, that doesn’t quite apply to today’s reading, because, while there may be plenty of magnificent, comical bullshit about The Letter in what you’re about to hear, the voice producing the analysis, the energy driving it is, to my ear, sincere. It truly wants to know and understand everything there is to know and understand about The Letter — the Who-What-Why-When-and-How of it.

We begin with a closer look at the large tea stain at the end of The Letter that serves as a kind of ‘period’ in the otherwise ‘punctuationless’ missive: “The teatimestained terminal […] is a cosy little brown study all to oneself and, whether it be thumb-print, mademark or just a poor trait of the artless, its importance in establishing the identities in the writer complexus…” (114:29-33). What we have here is a study in brown (the title, incidentally, of a great jazz album by Clifford Brown and Max Roach), or a brown study, that older expression for brooding, all in this case stemming—or spouting, or brewing, if you will—from spilled tea.

Now I know the following, far more recent expression postdates Finnegans Wake by a lot, but to “spill the tea” in today’s parlance is, in the definition of UrbanDictionary.com, “when one tells an especially juicy bit of gossip,” with “tea” defined as “the best kind of gossip, typically shared between friends. it’s a bonding tool for people of all ages. tea is usually about someone you know, but can also extend to celebrities random internet scandals, etc.” If in RuPaul’s Drag Race (the TV show that popularized ‘tea’ as ‘gossip’) the expression “all tea, all shade” signifies brutal honesty, then the Wake’s “all tea, all brown” stain that terminates The Letter represents deeply absorbing gossip. It’s also, coming back to the text, “importan[t] in establishing the identities in the writer complexus,” i.e. this study in brown, this tea stain must tell us something about the writer behind The Letter, a whodunnit mystery, or more precisely, a whowroteit mystery that haunts this chapter right up to the very end.

**“Freud and Jung Split Over Differences,” Corey Mohler,** **ExistentialComics.com**

The text then offers us “a word of warning” that adult content lies ahead, which is well warranted as the Wake is about to psychoanalyze The Letter, with a nudge and wink to Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, those sexually obsessed founding fathers of the field: “grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on 'alices, when they were yung and easily freudened” (115:21-23). The neurotic and erotic are never far apart. While we’re in this psychosexual zone, Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, makes a brief cameo when his Alice from Alice in Wonderland merges with that psychoanalytic watchword, Analysis. And Dodgson’s “camera” is also mentioned soon after, a reminder of his hobby of photographing children in the nude (Ep008 & Ep012), a subject about which plenty of conjectural, psychoanalytic tea has been spilled in the century since.

**Robert Rauschenberg, “Monogram” (1955-1959)**

Thus psychoanalysis spills into salaciousness. This kind of overly sexualized reading of a text reminds me of artist Robert Rauschenberg’s quip about art critics’ overly sexualized interpretations of his famous Combine “Monogram,” a sculpture of a stuffed goat’s head sticking out of a rubber tire. “Do you know that some people still say that tire is a sexual symbol?” Rauschenberg once mused incredulously. “I don't know how anyone could ever cross the street if they feel that way about tires!” Rauschenberg’s goat might have horns, but it need not be horny. As Father Freud himself once quipped, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. So too The Letter may not be as titillating as all the psychobabble suggests.

**“The Germans Play Monopoly,” Corey Mohler,** **ExistentialComics.com**

Then it’s on to a Marxist reading of the text. Remember how The Letter from Boston, heard in the previous episode (Ep025), is addressed to Maggie, i.e. Margaret, and mentions wedding cakes and offers thanks at one point? Well here’s how the Wake views these details through a Marxist lens: “Margaret is the social revolution while cakes mean the party funds and dear thank you signifies national gratitude.” (116:8-10) As so often happens with overtly political readings, it’s reductive.

Maybe then an expansive view of The Letter will suit us better, treating it as operatic, with a brief appearance by those inspirational lovers, Tristan and Isolde. The so-called high art of their Wagnerian melodies, however, quickly drops to the low art of doggerel — the kind of high-to-low movement that drives so much of Finnegans Wake — leading us from an operatic aria to a silly circular song about another Finnegan:

There was an old man named Michael Finnegan
He had whiskers on his chinnegan
The wind came along and blew them in again
Poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again
There was an old man name Michael Finnegan…

Ultimately, regardless of the theoretical framework applied to The Letter, be it Freudian, Marxist, or even Operatic, someone must have written it. This question about the letter-writer’s identity comes up earlier in Chapter 5, as you might recall, when a no-nonsense heckler asks, “who […] wrote the durn thing anyhow?” (107:36-108:1) (Ep023) Now we receive the outlines of an answer, however vague — as the text puts it, “Anyhow, somehow and somewhere, […] somebody […] wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down, and there you are, full stop.” (118:11-14) The “full stop” here is comically emphatic given that The Letter bears nary a period, aside from the now famous brown splotch of tea at the end, if we choose to read it as punctuation.

So our whodunnit/whowroteit hasn’t been solved. Yet, the text urges us, we mustn’t impatiently dismiss it as some nonsensical “riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings” (118:29-30). Let’s remain grateful that we at least have some part of The Letter in our possession, even if just a fragment, considering the difficult, dirt-filled journey it’s been through: “we ought really to rest thankful that at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves” (118:31-33). And let’s be sure to keep it close and remain optimistic that, in time, we’re bound to reveal the identity of who wrote it; or in the pleading words of the Wake, we must “cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy […] things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour” (119:3-6).

And now for the next quarrel, or quarter, of an hour, it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 114 line 21 to 119 line 9 of Chapter 5. The performance was filmed and recorded at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto on October 21st, 2024 with a live audience.

Today’s excerpt opens with music I wrote for piano trio with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums. With its languid haze of overlapping time signatures, the interlude pays homage to the dream language and world of the Wake.
[Music: “Freud (Ch05),” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]
[Richard Harte reads Finnegans Wake 114:21-119:9]

[114] Another point, in addition to the original sand, pounce pow-
der, drunkard paper or soft rag used (any vet or inhanger in
ous sot's social can see the seen for seemself, a wee ftofty od
room, the cheery spluttered on the one karrig, a darka disheen
of voos from Dalbania, any gotsquantity of racky, a portogal
and some buk setting out on the sofer, you remember the
sort of softball sucker motru used to tell us when we were all
biribiyas or nippies and messas) it has acquired accretions of
terricious matter whilst loitering in the past. The teatimestained
terminal (say not the tag, mummer, or our show's a failure!) is a
cosy little brown study all to oneself and, whether it be thumb-
print, mademark or just a poor trait of the artless, its importance
in establishing the identities in the writer complexus (for if the
hand was one, the minds of active and agitated were more than
so) will be best appreciated by never forgetting that both before
and after the battle of the Boyne it was a habit not to sign letters

[115] always. Tip. And it is surely a lesser ignorance to write a word
with every consonant too few than to add all too many. The
end? Say it with missiles then and thus arabesque the page. You
have your cup of scalding Souchong, your taper's waxen drop,
your cat's paw, the clove or coffinnail you chewed or champed
as you worded it, your lark in clear air. So why, pray, sign any-
thing as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a
perfect signature of its own? A true friend is known much more
easily, and better into the bargain, by his personal touch, habits
of full or undress, movements, response to appeals for charity
than by his footwear, say. And, speaking anent Tiberias and other
incestuish salacities among gerontophils, a word of warning
about the tenderloined passion hinted at. Some softnosed per-
user might mayhem take it up erogenously as the usual case of
spoons, prostituta in herba plus dinky pinks deliberatively summer-
saulting off her bisexycle, at the main entrance of curate's per-
petual soutane suit with her one to see and awoh! who picks her
up as gingerly as any balmbearer would to feel whereupon the
virgin was most hurt and nicely asking: whyre have you been so
grace a mauling and where were you chaste me child? Be who,
farther potential? and so wider but we grisly old Sykos who have
done our unsmiling bit on 'alices, when they were yung and
easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room and
what oracular comepression we have had apply to them! could
(did we care to sell our feebought silence in camera) tell our very
moistnostrilled one that father in such virgated contexts is not
always that undemonstrative relative (often held up to our con-
tumacy) who settles our hashbill for us and what an innocent all-
abroad's adverb such as Michaelly looks like can be suggestive
of under the pudendascope and, finally, what a neurasthene nym-
pholept, endocrine-pineal typus, of inverted parentage with a
prepossessing drauma present in her past and a priapic urge for
congress with agnates before cognates fundamentally is feeling
for under her lubricitous meiosis when she refers with liking to
some feeler she fancie's face. And Mm. We could. Yet what need
to say? 'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry, in

[116] affect, as singsing so Salaman susuing to swittvitles while as un-
bluffingly blurtubruskblunt as an Esra, the cat, the cat's meeter,
the meeter's cat's wife, the meeter's cat's wife's half better, the
meeter's cat's wife's half better's meeter, and so back to our
horses, for we also know, what we have perused from the pages
of I Was A Gemral, that Showting up of Bulsklivism by 'Schot-
tenboum', that Father Michael about this red time of the white
terror equals the old regime and Margaret is the social revolution
while cakes mean the party funds and dear thank you signifies
national gratitude. In fine, we have heard, as it happened, of
Spartacus intercellular. We are not corknered yet, dead hand!
We can recall, with voluntears, the froggy jew, and sweeter far
'twere now westhinks in Dumbil's fair city ere one more year is
o'er. We tourned our coasts to the good gay tunes. When from
down swords the sea merged the oldowth guns and answer made
the bold O' Dwyer. But. Est modest in verbos. Let a prostitute
be whoso stands before a door and winks or parks herself in the
fornix near a makeussin wall (sinsin! sinsin!) and the curate one
who brings strong waters (gingin! gingin!), but also, and dinna
forget, that there is many asleeps between someathome's first
and moreinausland's last and that the beautiful presence of wait-
ing kates will until life's (!) be more than enough to make any
milkmike in the language of sweet tarts punch hell's hate into his
twin nicky and that Maggy's tea, or your majesty, if heard as a
boost from a born gentleman is (?). For if the lingo gasped between
kicksheets, however basically English, were to be preached from
the mouths of wickerchurchwardens and metaphysicians in the
row and advokaatoes, allvoyous, demivoyelles, languoaths, les-
biels, dentelles, gutterhowls and furtz, where would their prac-
tice be or where the human race itself were the Pythagorean ses-
quipedalia of the panepistemion, however apically Volapucky,
grunted and gromwelled, ichabod, habakuk, opanoff, uggamyg,
hapaxle, gomenon, ppppfff, over country stiles, behind slated
dwellinghouses, down blind lanes, or, when all fruit fails, under
some sacking left on a coarse cart?
So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be: till wears and tears and

[117] ages. Thief us the night, steal we the air, shawl thiner liefest,
mine! Here, Ohere, insult the fair! Traitor, bad hearer, brave!
The lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, ever-
flowing on the times. Feueragusaria iordenwater; now godsun
shine on menday's daughter; a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad
wake, tell hell's well; such is manowife's lot of lose and win again,
like he's gruen quhiskers on who's chin again, she plucketed them
out but they grown in again. So what are you going to do about
it? O dear!
If juness she saved! Ah ho! And if yulone he pouved! The ol-
old stoliolum! From quiqui quinet to michemiche chelet and a
jambebatiste to a brulobrulo! It is told in sounds in utter that, in
signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary
neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a
con's cubane, a pro's tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue
athall. Since nozzy Nanette tripped palmyways with Highho
Harry there's a spurtfire turf a'kind o'kindling when oft as the
souffsouff blows her peaties up and a claypot wet for thee, my
Sitys, and talkatalka tell Tibbs has eve: and whathough (revilous
life proving aye the death of ronaldses when winpower wine has
bucked the kick on poor won man) billiousness has been billious-
ness during milliums of millenions and our mixed racings have
been giving two hoots or three jeers for the grape, vine and brew
and Pieter's in Nieuw Amsteldam and Paoli's where the poules
go and rum smelt his end for him and he dined off sooth ameri-
can (it would give one the frier even were one a normal Kettle-
licker) this oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their
marryings and their buryings and their natural selections has
combled tumbled down to us fersch and made-at-all-hours like
an ould cup on tay. As I was hottin me souser. Haha! And as
you was caldin your dutchy hovel. Hoho! She tole the tail or
her toon. Huhu!
Now, kapnimancy and infusionism may both fit as tight as
two trivets but while we in our wee free state, holding to that
prestatute in our charter, may have our irremovable doubts as
to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in

