JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 009 HOSTY THE BUSKER
PAGE 39:14-44:24 | 2024-09-26
PODCAST AUDIO
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
[Music: Richard Harte sings “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” from Finnegans Wake]
Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty
How he fell with a roll and a rumble
And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple
By the butt of the Magazine Wall
[Music fades out]
Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 9, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor—and my good friend and colleague—Richard Harte reading pages 39 to 44 from Chapter 2 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.
Will you be in Toronto on Monday, October 21st? If so, join us at the Fisher Rare Books Library in the University of Toronto for a very special live taping of Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake, which will also feature a display of rare books related to the novel, including Marshall McLuhan’s heavily annotated first edition of the Wake and Sir Edward Sullivan’s landmark study, The Book of Kells. The event is free. For more details and to reserve a seat, visit our website at www.OneLittleGoat.org.
[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]
Adam Seelig: Finnegans Wake is a production of One Little Goat Theatre Company. For the next five years, One Little Goat will film and record all 17 chapters (roughly 30 Hours) of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake before live audiences in various locations, screening and releasing them along along the way, with the aim of completing the entire book in time for its 90th birthday, May 4, 2029. One Little Goat Theatre Company is an official charity in Canada and the United States — if you’d like to support our work, please visit us online at www.OneLittleGoat.org to make a charitable donation. And if monetary support is not an option, you can still help this podcast by rating and reviewing it and by spreading the word. To get in touch, you’ll find our email address on the One Little Goat Theatre Company website and we’d love to hear from you.
[Music fades out]
Adam Seelig:
Barrie Phillip Nichol, better known as bpNichol, a patron saint of Canadian poetry, would have been 80 years old this September 30th, 2024. He was born in Vancouver in 1944 and died in Toronto at far too early an age, just shy of his 44th birthday.
In Episode 2 of this podcast series, we discussed the sounds and meanings emerging from the evocative opening word of Finnegans Wake, “riverrun”, including reverence, a river’s flow, a stream, a stream of consciousness, and a stream of unconsciousness conveying the dream language of Joyce’s night novel, hence “riverrun” as a dream (from rêverons in French) and as a ‘round dream’ (from the French, rêve rond), reminding us that the novel, like Shakespeare’s Tempest, like us, is “such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep.”
In opening bpNichol’s recently published notebook excerpts — beautifully assembled by Coach House Books under the title, Some Lines of Poetry — I was delighted to discover on the first page a poem called “a river” (1980), a mostly visual poem comprised of the letters in the word “river”, which allowed me, for the first time, to see and hear not only the nocturnal dream of the Wake’s opening word, “riverrun,” but the daydream in it, too, its ‘reverie’. ‘Reverie’: the musing unconsciousness of waking hours. And tracing ‘reverie’ to its etymological roots, I found two words, ‘revelry’ and ‘rejoicing’, the latter, ‘re-Joyce-ing’, echoing the author’s name, and the former, ‘revelry’, a reminder that what we have before us is — in the end and from its beginning — lots of fun.
I’ve posted a photo of bp’s poem on One Little Goat’s website, so you can enjoy it in bp’s own handwriting — you’ll find that at www.onelittlegoat.org/podcast, or better yet, pick up a copy of the book from Coach House. It’s a beauty.
riveri veriveriveriver
iveri veriveriveriveri
verive riveriveriveriv
eriveri veriveriverive
riverive riveriveriver
iveriveri veriveriveri
veriveri veriveriveriv
eriveri veriveriverive
riveri veriveriveriver
iveriv eviveriveriveri
bpNichol, some lines of poetry: from the notebooks of bpNichol. Coach House Books, Toronto, 2024.
"a river" (May 9, 1980), bpNichol, from the notebooks of bpNichol. Coach House Books, Toronto, 2024.
Now as this is a podcast, I’ll at least attempt to sound out the opening two lines of the 10-line poem, “a river”:
riveri veriveriveriver
iveri veriveriveriveri
This sound helped me hear one more element in the Wake’s “riverrun” of words, and that is ‘ever’, its ever-ness, foreverness and, famously, its never-ending-ness, the novel’s last page continuous with the first. The ever-present “riverrun” of Finnegans Wake is always now — it ever-runs.
Thank you bpNichol for that poem, and happy 80th birthday!
