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Originally posted by Citizen Carrier

http://www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/myers/bad_writing.html

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Originally posted by Citizen Carrier

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Originally posted by RVHorror

I actually *did* read Finnegans Wake, from start to finish. Did I get anything out of it, other than the ability to say "I've read it"? Why...that would be telling!

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But I can guess. Here's a SINGLE sentence from "Finnegans Wake".

Shem's bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an
eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a
sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip,
a trio of barbels from his megageg chin (sowman's son), the
wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial
tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of
thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of
two buttocks, one gleetsteen avoirdupoider for him, a manroot
of all evil, a salmonkelt's thinskin, eelsblood in his cold toes, a
bladder tristended, so much so that young Master Shemmy on
his very first debouch at the very dawn of protohistory seeing
himself such and such, when playing with thistlewords in their
garden nursery, Griefotrofio, at Phig Streat III Shuvlin, Old
Hoeland, (would we go back there now for sounds, pillings and
sense?

Reading this is like that scene in "Doc Hollywood" where everybody politely tolerates the drunken old town doctor as he slurs out a bunch of Walt Whitman poems. At least Whitman was intelligible and insisted on using actual ENGLISH language.

I mean really. Joyce played a tremendous joke on a lot of stuffed shirts, of which he was obviously one, and people are still trying to figure it out.

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