

### James Joyce Reincarnated:

### The WordGuru, Glen Kealey

By Don A Lashomb

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Don A Lashomb

License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author and should not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed it, please encourage others to download their own copy via official channels so that the total number of copies and readers can be more accurately gauged.

Quoted materials obviously remain copyright of their original authors or current legal holders; quotes are reproduced here under the fair use doctrine for commentary and criticism.

Cover artwork shows Kealey facing Joyce's death mask.

### Table of Contents

Author's Disclaimers

Reference Abbreviations

Introducing the Word SculPTor

The "Premise"

Language "Coding"

Flowing Water: Joyce's Rivers, Kealey's Flood

Finn on the Raft

Neanderthalers Are Like Fairies

Re-Creation Recycling: REGO and REPO

In ALP's Santa-Sack: Quarks Fit for a Sac•red Hadron Bag Lady

There's Nothing New, Just a Rein•car•nated Compost Heap

"If I Go All Goes": Forget! or Be Re•membered with Creation

Conclusions: Name-calling, Laughing at Madness, and Living in Two Worlds

Addendum: Five Final Coincidences

Afterward: From Kealey's True Believers . . . to the Cult of Saint Joyce

NOTES

About the Author

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### Author's Disclaimers

Because of the unconventional nature of this work's subject matter, it seems prudent to make certain matters clear to the reader as soon as possible. 1) While the author obviously believes that the ideas of Glen Kealey deserve some serious attention, he does not endorse or subscribe to them literally. 2) That said, the author absolutely does not intend his work to ridicule Glen Kealey or make light of the concerns of those who support his philosophy; rather, the author considers all of them good people who are, in their own way, fighting for a better world. 3) Despite having written a thesis on Finnegans Wake and continuing to follow literary debates on the subject, the author does not wish to be known as a Joycean.

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### Reference Abbreviations

Most references will be cited as endnotes. References to some of Joyce's works and to the Ellmann biography, however, are cited parenthetically, in the main text, using the abbreviations below.

FW : James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press), 1939. (References are to page and line numbers. Sections are indicated by "book" and chapter numbers, e.g. i.8.)

JJ : Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, revised ed. (New York: Oxford Press), 1982.

LI : James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957; reissued with corrections in 1966).

P : James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. R.B. Kershner (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1993).

U : James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. H.W. Gabler with W. Steppe & C. Melchior (London: Bodley Head, 1986). (References are to episode and line numbers, e.g. U 12.727-9.)

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### Introducing the Word SculPTor

At 4:12 a.m. on July 1, 2010, the following message was posted on the _Draco Debates_ Yahoo! group by a man named Glen Kealey:

Creator God is Cashing-In his GE Human Potato Chips-off-the-Old-Block

SEE BRAZIL'S "JESUS, THE REDEEMER" AYE-AYE LEMUR

Bringing in the sheaves: A collection of five feathered human arrows all crunched to-get-her in a quiver, by means of the Fannie Mae mortgage money pulley.

SESAME SEESAW BAYER

To be or not to be Yemen's Empty Quarter shebang, shebang.

Bing, Being, Boeing, Beijing, Bang  
____________________________

The SculPTor (1776-1867)  
WWW.WORDSCULPTOR.NET aka WWW.KEALEY.NET[]

In a strange way, it is as if James Joyce at his most bizarre has been reborn in altered form. His new incarnation is less professional, less presentable than the last. He is even more of an outsider. He seeks neither money nor fame, desires neither benefactors to support him nor critics to champion him. He only wants to save the world. His weird language reconceives and strings together disparate pieces of history, mythology, popular culture, current events, and autobiography. His words form a radically creative narrative that functions as a quasi-religion for himself and his small circle of followers, who parse his every syllable and locate what seem to be references to his ideas in other fields of knowledge. To almost anyone else, his story sounds ludicrous at best, and at worst totally incomprehensible; most who encounter it soon dismiss it as crazy or nonsensical. In particular, the way in which he uses language is a sore point of contention: people should not—do not—use language the way he uses it. The multiform material that has become the great work of this man's life in fact resembles nothing so much as it resembles Finnegans Wake. And if we were to take the sometimes wacky, often amorphous concepts of Finnegans Wake quite literally—fearsomely believing in HCE, ALP, the Museyroom, the workings of the cycles, and everything else in the book as if it all constituted factual reality—then the experience closest to our own would be the peculiar language-bound credo of Glen Emmett Patrick Kealey, the self-styled "Word SculPTor".