At the heart of today’s episode is one of the Wake’s outstanding characters, the scandalmongering balladeer—or in today’s terms, the caustic singer-songwriter—by the name of Hosty. We’ll get to him in a moment.
Jumping back into the stream where we left off last time in Chapter 2 on page 39…
The Brazen Head, The Liberties' landmark pub.
The zigzagging relay of gossip about HCEarwicker from the previous episode (Episode 008) that ended up galloping around at the racetrack now reaches the ears of two down-and-out Dubliners, recently out of jail, the brothers Treacle Tom and Frisky Shorty. Treacle Tom gets seriously drunk in the historically disreputable distillery district known as The Liberties — I love how the text itself becomes positively slurred and alcoholic in Treacle Tom’s section. Treacle Tom then crashes in a rooming-house, and during a bad night’s sleep, talks in his sleep, repeating the rumours about HCE, which are heard by a trio of homeless men, the last of whom is the scandalous street busker, Hosty.
That name, Hosty, aside from being a mononymous musician anticipating the likes of Elvis, Prince and Beyoncé, is another case where the Wake can be suggesting both ‘it and its opposite’. On the one hand, the name “Hosty” can suggest welcoming, as a host would be, while on the other, someone who’s hostile, from the Latin hostis, meaning ‘stranger’ and ‘enemy.’ There’s also a faint echo of our protagonist, “HCE”, in the sound “Hosty” — more on that in the next episode.
That same cold night, Hosty, unlucky in life, considers suicide, but the gossip about Earwicker, having reached his ears, rejuvenates him by morning (41:13) and inspires him to write a new ballad, after some morning drinking with his buddies.
In the last two paragraphs of today’s reading, Hosty, through his scandalous song about Earwicker, spreads the gossip further. We are told that he sings it to “a singleminded supercrowd, easily representative” (42:22) of every social strata in Dublin — and here the Wake describes the full range of this audience/mob with a level of detail comparable to a Bruegel painting of a village packed with people or a busy scene in a Where’s Waldo book. The shocking song then makes its way into print, and before you know it, the wind blows sheets of it from village to village across all of Ireland.
A Village Festival in honour of St. Hubert and St. Anthony. Pieter Brueghel II, 1627.
So in Chapter 2, what started as a seemingly straightforward encounter between Earwicker and the cad in Dublin’s Phoenix Park (Episode 8) has blown up into a nation-wide scandal. As the text puts it, turning the Irish nationalist song, ‘A Nation Once Again,’ into something rubbernecky and salacious, “a nation wants a gaze” (43:21-30).
A large crowd has assembled to hear Hosty sing his widely distributed song, the text gives him a full-throated, bouncing introduction, and the audience breaks out in wild applause. So thunderous is this clapping, and so like a “Glass crash” (44:15-16) that it morphs into one of the Wake’s ‘thunderwords’ containing 100 letters. This particular ‘thunderword’, the third of ten in the novel, is comprised of phonemes and words that mean ‘clapping’ or ‘applause’, with the final syllable, “kot”, intriguingly suggesting ‘shit’— kot in German means ‘feces’. It’s a fitting end for the thunderous applause of this 100-letter ‘thunderword’ in light of the slander-filled shitstorm that Hosty, the ultimate shit-talker, unleashes on Earwicker through his song, “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”.
We’ll hear Richard Harte, as Hosty, sing that “longawaited Messiagh of roaratorios” (41:28) in the next episode, and we’ll also publish on our website the corresponding shit music, excuse me, sheet music, written by Joyce himself.
Right now, it’s time to welcome you back to Noonan’s Irish Pub for Richard’s reading of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 39 line 14 to page 44 line 24 for the continuation of Chapter 2.
Richard’s reading was shot and recorded in Toronto at Noonan’s Irish Pub on June 26th, 2023 with a live audience. The film premiered at the Toronto Irish Film Festival and Bloomsday Film Festival at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.
[Richard Harte reads Finnegans Wake 39:14-44:24.]
[39] ‘Twas two pisononse Timcoves (the wetter is pest, the renns are
overt and come and the voax of the turfur is hurled on our lande)
of the name of Treacle Tom as was just out of pop following the
theft of a leg of Kehoe, Donnelly and Packenham’s Finnish pork
and his own blood and milk brother Frisky Shorty, (he was, to be
exquisitely punctilious about them, both shorty and frisky) a tip-
ster, come off the hulks, both of them awful poor, what was out
on the bumaround for an oofbird game for a jimmy o’goblin or
a small thick un as chanced, while the Seaforths was making the
colleenbawl, to ear the passon in the motor clobber make use of
his law language (Edzo, Edzo on), touchin the case of Mr Adams
what was in all the sundays about it which he was rubbing noses
with and having a gurgle off his own along of the butty bloke in
the specs.