[118] the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far de-
ciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily indepen-
dence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine author-
ship and holusbolus authoritativeness. And let us bringtheecease
to beakerings on that clink, olmond bottler! On the face of it,
to volt back to our desultory horses, and for your roughshod
mind, bafflelost bull, the affair is a thing once for all done and
there you are somewhere and finished in a certain time, be it a
day or a year or even supposing, it should eventually turn out
to be a serial number of goodness gracious alone knows how
many days or years. Anyhow, somehow and somewhere, before
the bookflood or after her ebb, somebody mentioned by name in
his telephone directory, Coccolanius or Gallotaurus, wrote it,
wrote it all, wrote it all down, and there you are, full stop. O,
undoubtedly yes, and very potably so, but one who deeper thinks
will always bear in the baccbuccus of his mind that this down-
right there you are and there it is is only all in his eye. Why?
Because, Soferim Bebel, if it goes to that, (and dormerwindow
gossip will cry it from the housetops no surelier than the writing
on the wall will hue it to the mod of men that mote in the main
street) every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle
anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving
and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhorn
(possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually
more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollabora-
tors, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently
pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable
scriptsigns. No, so holp me Petault, it is not a miseffectual why-
acinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops
and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed:
it only looks as like it as damn it; and, sure, we ought really to
rest thankful that at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning we
have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show
for ourselves, tare it or leaf it, (and we are lufted to ourselves as
the soulfisher when he led the cat out of the bout) after all that
we lost and plundered of it even to the hidmost coignings of the

[119] earth and all it has gone through and by all means, after a good
ground kiss to Terracussa and for wars luck our lefftoff's flung
over our home homoplate, cling to it as with drowning hands,
hoping against hope all the while that, by the light of philo-
phosy, (and may she never folsage us!) things will begin to clear
up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour
and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs,
as they ought to categorically, as, stricly between ourselves, there
is a limit to all things so this will never do.

[End of excerpt]
Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading pages 114 to 119 from Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake, recorded live at the Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto on October 21st, 2024. Join us for Episode 27 in a fortnight for Richard Harte’s continuation of Chapter 5. In the meantime, to be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast?
[Music: “Closing Credits (Ch05),” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]

For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and the complete films of Chapters 1, 2 and 3 visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website. One Little Goat Theatre Company is a nonprofit, artist-driven, registered charity in the United States and Canada that depends on donations from individuals to make our productions, including this one, possible. If you’re able, please make a tax-deductible donation through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support! And thank you to the artists for this episode: Richard Harte; Sound by William Bembridge; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig; Music arranged and performed on the piano by me, with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums, recorded at Ghost Town Studio in Toronto. A big thanks to John Shoesmith, Special Collections Librarian, to David Fernández, Head of Rare Books and Special Collections, and to their colleagues at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, as well as to our wonderful live audience. Thank you to the team at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie. Thank you for listening!
[Music fades out] [End of Ep026]

Mentioned: Littery letter, Freudian and Marxist interpretations of The Letter, art of bullshitting, tea stain, study in brown, “spill the tea,” tea as gossip, RuPaul’s Drag Race, whodunnit/whowroteit mystery, psychoanalysis, Jung, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, psychosexual readings, Robert Rauschenberg “Monogram,” opera, Tristan and Isolde, Michael Finnegan folk song, “cling to” The Letter, synopsis.

Cited: “Rauschenberg’s Cultural Canvas,” by Hank Burchard, Washington Post, 1991-05-12.

Episode 025: Letter from Boston, Thunderword #5 (109:1-114:20)

July 2, 2026 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 025:
Letter from boston, thunderword #5

PAGE 109:1-114:20 | CHAPTER 5 | 2026-07-02

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

[Music: Instrumental of “The Alphabet Song (Variation On)” with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series. Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 25, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 109 to 114 from Chapter 5 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear. This episode is releasing on July the 2nd of 2026, so I’d like to wish all the Canadian listeners out there a Happy belated Canada Day; and to the Americans, a Happy early Fourth of July.
[Music: “Breakfast,” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]

Adam Seelig: Boston, Massachusetts is the birthplace of the Irish American folk song that gives Finnegans Wake its title. It’s also the origin of the letter at the heart of Chapter 5 and of today’s excerpt — the letter written by ALP that will, she hopes, clear the name of her publicly maligned spouse, HCE. But was it in fact written by ALP? This mystery will continue to haunt Chapter 5 right up to the chapter’s very last line.

Today’s excerpt begins by focusing on The Envelope of The Letter, asking us if anyone has ever “looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope?” Well if you haven’t, you’re about to, because, as the text tells us, an envelope is to a letter what underwear is to the naked body. It’s far more suggestive than you may have thought.

**Ardagh Chalice, 8th Century CE (National Museum of Ireland**)

We then return to our trusted hen, Belinda, who has pecked and picked out The Letter from a dump of litter; a littery letter that might even hold up as literature. Remember (and if you don’t, Finnegans Wake now reminds us), some of Ireland’s greatest treasures were discovered in even muckier contexts, like the Ardagh Chalice, the 1,100-year-old gold-silver-bronze-brass-and-pewter cup discovered accidentally in 1868 by two boys, Jim Quin and Paddy Flanagan, who were simply digging in the dirt for potatoes. So too the Book of Kells, Ireland’s extraordinary literary treasure, was discovered a thousand years ago hidden under — you guessed it — a pile of dirt. The Book of Kells will come up later in this chapter in more detail, and I’ve posted in the transcript for this podcast episode an image of the Ardagh Chalice; the real thing is on display at the National Museum of Ireland.

Now, on page 111, we get to hear The Letter itself. Like most letters, it was mailed from somewhere; in this case, “Boston (Mass.)”. Like most letters, it is dated; in this case, “the last of the first,” or the last day of the first month, i.e. the 31st of January. And like most letters, it begins with the word “Dear”. But who is the addressee? Here’s where the dream language of the Wake, true to form, becomes playfully elusive: “Dear whom it proceded to mention”. Based on these first words, the addressee appears to be nameless. But the very next word is the name “Maggy”. “Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy”. So is the letter written to “Maggy”? Well, the very next words give us: “Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome's health well…” etc.

If The Letter had any commas, we could have determined to whom it’s addressed. But as it flows punctuationlessly, we can only guess at where its first comma might have gone. Was ALP’s intention — if indeed ALP wrote the letter — was her intention?:
“Dear whom it proceded to mention [COMMA,] Maggy well & allathome's health well…” etc.
Or was the intention?:
“Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy [COMMA,] well & allathome's health well…” etc.

Without that vital comma, the Wake, always open to possibilities, ever rich in ambiguity, keeps its options open. Here’s a quick preview of Richard Harte setting up and reading The Letter in today’s excerpt:

…a goodish-sized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome's health well only the hate turned the mild on the van Houtens and the general's elections with a lovely face of some born gentleman with a beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear thankyou Chriesty and with grand funferall of poor Father Michael… (111:8-15)

I’ll save the rest so you can hear it all in context, but what you can probably already gather from this sample is that The Letter — perhaps reflecting the pile of litter in which Belinda the Hen found it — is a jumble of epistolary tropes, including news from home with reports on the weather, people’s health, current events, a wedding, a funeral (or in the language of the Wake, a “funferall”, echoing Tim Finnegan’s funeral in the Irish American folk song, “Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake”). For me, The Letter is an auditory equivalent of the cubist paintings and collages of Picasso and Braque, especially those that include scattered snippets of newspaper text (I’ll post some of these images in the podcast transcript). Picasso and Braque’s cubist works never give us a whole, autonomous story from Le Journal, but they certainly convey the experience of taking in the newspaper in bits and pieces. Similarly, The Letter of the Wake may not give us a whole, autonomous story from Boston, but it certainly conveys, through collage, the personal experience of writing and receiving news from Irish America. Collage, cubism, bricolage, composite — there are numerous ways to describe the style of The Letter, but perhaps pastiche comes closest, because Joyce felt it fitting once in his own personal correspondence (which, perhaps disappointingly, includes proper punctuation) to describe himself as a ‘cut-and-paste’ author: “I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description.” (Ellmann 626)

Pablo Picasso La bouteille de Suze (Bottle of Suze) 1912 lr.jpeg

Braque bottle glass newspaper 1914 lr.jpeg

Above, clockwise from top left: Pablo Picasso “La bouteille de Suze” (1912); “Siphon, Glass, Newspaper, and Violin (1912); Georges Braque, “Verres et bouteilles (Fourrures)” (1914); “Bottle, Glass, Newspaper” (1914).

And while Picasso and Braque’s works often picture a bottle of wine or beer near their newspapers, the Wake prefers tea, choosing to put it on the very letter itself — quite literally, the only punctuation mark in The Letter is at the end, where, in lieu of a conventional period, we find a big tea stain, or in the language of the Wake, a “largelooking tache of tch. The stain, and that a teastain…”

For all my comparisons of The Letter to cubism, the Wake itself, in the next paragraph, likens it to viewing a photograph of a horse whose negative melted while under development. Blurry, in other words, and hard to make out, likely because of the time The Letter spent buried under sod.

We’re then treated to a brief cameo by the recurring character, Kate, who, as HCE and ALP’s charwoman, is well accustomed to dealing with muck. Kate made her first of many appearances back in Chapter 1 as the mock tour guide of the Museyroom (Ep003), and you’ll quickly recognize her in today’s excerpt when you hear her single-syllable signature, “Tip” (112:2), a word that also resonates with the pile of trash in which The Letter turned up.

**Barack Obama (right) endorsing Kamala Harris for President in 2024**

The following paragraph opens with a short, rousing sentence: “Lead, kindly fowl!” and goes on to champion womankind, reminding us that women have always led the way for men. Coincidentally, 10 days before we filmed and recorded this reading of Chapter 5 back in October of 2024, former American President Barack Obama, during the fierce presidential election between Donald Trump (a man) and Kamala Harris (a woman), urged black American males to vote for Harris in a way that meshed perfectly with this paragraph in the Wake. As Obama put it, “Women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time. When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting.” Sounds a lot like ALP coming to HCE’s defence.

The next paragraph focuses on ALP’s writing of her letter, telling us repeatedly about what “schwrites” (113), or ‘what she writes’. And this epistolary paragraph includes the fifth of the Wake’s 10 thunderwords — those extraordinary 100-letter words comprised of multilingual phonemes. But this thunderword differs from the others in two significant ways.

(1) Unlike the previous four thunderwords, this one occurs not at the end of the paragraph as an emphatic and dramatic exclamation, but in the middle as part of the paragraph’s ongoing flow. You almost wouldn’t notice it’s a thunderword, so little attention does it call to itself. In this sense, it draws more on ALP’s work behind-the-scenes than on HCE’s all too publicized activities. And by not ending the paragraph, as the previous thunderwords did, this very different thunderword draws on ALP’s continuously flowing nature, her riverrunning character.