Though he is not a Christian, the capital "PT" in his moniker alludes to Saint Peter, first Pope and founder of the Catholic Church. The group of four or five persons who might be termed Kealey's true believers (for they deny that they are a "cult" of passive "followers") say that those who reject Kealey's ideas simply lack "functioning brains". Their defense evokes the ways in which Joyce's circle sometimes characterized those who reacted negatively to Work in Progress: "[I]f you don't understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen," Beckett wrote, "it is because you are too decadent to receive it."[] But really, Joyce claimed, "It is all so simple. If anyone doesn't understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud" (JJ 590). Kealey underpins his own enterprise with a similar rationale: "Every word . . . in every language is built with philosophers' stones. . . . 'Silly balls' [i.e. syllables to juggle and play with]. Phonetics is the common denominator of all language. So is pictograph."[]

The present study will reveal a deep connection and kinship between Joyce and Kealey. The two share a striking number of similar interests and favorite themes. Both men subscribed to superstitious beliefs and utilized them to produce unusual linguistic material. They both use word games, subversive ideas about reality, and creative logic in attempts to understand the world and their respective places in it (Joyce came to see himself as an archetypal scribe; Kealey sees himself as something of a prophet). But while Joyce used these interests and abilities to form Finnegans Wake—an endlessly rich book that provides readers with innumerable lines of thought, amusement, and inquiry—Kealey eschews aesthetics and demands that his ideas be taken literally, not literarily. Early psychoanalysts noted that their most neurotic patients simply showed them clearer, more pronounced examples of traits present in healthier members of society, and Joyceans would find similar benefits in studying Kealey: he may be a Quixotic crank, but he offers us a very raw, direct view into certain imaginative drives quite like the ones that fueled the composition of Finnegans Wake. In Kealey we glimpse what Joyce might have been like were he not a self-described artist; and we can thus better descry the value, point, and use of Joyce's having been a literary writer. We often give pause when considering Finnegans Wake as "fiction", or as a "novel"; but with Kealey's work as a counterpoint the importance of Joyce's fictionalization process rises in our estimation. Both Joyce and Kealey seem obsessed with similar material, similar types of material, and similar ways of making sense of it all by means of creative language. Through his art Joyce was able to overcome his idées fixes and channel them in worthwhile directions. But whereas Joyce swims in this material, Kealey—somewhat like Lucia Joyce—wallows in a flood (and the thematic "water" metaphor proves quite appropriate, as we will see below). By understanding Kealey we gain the ability to "subtract" his nature from all we know of Joyce; and by doing this, the nature of Joyce's sublime, sublimating artistry stands revealed in greater detail.

Kealey offers Joyceans an extremely unique point of comparison. Unlike so much of the other material with which Joyce's work is compared, the case of Kealey stands out because he is a real, living person who is totally, truly immersed in creative linguistics. His example allows us to observe the function (and dysfunction) of linguistic processes similar to Joyce's own as they actually arise, straight-facedly, in a twenty-first century society. Though we may disagree with him or find him patently absurd, Kealey has actually managed to live in (and somewhat successfully promote) a lifestyle based on certain linguistic conceptualizations quite like those that Joyce expressed via Finnegans Wake. As such, the case of Glen Kealey deserves our attention. It serves as a strange, contemporary illustration of what some of Joyce's ideas might have wrought if they emerged in a different person, in a different time and place. Seeing these similar ideas in a different context helps us better understand the intricate nature of the wildly creative, strange linguistic philosophies involved.