This Treacle Tom to whom reference has been made had
been absent from his usual wild and woolly haunts in the land
of counties capalleens for some time previous to that (he was, in
fact, in the habit of frequenting common lodginghouses where
he slept in a nude state, hailfellow with meth, in strange men’s
cots) but on racenight, blotto after divers tots of hell fire, red
biddy, bull dog, blue ruin and creeping jenny, Eglandine’s choic-
est herbage, supplied by the Duck and Doggies, the Galop-
ping Primrose, Brigid Brewster’s, the Cock, the Postboy’s Horn,
[40] the Little Old Man’s and All Swell That Aimswell, the Cup and
the Stirrup, he sought his wellwarmed leababobed in a hous-
ingroom Abide With Oneanother at Block W.W., (why didn’t
he back it?) Pump Court, The Liberties, and, what with
moltapuke on voltapuke, resnored alcoh alcoho alcoherently to
the burden of I come, my horse delayed, nom num, the sub-
stance of the tale of the evangelical bussybozzy and the rusinur-
bean (the ‘girls’ he would keep calling them for the collarette
and skirt, the sunbonnet and carnation) in parts (it seemed he
was before the eyots of martas or otherwales the thirds of fossil-
years, he having beham with katya when lavinias had her mens
lease to sea in a psumpship doodly show whereat he was looking
for fight ------- with whilde roarses) oft in the chilly night (the
metagonistic! the epickthalamorous!) during uneasy slumber in
their hearings of a small and stonybroke cashdraper’s executive,
Peter Cloran (discharged), O’Mara, an exprivate secretary of no
fixed abode (locally known as Mildew Lisa), who had passed
several nights, funnish enough, in a doorway under the blankets
of homelessness on the bunk of iceland, pillowed upon the stone
of destiny colder than man’s knee or woman’s breast, and
Hosty, (no slouch of a name), an illstarred beachbusker, who,
sans rootie and sans scrapie, suspicioning as how he was setting
on a twoodstool on the verge of selfabyss, most starved, with
melancholia over everything in general, (night birman, you served
him with natigal’s nano!) had been towhead tossing on his shake-
down, devising ways and manners of means, of what he loved
to ifidalicence somehow or other in the nation getting a hold of
some chap’s parabellum in the hope of taking a wing sociable
and lighting upon a sidewheel dive somewhere off the Dullkey
Downlairy and Bleakrooky tramaline where he could throw true
and go and blow the sibicidal napper off himself for two bits to
boldywell baltitude in the peace and quitybus of a one sure shot
bottle, he after having being trying all he knew with the lady’s
help of Madam Gristle for upwards of eighteen calanders to get
out of Sir Patrick Dun’s, through Sir Humphrey Jervis’s and
into the Saint Kevin’s bed in the Adelaide’s hosspittles (from
[41] these incurable welleslays among those uncarable wellasdays
through Sant Iago by his cocklehat, goot Lazar, deliver us!)