(2) The previous thunderwords centred on one word or concept and mashed together various polylingual phonemes that related to it. Thunderwords 1 & 2 are comprised of words and phonemes meaning “thunder”. Thunderwords 3 & 4 mostly centre on words and phonemes for “shit” and “whore”, respectively. Today’s thunderword, on the other hand, Thunderword #5, seems more narrative than conceptual, more open to interpretation than singularly focused, more out-for-a-walk than rooted-in-place, more rolling, gentle, spread out thunder (if you will) than sharp, shocking crack.

Let’s take a look at it — but first, since my tongue gets too twisted, here’s a preview of Richard Harte reading it from today’s excerpt:

Thingcrooklyexineverypasturesixdixlikencehimaroundhersthemaggerbykinkinkankanwithdownmindlookingated. (113:9-11)

**“…downmindlookingated” — Hieronymus Bosch, left panel of “Haywain Triptych” (1515)**

As with everything in Finnegans Wake, there are many ways to interpret this thunderword. For example, Women and Literature are two themes that emerge here, especially in light of this paragraph’s recurring motif, she writes, or “schwrites”, i.e. She, for Women; and Writes, for Literature.

For women, we can tease out phonemes and words like “hin” for hen; “eve” for womankind’s Biblical forebear; “hers”; “magger” for Maggie; “kankan” for the energetic female dance.

For literature, we can tease out “ingcr” for ink; “crookly” for the Norwegian trykke, meaning print; “exi” for essay; “past” for post, i.e. mailing letters; “sthem” for Shem the Penman, ALP’s writer son, whom we’ll see more of as the Wake continues; “magger” for magazine; “inkink” for, well, ink and more ink; “loo” for lu, which is French for reading; “ated” for edit. (And I want to give a shoutout for these literary interpretations to The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake by son of Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, whose own son, incidentally, attended the reading you’re about to hear.)

**“…downmindlookingated” — Masaccio, from “The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” fresco (1425)**

In this female epistolary thunderword I also see elements of Eve and Adam, whom we met in the opening line of Finnegans Wake, and the sneaky serpent, to whom we owe humanity’s loss of paradise, our fall, our original sin of sex. Through this lens of ALP and HCE as our imperfect Biblical ancestors Eve and Adam, we can tease out “Thingcrooklyex” for the crooked, sexual snake; “eve” for Eve, naturally; “rypast” for Eve’s first repast, i.e. the forbidden fruit commonly depicted as an apple; “pasture” for the Garden of Eden; and “downmindlookingated” for Eve and Adam, having fallen, now locked out of Paradise, looking down — perhaps as painted by Renaissance artists Masaccio or Hieronymus Bosch (whose images I’ll include in the transcript). This suggestion of humanity’s sexual fall also helps account for the “dix” in this 100-letter word. So Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake isn’t all hen, it’s also cock.

Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 109 line 1 to page 114 line 20 of Chapter 5. The performance was filmed and recorded at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto on October 21st, 2024 with a live audience. And since today’s excerpt could easily be titled “The Letter,” the brief opening music you’ll hear, which I wrote for piano trio with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums, loosely quotes Joe Cocker’s 1970 hit “The Letter”.

[Music: “Boston, Tea, Letter (Ch05),” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.] [Richard Harte reads Finnegans Wake 109:1-114:20]

[109] Luckily there is another cant to the questy. Has any fellow, of
the dime a dozen type, it might with some profit some dull even-
ing quietly be hinted — has any usual sort of ornery josser, flat-
chested fortyish, faintly flatulent and given to ratiocination by
syncopation in the elucidation of complications, of his greatest
Fung Yang dynasdescendanced, only another the son of, in fact,
ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped
addressed envelope? Admittedly it is an outer husk: its face, in
all its featureful perfection of imperfection, is its fortune: it ex-
hibits only the civil or military clothing of whatever passion-
pallid nudity or plaguepurple nakedness may happen to tuck it-
self under its flap. Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or
even the psychological content of any document to the sore
neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is
just as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest
taste) as were some fellow in the act of perhaps getting an intro
from another fellow turning out to be a friend in need of his, say,
to a lady of the latter's acquaintance, engaged in performing the
elaborative antecistral ceremony of upstheres, straightaway to run
off and vision her plump and plain in her natural altogether, pre-
ferring to close his blinkhard's eyes to the ethiquethical fact that
she was, after all, wearing for the space of the time being some
definite articles of evolutionary clothing, inharmonious creations,
a captious critic might describe them as, or not strictly necessary
or a trifle irritating here and there, but for all that suddenly full
of local colour and personal perfume and suggestive, too, of so
very much more and capable of being stretched, filled out, if need
or wish were, of having their surprisingly like coincidental parts
separated don't they now, for better survey by the deft hand of
an expert, don't you know? Who in his heart doubts either that
the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the
feminine fiction, stranger than the facts, is there also at the same
time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from
the other? Or that both may then be contemplated simultaneously?
Or that each may be taken up and considered in turn apart from
the other?

[110] Here let a few artifacts fend in their own favour. The river felt
she wanted salt. That was just where Brien came in. The country
asked for bearspaw for dindin! And boundin aboundin it got it
surly. We who live under heaven, we of the clovery kingdom,
we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching
the land. We suddenly have. Our isle is Sainge. The place. That
stern chuckler Mayhappy Mayhapnot, once said to repeation
in that lutran conservatory way of his that Isitachapel-Asitalukin
was the one place, ult aut nult, in this madh vaal of tares (whose
verdhure's yellowed therever Phaiton parks his car while its
tamelised tay is the drame of Drainophilias) where the possible
was the improbable and the improbable the inevitable. If the pro-
verbial bishop of our holy and undivided with this me ken or no
me ken Zot is the Quiztune havvermashed had his twoe nails
on the head we are in for a sequentiality of improbable possibles
though possibly nobody after having grubbed up a lock of cwold
cworn aboove his subject probably in Harrystotalies or the vivle
will go out of his way to applaud him on the onboiassed back of
his remark for utterly impossible as are all these events they are
probably as like those which may have taken place as any others
which never took person at all are ever likely to be. Ahahn!
About that original hen. Midwinter (fruur or kuur?) was in the
offing and Premver a promise of a pril when, as kischabrigies sang
life's old sahatsong, an iceclad shiverer, merest of bantlings ob-
served a cold fowl behaviourising strangely on that fatal midden
or chip factory or comicalbottomed copsjute (dump for short)
afterwards changed into the orangery when in the course of
deeper demolition unexpectedly one bushman's holiday its limon
threw up a few spontaneous fragments of orangepeel, the last
remains of an outdoor meal by some unknown sunseeker or place-
hider illico way back in his mistridden past. What child of a strand-
looper but keepy little Kevin in the despondful surrounding of
such sneezing cold would ever have trouved up on a strate that
was called strete a motive for future saintity by euchring the
finding of the Ardagh chalice by another heily innocent and
beachwalker whilst trying with pious clamour to wheedle Tip-

[111] peraw raw raw reeraw puteters out of Now Sealand in spignt
of the patchpurple of the massacre, a dual a duel to die to
day, goddam and biggod, sticks and stanks, of most of the
Jacobiters.
    The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans, a more than
quinquegintarian (Terziis prize with Serni medal, Cheepalizzy's
Hane Exposition) and what she was scratching at the hour of
klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodish-
sized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston
(Mass.) of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceded to
mention Maggy well & allathome's health well only the hate
turned the mild on the van Houtens and the general's elections
with a lovely face of some born gentleman with a beautiful present
of wedding cakes for dear thankyou Chriesty and with grand
funferall of poor Father Michael don't forget unto life's & Muggy
well how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must now
close it with fondest to the twoinns with four crosskisses for holy
paul holey comer holipoli whollyisland pee ess from (locust may
eat all but this sign shall they never) affectionate largelooking
tache of tch. The stain, and that a teastain (the overcautelousness
of the masterbilker here, as usual, signing the page away), marked
it off on the spout of the moment as a genuine relique of ancient
Irish pleasant pottery of that lydialike languishing class known as
a hurry-me-o'er-the-hazy.
    Why then how?
    Well, almost any photoist worth his chemicots will tip anyone
asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt
enough while drying, well, what you do get is, well, a positively
grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values
and masses of meltwhile horse. Tip. Well, this freely is what
must have occurred to our missive (there's a sod of a turb for
you! please wisp off the grass!) unfilthed from the boucher by
the sagacity of a lookmelittle likemelong hen. Heated residence
in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound had partly ob-
literated the negative to start with, causing some features pal-
pably nearer your pecker to be swollen up most grossly while

[112] the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan
of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Tip.
    You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says:
It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out:
Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest no-
tions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly! The quad gos-
pellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim
may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne.
    Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird
has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult,
be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific
sense is sound as a bell, sir, her volucrine automutativeness right
on normalcy: she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to
lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species and hoosh
her fluffballs safe through din and danger!); lastly but mostly, in
her genesic field it is all game and no gammon; she is ladylike in
everything she does and plays the gentleman's part every time.
Let us auspice it! Yes, before all this has time to end the golden
age must return with its vengeance. Man will become dirigible,
Ague will be rejuvenated, woman with her ridiculous white bur-
den will reach by one step sublime incubation, the manewanting
human lioness with her dishorned discipular manram will lie
down together publicly flank upon fleece. No, assuredly, they are
not justified, those gloompourers who grouse that letters have
never been quite their old selves again since that weird weekday
in bleak Janiveer (yet how palmy date in a waste's oasis!) when
to the shock of both, Biddy Doran looked at literature.
    And. She may be a mere marcella, this midget madgetcy,
Misthress of Arths. But. It is not a hear or say of some anomo-
rous letter, signed Toga Girilis, (teasy dear). We have a cop of
her fist right against our nosibos. We note the paper with her
jotty young watermark: Notre Dame du Bon Marché. And she
has a heart of Arin! What lumililts as she fols with her falli-
mineers and her nadianods. As a strow will shaw she does the
wind blague, recting to show the rudess of a robur curling and
shewing the fansaties of a frizette. But how many of her readers

[113] realise that she is not out to dizzledazzle with a graith uncouthre-
ment of postmantuam glasseries from the lapins and the grigs.
Nuttings on her wilelife! Grabar gooden grandy for old almea-
nium adamologists like Dariaumaurius and Zovotrimaserov-
meravmerouvian; (dmzn!); she feel plain plate one flat fact thing
and if, lastways firdstwise, a man alones sine anyon anyons
utharas has no rates to done a kik at with anyon anakars about
tutus milking fores and the rereres on the outerrand asikin the
tutus to be forrarder. Thingcrooklyexineverypasturesixdix-
likencehimaroundhersthemaggerbykinkinkankanwithdownmind-
lookingated. Mesdaims, Marmouselles, Mescerfs! Silvapais! All
schwants (schwrites) ischt tell the cock's trootabout him. Ka-
pak kapuk. No minzies matter. He had to see life foully the
plak and the smut, (schwrites). There were three men in him
(schwrites). Dancings (schwrites) was his only ttoo feebles.
With apple harlottes. And a little mollvogels. Spissially (schwrites)
when they peaches. Honeys wore camelia paints. Yours very
truthful. Add dapple inn. Yet is it but an old story, the tale of
a Treestone with one Ysold, of a Mons held by tentpegs and his
pal whatholoosed on the run, what Cadman could but Badman
wouldn't, any Genoaman against any Venis, and why Kate takes
charge of the waxworks.
Let us now, weather, health, dangers, public orders and other
circumstances permitting, of perfectly convenient, if you police,
after you, policepolice, pardoning mein, ich beam so fresch, bey?
drop this jiggerypokery and talk straight turkey meet to mate, for
while the ear, be we mikealls or nicholists, may sometimes be in-
clined to believe others the eye, whether browned or nolensed,
find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself. Habes
aures et num videbis? Habes oculos ac mannepalpabuat? Tip! Draw-
ing nearer to take our slant at it (since after all it has met with
misfortune while all underground), let us see all there may remain
to be seen.
I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace avery-
buries and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear. You
are a poorjoist, unctuous to polise nopebobbies and tunnibelly

[114] soully when 'tis thime took o'er home, gin. We cannot say aye
to aye. We cannot smile noes from noes. Still. One cannot help
noticing that rather more than half of the lines run north-south
in the Nemzes and Bukarahast directions while the others go
west-east in search from Maliziies with Bulgarad for, tiny tot
though it looks when schtschupnistling alongside other incuna-
bula, it has its cardinal points for all that. These ruled barriers
along which the traced words, run, march, halt, walk, stumble
at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety seem
to have been drawn first of all in a pretty checker with lamp-
black and blackthorn. Such crossing is antechristian of course,
but the use of the homeborn shillelagh as an aid to calligraphy
shows a distinct advance from savagery to barbarism. It is
seriously believed by some that the intention may have been
geodetic, or, in the view of the cannier, domestic economical.
But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and
end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering
up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace
and jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit. Sleep,
where in the waste is the wisdom?
[End of excerpt]

Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading pages 109 to 114 from Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake, recorded live at the Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto on October 21st, 2024. Join us for Episode 26 in a fortnight for Richard Harte’s continuation of Chapter 5. In the meantime, to be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast?

