writing in the dust

The next book, found in a strip mall store in Niles, nicely brought up the issue of rereading, which should be an achievable luxury during a holiday break. It is called, unsubtly for this particular practice I’ve raised, *Rereadings: Seventeen Authors Revisit Books They Love*, edited by the lively essayist Anne Fadiman. First readings are about velocity, she observes, but rereadings are about depth — “the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story.” However, for the rereader, difficulties can arise, as when Fadiman was reading C. S. Lewis’s *The Horse and His Boy* to her eight-year-old son. He quickly grew tired of her penchant for analyzing it, as she revisited it so many years after her own young readerly rapture at it, and fiercely said, “Mommy, can you just *read*?” Later in the book, Patricia Hampl’s recollection of reading everything by Katherine Mansfield is thrilling: “But I didn’t just *read* Mansfield. I stalked her. I chased down primary sources, secondary sources, tracking any shred of memory or gossip.” In a suggestive image, she writes of dragging Mansfield out of “low-rent housing” that was her limited presence in anthologies and, by connecting her to a grand literary lineage, Shakespeare-Keats-Mansfield, she “dragooned her into the firmament.”

I reached this particular shop by taking a long drive north up Harlem Avenue, surveying the miscellany of shops and services, the oversized and colorful business signs. The approach was fitting, then, for a book fit for my own rereading, or at least a different kind of reading — James Joyce’s *Finnegans Wake*, in a battered old Viking paperback edition. Reader, I paid $1 for this book. Hallelujah. I had dutifully waded through this last great book of Joyce’s once before, armed with a commentary and a pile of secondary sources, and only after I had read *Portrait of the Artist* as a self-satisfied college student and *Ulysses* as a graduate student. Finding this charmingly ragged but durable copy now, though, brought to mind an old poet friend who lived just off Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It seemed he had read everything, especially international poets of varying centuries but always of the most obscure variety. He translated verses from the Czech, I think. I picture him wearing fingerless wool gloves, though this may be merely a convenient misremembrance, highly appropriate if not exactly accurate. I do remember visiting his apartment once after a poetry slam in the square, and it was noticeably cold. He kept the temperature extremely low to minimize heating costs. I remember he poured some wine or something, and then, as we settled into his dimly lit living room, he pulled down *Finnegans Wake* from a high shelf and commenced, not to reading, but to dipping. Joyce’s mesmerizing, sometimes incomprehensible prose sounded forth in glorious bursts. I hadn’t read, much less studied, the book yet, so this taste mesmerized me. And so in honor of this, till then, long-forgotten friend, I have spent parts of this short break dipping into *Finnegans Wake*: “Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!”