In the mid-1980s Kealey was a highly successful Canadian businessman and developer in charge of a $160 million office building project.[] But rather than pay a Cabinet minister a $5,000 kickback, Kealey blew the whistle. He spent the next decade (and most of his savings) touring Canada, giving speeches about government corruption, and trying to get various Canadian politicians (including then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney) convicted of apparent wrongdoings related to bribery and the $160 million project, which by then had been canceled. In the early 1990s Kealey "loudly protest[ed]" for 1,000 straight days on Parliament Hill.[] He eventually won his day in court, but ultimately proved unsuccessful in getting the politicians jailed.[] Kealey was devastated and decided to exile himself, for the most part, from public life. He began an introspective quest to figure out where he had gone wrong and how the political system really functioned, behind the scenes. He is currently a farm manager in Oxford Mills, Ontario, President (and seemingly sole member) of the Canadian Institute for Political Integrity, and "Word SculPTor/Teacher : of Ultimate Reality"[].

Kealey believes that by "decoding" language one can deduce the ruling influence on human affairs to be a group of nefarious, technologically advanced Neanderthalers, "the Deans of Dollars" who live miles beneath the Earth's surface (and who, as a later section will discuss, happen to resemble the shee of Irish legends, referenced often in Finnegans Wake). For several years now Kealey has been telling his fantastic story by giving examples of a perceived "coding" that he insists is not his own invention but rather the underlying logic of language itself. In so doing, he has refined his ideas into an entire language-based mythology. He now finds himself "constantly surprised by the linkages that appear" every time he scrutinizes the keywords, terms, and names that arise in the daily news cycles.[] "I spend most of my time doing that," he explains, "taking a word that seems important today . . . breaking it down into its component parts, and [asking myself] 'What are they saying here?'"[] Again and again he discovers that every word, once "decoded", fits nicely into his "Premise" and bizarre outlook on life.

By contrast and by felicitous comparison, the strange case of Glen Kealey can help us better understand the superstitious "word magic" of Joyce's later work. As James Atherton noted long ago, Joyce "saw himself as the Vates, the poet and prophet, and his work as the sacred book of a new religion of which he was the prophet and priest."[] In Kealey we see a clear, contemporary recurrence of the magical thinking in which Joyce indulged so wantonly and gloriously while writing Finnegans Wake. Though their respective linguistic processes are not identical, Kealey's work appears to shadow or mirror Joyce's. A Joycean who acquires comprehension of Kealey's material would find that it seems to form a negative space background (to borrow a term from visual art) around Finnegans Wake. As such, Kealey's work better defines the shape of Joyce's composition in terms of what might be called revelatory linguistic delusion-making. Both Joyce and Kealey try to locate and explicate the hidden history or secret workings of reality by means of strange language and allegories—though Kealey evidently, stubbornly believes in the literal existence of many of his fantastic concepts. Kealey's insistence on singular interpretations of words, phrases, and archetypal ideas stands in great contrast to the open-endedness of Finnegans Wake. This causes us to appreciate the effect, and effectiveness, of Joyce's hyper-connotative fiction, which allows for various interpretations and encourages readers to form connections unbound by strict authorial intent.

Sections below will detail various, often striking similarities between Kealey's personal mythology and certain features of Finnegans Wake. This present section and the next, however, must first give an overview of the subject matter and explain Kealey's "Premise". For now, let us note that Joyce's use of the word Neanderthal in Finnegans Wake fortuitously aligns with the cavemen-centric narrative of Glen Kealey: We hear of "the meandertale, aloss and again," which soon becomes a "meanderthalltale" (FW 18.22-3, 19.25). In his story, his conversations, and his logic, Kealey certainly does meander, as we shall see. His material repeats itself while positing historical cycles, cryptic language ciphers, villainous Neanderthal underlords, a Godlike supercomputer, and an imminent, global "blackwater" flood—all of which certainly constitutes a thalltale ["tall tale"].