[Music: “Closing Credits (Ch05),” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]

Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support! And thank you to the artists for this episode: Richard Harte; Sound by William Bembridge; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig; Music arranged and performed on the piano by me, with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums, recorded at Ghost Town Studio in Toronto. A big thanks to John Shoesmith, Special Collections Librarian, to David Fernández, Head of Rare Books and Special Collections, and to their colleagues at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, as well as to our wonderful live audience. Thank you to the team at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie. Thank you for listening! [Music fades out]

[End of Ep025]

Mentioned: Boston, Massachusetts, ALP, The Letter, suggestive envelope, Belinda the Hen, The Letter and treasure found in muck, Ardagh Chalice, Book of Kells, punctuationless letter, epistolary tropes, Picasso and Braque’s cubism, tea stain, blurry photography, Kate, “Lead, kindly fowl!”, championing womankind, Obama cheers on Harris, she writes, thunderword #5, Women and Literature, Eve and Adam and snake, synopsis.

Cited: “Obama, in blunt terms, tells Black men to get over their reluctance to support Harris,” NPR, 2024-10-10.
Eric McLuhan. The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake. . University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Episode 024: Special: Interview with Nina Beguš on Finnegans Wake in AI

June 18, 2026 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
SPECIAL: INTERVIEW WITH NINA BEGUŠ ON FINNEGANS WAKE IN AI

2026-06-18

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

[Music: Instrumental of “The Alphabet Song (Variation On)” with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series. Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. This episode, number 24, is a special one because joining us from Berkeley, California will be scholar Nina Beguš, who is using Finnegans Wake to shape an unusual AI named “FinneGAN.” Hi, I’m Adam Seelig, and I’m the director of the Finnegans Wake film series produced by One Little Goat Theatre Company.

**Digital Humanities Scholar Nina Beguš, University of California Berkeley**

Thank you to those of you who joined us in Hudson, New York, recently on June 11th at Time and Space Limited for “Joyce / Cage,” an evening featuring excerpts from One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake film series paired with Wake-inspired songs by John Cage. And thank you to those of you in Dublin who attended our all day screening of Finnegans Wake Chapter 4 at the James Joyce Centre for the Bloomsday Film Festival on Bloomsday, June 16th.

[Music: “Breakfast,” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]
Adam Seelig: Finnegans Wake is a production of One Little Goat Theatre Company. One Little Goat is filming and recording all 17 chapters (roughly 30 hours) of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake before live audiences in various locations, screening and releasing them along the way, with the aim of completing the entire book for its 90th birthday, May 4, 2029. One Little Goat Theatre Company is an official charity in Canada and the United States. To help us produce this first-of-its-kind filmed reading series — of which we’ve filmed 8 chapters so far, with 9 more to go — please visit OneLittleGoat.org to make a charitable donation. Your donation enables us to bring this production to audiences and helps support the outstanding artists who make it possible. To be the first to hear about our live tapings, events, and screenings, please join our mailing list, also at OneLittleGoat.org.
[Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Earlier this year, several people sent me an online article published by Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences titled “What Finnegans Wake Teaches Us about AI“ (Paul Massari, February 26, 2026). This was my introduction to the fascinating work of scholar Nina Beguš and the special AI she helped train named FinneGAN. Nina’s research focuses on the oft overlooked innerworkings of Artificial Intelligence, known as “latent spaces,” which she compares to the unusual dream language of Joyce’s last novel. In the process, she’s also coined a term that combines imagination with imitation through a creative process she calls “imagitation.” Brilliant.

Nina is the author most recently of Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, published by University of Michigan Press, and she joins me right now from her office at the University of California Berkeley. And allow me to just add two quick comments…
(1) as a Stanford University alumnus, and therefore, automatically, a Berkeley rival, I have set aside my anti-Cal prejudices to conduct this interview today with Nina — it took a lot of work for me to do that. And
(2), more seriously, I’m taking a moment to note the recent death of Frederick Wiseman, whose cinematic style is a model and inspiration for the Finnegans Wake film series I’m now directing with One Little Goat Theatre Company. All of Wiseman’s movies are amazing, but if I had to choose a favourite, it would be At Berkeley, his four-hour film of the illustrious university where we now find Nina.

Nina Beguš, welcome, and thank you so much for joining me!

Nina Beguš: Hi, Adam and everyone! I’m so glad to be here.

Adam Seelig: Wow — there is so much for us to discuss. Let’s get into it.

In your AI research I’m seeing a thorough understanding of and appreciation for the arts, and you’re a clear champion for the humanities. To quote you back to yourself, “Humanities are co-cartographers of AI’s interior, bringing literary, philosophical, and architectural tools into spaces that engineering alone cannot fully describe or design.” In the Harvard article, you mentioned wanting to bring your work in Artificial Intelligence and Digital Humanities to a wider audience, including artistic communities. So this might be a case of ‘careful what you wish for’ because, as part of artistic communities myself, I’m eager to know more about your work, particularly your work with Joyce’s last novel and AI, which focuses on latent space. What is latent space?

Nina Beguš: Yes, latent spaces — the term is more popular with humanists than with technologists, I must say, first of all. Latent spaces are these hidden layers that are doing all the work behind what any AI model that we have today is doing. So basically, they are these black boxes that we have a really hard time interpreting, because the latent spaces are basically mathematical categories. They are the structures of vectors with hundreds or thousands of dimensions. And in that way, they are invisible to us humans and unimaginable to us humans. But we have techniques that can help us try to visualize them and understand them, although they are radically invisible and inaccessible. And some of these techniques we’re using in this very technical field of interpretability, trying to see what the models are doing inside. And then in this paper that you mentioned, “Latent Spacecraft” (“Latent Spacecraft Brains GANs Finnegans“ 2026) and in our work that we exhibited in the art world, we’ve shown that you could also use humanistic interpretability. You can use humanistic techniques, methods, such as comparison, interpretation, reading, metaphorical, spatial thinking, to navigate these interiors of machine learning models.

Adam Seelig: There were two terms that I didn’t know until I encountered your work. One is this latent space, which you’ve described wonderfully. And maybe I could echo it back to you as a kind of interior of every AI model that we’ve been working with. Is that fair to say, that it’s kind of one layer back from the surface?

Nina Beguš: Yes. Yes. The latency is crucial.

Adam Seelig: And there’s this other term, G.A.N. Could you tell us what that is, please?

Nina Beguš: So we call them GANs. This is just an abbreviation for Generative Adversarial Networks. It’s an architecture of an AI model. It’s very different from what people usually know, which is large language models (LLMs) that are built on transformer architecture. This architecture, it’s called “generative” because these networks are very productive. You give them just a little bit of data and they figure it out on their own. We gave them just eight words of English and they figured out the whole phonology of the English language, for example. So here’s the first difference with large language models: they need a lot — humongous amounts of data. GANs need very little to be able to produce something. “Adversarial” in their name is really about having two neural networks within this architecture — there are two networks that train each other. I often describe them as Higgins, Dr. Higgins and Eliza from Shaw’s Pygmalion, because one network sees the data, knows what the data is. And the other one doesn’t. And I think GANs are actually the only architecture that never sees the data — this generator that needs to produce it, that needs to produce fake data, this generator basically starts from scratch, starts with complete noise. It doesn’t know what the other network is going to offer as data. So it only learns from its feedback. It could be pixels. It could be text. It could be sound. It could be anything. And so it starts with complete noise, and then slowly through feedback and through trying out different options, it gets to more and more structure and eventually to a word in our case, because we gave them words as input data. And this all happens without human intervention.

Adam Seelig: Incredible. So the only part that you have contributed is the vocabulary. And in your case, your vocabulary that you’re describing was under eight words. Now, I believe that your GAN learned to say “start” or something that was somewhat comprehensible or almost comprehensible to us. What was that experiment?

Nina Beguš: So those are the basic GANs. The ones where we just teach them how English language looks like. So we gave them eight words, such as “greasy,” “suit” —very basic, random words. And they would start producing new words. One of the first words, if not the first word, was actually “start.” And it was a combination of the words that they were fed, but it wasn’t in the training data. So this is what we call “imagitation,” because they don’t just imitate, they don’t produce just “greasy greasy greasy,” because they’ve seen “greasy.” But from those few words, they’re able to come up with new words — new words of English or possible words of English.

Adam Seelig: So I have the list of words here from that experiment. The words were: ask, carry, dark, greasy, like, suit, water, & year. And you say here that from that, the model could produce “start” — a plausible word that follows English phonology, but isn’t in our vocabulary. So — and I’m quoting you here — “they don’t produce non-plausible words. They figure out the rules quickly.” One of the many things that is fascinating about the work that you’re doing is that your GANs are behaving like children who are acquiring language. Yes?

Nina Beguš: Yes. They are much closer to how us humans acquire language than, for example, large language models, which obviously learn on text, which is not how any human learns how to speak, and also need an immense amount of data. So the way it works with GANs is they learn from their environment. This is how our children learn too. They have, you know, basic imitation — a child learning from parents, just working with the principles that they are introduced to in their environment. And then they are able to push further into novel combinations. Sometimes kids would come up with a new word that doesn’t really exist. And there’s this aspect of playfulness in this.

Adam Seelig: I love that, the playfulness is so key. As a parent myself, when my kids were much younger — this is now years ago — my eldest at one point drew a picture of a bunny rabbit and a window, and then he described what was going on. He said, “This bunny is eyes-ing on the window.” There’s no such thing as “eyes-ing” in that sense, as we all know, and maybe it was “looking through” or “looking at” or what have you, but he invented it. The younger one at one point came up with one that we still use to this day, which he invented: “carrot on the cob.” So kids are just amazing with figuring it out, playing with it, making themselves known, and sometimes maybe just pure invention. And that’s what I love about this term that you’ve coined — imitation + imagination = imagitation.

And let’s get to Joyce now, because you are claiming that Joyce — let me paraphrase, and you can tell me if I’m out of line here — was a pioneer in exploring this latent space or this childlike playfulness that bent the rules of conventional syntax?

Nina Beguš: Yes. I mean, as with many things with Joyce, he kind of anticipates what happens in computing decades before anything like that is a possibility. So in the history of computing and Joyce and this conversation that’s been happening, a lot of computing returns to Joyce. So it’s not a coincidence that we did too, because it’s just so interesting how he manages to chart this latency of language. You know, what he was trying to do — he called it “the writing of the night.” He said there are other registers of language. Language is sometimes given in a state which doesn’t really work during the day. It’s not orderly. He called it “wide-awake language.” He said, This is not what I’m going after — not plot and “cut-and-dry grammar.” He said, I want to try to see how the writing of the night looks like. So basically going into this latency of language — what’s happening with language when it’s not completely externalized, because he really tried to express how things are in the night, in different stages: the conscious, unconscious, semi-conscious. He’s talking about that to his editor in his letters when he’s writing Finnegans Wake. That was his pursuit.

