I'm not dead. I've just been busy, particularly with a) school and b) work. I had to write three long, research-intensive papers last week, and I have to write three more this week. Yay, grad school! Also, I have an obscene amount of prep work to do before I start teaching my first TPR class next week, and now they want me to cross-train to teach ACT courses as well. Oh, and
Finnegans Wake is still kicking my ass and ruining me for all future literature for the rest of my life.
GUYS I HAD A MENTAL BREAKTHROUGH.
Finnegans Wake is like the early twentieth-century equivalent of all of those stoner shows on Adult Swim. It totally is!! Think about it: Created by a too-cool-for-you mentally ill alcoholic who was so caught up in how clever and funny his own intellectual masturbation sounded to
him that he simply didn't care whether any of ended up as impenetrably stupid, asinine, and unfunny to anybody else. Except that
Finnegans Wake IS awesomely clever and funny IF you're steeped enough in the pop culture of the time to "get" all of the jokes and references. But even if you "get" the jokes and references, however, the style of humor is very much Your Mileage May Vary, so unless you actually
are a) James Joyce himself or b) stoned out of your mind, immortal lines like "All the world loves a gleaming jelly!" just may not actually strike you as terribly funny.
So basically,
Finnegans Wake is the original
Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
The difference being, once you cut through the dense impenetrability of the surface-level humor in
Finnegans Wake, you uncover a truly epic work of fiction that is a universal story about true love, parent-child relationships for good and for ill, sibling rivalry, the inevitability of sin and the possibility of healing redemption, and the rise and fall of all human empires that ever were and ever will be. On the other hand, if you attempt to peel away the surface-level "humor" of something like
Aqua Teen Hunger Force, you're left with nothing, as the pop culture references and ironic non-sequitur humor are the entire point of the show.
So maybe
Finnegans Wake is not so much like Adult Swim after.
Speaking of Adult Swim!
Who here is FRICKIN' STOKED about the Metalocalypse premiere tonight?!?! And who here is
still frickin' stoked about how unbelievably awesome the first three episodes of the new season of
The Venture Brothers were?!
I know I am!
Oh, goddammit. As I was writing this entry, a little bird just told me that now Fanhistory.com is using a new bot to generate entries from archived Yuletide stories. (*siiiiiiigh*) Goddamit, FH. That is so many levels of stupid and annoying that I don't even know where to begin. Not like it's any less stupid or annoying than any other bot that FH has ever unleashed upon the interbutts, but still.