Word: waking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE, by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. Readers get a guided economy tour of the night life of H. C. Earwicker, mightiest of Irish dreamers, whose nocturnal visions embrace all human history, from the fall of man to Judgment Day. A gifted novelist and linguist, Burgess plays a lively Virgil to the Dublin Dante...
Dirty Hands. Whatever the legal and political fallout, the most fundamental problem confronting Congress in the wake of its historic vote last week is that of its own ethics. Now that Powell has been excluded, Capitol Hill can ill afford to coddle other rascals, as it unquestionably has done in the past. In the past 16 years, for example, two House members were allowed to serve out their terms despite conviction for payroll padding, and a third served a four-month prison term for income-tax evasion, won re-election later that year and was subsequently sworn...
...night a signal of more or less distress is coming in to the State Department message center from at least one of them. In the wee hours, the cables marked NIACT, or "night action," are rushed to a duty officer who has to decide whether to call and wake the appropriate assistant secretary, remembering that the assistant secretary may already have been wakened once before. Early in the morning, last night's take of cables is culled over, digested and circulated in innumerable copies, and several times during the day overflowing in-baskets are topped off with a new sheaf...
Burgess defends Wake against the obvious objection that it lacks intelligibility: "A book about a dream would be false if it made everything as clear as daylight. If it woke up and became rational it would no longer be Finnegans Wake." True enough, but a more serious charge is that the dream of H. C. Earwicker does not in fact follow a dream like logic but conforms to the logic imposed upon it by the esthetic, moral and historical theories of James Joyce...
Finnegans Wake represents the failure of that grandiloquent scheme. But it is a failure so brilliant that it can still illuminate the mind and gladden the spirit of all who do not regard words as mere tokens or tools, who see them as playthings capable of magic, creating awe by liturgy, or laughter by a conjurer's sleight of alphabet...