Make New Friends, and Keep the Old?

The fact that several people I don't know and have no prior connection to have started subscribing to this blog (and the resulting guilt that I haven't actually posted anything here for a while) has made me start thinking a lot about the still-evolving issues of identity and the Internet. Over the past semester, as I've used Skype to talk face à face with my family six time zones away and used a blog to share my day to day ramblings with a lot more people than I expected, I've realized, as I often do, that the Internet is making the world either a much smaller place by bringing people together or a much larger place because the possibilities open to exploration are so much nearer. And this larger or smaller world is filled with lots of people who, for whatever reason, come to this blog and meet what amounts to an electronic version of me.



My literary theory classes have made me face a lot of questions about identity, society and how literature can be used as a tool to enforce or establish identity, but I think that the question of new literacies, like the Internet and its associated tools like blogs and web forums, has never really come up. I would argue that in the age where anyone can say anything anywhere in the world the written word is loosing its power -- because so many people are 'speaking' at the same time, does anyone bother to listen to what anyone else is saying? Obviously I've been using this blog as a force to establish my identity as a writer -- or rather, using this blog as a force to project that I want to be seen as a writer -- and some people are apparently interested in what I have to say.



This boggles my mind, as I seem to lack the authorial legitimacy to be considered a blogger worth listening to. (As one of them is, in fact, a published writer according to his own blog, I think this legitimacy question kind of answers itself.) They are in fact buying into the projection facilitated by the mask of the Internet and assuming I have legitimacy to make statements about how to write or craft characters or even make comments about whether a book is good or not. (I'm sure at least one of the people who chimes in on my comment box from time to time will have a field day with this legitimacy thing, but I think it's true, even if he doesn't.)



I have a running inside joke with the members of one of my online social groups about my age -- for at least one year when I was actually in my final year of middle school and part of my first year of high school I had them all convinced I was in college. It was a great compliment for me and a bit of a joke for them that a fourteen year old middle schooler managed to make several grown men and women think she was four or five years older than she was, but the story brings up a great point about the masking power of the Internet. Behind the veil of webservers, proxies and computer screens, legitimacy actually becomes easier to attain, so much so that a third year college student from a small suburb of Chicago who can't even get up the nerve to submit her poetry to the school literary magazine can wax theoretic (okay, partially theoretic) from her soapbox and actually have people who have published books and written masters theses on this stuff listen. Or read. Or...well, whatever verb you want to use with that, actually.

And I'm wondering if this supposed legitimacy is a good thing. Like the effusion of the written word the Internet has facilitated, can we not also say that this over-application of legitimacy to Internet-based communication is in fact diluting what legitimacy actually means? Take Twitter, for example. Putting the power of the microblog literally in the hands of everyone with a BlackBerry is diluting what it means to make something worthy of reading. Do we need to follow everything Perez Hilton or Ashton Kutcher tweets? Some people might say that Kutcher's 4 million followers bestow on him some kind of legitimacy credentials. What makes their lives worthy of listening to? What makes everyone else's stream of consciousness, 140-characters-or- less Tweets a worthy use of our time and space in my feedreader? (The reason this blogger doesn't have a Twitter is because a) she knows no one would read hers and it is therefore a waster of server space and b) she can't make a coherent point in 140 characters or less.)

I'm not saying that you, wonderful readers, are following my every word with baited breath. I know that this blog is simply not that interesting (or frequently updated) to merit that kind of following. But the fact that I'm on your blog rolls and feedreaders astonishes me. And I'm touched. Really, I am.

So, as we near the last days of an old year and begin a new one, let's raise a glass to old friends we haven't seen in a while, new friends we haven't met and probably never will and the socially fascinating power of the Internet.

James Joyce is a Linguistic Genius and I Want In.

Friends, I have looked in the face of a genius that can only be taken in small doses, and its name is Finnegans Wake by Mister James Joyce. I can't stand any of his other writing, but we read a section of the eighth chapter of the first part, the famous chapter where Joyce works in, by hook or by crook, the name of every major river in the world, and I'm in love. But only in small doses, mind you. FW, I think, is a work best taken by the shot glass and not by the tankard. (I'll take my Tolkien by the tankard and my P'OB by the pint glass, thankyouverymuch.)

