So, I’m about 60 pages into Finnegan’s Wake now. I’m enjoying it. Just letting it wash over me really. I’m trying to approach it in novel ways, and came up with a good one yesterday. I picked out ten books from my little collection, more or less randomly. I would read one page from FW. Then, I would pick up one of those books randomly, and then pick and read one page at random. Then I would go back to FW, read one page. And repeat the process. Until I had read ten consecutive pages in FW.

It was especially interesting, because it immediately seemed like the books and passages which I had chosen had some sort of weird mystical correlation to whatever was being discussed in FW. It plays all kinds of nice tricks on your mind, trying to string all these things together. Like, you’d be surprised at how the themes from these random book passages are echoed all together. It totally turns on and tunes into some weird pathways in your mind that you don’t get to normally use. Like, it just seemed to make so much sense. Because there are so many alleys and passageways into Joyce’s text, that by doing this, it’s almost like you get to stumble into secret underground temple rooms loaded with treasure. It’s also nice to take these normally linear texts and turn them into some weird hyperrational soup. I plan on doing some more of it tonight before I go to bed. Oh, I was also hoping it would help trigger weird dreams. It may have, but I didn’t write any down last night, except for that one about the little plant.

Also, I just found this thing about the word “Occult” (as in knowledge) on wikipedia, which I think is extremely applicable to what Finnegan’s Wake is all about:

Sometimes the knowledge does not consist of access to particular facts, but is arrived through the mind being taken through a process triggered by a text, image or performance.