It takes insouciance to use the word insouciance twice in one article.  Unfortunately, that article is not free.

But..

If you subscribe to The New York Review here you generate a little money for charity. We give all our commissions away as described on our masthead.

Sarah Boxer on blogs, bloggers and blogging, from the early days to the here and now.

Are they a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?

We have updated our Free Books page. The idea is to get wider distribution.

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Martin Heidgegger died before completing his attempt to overturn the entire philosophical tradition. On the way, though, he did come up with a new way of thinking about “being” that has largely been incomprehensible to anyone without a properly functioning Department of Philosophy to hold their hand and guide them through specialized language, questionable translations, and impenetrable prose.

Until now.

The University of California at Berkeley has made Hubert Dreyfus’s class on Heidegger available as a podcast. Professor Dreyfus has also provided some useful notes and a reading list. One of the books he recommends, William Blattner’s Being and Time, A Reader’s Guide, is particularly lucid.  That particular book and Professor’s Dreyfus’ lectures compliment one another very well.

That said, the kindest thing that can be said about Heidegger as a human being is that he was deeply flawed man.  Rüdiger Safranski’s biography is also a good introduction to Heidegger while addressing his behaviour in Nazi Germany. 

Another quick introduction to Heidegger is available in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Did you miss Bloomsday, the day on which the action of James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place? If so, don’t worry. You can relive the experience of a full reading thanks to the good people at LibriVox.  Full details about the recordings and other disclaimers related to copyright are available here: 

http://librivox.org/ulysses-by-james-joyce/

Don’t forget to buy the book and stock up on useful commentaries and studies by visiting the Ulysses page in the bend of bay store.  Our commissions go straight to charity.

bend of bay magazine includes versions of two performance scenarios for Finnegans Wake that were originally published by The Abiko Quarterly in 1993. I was pleased to find a comment on this post from Tatsuo Hamada, the publisher, informing me that the Abiko is still going strong as an annual. The 2007 issue, pictured below, is now available.  If you would like a copy, send $20 cash or an international money order to:

Tatsuo Hamada
Hananoi 1787-28,
Kashiwa-shi 277-0812
Japan

Some time ago, Ralph Lichtensteiger sent a message to SILENCE, the John Cage mailing list, requesting ”… stories about your experience with the phenomena of Silence and noise …”  

The result is Silence/Stories, a print ready 66 page pdf file that includes the stories, images and bios of the contributors. Contributors represent a wide array of backgrounds. Some worked with John Cage. Others wrote about him, or used some of his methods and ideas in their own work.  (Full disclosure - this post was written by a contributor, although not one of those referred to in the previous  two sentences). Some stories include anecdotes or responses to John Cage, and others describe “Cage influenced listening.”  You can downdoad the PDF here  or here.

This post provided some suggestions for first time readers of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It also included a reading list.  However, Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake is out of print and has also vanished from at least three public libraries. Fortunately, the James Joyce Scholar’s Collection has put Hart’s book online. You can access it directly here. 

All the books in the James Joyce Scholar’s Collection are out of print, but below are links to a few you might explore after getting through my original recommendations.

A Classical Lexicon for Finnegans Wake
The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis
A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer
Joyce-again’s Wake: An Analysis of Finnegans Wake
The Sigla of Finnegans Wake
Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake
Third Census of Finnegans Wake
The “Wake” in Transit

All this assumes, of course, that you have actually read Finnegans Wake, the book.  If you haven’t bought a copy, the full text is available here, courtesy of Trent University. You can find an interesting, annotated version of Finnegans Wake at finwake.com.

bend of bay has been giving away books since 1999. Most are paperbacks. Their condition varies. Some are like new, while others date from the 1960’s with yellowing pages and disintegrating bindings.

If you are interested in distributing some of these books, write us at the email below or complete this contact form. Please be patient awaiting a response. You will need to reimburse us for the cost of shipping via U.S. Mail, but we will tell you the cost before sending them off to give you a chance to change your mind. There will be no charge for the books themselves, and we will not send more than 5 small paperbacks or two trade paperbacks.

You will need to eventually leave these books in public places. Each will have the following label on its cover:

Free book from bendofbay! Read it,
then pass it on. For info:
www.bendofbay.org/books
books@bendofbay.org

For those of you who either do not have or do not wish to part with the money for the excellent boxed set of  the Tales of Anton Chekhov published by Ecco Press, all 201 stories in the Contance Garnett translations are also available at http://chekhov2.tripod.com/. 

It is recommended that you read one Chekhov a day for the next 201 days. If you read them online, email a thank you note to the site’s creator. The address is at the bottom of the home page.

Around 200 additional paperbacks are set to be distributed under the free books program. Watch for them. Last year,  someone picked up Bleak House by Charles Dickens at Narita airport in Japan. It began its journey on a commuter train in New Jersey.

All books are left in public places. Each has the following label on its cover:

Free book from bendofbay! Read it,
then pass it on. For info:
www.bendofbay.org/books
books@bendofbay.org

I have just set up a bookstore, of sorts, using Amazon’s new aStore service. The link also appears in the sidebar. The store is quite simple and generally features authors and music I happen to care about or to be listening to at the moment.  As with every other link on these pages, any commissions I collect are donated, in turn, to one of two food banks in New Jersey, U.S.A.

One way to become a better, more attentive reader in general is to pick one author and dive in deeply. I selected James Joyce partially out of a sense of obligation - Joyce was, and remains, after all, a cannonized author and his short story The Dead is regularly taught and may be one of the best ever written.  Dubliners, the collection from which The Dead is taken, is probably Joyce’s most accessible book. Finnegans Wake is the most daunting. Herewith my advise on reading Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake, unfortunately, comes with a lot of academic baggage. Even before it appeared in final form, way too much emphasis was placed on deciphering the portmanteau words and attempting to translate what Joyce wrote into something resembling conventional English. This is unfortunate, really misses the point, and subverts Joyce’s project. The best way to approach Finnegans Wake is, quite simply, to read it straight through without worrying too much if you understand every word. Face it, you will not. But if you read it with the same attention that you devote to other books, you will notice patterns and develop snippets of understanding. Meaning will bubble up. Trust me. It helps, too, to read it aloud or, barring that, to mentally vocalize the words.

Once you have read the book, then it is OK to start checking out the secondary literature. I have included a couple of links below. However, if you don’t believe me and want to start with a guide, then by all means choose The Finnegans Wake Experience, a short book by Roland McHugh. While McHugh is also known for his collection of annotations, The Finnegans Wake Experience. The Finnegans Wake Experience discusses his personal history with the book. Importantly, McHugh came to the book cold, so his retelling of his experience will provide you with confidence and reassurance should you get bogged down in Finnegans Wakes’  compexities.

Do not make the same mistake I did. Never read the hopelessly reductive, superficial “Skeleton Key”. Here are some of the more useful books I have found. Clive Hart’s book is out of print, but your library may have it and you can probably buy it used.

Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, by Clive Hart

Joyces Book of the Dark, by John Bishop.

Hart’s book is particularly good on structure, while Bishop’s will give you a good feel for the language.