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In 1939 I bought a copy of Finnegans Wake in a department store in Seattle, Washington. I had read the parts of Work in Progress as they appeared in transition. I used outloud to entertain friends with The Ondt and the Gracehoper. But even though I owned a copy, no matter where I lived, the Wake simply sat on a table or shelf unread. I was "too busy" writing music to read it. In 1942 Janet Fairbanks asked me for a song. I browsed in the Wake looking for a lyrical passage. The one I chose begins page 556. I changed the paragraph so that it became two and read as follows: "Night by silentsailing night, Isobel, wildwood's eyes and primarose hair, quietly, all the woods so wild, in mauves of moss and daphnedews, how all so still she lay, neath of Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake the whitethorn, child of tree, like some losthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled, as fain would she anon, for soon again 'twill be, win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me! deeply, now evencalm lay sleeping; "Night, Isobel, sister Isobel, Saintette Isobelle, Madame Isa Veuve La Belle." The title I chose was one of Joyce's descriptions of her, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs. I remember looking in later years several times for other lyrical passages in the Wake. But I never settled on one as the text for another song. In the middle 'sixties Marshall McLuhan suggested that I make a musical work based on the Wake's Ten Thunderclaps. He said that the Thunderclaps were, in fact, a history of technology . This led me to think of Jasper Johns' Painted Bronze (the cans of ale) and to imagine a concert for string orchestra and voices, with the addition towards the end of wind instruments. The orchestra would play notes traced from star maps (Atlas Borealis) but due to contact microphones and suitable circuitry the tones would sound like rain falling, at first, say, on water, then on earth, then wood, clay, metal, cement, etc.,finallynot falling, just being in the air, our present circumstance. The chorus meanwhile would sing the Thunderclaps, which would then be electronically transformed to fill up the sound envelopes of an actual thunderstorm. I had planned to do this with Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois 1968-9, but HPSCHD took two years rather than one to make and produce. Due to N. O. Brown's remark that syntax is the arrangement of the army, and Thoreau's that when he heard a sentence he heard feet marching, I became devoted to nonsyntactical "demilitarized " language. I spent well over a year writing Empty Words, a transition from a language without sentences (having only phrases, words, syllables, and letters) to a "language" having only letters and silence (music). This led me to want to learn something about the ancient Chinese language and to read Finnegans Wake. But when in this spirit I picked up the book, Joyce seemed to me to have kept the old structures ("sintalks") in which he put the new words he had made. It was when I was in this frame of mind that Elliott Anderson, editor of TriQuarterly, wrote asking me to write something (anything, text or music) for an issue of the magazine to be devoted to the Wake (In the wake of the Wake). I said I was too busy. I was. I was writing Renga and had not yet started Apartment House 1776 the performance date of which had alWritmg for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake : 133 ready been set. Anderson replied that his deadline could be changed. I refused again and again. He persisted. Anderson was not thefirstperson to bother me by asking me to do something when I was busy doing something else. We continually bother one another with birthdays, deadlines, celebrations , blurbs, fund raising, requests for information, interviews, letters of introduction, letters of recommendation. To turn irritation into pleasure IVe made the practice, for more than ten years now, of writing mesostics (not acrostics: row down the middle, not down the edge). What makes a mesostic as far as I'm concerned is that thefirstletter of a word or name is on the first line and following it on thefirstline the second letter of the word or name is not to be found. (The second letter is on the second line.) When, for instance, we were in a bus...

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