**“Apples” (oil on canvas, 1878), Paul Cézanne. Not all red, but not so bad. (Metropolitan Museum of Art**)

I think the easiest way to imagine this is for me to ask you: try to imagine a red apple. And as I ask you this, do you see it in your brain? Can you imagine it?

Adam Seelig: I do. It’s also a dangerous question to ask of someone named Adam, but go on.

Nina Beguš: [Laugh] So most people will be able to imagine this, visualize the red apple in a sort of low definition. It’s not completely clear the way your vision can render it if you don’t try, right? And this is how language is as well. You can hear me speak now in clear sentences, but the way language works in my internal layers, in my biological neural networks, in my brain, is more compressed, has this low definition to it. And this is why Joyce is so informative of what we found in our AI models, in GANs. Because when you listen to GANs, you will also hear they have this kind of old-school, gritty sound. It was very important for us to be able to publish these models, for people to just access them and play with them and hear them and see how they work.

Adam Seelig: How is it that the GAN has that kind of voice? What determined the voice of your GAN? In Finnegans Wake, the voice of the narrative often adheres, however lightly, to whoever might be in the scene. If it’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, then that voice might be more flowing and river-like because she is a river. And if it’s Earwicker, then it might take on some of his pub-keeping kinds of sounds and consciousness. And this narrative kind of floats throughout Finnegans Wake and takes on these different — literally hundreds of different voices, languages, and so on, depending on what’s happening in that zone. How did your GAN get its voice? And I should also really highlight the name of your GAN, which is “FinneGAN.”

**Gašper Beguš and Nina Beguš (Photo: Matevž Granda)**

Nina Beguš: Yeah, that’s a different GAN. So we created one that’s just words of English. And then we trained another one from scratch, simply on Finnegans Wake. So this other model, FinneGAN, as we call him, never really saw actual English words, does not know how our English looks like — only knows the world of Finnegans Wake. And what’s interesting about this voice or sound is —so the engineering part, Gašper Beguš, who made these models in his lab here at Berkeley, the engineering part is not very involved. You don’t really know what will come out of it. Gašper also trained these models on whale clicks because he’s studying whale communication. And you can pretty much train them on anything. I mean, GANs were initially, about ten years ago, famous for the deep fakes of cats, right? This is how it all started. Now, do they have a distinct voice? They have this imitative power, of course. But we really wanted to publish them because in general, in mainstream AI, people only interact with large language models that are very polished. They have these glib exteriors, right? Language is very smooth — it’s this world of perfect Newtonian physics where the apple falls beautifully down from the tree.

**Feline “deep fakes” at** **www.thesecatsdonotexist.com**

Adam Seelig: There’s that apple again, yes.

Nina Beguš: There’s the apple. But with GANs it’s not. It’s like listening to a radio that doesn’t have a clean frequency yet.

Adam Seelig: Very nice. And that’s where Finnegans Wake plays in so nicely into what you’re doing as a literary model for that in-between, night-languagey, children’s language, pre-verbal, post-verbal, can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on-it kind of quality — the dreamlike quality. That was one thing I wanted to ask you about too, is that there’s a lot of focus on children’s acquisition or child acquisition of language and of the childlike play in GANs. And one of the things I wanted to mention in that regard is dreams. I feel like through the dream language of Finnegans Wake, there’s a collapse of the conscious and rational and a kind of unconscious return to that pre-conscious or young, playful kind of zone of speech. And so maybe when we sleep at night, we are going back to a childlike place.

Nina Beguš: I love this comparison. Yes. When we started working on this project — so this was with Gašper Beguš, who built the models, and then with Metahaven, this wonderful artistic collective that helped us think through this, and visualized the models together with Ricardo Petrini. When we started talking about it, we said, isn’t it funny how all these terms — subconscious, deep learning, embedding — they suggest that all cognitive structures have this depth. And it seems like there’s this spatial metaphor about how we think of latency and making the invisible spaces visible, which is really what we’re trying to do here. And this is why we called it Latent Spacecraft, because latent spacecraft is really about navigating. It’s a craft of approaching spaces that are not navigable in a way. And our choice was to navigate them through language, because we know a lot about human language. Linguists have studied it for a long time. Cognitive scientists, right? We know a lot about literature. So this was our way in. It was through language acquisition and through literary experiments such as Finnegans Wake. And I love the dream comparison, because dreams make sense, right, when you’re in them, even though rationally they might not. But there’s this world that is being held together and it’s not in high definition again. It’s about this noisiness that GANs also produced when they try to get to a structure. So when they go from noise to a signal, from noise to a word, they produce a structure that’s clearer and clearer. And this is also how we presented the model — you look at the model and it goes from noise and then into upper and upper and upper layer. And you can see the structure coming together. And at the end, you sort of hear a sentence that you kind of think you know what it might mean, but it’s not completely externalized language yet. It’s like peeking into this dreamlike world where structures are formed in these cloud-like formations, in these soft, condensed formations.

Adam Seelig: I want to point our listeners to — in the transcript of this episode that we’re doing right now — they’re going to find a link to this FinneGAN that you have online. I think there are two GANs there. One is FinneGAN and the other one combines words.

Nina Beguš: Yes.

Adam Seelig: But people who are listening who don’t have patience to go online and find that can just Google “Latent Spacecraft Brains GANs Finnegans.” And I’m on that site right now and looking at this, and as promised, we’re coming back to this. I want to understand what’s going on here. I’m seeing — for those of you who are as old as I am — a kind of foggy TV test-pattern-like image, mostly in black and white, and some interesting patterns that are unfolding. And so this almost Rorschach-like thing that I’m looking at, that has a circle in the middle and then some clouds all around it — it’s very evocative. What happens when I go there?

Nina Beguš: Well, basically every time you open this website with the model, the model produces a new sentence from scratch — a sentence that I have never heard or anybody else has ever heard. It’s unique every single time because the model is actually working and producing it for you.

Adam Seelig: Incredible. Do you think that we could — when we’re done with our interview today — do you think that I could borrow some or have some audio of what that sounds like, and we can maybe put some of that into this episode so people can hear a couple of sentences?

Nina Beguš: Absolutely. I think — you might have to explain that they won’t necessarily understand what it is saying. Sometimes the words are close to intelligible, and online we put a transcriptor that’s trying to make sense of what’s being said, but sometimes it’s not very accurate.

Adam Seelig: So those who are reading Finnegans Wake well know that we’re spending a lot of time with the equivalent of your transcriptor, trying to figure out what’s happening here in this latent space of a novel that James Joyce has created. And maybe what we’ll do is I’m going to share a couple — a little bit of Joyce’s background in, let’s say, experimenting or exploring children and their approach to sound, speech, experience, and how important that was to his work, especially in Finnegans Wake. And then maybe you could provide a sentence or two you’ve heard or that have surprised you from your FinneGAN. Would that be an okay approach right now?

Nina Beguš: Oh, absolutely. I often — I mean, I can already do it right now. In the article itself, we put a sentence. Yes. “Right, we inhabit a locked hole, but can we use it?”

Adam Seelig: [recorded after the interview] I’m recording this after the interview and want to thank Nina for providing me with her original audio recordings of FinneGAN to share with you all. Here’s how that phrase sounded when FinneGAN’s voice, so to speak, spoke these words in the first place. And let me just add — and perhaps this is my Finnegans Wake brain accustomed to cyclical themes of falling and rising in the novel — but where Nina’s lab transcription has “right, we inhabit a locked hole,” I swear I can hear FinneGAN saying “rise, we inhabit a locked hole.” Okay, here’s the recording.

FinneGAN: “Right, we inhabit a locked hole, but can we use it?”

Adam Seelig: That was one of the sentences. I love that one.

Nina Beguš: Yeah. So even in the locked hole sentence, you can hear that the model actually says “holee,” it doesn’t say “hole.” But the transcriptor is modern. So it will put some things in there that have not existed in Joyce’s time. It doesn’t have a sense of history.

Adam Seelig: Mm-hmm. So maybe we can let our listeners hear a couple of those, and I’ll find a way to get that audio, and you yourselves can hear a couple of those sentences.

Adam Seelig: [recorded after the interview] And indeed, following the interview, Nina generously sent me some more of FinneGAN’s eccentric phrases, beginning with the second one mentioned in her article, “Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans,” which her lab, using Whisper speech recognition software, transcribed as: “Power of Motsunoshi Station Lettuce Wait a ti-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i.” Here’s how Finnegan said it originally.

FinneGAN: Power of Motsunoshi Station Lettuce Wait a ti-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i.

Adam Seelig: Have there been any other sentences that have stood out for you? I’ll let you think about that while I share some sentences from Joyce — or even just quickly, a quick background on children in literature and how really they were ignored for so long. And in my mind, at least in English literature, it’s William Wordsworth who really champions children’s experience. And he even in The Prelude talked about the poetic spirit, and claims that everyone is born with the poetic spirit. He calls it “the first poetic spirit of our human life” (Book II, “School-Time (continued),” 275-76). And all are born with it, but only some remember it. Of course, those who remember it are (self-congratulatory, as always, I imagine) the poets. And poets hold on to that. So we all have that. I’m thinking, analogously — it seems like the large language models are the adults who have forgotten that poetic spirit, whereas your GAN is the child that has maintained that poetic spirit.

Nina Beguš: I love that you say that because when we were working with the transcriptor, we said, “Oh, it’s like the adult trying to make sense of what the kid is saying.”

Adam Seelig: Terrific.

Nina Beguš: And sometimes not recognizing it. I mean, I had this experience myself. My oldest child is named Tomaž, and he could not pronounce his name when he was an infant. And so he would always say “mm-bah mm-bah mm-bah,” and we had no idea what that means until many months later. [Laugh] We deciphered it.

Adam Seelig: Yes. And he knew all along and he was making himself known, and it was us who took a little more time to figure it out. But eventually the penny will drop.

In Joyce’s work, he’s already from Dubliners, a young protagonist says — and I’m quoting here — “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the catechism.”

Then we have Portrait, he goes on to the novel, which famously opens with a kind of children’s story: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...” I mean, this is really getting at these early sounds.

In Ulysses, there’s the chapter “Oxen of the Sun,” where Joyce is exploring the liminal, embryonic, unconscious speech. It opens with these words that I can barely even pronounce — much as your son was unable to pronounce his own name early on and finding some other form of speech. And so it’s kind of early pregnancy of language that he’s exploring there.

And then I would say when we get to Finnegans Wake — perhaps the greatest influence on the entire novel (and people will argue otherwise for sure) might be Mother Goose. On page one, we already have Humpty Dumpty, and this is from the first page of Finnegans Wake: “The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes” (3:18-21). So there we have Humpty Dumpty from the start.

**Humpty Dumpty “Cruncheez” spelled à la Joyce.**

**Richard Harte sings the Ballad of Persse O’Reilly (“Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty…”) in One Little Goat’s film of** *Finnegans Wake*, Chapter 2.

So we know we have someone who is taking “unserious” (I put in quotes) literature for children, and songs and games and so on, and taking them very, very seriously, and mining them and playing with them and stretching them. The first chapter of Book II, which is the chapter I’m rehearsing with Richard Harte now, is all children’s games, children’s dances, children’s songs, children’s rhymes. So the importance of childhood in this work and the playfulness that it brings is so essential.

And so now I want to turn to you one more time and hear maybe some play from your FinneGAN — another sentence or two that it’s played with or invented.

Nina Beguš: Yeah. I mean, approaching this pre-verbal world, I think, is the right identity to it. I’m trying to see what other sentences I’ve written down. Some were actually quite obscene. I’m looking at my folder right now to find them.