without after having been able to jerrywangle it anysides. Lisa
O’Deavis and Roche Mongan (who had so much incommon,
epipsychidically; if the phrase be permitted hostis et odor insuper
petroperfractus) as an understood thing slept their sleep of the
swimborne in the one sweet undulant mother of tumblerbunks
with Hosty just how the shavers in the shaw the yokels in the
yoats or, well, the wasters in the wilde, and the bustling tweeny-
dawn-of-all-works (meed of anthems here we pant!) had not been
many jiffies furbishing potlids, doorbrasses, scholars’ applecheeks
and linkboy’s metals when, ashhopperminded like no fella he go
make bakenbeggfuss longa white man, the rejuvenated busker (for
after a goodnight’s rave and rumble and a shinkhams topmorning
with his coexes he was not the same man) and his broadawake
bedroom suite (our boys, as our Byron called them) were up
and ashuffle from the hogshome they lovenaned The Barrel, cross
Ebblinn’s chilled hamlet (thrie routes and restings on their then
superficies curiously correspondant with those linea and puncta
where our tubenny habenny metro maniplumbs below the ober-
flake underrails and stations at this time of riding) to the thrum-
mings of a crewth fiddle which, cremoaning and cronauning, levey
grevey, witty and wevey, appy, leppy and playable, caressed the
ears of the subjects of King Saint Finnerty the Festive who, in
brick homes of their own and in their flavory fraiseberry beds,
heeding hardly cry of honeyman, soed lavender or foyneboyne
salmon alive, with their priggish mouths all open for the larger
appraisiation of this longawaited Messiagh of roaratorios, were
only halfpast atsweeeep and after a brisk pause at a pawnbroking
establishment for the prothetic purpose of redeeming the song-
ster’s truly admirable false teeth and a prolonged visit to a house
of call at Cujas Place, fizz, the Old Sots’ Hole in the parish of
Saint Cecily within the liberty of Ceolmore not a thousand or one
national leagues, that was, by Griffith’s valuation, from the site
of the statue of Primewer Glasstone setting a match to the march
of a maker (last of the stewards peut-être), where, the tale rambles
[42] along, the trio of whackfolthediddlers was joined by a further —
intentions — apply — tomorrow casual and a decent sort of the
hadbeen variety who had just been touching the weekly insult,
phewit, and all figblabbers (who saith of noun?) had stimulants
in the shape of gee and gees stood by the damn decent sort after
which stag luncheon and a few ones more just to celebrate yester-
day, flushed with their firestufffostered friendship, the rascals came
out of the licensed premises, (Browne’s first, the small p.s. ex-ex-
executive capahand in their sad rear like a lady’s postscript: I want
money. Pleasend), wiping their laughleaking lipes on their sleeves,
how the bouckaleens shout their roscan generally (seinn fion,
seinn fion’s araun.) and the rhymers’ world was with reason the
richer for a wouldbe ballad, to the balledder of which the world
of cumannity singing owes a tribute for having placed on the
planet’s melomap his lay of the vilest bogeyer but most attrac-
tionable avatar the world has ever had to explain for.
This, more krectly lubeen or fellow—me—lieder was first
poured forth where Riau Liviau riots and col de Houdo humps,
under the shadow of the monument of the shouldhavebeen legis-
lator (Eleutheriodendron! Spare, woodmann, spare!) to an over-
flow meeting of all the nations in Lenster fullyfilling the visional
area and, as a singleminded supercrowd, easily representative,
what with masks, whet with faces, of all sections and cross sections
(wineshop and cocoahouse poured out to brim up the broaching)
of our liffeyside people (to omit to mention of the mainland mino-
rity and such as had wayfared via Watling, Ernin, Icknild and
Stane, in chief a halted cockney car with its quotal of Hardmuth’s
hacks, a northern tory, a southern whig, an eastanglian chroni-
cler and a landwester guardian) ranging from slips of young
dublinos from Cutpurse Row having nothing better to do than
walk about with their hands in their kneepants, sucking air-
whackers, weedulicet, jumbobricks, side by side with truant
officers, three woollen balls and poplin in search of a croust of
pawn to busy professional gentlemen, a brace of palesmen with
dundrearies, nooning toward Daly’s, fresh from snipehitting and
mallardmissing on Rutland heath, exchanging cold sneers, mass-
[43] going ladies from Hume Street in their chairs, the bearers baited,
some wandering hamalags out of the adjacent cloverfields of
Mosse’s Gardens, an oblate fater from Skinner’s Alley, brick-
layers, a fleming, in tabinet fumant, with spouse and dog, an aged
hammersmith who had some chisellers by the hand, a bout of
cudgel players, not a few sheep with the braxy, two bluecoat
scholars, four broke gents out of Simpson’s on the Rocks, a
portly and a pert still tassing Turkey Coffee and orange shrub in
tickeyes door, Peter Pim and Paul Fry and then Elliot and, O,
Atkinson, suffering hell’s delights from the blains of their annui-
tant’s acorns not forgetting a deuce of dianas ridy for the hunt, a
particularist prebendary pondering on the roman easter, the ton-
sure question and greek uniates, plunk em, a lace lappet head or
two or three or four from a window, and so on down to a few good