When Max Eastman asked James Joyce why he had written Finnegan's wake in such a difficult, flummoxing manner, he replied (and I would here insert the adverbs 'unconcernedly' or 'confidently', as they seem to fit) "To keep the critics busy for three hundred years."

Well, he succeeded. It would probably be impossible on a physical as well as an intellectual scale to create a copy of Finnigans Wake with a complete gloss to this man's created words, mainly becuase you don't know where to stop glossing his words. Do I give him credit for managing to work in the Samoan for "What's new?" here? Does "your rere gait's creakorheuman bitts" translate to 'crake (monster) or human, creak (merely a noise made by your joints) or human, creak or rheum(atic) or creek (reference to ALP being river Liffey) or human? Why does he use the word 'beyant' here; is he trying to work in a reference to bezants or make the poolbeg flasher (who may be a man or a boat, you decide) more animalistic?

My point is, this book's insane, and people spend thier whole lives playing Joyce's ridiculous lingustic game. I jumped in with gusto and my copy of these five pages is marked high to heaven with notes that the glosses left out. And then -- And then! -- I decided we'd play a little bit of this game ourselves here at the Village Wordsmithy. I'm going to give you a sentence, done in Joycian style, and you're going to Guess the Gloss. Have you got your paper ready? Your pencil sharp and your dictionary flipping finger sharper?

Okay, GO!

Deyew kene, my eerie Ann, the thyme when t'bhoys of Gullwaye and Poolbleckt were gonne for schilders?

Are you working?
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Are you still working?

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Okay, now you can see the answers.

deyew -- i.e 'do you' or the dew (ref to foggy dew, irish rebel song) or yew, very poisonous tree that in irish mythology is either a symbol of long life or death, often planted in church yards. Yew is also used for english strongbows -- ref to Strongbow as conqueror of Ireland

kene -- ken, scots, 'to understand or remember' or keen, irish, to mourn

my eerie Ann -- Ireland as Eirann

thyme -- do you remember the thyme (we ate) when this happened or do you remember the time this happened, thyme as an herb used in death rituals in ancient egypt and middle ages "Thyme was also used as incense and placed on coffins during funerals as it was supposed to assure passage into the next life." (wikipedia)

t'bhoys -- i.e 'the boys' or 'the bhoys' (a slang term for a young irish american during the 1850s, specifically one from the Bowery in New York) or the hoys, "a small vessel, usually rigged as a sloop, and employed in carrying passengers and goods, particularly in short distances on the sea-coast." or "a strong but clumsy person"(OED)

Gullwaye -- Galway or the gull-way, the sea

Poolbleckt -- Poolbeg, a river near dublin, or pool-black, the meaning of Dublin, dubh-lin, or Blackpool, city in Lancashire, or poblacht, irish for republic

Gonne -- Maude Gonne, famous for her revolutionary activities during the twenties and being the subject of a series of poems by WB Yeats

schilders --soldiers, or children, or a reference to Robert Erskine Childers, an Irish Anti-Treatyite; 'do you remember when the boys of ireland went to go die for the dream of a free ireland?' or 'do you remember when the boys of ireland went to go fight a war' or 'do you remember when the boys of ireland went to go pursue childish dreams'


See, wasn't that fun? Did anyone come up with anything else?


Now, the fun part about this game is this -- when I wrote that sentence, I had one message in mind: Do you remember, Ireland, the time when the boys of galway and dublin were gone for soldiers? While I was making my gloss and playing around with the way words were spelled I found out that whole buisness about thyme as a symbol of death (it fits, but it wasn't intentional) and the significance of the yew tree (also a symbol of death; appropriate!) I'd forgotten who Childers was, but he worked out, too, and then when I realised I could swap Maude Gonne into the mix, in she went!

The point of this exercise, boys and girls, is merely fun, and also a kind reminder that Joyce could be a genius, or, like me, he could just be one extremely lucky bugger.