Adam Seelig: We want to hear the obscene ones. This is, of course, James Joyce’s world that we’re dealing with.

Adam Seelig: [recorded after the interview] After the interview, Nina successfully dug up the phrase she was thinking of, which her lab transcribed as, “Wanted him quite well for the Olympics. Kolopolitschevskiy rectum.” Here’s how FinneGAN’s original utterance sounded:

FinneGAN: Wanted him quite well for the Olympics. Kolopolitschevskiy rectum.

Adam Seelig: [recorded after the interview] And here’s another FinneGAN expression, transcribed as, “This is a gag out of I’m-a-slaughtering-to-you-with-a-sauce-and-a-stubber-ultra-meat.”

FinneGAN: This is a gag out of I’m-a-slaughtering-to-you-with-a-sauce-and-a-stubber-ultra-meat.

Adam Seelig: [recorded after the interview] And here’s one last phrase from FinneGAN, transcribed by Nina’s lab via speech recognition software as, “Boris’s tower. This round moves completely into my Abu Dhabi city.”

FinneGAN: “Boris’s tower. This round moves completely into my Abu Dhabi city.”

Adam Seelig: You’ve provided some examples of the expression, and we talked about the voice. And this is maybe a little bit strange, but — music and tone. Is that something that is going to play into FinneGAN?

Nina Beguš: Well, we’re continuing this project with a second iteration, because we started talking about this all also in relation to animals, because there are, you know, machines have acquired human language. But there were some animals that have learned the rudiments of it, like parrots. And they would do imagitation in some sort of way where, you know, this Einstein parrot named Alex, by Irene Pepperberg — he didn’t know the word “apple.” We’re back with apples. But he knew “banana” and “cherry.” So he called the apple “banerry.”

Adam Seelig: Incredible.

Nina Beguš: And this is still so unexplored. And I mentioned already that Gašper works on deciphering whale communication, so we’ve been thinking about sound across humans and machines and also animals — just looking at these underlying principles that maybe work across neural networks, both biological and artificial. But we’ve also been wondering, you know, what’s the original sound? What was the first sound on Earth? Have we always had sound or speech? And I think when you describe now Joyce playing and going back to these childlike operations, approaching the pre-linguistic, pre-verbal word, world — this is really hard to do for an artist. Even if you look at visual artists, for example, right? They become really good in realism and then they go into some other style. And sometimes, you know, at the age of three and four and five, our children create masterpieces. I have a full house of just my kids’ paintings because sometimes they are just so good that you actually have to frame them. And as an artist, you’re kind of trying to go back to that unbounded exploration that you had as a child, that you could afford as a child because you did not know the rules. You did not know limitations, right? This is how it is with language. You’re just exploring it. We’ve all gone through these nursery rhymes and through these tales and stories because this is how you learn how to reason and how to think. So yeah, going all the way back to this — I think it’s more and more important because science has been completely separated from arts. But now, especially with AI, I think it’s becoming more important to have them together. And that hasn’t been always a case that they’ve been separated. I just read Lamarck’s biography and, you know, back in the day scientists would be inspired by a poem during their research process. So I think what we’re really trying to push for here is to have this more interdisciplinary approach to exploring what we see as pure technicality, as this technology.

Adam Seelig: I have a question for you about the GANs. Now you’re working with I imagine several — just for this purpose, let me narrow it down to two. Let me narrow it down to FinneGAN and the other one where you had eight words and then it invented the word — or imagitated the word — “start,” or something that was close to something we recognize and is almost — and even is — intelligible to us. And I’m asking about the difference between the two, because the one where you fed eight words — well, that’s not a lot. But the FinneGAN — did you feed the FinneGAN over 600 pages of text? Because that is obviously drastically more. And how did the limit of one influence that GAN versus the abundance of the other?

Nina Beguš: Yes. So there’s much more data. They are both very small models, but there’s much more data with the FinneGAN. And the way we did it is we use the audio for GANs, not text. So this is a novel that’s meant to be read aloud. I mean, in the paper, I think we put a reading from Sweny’s — where, you know, an actual place in Ireland where people still gather to read Ulysses and other works, because it’s a reference in the novel. So this sound aspect of Joyce is primary, right? Especially with Finnegans Wake.

Adam Seelig: Absolutely. I concur 100% — as someone who’s involved with filming and recording Richard Harte and Pip Dwyer reading all of this material, I couldn’t agree more. Yes, sorry, go on.

Nina Beguš: So the two models — the FinneGAN, because it is trained on four-second audios, I think, then produces sentences. But the concatenation GAN, the one that’s only trained on words, pretty much produces only words, although it has become so good that it started — basically rudimentary syntax — it started to place them one after another. So it would say “water, underwater,” or “Andrei, hi Andrei,” things like that. So it’s already, you know, evolving in that direction where it’s going from just words towards composing them. That’s why we call it the concatenation GAN.

Adam Seelig: And of course, when I say that the FinneGAN is much larger, that’s just a relative term. Of course, compared to any large language model, it is a drop in the bucket. And so that is fundamentally something very different in what you’re doing here from most of the artificial intelligence, AI, that most of us have had exposure to now — even on a daily basis in internet searches and so on.

Nina Beguš: Yeah. I mean, we did train an LLM also on Finnegans Wake — we just didn’t publish it here in this paper, but new papers are coming and it’s already accessible online. We just wanted to see the difference and how good the model is with imagitating words, with creating nonce words — words that could be words, but are not — like “tonard,” “least,” “castank,” right? What Joyce does. And the model is really good at it, turns out.

Adam Seelig: Fantastic. And if you’re ever open one day to training FinneGAN on our audio from our Finnegans Wake film series, we would be very open to that.

Nina Beguš: Wonderful.

Adam Seelig: I am wondering about that: is the audio that you shared or brought or trained, what have you, for your FinneGAN — is that audio read by a human or is it read out loud by a machine?

Nina Beguš: It’s read out loud by a machine. We didn’t want to get into a copyright issue. We were considering — I know there’s beautiful audio readings by, you know, Irish actors — we were considering using that. I’m sure it would have a different tone to it if we had.

Adam Seelig: Well if you ever wanted to do that, I know a couple of Irish actors who have been reading Finnegans Wake a lot. [Laugh] So talk to me and we’re very happy to share. And I think it’s just an extraordinary project that you’ve got going on here — that you have drawn this comparison between a kind of machine learning, a sort of infancy of machine learning, and the importance of infancy and pre-verbal / post-verbal / dream-verbal world of Finnegans Wake. It’s really, I think, an inspired connection that you’ve made. And this term that you’ve created is one that I anticipate I’ll be using in future, which is imagitation, this imitation plus imagination that is so actively a part of the GANs and, of course, so actively a part of the Finnegans Wake world.

Nina, thank you very much for joining us here, telling us about what you’re working on, telling us about your FinneGAN. And I look forward to future conversations in person and maybe in this format again in future.

Nina Beguš: Yes, that would be wonderful. Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

[End of interview]

Adam Seelig: That was my interview with Berkeley scholar Nina Beguš. Together with her colleagues Gašper Beguš, Metahaven and Riccardo Petrini, Nina is the author of “Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans,” to which you’ll find a link in the transcript for this podcast on One Little Goat Theatre Company’s website, www.OneLittleGoat.org. Join us in a fortnight for Episode 25 when Richard Harte continues Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake. In the meantime, to be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast?

[Music: “Closing Credits (Ch05),” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]
For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and the complete films of Chapters 1, 2 and 3 visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website.

One Little Goat Theatre Company is a nonprofit, artist-driven, registered charity in the United States and Canada that depends on donations from individuals to make our productions, including this one, possible. If you’re able, please make a tax-deductible donation through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support! Music for this episode was arranged and performed on the piano by yours truly, Adam Seelig, with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums, recorded at Ghost Town Studio in Toronto. A big thank you once again to special guest Nina Beguš. Thank you as ever to the team at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie. Thank you for listening!
[Music fades out]
[End of Ep024]

Mentioned: Nina Beguš, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital Humanities, Stanford vs Cal (Berkeley), Frederick Wiseman, “At Berkeley” (film), FinneGAN, “imagitation,” latent spaces, GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), large language models (LLMs), “What Finnegans Wake Teaches Us about AI,” “Latent Spacecraft Brains GANs Finnegans,” humanistic interpretability, eight-word experiment, whale communication, nonce words, child language acquisition and invention, children and language in Joyce (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses “Oxen of the Sun”, Finnegans Wake), Mother Goose, Humpty Dumpty, “the writing of the night,” dream language, pre-verbal language, Metahaven, Ricardo Petrini, Gašper Beguš, University of California Berkeley, Whisper speech recognition, deep fakes (of cats), “We inhabit a locked hole but can we use it?”, William Wordsworth’s “poetic spirit” in children, Shaw’s Pygmalion, Irene Pepperberg’s Alex the parrot, Richard Harte, Pip Dwyer, Sweny’s Pharmacy Dublin, interdisciplinary science and arts.

Resources: Transcript for this episode, including the text of Finnegans Wake.

Cited: “What Finnegans Wake Teaches Us about AI,” Paul Massari, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2026-02-26.
“Latent Spacecraft Brains GANs Finnegans,” Nina Beguš, Gašper Beguš, Metahaven, Ricardo Petrini; Antikythera, https://latentspacecraft.antikythera.org/, 2026-03-02.

Episode 023: In the name of Annah (104:1-108:36, Begin Ch05)

June 4, 2026 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 023:
IN THE NAME OF ANNAH

PAGE 104:1-108:36 | BEGIN CHAPTER 5 | 2026-06-04

PODCAST AUDIO

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

[Music: Instrumental of “The Alphabet Song (Variation On)” with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series. Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 23, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 104 to 108 to begin Chapter 5 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.

**John Cage prepares his piano (photo: Irving Penn, 1947)**

For those of you in New York, join me on Thursday, June 11th at Time and Space Limited in Hudson, New York for “Joyce / Cage,” an evening featuring excerpts from One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake film series paired with Wake-inspired songs by John Cage. The songs will be performed live by soprano Jaclyn Hopping, accompanied by John Cage Trust Executive Director Jeffrey Lependorf, who will also join me in conversation. It promises to be a great night, so come if you can. For information on and tickets to this event, please visit One Little Goat Theatre Company’s website.

And for those of you around Dublin on Tuesday, June 16th, the Bloomsday Film Festival will be screening our complete film of Finnegans Wake Chapter 4 at the James Joyce Centre. For details and links, please visit the Bloomsday Film Festival website or www.OneLittleGoat.org.

[Music: “Breakfast,” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]

[Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake turns to the female protagonist of the novel, Anna Livia Plurabelle, or ALP, focusing on her as river (the River Liffey), as spouse (of HCEarwicker), and as author of a consequential letter that promises to rehabilitate HCE’s much maligned reputation. It’s ‘Anna to the rescue,’ or in the words of the previous chapter, “The solid man saved by his sillied woman.” (94:3)

If I had to give this chapter a title — and if the title hadn’t already been taken by Joe Cocker, that ‘roostery’ English blues singer — I’d call it “The Letter.” And if I went a step further to give the chapter subheadings, they would be “The Paper of the Letter,” “The Envelope of the Letter,” “The Message of the Letter,” “The Letters of the Letter,” etc.

This famous letter is found by a Hen named Belinda, and she finds it in a litter, a dump, in dirt, under sod, or to bring back that word we often heard in Chapter 1, in a ‘tip,’ i.e. a trash heap. This littery letter appears to be written by Anna. But even that, as so often happens in the Wake, is open to debate, because there’s a mystery that haunts this chapter, right up to its conclusion, and that is: Who wrote the letter? Was it in fact Anna? And if not her, who?