old souls, who, as they were juiced after taking their pledge over at
the unkle’s place, were evidently under the spell of liquor, from the
wake of Tarry the Tailor a fair girl, a jolly postboy thinking off
three flagons and one, a plumodrole, a half sir from the weaver’s
almshouse who clings and clings and chatchatchat clings to her, a
wholedam’s cloudhued pittycoat, as child, as curiolater, as Caoch
O’Leary. The wararrow went round, so it did, (a nation wants
a gaze) and the ballad, in the felibrine trancoped metre affectioned
by Taiocebo in his Casudas de Poulichinello Artahut, stump-
stampaded on to a slip of blancovide and headed by an excessively
rough and red woodcut, privately printed at the rimepress of
Delville, soon fluttered its secret on white highway and brown
byway to the rose of the winds and the blew of the gaels, from
archway to lattice and from black hand to pink ear, village crying
to village, through the five pussyfours green of the united states
of Scotia Picta — and he who denies it, may his hairs be rubbed
in dirt! To the added strains (so peacifold) of his majesty the
floote, that onecrooned king of inscrewments, Piggots’s purest, ciello
alsoliuto, which Mr Delaney (Mr Delacey?), horn, anticipating
a perfect downpour of plaudits among the rapsods, piped
out of his decentsoort hat, looking still more like his purseyful
namesake as men of Gaul noted, but before of to sputabout, the
[44] snowycrested curl amoist the leader’s wild and moulting hair,
‘Ductor’ Hitchcock hoisted his fezzy fuzz at bludgeon’s height
signum to his companions of the chalice for the Loud Fellow,
boys’ and silentium in curia! (our maypole once more where he rose
of old) and the canto was chantied there chorussed and christened
where by the old tollgate, Saint Annona’s Street and Church.
And aroud the lawn the rann it rann and this is the rann that
Hosty made. Spoken. Boyles and Cahills, Skerretts and Pritchards,
viersefied and piersified may the treeth we tale of live in stoney.
Here line the refrains of. Some vote him Vike, some mote him
Mike, some dub him Llyn and Phin while others hail him Lug
Bug Dan Lop, Lex, Lax, Gunne or Guinn. Some apt him Arth,
some bapt him Barth, Coll, Noll, Soll, Will, Weel, Wall but I
parse him Persse O’Reilly else he’s called no name at all. To-
gether. Arrah, leave it to Hosty, frosty Hosty, leave it to Hosty
for he’s the mann to rhyme the rann, the rann, the rann, the king
of all ranns. Have you here? (Some ha) Have we where? (Some
hant) Have you hered? (Others do) Have we whered (Others dont)
It’s cumming, it’s brumming! The clip, the clop! (All cla) Glass
crash. The (klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrotty-
graddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot!).
Ardite, arditi!
Music cue.
[End of reading excerpt]
Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading from Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake, pages 39 to 44, recorded with a live audience at Noonan’s Irish Pub in Toronto on June 26th, 2023.
Join us in two weeks for Episode 10 when Richard concludes Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake with Hosty’s scandalous song, “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly”. To be sure you don’t miss any episodes, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast? For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and trailers for the films, visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also at OneLittleGoat.org.
[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]
Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support! And thank you to the artists for this episode: Richard Harte; Sound by William Bembridge; Podcast production by Sean Rasmussen; Stage Management by Jobina Sitoh; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig. A big thanks to Jane Noonan and the staff at Noonan’s Irish Pub, as well as to our wonderful live audience. Thank you to everyone at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie. One Little Goat Theatre Company is a nonprofit, artist-driven, registered charity. To donate or find out more or to join our mailing list please visit www.OneLittleGoat.org
Thank you for listening!
[Music fades out]
[End of Ep009]
Mentioned: bpNichol, more glosses on “riverrun”, The Liberties, Hosty the scandalmongering busker, Bruegel, Where’s Waldo, Hosty’s ballad on HCE spreads across Ireland, third ‘thunderword’ in Finnegans Wak, synopsis.
Resources: Transcript for this episode, including the text of Finnegans Wake pages 39-44.
Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce: there are many free copies of FW to read online or download, e.g. finwake.com
James Joyce Digital Archive, “Chicken Guide” to Finnegans Wake provides a ‘plain English’ paraphrase of each chapter by Danis Rose.
Edmund Epstein, A Guide through Finnegans Wake. University Press of Florida, 2009.
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (4th edition). Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2016.
John Gordon’s annotations on his Finnegans Wake blog.
Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1982.
bpNichol, some lines of poetry: from the notebooks of bpNichol. Edited by Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts. Coach House, Toronto, 2024.