I was once asked to explain the meaning of this here scribble, w/ interesting results!
—————– Original Message —————–
From: Bobby Campbell
Date: Jun 26, 2007 1:53 PMHello J!
Cherry Island is a landfill where I often work in my job as a land surveyor. I’m outfitted there w/ the tools for to set fill limit grade stakes. By which the workers can determine how much more garbage a given area can house before reaching capacity.
The quote is from Terence Mckenna, re: his fractal spacetime model.
Have a Good’n!
bc
—————– Original Message —————–
From: J
Date: Jun 28, 2007 12:45 AMIsn’t that a 24″ gauge & a common gavel?
You a travelin man?
—————– Original Message —————–
From: Bobby Campbell
Date: Jun 28, 2007 11:28 PMFrom the west and traveling to the east, in search of light!
Actually I had never heard of any of that until I googled “24” gauge & common gavel” a minute ago. They’re really an extendable prism pole and a sledge hammer, but I see what you mean!
My first read through of Finnegans Wake was done mostly at Cherry Island, sitting in my work truck, amongst the trash heap landscape, which is wildly appropriate, as Terence McKenna explains, “I mean, Joyce is so dense with technical terms, brand names, pop references, localisms; the way to conceive of Finnegans Wake is like a midden, a garbage dump — and there is, in fact, a garbage dump in the Wake that figures very prominently.” – Surfing on Finnegans Wake
“Where in the waste is the wisdom?”
JJ, FW Pg. 114
“The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans…and what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodish-sized sheet of letterpaper”
JJ, FW Pg. 111
A plot point in Finnegans Wake concerns a letter dictated by Anna Livia Plurabella to her son Shem the Penman, which may or may not exonerate Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (her husband, his father) of the vague and ever changing crime(s) of which he is accused. The letter becomes lost, and then is unearthed by a hen named Belinda (sometimes called Biddy) in a garbage dump, and then taken by the other son, Shaun the Postman. It turns out that anywhere the letter would have spoken definitively on the character of HCE the hen’s beak has poked a hole in the paper.
That is at least one overly simplified way of reading one level of a small part of FW!
A bit of Joyce’s conceptual punning is illustrated above. Anna Livia Plurabelle’s character is identified through Finnegans Wake by the initials ALP, which is an abbreviation of Aleph. The first letter/number in the Hebrew alphabet/numerals. The search for Anna Livia Plurabella’s letter is in some ways a search for Aleph, the initial state.
All of which forms the background of an old comic strip of mine: BEACH/DUMP USA: A Drama of Comparisons (NSFW)