**Vik Muniz’s trash/art (New York Times 2010-10-24)**

Chapter 5 opens with a glorious and playful invocation of Anna Livia Plurabelle that merges the Quran with the Bible. Every sura in the Quran begins with, “In the name of Allah the all merciful,” and the Lord’s Prayer, one of the Bible’s greatest hits, goes like this: “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:9-10)) Chapter 5’s opening line combines them: “In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!” (104:1-3)

The chapter then introduces us to Anna’s famous letter. Although it’s described as “her untitled mamafesta,” the letter in fact has gone by hundreds of different names at many different times. Edmund Epstein counts 312 of them in total, with most referring to the love and marriage of our flawed hero, HCE, and his long-suffering spouse, ALP. One thing that Richard Harte and I regularly look for in the Wake — especially when approaching an epic catalog like this one — is a rising and falling movement in any given phrase, sentence and paragraph because Finnegans Wake itself is, as we’ve seen over several chapters, a sublime and ridiculous evocation of the cyclical rise and fall of humanity.

Here, for example, is one of the names for the letter appearing early in the list: “Knickle Down Duddy Gunne and Arishe Sir Cannon,” with the downward motion (“Knickle Down”) followed naturally by the upward (“Arishe Sir Cannon”), in this case suggesting investiture or a knighthood ceremony in which the subject kneels (or ‘knickles’) down in order to receive honour — paradoxically lowering himself to become exalted. The name immediately preceding this one lifts us up: “Anna Stessa’s Rise to Notice” (104:8-9). And these are just two of the 312 inventive names for Anna’s manifesto, of which I’ll point out just a few more…

“From the Rise of the Dudge Pupublick to the Fall of the Potstille” (105:22-23) — another up and down, in this case contrasting the rise of the Dutch Republic with the fall of the Bastille, mixed with a healthy dose of alcoholic terms in light of HCE and ALP’s identity (one of their many identities) as publicans of the Mullingar Inn in Chapelizod; hence “Pupublick,” which also hints at HCE’s sin-tinged stutter, and “Postille,” echoing a “pot still” for distilling whisky.

Several names for the letter call out HCE and ALP’s initials, for example:
— “He Can Explain”, which gives us HCE (105:14), and
— “Allolosha Popofetts”, which yields ALP (106:22-23).

A simple, three-word name, “The Suspended Sentence,” (106:13-14) could refer to the suspended judicial sentence for HCE’s alleged sins, while also applying to Finnegans Wake itself, given that the novel suspends a sentence between the end and the beginning, famously ending mid-sentence and beginning with its continuation — the “r” in the novel’s opening word, “riverrun,” remains uncapitalized for good reason. For more observations on this evocative name for the letter, I will link in the transcript for this episode to a terrific Finnegans Wake blog called, fittingly, “The Suspended Sentence”.

And while you may end up with your own favourite name-for-the-letter in this inventive list, I’ll share mine: “Of the Two Ways of Opening the Mouth” (105:23-24).

**Priests perform the opening of the mouth ritual. Extract from the Papyrus of Hunefer Egyptian** **Book of the Dead** **(c.1300 BCE).**

Not only does this entry reference “The Book of Opening the Mouth” from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, suggesting ancient rituals of death and afterlife, falling and rising, but to my ear it’s a perfect encapsulation of what this entire novel achieves, remarkably, on every single page, and that is an uncanny ability to say two often contradictory things at once; to say it and its opposite; to speak, paradoxically, out of both sides of the mouth. From the very first word of the novel’s very title, Finnegans, I hear at least ‘two ways of opening the mouth,’ with “Finn” suggesting the ‘finality’ of an end, and “egan” suggesting ‘again’; the former a fall, the latter a rise; to ‘end again’? We haven’t even read the full title, let alone the novel, and Finnegans Wake has already shown us “Two Ways of Opening the Mouth”.

**The Arms of the City of Dublin. “The motto, which translates, *The Obedience of the Citizen is the Felicity of the Town*, is parodied in several places in the Wake.” (Danis Rose,** **James Joyce Digital Archive**)

The final name given to ALP’s letter in this multi-page catalog is a breathless, run-on that summarizes her defense of HCE against a conspiring public that has fabricated salacious accusations about HCE vis-à-vis two girls in Dublin’s Phoenix Park and Chapelizod (107:1-7); and in the course of her full-throated defence of her husband, Anna slings some mud of her own, smearing the two girls or young women in this slanderous scenario as “a Pair of Sloppy Sluts” and ends by mentioning their “Raincoats”, a sartorial detail that associates the two allegedly disreputable young women with the two togaed women portrayed in Dublin's traditional Coat of Arms — I’ll post an image of the Dublin Coat of Arms in the podcast transcript because I think you’ll get a kick out of seeing it in this context.

Following our live audience’s deserved applause for Richard’s delivery of this epic, sentence suspended over three pages, the text presents us with a new, professorial character who appears to analyze Anna’s letter as if it were a rare and ancient manuscript, the way a paleographer might.

Where some see mere litter, the hen finds a letter; and where the hen picks (and pecks) out at letter, the paleographer sees a scrap of literature. Like “The Man on the Dump” in Wallace Stevens’s poem, Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake returns literature to litter while transforming litter into literature. “The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down…” (107:8-10) This is how our paleographer’s assessment of the written specimen begins, and after a full paragraph of this polysyllabic (and hilarious) scholarly pretention, a voice from the text, as if heckling our speaker, butts in with the question everyone wants to know: “who […] wrote the durn thing anyhow?” (107:36-108:1) Up until now I assumed it was ALP. This question of who wrote The Letter now becomes the mystery that Chapter 5 attempts to solve.

And that, the text reassures us, will require some forbearance: “remember patience is the great thing” (108:8).

Before we hear the opening pages of Chapter 5, I want acknowledge how lucky we were to film and record this chapter at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. Chapter 5 might be the bookiest of chapters in this already bookish book that is Finnegans Wake, so a library, naturally, is a great location; but a library with as deep and broad and (true to its name) rare a collection as the Fisher… well, that is the ideal location. It also doesn’t hurt that the Fisher Library is architecturally stunning. Torontonians will know the Fisher’s exterior as the ‘head of the peacock,’ so to speak, at U of T’s Robarts Library, while others of you may have seen its interior in Star Trek: Discovery (Season 5, Episode 8, “Labyrinths”) where it played the part of the “eternal archive,” an infinite library safeguarding the secrets of the universe. (And I’ll post a link to that Star Trek episode in this episode’s transcript.)

I want to thank Librarians John Shoesmith and David Fernández at the Fisher for opening their doors to One Little Goat for our live taping of this chapter, and for allowing us to pull and display 100 books and manuscripts that relate to the novel in general and this chapter in particular, including a 500-year-old Geneva Bible and Quran; a 1927 copy of transition magazine where the opening pages of Chapter 5 were first published; and two first-editions of Finnegans Wake — the first, a copy in mint condition; the second, a heavily annotated copy annotated by media maven and visionary Marshall McLuhan (1911-80).

**19th-century engraving of Gutenberg's 15th-century printing press. (Image: Public Domain)**

Which is another reason our shoot of Chapter 5 at Fisher was bashert, or meant to be: Marshall McLuhan’s archives are housed at Fisher, and McLuhan was a lifelong reader and devotee of Finnegans Wake. His insights into the novel — I can tell you from having looked at some of those annotations in his first edition copy — are absolutely brilliant. For example (as those of you who listened to Episode 2 of this podcast series might recall), McLuhan read Joyce’s text as a verbal fugue, noting that “back” in the opening sentence — “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” — sounds like “Bach” (as in Johann Sebastian), and “bach” is German for “brook,” which is a stream or kind of river; so this ‘river running back’ or ‘backwards’ is also a ‘river running Bach’ or ‘Bachwords.’ A literary fugue.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan’s book from 1962, examines the effect of the printing press on human thought and experience. McLuhan’s contention is that Johannes Gutenberg’s invention in the 1400s shifted literature from an oral medium to a visual one; from ear to eye; and consequently, from communal to individual. Before the printing press, 99 people wanting to access a text would gather around one person to hear them recite it — because that one person, whether a scholar, rabbi, priest, imam, monk, etc., was the only literate one with access to that scroll. Today, thanks to Gutenberg’s nifty invention, all 99 people can read it on their own. So our experience of texts and literature since the printing press transitioned from oral, audible and communal to visual, silent and solitary. What McLuhan found remarkable in Finnegans Wake, as well as in the unpunctuated writing of Gertrude Stein and other modernists, is literature’s return from eye back to ear, because the Wake not only explores the medium of print, deeply and irreverently, but through its dream language, demands to be heard. In the process, individual readers become communal listeners. And here we are, dear audience, about to hear Richard Harte’s reading/performance of Finnegans Wake.

“Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse comes all right.” These are the words of the poet — and priest! — Gerard Manley Hopkins (1884-1889), quoted in The Gutenberg Galaxy by McLuhan, who goes on to compare the writing of Hopkins with that of Joyce: “Joyce never tired of explaining how in Finnegans Wake ‘the words the reader sees are not the words that [they] will hear.’ As with Hopkins, the language of Joyce only comes alive when read aloud” (95). It reminds me of another of Joyce’s comments on the Wake: “If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all [they] need do is read it aloud.” Of course, even then, there’s no guarantee we will “understand” every word, since a certain amount of bewilderment or mystery is fundamental to any dream or dream language, but I can guarantee we’ll have lots of fun along the way — together. That was certainly the case with our live audience at Fisher Library (including, by the way, relatives of Marshall McLuhan), gathered on October 21st, 2024 to hear and see Richard Harte read/perform James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Chapter 5. Here are the opening pages of that chapter, from page 104 line 1 to page 108 line 36.

[Richard Harte reads Finnegans Wake 104:1-108:36]

[104] In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the
Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her
rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!
Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has
gone by many names at disjointed times. Thus we hear of, The
Augusta Angustissimost for Old Seabeastius' Salvation, Rockabill
Booby in the Wave Trough, Here's to the Relicts of All Decencies,
Anna Stessa's Rise to Notice, Knickle Down Duddy Gunne and
Arishe Sir Cannon, My Golden One and My Selver Wedding,
Amoury Treestam and Icy Siseule, Saith a Sawyer til a Strame, Ik
dik dopedope et tu mihimihi, Buy Birthplate for a Bite, Which of
your Hesterdays Mean Ye to Morra? Hoebegunne the Hebrewer
Hit Waterman the Brayned, Arcs in His Ceiling Flee Chinx on the
Flur, Rebus de Hibernicis, The Crazier Letters, Groans of a Briton-
ess, Peter Peopler Picked a Plot to Pitch his Poppolin, An Apology
for a Big (some such nonoun as Husband or husboat or hose-
bound is probably understood for we have also the plutherple-
thoric My Hoonsbood Hansbaad's a Journey to Porthergill gone
and He Never Has the Hour), Ought We To Visit Him? For Ark
see Zoo, Cleopater's Nedlework Ficturing Aldborougham on the
Sahara with the Coombing of the Cammmels and the Parlourmaids
of Aegypt, Cock in the Pot for Father, Placeat Vestrae, A New
Cure for an Old Clap, Where Portentos they'd Grow Gonder how
I'd Wish I Woose a Geese; Gettle Nettie, Thrust him not, When the

