POEM: "Finnegan's Awake"

Poet Seven Dhar (O'Dare), Wisdom Quarterly; Cartoonstock.com; The Clancy Brothers ("Finnegan's Wake")

Irish stereotypes cartoons and comics - funny pictures from CartoonStock.com

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"Finnegan's Awake"

A modern Irish poem by Seven

When Irish American eyes are smilin' | National Museum of American History (si.edu)

Irish humor or craic (ar.pinterest.com)

THIS IS AN ABBREVIATED PORTION OF A LONGER LYRICAL, TONGUE-TWISTING WORK THAT TELLS THE STORY OF THE BUDDHA'S LIFE IN THE VEIN OF JAMES JOYCE'S FINNEGANS WAKE. LIKE JOYCE, THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS WORK WAS THE FAMOUS IRISH SONG, "FINNEGAN'S WAKE." IT'S ODD THAT WHEN YOU TALK TO GOD, IT'S CALL PRAYER, BUT WHEN GOD TALKS TO ME, IT'S CALLED SCHIZOPHRENIA.

[PROLOGUE]

I will pray you a poem.

In Irish but in English.

Yet you won't understand because

You don't sing your language.

"Scratch pictures on asylum walls

With broken nails and matchsticks

Hypodermic" or pneumatic,

Get under my skin with your fix!

To a drop of the craythur I was born,

A thimble of fuisce, a mash of the corn,

Unlike Bushmills a comforting 'board,

No room for the cups where the tankards are stored.

To a tuber's fine tincture

I was turned on,

A poteen, a poitín [\pot-cheen\],

All mellow and brown.

[Mara is The F'end in many guises.]

A Liam, a Rhea, a Ryan, a Rip

Around a cadaver a sway and a sip,

A Pat, a Maria, a Michael, and a Mic

Slosh the carcass in a rite Catholic rinse.

Shillelagh shake; shellac shenanigans;

Sheet and shout and shoot sharp shingles to shush 'em;

Unsheathe and shear and bathe sheep in springs;

Finn' Ph'n, friend us again!

The Oracle spoke but Sumerian,

Like the Gilg and the Manx on the Isle of Man:

"Die Ivory Isle, uber mensch Damen,"

Cried Mary, their little lamb.

Gil or Gilly, he's a Gilligan;

This weird O' Willy won't will again.

He's a handful, I tell it's true, Liam.

Finn' Ph'n, friend us again!

[DIALOGUE]

Siddhartha saw samsara end;

Revolving-Round, spin no more instead!

But we pose to our old friend:

Come, Finnegan, become again!

What is a wake? To raise The Dead?

Then shimmy-toss my own two cents!

Shake the spirit and rouse the breath.

Come, Finnegan, become again!

Mara's three daughters (Lust, Discontent, and Delight) interrupt Sid's meditative absorption.

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Lust, Discontent, and Delight

Shirley, Shannon, and Shay ahem

like fiendish daughters of The F'end

To pull thee from thy 'sorption then

pale in search of spirits in a pen

Corked and screwed and waxed wick-end

Bitter as the Grape, Guinness, or Grain,

I say, I sing, I say again:

Come, Finnegan, become again!

Wan wolves who wander for crimson drink

Wretch and writhe by 'bane beside a splint.

Hale men who haggle at Haddock hint

Then writhe and wretch to get a stint

[Poetic inspiration plus the Bard]

A Shropshire Lad, a filly wink

Bard of Avon, cauldron ingredient

A skinny finny to feed the fink.

Come, Finnegan, become again!

Ne plus ultra, Naiad and Nymph,

Dryad, Damsel of Dark Forest, minx

Meadow maiden of mirth and myth,

Come, Finnegan, become again!

Flanagan, Hannigan, Flanders, and Haw

Millicent, Gilligan, Moira, and Maw

The crow ascends till it empties it craw.

Descend, Finnegan, descend!

Vril Society Oracle Maria Orsitch

Hennessy, Tennessee, Tiger, and Todd'

Our sighting grew to a vision of GOD.

The winged agree, The awed are odd.

Descend, Finnegan, descend!

With a mane to wick the dew Or switch,

The Messenger, came through in Gaelic:

"Thy Iv'ry Isle, uber-dames, damn it..."