[105] Myrtles of Venice Played to Bloccus's Line, To Plenge Me High
He Waives Chiltern on Friends, Oremunds Queue Visits Amen
Mart, E'en Tho' I Granny a-be He would Fain Me Cuddle, Twenty
of Chambers, Weighty Ten Beds and a Wan Ceteroom, I Led the
Life, Through the Boxer Coxer Rising in the House with the Golden
Stairs, The Following Fork, He's my O'Jerusalem and I'm his
Po, The Best in the West, By the Stream of Zemzem under Zig-
zag Hill, The Man That Made His Mother in the Marlborry
Train, Try Our Taal on a Taub, The Log of Anny to the Base
All, Nopper Tipped a Nappiwenk to his Notylytl Dantsigirls, Prszss
Orel Orel the King of Orlbrdsz, Intimier Minnelisp of an Extor-
reor Monolothe, Drink to Him, My Juckey, and Dhoult Bemine
Thy Winnowing Sheet, I Ask You to Believe I was his Mistress,
He Can Explain, From Victrolia Nuancee to Allbart Noahnsy,
Da's a Daisy so Guimea your Handsel too, What Barbaras Done
to a Barrel Organ Before the Rank, Tank and Bonnbtail, Huskvy
Admortal, What Jumbo made to Jalice and what Anisette to Him,
Ophelia's Culpreints, Hear Hubty Hublin, My Old Dansh, I am
Older northe Rogues among Whisht I Slips and He Calls Me his
Dual of Ayessha, Suppotes a Ventriliquorst Merries a Corpse,
Lapps for Finns This Funnycoon's Week, How the Buckling Shut
at Rush in January, Look to the Lady, From the Rise of the
Dudge Pupublick to the Fall of the Potstille, Of the Two Ways
of Opening the Mouth, I have not Stopped Water Where It Should
Flow and I Know the Twentynine Names of Attraente, The Tortor
of Tory Island Traits Galasia like his Milchcow, From Abbeygate
to Crowalley Through a Lift in the Lude, Smocks for Their Graces
and Me Aunt for Them Clodshoppers, How to Pull a Good Horus-
coup even when Oldsire is Dead to the World, Inn the Gleam of
Waherlow, Fathe He's Sukceded to My Esperations, Thee Steps
Forward, Two Stops Back, My Skin Appeals to Three Senses and
My Curly Lips Demand Columbkisses; Gage Street on a Crany's
Savings, Them Lads made a Trion of Battlewatschers and They
Totties a Doeit of Deers, In My Lord's Bed by One Whore Went
Through It, Mum It is All Over, Cowpoyride by Twelve Acre Ter-
riss in the Unique Estates of Amessican, He Gave me a Thou so I

[106] serve Him with Thee, Of all the Wide Torsos in all the Wild Glen,
O'Donogh, White Donogh, He's Hue to Me Cry, I'm the Stitch
in his Baskside You'd be Nought Without Mom, To Keep the
Huskies off the Hustings and Picture Pets from Lifting Shops, Nor-
sker Torsker Find the Poddle, He Perssed Me Here with the Ardour
of a Tonnoburkes, A Boob Was Weeping This Mower was Reaping,
O'Loughlin, Up from the Pit of my Stomach I Swish you the White
of the Mourning, Inglo-Andeen Medoleys from Tommany Moohr,
The Great Polynesional Entertrainer Exhibits Ballantine Braut-
chers with the Link of Natures, The Mimic of Meg Neg end
the Mackeys, Entered as the Lastest Pigtarial and My Pooridiocal
at Stitchioner's Hall, Siegfield Follies and or a Gentlehomme's Faut
Pas, See the First Book of Jealesies Pessim, The Suspended Sen-
tence, A Pretty Brick Story for Childsize Heroes, As Lo Our Sleep,
I Knew I'd Got it in Me so Thit settles That, Thonderbalt Captain
Smeth and La Belle Sauvage Pocahonteuse, Way for Wet Week
Welikin's Douchka Marianne, The Last of the Fingallians, It Was
Me Egged Him on to the Stork Exchange and Lent my Dutiful
Face to His Customs, Chee Chee Cheels on their China Miction,
Pickedmeup Peters, Lumptytumtumpty had a Big Fall, Pimpimp
Pimpimp, Measly Ventures of Two Lice and the Fall of Fruit,
The Fokes Family Interior, If my Spreadeagles Wasn't so Tight
I'd Loosen my Cursits on that Bunch of Maggiestraps, Allolosha
Popofetts and Howke Cotchme Eye, Seen Aples and Thin Dyed,
i big U to Beleaves from Love and Mother, Fine's Fault was no
Felon, Exat Delvin Renter Life, The Flash that Flies from Vuggy's
Eyes has Set Me Hair On Fire, His is the House that Malt Made,
Divine Views from Back to the Front, Abe to Sare Stood Icyk
Neuter till Brahm Taulked Him Common Sex, A Nibble at Eve
Will That Bowal Relieve, Allfor Guineas, Sounds and Compliments
Libidous, Seven Wives Awake Aweek, Airy Ann and Berber Blut,
Amy Licks Porter While Huffy Chops Eads, Abbrace of Umbellas
or a Tripple of Caines, Buttbutterbust, From the Manorlord Hoved
to the Misses O'Mollies and from the Dames to their Sames, Many-
festoons for the Colleagues on the Green, An Outstanding Back and
an Excellent Halfcentre if Called on, As Tree is Quick and Stone is

[107]      White So is My Washing Done by Night, First and Last Only
True Account all about the Honorary Mirsu Earwicker, L.S.D.,
and the Snake (Nuggets!) by a Woman of the World who only can
Tell Naked Truths about a Dear Man and all his Conspirators how
they all Tried to Fall him Putting it all around Lucalizod about
Privates Earwicker and a Pair of Sloppy Sluts plainly Showing all
the Unmentionability falsely Accusing about the Raincoats.
    The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture.
There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it
down the tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly
ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely
profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput. To the hardily curio-
sing entomophilust then it has shown a very sexmosaic of nym-
phosis in which the eternal chimerahunter Oriolopos, now frond
of sugars, then lief of saults, the sensory crowd in his belly
coupled with an eye for the goods trooth bewilderblissed by
their night effluvia with guns like drums and fondlers like forceps
persequestellates his vanessas from flore to flore. Somehows this
sounds like the purest kidooleyoon wherein our madernacerution
of lour lore is rich. All's so herou from us him in a kitchernott
darkness, by hasard and worn rolls arered, we must grope on till
Zerogh hour like pou owl giaours as we are would we salve aught
of moments for our aysore today. Amousin though not but. Closer
inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of person-
alities inflicted on the documents or document and some prevision
of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone unwary
enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far
managed to happen along. In fact, under the closed eyes of the in-
spectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their con-
trarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody similarly as by the
providential warring of heartshaker with housebreaker and of
dramdrinker against freethinker our social something bowls along
bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of prearranged disappoint-
ments, down the long lane of (it's as semper as oxhousehumper!)
generations, more generations and still more generations.
    Say, baroun lousadoor, who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing

[108] anyhow? Erect, beseated, mountback, against a partywall, below
freezigrade, by the use of quill or style, with turbid or pellucid
mind, accompanied or the reverse by mastication, interrupted
by visit of seer to scribe or of scribe to site, atwixt two showers
or atosst of a trike, rained upon or blown around, by a right-
down regular racer from the soil or by a too pained whittlewit
laden with the loot of learning?
Now, patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and
above all things else we must avoid anything like being or be-
coming out of patience. A good plan used by worried business
folk who may not have had many momentums to master Kung's
doctrine of the meang or the propriety codestruces of Carpri-
mustimus is just to think of all the sinking fund of patience pos-
sessed in their conjoint names by both brothers Bruce with whom
are incorporated their Scotch spider and Elberfeld's Calculating
Horses. If after years upon years of delving in ditches dark one
tubthumper more than others, Kinihoun or Kahanan, giardarner
or mear measenmanonger, has got up for the darnall same pur-
pose of reassuring us with all the barbar of the Carrageehouse
that our great ascendant was properly speaking three syllables
less than his own surname (yes, yes, less!), that the ear of Fionn
Earwicker aforetime was the trademark of a broadcaster with
wicker local jargon for an ace's patent (Hear! Calls! Everywhair!)
then as to this radiooscillating epiepistle to which, cotton, silk or
samite, kohol, gall or brickdust, we must ceaselessly return, where-
abouts exactly at present in Siam, Hell or Tophet under that
glorisol which plays touraloup with us in this Aludin's Cove of
our cagacity is that bright soandsuch to slip us the dinkum oil?
Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the
positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its
page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of
that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclu-
sion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpre-
sence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks)
on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable
of misappropriating the spoken words of others.
[End of excerpt]

Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading the opening pages of Chapter 5 from Finnegans Wake, recorded live at the Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto on October 21st, 2024.

Join us for Episode 24 in a fortnight for a special interview with Berkeley scholar Nina Beguš on her unusual use of Finnegans Wake to shape Artificial Intelligence. And join us two weeks later for Episode 25 for Richard Harte’s continuation of Chapter 5. In the meantime, to be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast?

[Music: “Closing Credits (Ch05),” instrumental with Tyler Emond on bass, Jinu Isac on drums, Adam Seelig on piano, from the Finnegans Wake film series.]
For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and the complete films of Chapters 1, 2 and 3 visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website. One Little Goat Theatre Company is a nonprofit, artist-driven, registered charity in the United States and Canada that depends on donations from individuals to make our productions, including this one, possible. If you’re able, please make a tax-deductible donation through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support! And thank you to the artists for this episode: Richard Harte; Sound by William Bembridge; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig; Music arranged and performed on the piano by me, with Tyler Emond on bass and Jinu Isac on drums, recorded at Ghost Town Studio in Toronto. A big thanks to John Shoesmith, Special Collections Librarian, to David Fernández, Head of Rare Books and Special Collections, and to their colleagues at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, as well as to our wonderful live audience. Thank you to the team at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie. Thank you for listening!
[Music fades out]
[End of Ep023]

Mentioned: John Cage, Time & Space Limited, Hudson NY, Bloomsday Film Festival, ALP, Anna Livia Plurabelle, The Letter, letter/litter, who wrote the letter?, Quran and Bible, names of the letter, ALP’s defense of HCE, cyclical falling and rising, “The Suspended Sentence,” “Of the Two Ways of Opening the Mouth,” two women on Dublin Coat of Arms, enter the professor of paleography, letter/litter/literature, patience, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg printing press, literature’s shift from ear/aural/communal to eye/visual/individual, Gerard Manley Hopkins, “read it with the ears,” dream language, people gathering to hear text read, synopsis.

Cited: Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). University of Toronto Press, 2011.

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 028: CSI: DUBLIN

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 027: THE (DIRTY) BOOK OF KELLS

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 026: SPILL THE TEA, STUDY IN BROWN

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 025:
Letter from boston, thunderword #5

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
SPECIAL: INTERVIEW WITH NINA BEGUŠ ON FINNEGANS WAKE IN AI

2026-06-18

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 023:
IN THE NAME OF ANNAH

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

ONE LITTLE GOAT THEATRE COMPANY IS A REGISTERED CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 028: CSI: DUBLIN

PAGE 123:11-125:23 | END OF CHAPTER 5 | 2026-08-13

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 027: THE (DIRTY) BOOK OF KELLS

PAGE 119:10-123:10 | CHAPTER 5 | 2026-07-30

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 026: SPILL THE TEA, STUDY IN BROWN

PAGE 114:21-119:9 | CHAPTER 5 | 2026-07-16

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 025:Letter from boston, thunderword #5

PAGE 109:1-114:20 | CHAPTER 5 | 2026-07-02

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKESPECIAL: INTERVIEW WITH NINA BEGUŠ ON FINNEGANS WAKE IN AI

2026-06-18

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 023:IN THE NAME OF ANNAH

PAGE 104:1-108:36 | BEGIN CHAPTER 5 | 2026-06-04

PODCAST AUDIO

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

ONE LITTLE GOAT THEATRE COMPANY IS A REGISTERED CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 028: CSI: DUBLIN

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 027: THE (DIRTY) BOOK OF KELLS

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 026: SPILL THE TEA, STUDY IN BROWN

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 025:
Letter from boston, thunderword #5

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
SPECIAL: INTERVIEW WITH NINA BEGUŠ ON FINNEGANS WAKE IN AI

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 023:
IN THE NAME OF ANNAH