So, come, Finnegan, become again again!

And so on and so forth.

"Finnegan's Wake" (The Clancy Brothers)

Why people can't write, according to Harvard psychologist

 

The single reason why people can't write, according to a Harvard psychologist

Sense of Style (Steven Pinker)

"Why is so much writing so hard to understand? Why must a typical reader struggle to follow an academic article, the fine print on a tax return, or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?"

These are questions Harvard psychologist Dr. Steven Pinker asks in his book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. They're questions I've often encountered  -- and attempted to tackle --  throughout my career as a business writer and editor.

Whenever I see writing that is loaded with jargon, clichés, technical terms [or jargon], and abbreviations, two questions come immediately to mind. First, what is the writer trying to say, exactly?

Second, how can the writer convey her ideas more clearly, without having to lean on language that confuses the reader?

For Dr. Pinker the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls the "Curse of Knowledge," which he defines as "a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose." More

Mandy Kahn’s PEACE CLASS (free, 9/23)

FREE from The Philosophical Research Society

This free online gathering serves to build personal and collective peace with PRS Artist in Residence Mandy Kahn.

ABOUT
It’s time to talk about peace — not as the opposite of war but as a universal power source that any individual can plug in to for free. Peace is an energy that flows and can be used to build peace in the individual experience and by extension in the collective experience.

It is not the opposite of war: Peace is a state where war cannot exist. The nonexistence of war in the experience of peace is simply one small aspect; war is simply one of many things that cannot exist there.

To focus on what is not present in the state of peace is to fail to focus on what is present and how what’s present can be used. This distraction keeps us from understanding the nature of peace and from using it to build a world that is continuously peaceful — a world in which it is remembered that all plants and bodies of water are holy, a world in which all are perfectly free and, by way of that freedom, are themselves, who by way of such selfhood are creative.

That is available to us, and it’s available for free. The free energy source of peace cannot be bought or commodified. It can only remain free. And it can only be used in one way: to build a peaceful world — such a world as is our birthright.

 

Mandy Kahn is the author of two poetry collections. Her work is included in The Best American Poetry anthology series and she is the subject of the forthcoming documentary Peace Piece: The Immersive Poems of Mandy Kahn. Kahn presented a program of peace-building interactive poems at the Getty Museum in 2019; she hosts a live event series at the Philosophical Research Society called I LIKE PEACE.

Drop in for a class, or come for the full series. No need to attend the first meeting; drop in at any point. Eventbrite

TIPS:

• Chrome works best for this platform - if there are any delays in the connection please try using Chrome.
• When you enter the event you may be asked if livewebinar can access your microphone and camera. In order to participate in the event please select OK. You will have an option to turn off your audio and/or camera during the event at any time.
• Please have writing materials on hand.

Writers' Secret to a Happy Marriage

Maria Popova (BrainPickings.com)

Anna Dostoyevskaya by Laura Callaghan from The Who, the What, and the When

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Dostoyevsky's Young Wife on the Secret to a Happy Marriage

How to nurture a love that will “stand as a firm wall,” “won’t let you fall,” and “gives warmth.”

His most famous Russian novel

In the summer of 1865, just after he began writing Crime and Punishment, the greatest novelist of all time hit rock bottom. Recently widowed and bedeviled by epilepsy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Nov. 11, 1821–Feb. 9, 1881) had cornered himself into an impossible situation.

After his elder brother died, Dostoyevsky, already deeply in debt due to his gambling addiction, had taken upon himself the debts of his brother’s magazine. Creditors soon came knocking on his door, threatening to send him to debtors’ prison.

(A decade earlier, he had narrowly escaped the death penalty for reading banned books and was instead exiled, sentenced to four years at a Siberian labor camp — so the prospect of being imprisoned was unbearably terrifying to him).

In a fit of despair, he agreed to sell the rights to an edition of his collected works to his publisher, a man named Fyodor Stellovsky, for the sum of his debt — 3,000 rubles, around $80,000 in today’s money.

As part of the deal, he would also have to produce a new novel of at least 175 pages by Nov. 13th of the following year. If he failed to meet the deadline, he would lose all rights to his work, which would be transferred to Stellovsky for perpetuity.

Only after signing the contract did Dostoyevsky find out that it was his publisher, a cunning exploiter who often took advantage of artists down on their luck, who had purchased the promissory notes of his brother’s debt for next to nothing, using two intermediaries to bully Dostoyevsky into paying the full amount.

Portrait of by Vasily Perov, 1871

Enraged but without recourse, he set out to fulfill his contract. But he was so consumed with finishing Crime and Punishment that he spent most of 1866 working on it instead of writing The Gambler, the novel he had promised Stellovsky. When October rolled around, Dostoyevsky languished at the prospect of writing an entire novel in four weeks.

His friends, concerned for his well-being, proposed a sort of crowdsourcing scheme — Dostoyevsky would come up with a plot, they would each write a portion of the story, and he would then only have to smooth over the final product.

But, a resolute idealist even at his lowest low, Dostoyevsky thought it dishonorable to put his name on someone else’s work and refused. There was only one thing to do — write the novel, and write it fast.

Anna Dostoveskaya lived to be 71.

On Oct. 15 he called up a friend who taught stenography, seeking to hire his best pupil. Without hesitation, the professor recommended a young woman named Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. (Stenography in that era was a radical innovation, and its mastery was so technically demanding that of the 125 out of the 150 students who had enrolled in Anna’s program had dropped out within a month).

Anna, 20, had taken up stenography shortly after graduating from high school hoping to become financially independent by her own labor. She was thrilled by the offer. After all, Dostoyevsky was her recently deceased father’s favorite author, and she had grown up reading his tales. The thought of not only meeting him but helping him with his work filled her with joy.

The following day, she presented herself at Dostoyevsky’s... More

Rattle's Rattlecast VIDEO

Tim Green, Danusha Lameris (Rattlecast #40)

Submit for the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prizes

2020 Hillary Gravendyk Prize Announcing the 2020 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, Sponsored by the Inlandia Institute! One National and one Regional Winner will each be awarded $1000 and book publication, and additional books may be chosen for publication by the editors. The Hillary Gravendyk Prize is an open poetry book competition for all writers regardless of the number of previously published poetry collections. The manuscript page limit is 48 - 100 pages, and the press invites all styles and forms of poetry. Only electronic submissions accepted via Inlandia’s Submittable portal. Entries must be received online by April 30, 2020 at midnight Pacific Standard Time. Reading fee is $20. The winners will be announced late Summer/Fall 2020, for publication in 2021. For more details or to submit, visit the Submittable portal. Inlandia Institute | Inlandia Literary Journeys CONNECT WITH US! ‌ ‌ ‌

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Who was the REAL "Shakespeare"?

WJ Ray (wjray.net/shakespeare...); Wikipedia edit

Martin Droeshout portrait of "Shakespeare" (hand held mask)

Edward de Vere, Welbeck portrait (the Miller Family)

For every reader of the First Folio, from Sir George Greenwood and W.W. Greg to Leah Marcus, the Droeshout portrait of "Shakespeare" has been an unsolved puzzle, symbolic of the disturbing mystery: Who wrote the Shakespeare canon of plays?

Emerson considered this “the first of all literary questions.” Nor have we solved the riddle as “to the reader” on the facing page.

Without an understanding of these blatant challenges, the most knowledgeable follower of “Shakespeare” is kept from the author and how he lived, essential to appreciating any work of art. The key that turns the lock opens the door.

Secrets of the Droeshout Portrait in Shakespeare’s First Folio
by WJ Ray

The Droeshout portrait, frontispiece of the First Folio, was contrived as a collection of linguistic and visual puns to impart the name and title of the Shakespeare plays’ author, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

The ulterior use of such puns — foreign language, typographical, numerical, and visual — are evident throughout the introductory materials. Historically, the title page and facing poem have been taken at face value and the anomalies shrugged off.

Consensus belief, commercial promotion, and analytic neglect, perhaps intimidated by tradition, together perpetuated the original deception and gave it credibility by default.

• Full essay with detailed illustrations and appendices: PDF
• VIDEO: "The Secret Evidence of Who Wrote the Shakespeare Canon" from Willits Community TV Inc. on Vimeo. More