Whereas Joyce in Finnegans Wake constructed innumerable portmanteau words, Kealey's method treats existent words as if they were already portmanteaus. As such, Kealey's operations to break down commonplace words are akin to the work we perform when trying to read Finnegans Wake. (Perhaps the simplest way to describe Kealey's psychology is to say that he reads the world the way littérateurs read books.) While Joyce crammed many pre-established words together in order to make his own unique language, Kealey focuses on certain words (normal words found in dictionaries) and unpacks them to reveal what he believes are the hidden words inside, including their secret meanings and concealed "linkages" to other words—all of which happen to accord with his idiosyncratic worldview. For example, instead of the English word Neanderthals, Kealey uses Neanderthalers, the Dutch version, because he can connect it to Thaler, a type of German coin from which dollar derived. Moreover, as Kealey's method frequently disregards the first letter of a word as "cosmetic" (since "Words really begin at the second letter"), the remaining first four letters (eand) can be rearranged or "decoded" to read dean. Thus, Neanderthalers are "the Deans of Dollars". Kealey also says that this dean is a cognate for dinosaur (deinos being the Greek word for "monstrous", which the Neanderthalers certainly are). And, by the way, the singer Dean Martin was a clue to all this ("Dean-O"/dino/deinos).[]

Both Kealey and Joyce utilize diverse sources to create conglomerate characters, imagos, and concepts. A lounge lizard dinosaur who lives underground is no weirder than various figures we discern from the portmanteaus of Finnegans Wake—so many of them made up of homophonic words across multiple languages, all melded together and given peculiar new forms and contexts by Joyce. While Kealey discerns such Frankensteinian conglomerations from normal words and believes them to be real aspects of our world, Joyce composes a fictional plane on which readers can entertain his new, bizarre words in ways that seem psychologically safer and probably more imaginatively profitable.

The present study is concerned neither with making amateur psychological diagnoses nor with ridiculing the unusual (but in some ways, perhaps, heroic) man who can now be added, as a latecomer, to the list of figures whose character and word processes shed light on Joyce's own. Due to its extreme creativity and rare nature, the linguistic work of Glen Kealey deserves serious consideration, especially in comparison with Finnegans Wake, which seems in many respects its closest analogue. Nevertheless, it bears acknowledging that many people would readily say that Glen Kealey suffers from various types of delusions (delusions of grandeur, delusions of reference) and from some sort of paranoid schizophrenia. But Carl Jung suspected that Joyce himself "had a latent psychosis," a "'psychological' style" that was "definitely schizophrenic" (JJ 679-80), and legions of unfair readers have casually labeled Joyce insane simply because they could not understand his writing. (As noted in a later section, Joyce also questioned, if not his own sanity, the sanity of his book.) Obviously, none of that has prevented serious readers from appreciating Joyce's writing for all it's worth, for all its quirks and quarks. Many Joyceans have also investigated the artistry and creative personality of Lucia Joyce, not discounting any of it simply because she was mentally ill. Like Lucia, Kealey has never received a formal psychological diagnosis. Unlike Lucia, Kealey has never been institutionalized—though he lives a fairly reclusive life. Both Joyces—especially James—mirror Kealey: Kealey is almost a composite of the two Joyces, possessing to somewhat lesser degrees the talent of the father and the social ostracism and stigma of the daughter. They mirror him and he mirrors them, and we are better for having a new mirror in which to view James Joyce from another angle.

Unlike the writer of Finnegans Wake, Kealey does not consider himself an author of literature, let alone anything resembling a fictionist. Rather, he intends his words to pique people's curiosity and make them aware of the deep danger that he believes to lie at the heart of our world—literally beneath our feet without our knowing it. In colloquial terms, Kealey (whose autobiographical blurb is titled "When I Woke Up!"[]) wants to wake people up from their mental slumber. As such, his often solemn, oddly-worded alerts, written and spoken, complement Joyce's playful dream-book, whose title can be read—or rather heard—as an imperative sentence. We should note that that both Kealey and Joyce's respective conceptions of sleeping, dreaming, and waking are highly metaphorical. We do not really sleep or dream while we read Finnegans Wake, and Kealey does not believe that those who don't hear—or choose to ignore—his message are literally asleep. Likewise, both men's invocations for others to wake imply a state of mind above that of conventional consciousness. Amusingly, a 1994 book entitled New World Order Corruption in Canada, dedicated to Kealey for his activism and protests on Parliament Hill, includes the following apology for the spelling and grammatical errors that remain in the final copy: "You will find mistakes, but always remember what James Joyce said about the title of Finnegans Wake: 'I left the apostrophe out to wake people up.'"[] (Note: Joyce never said that exactly.)

The totality of Kealey's words that have been documented—in print, in audio recordings, and in electronic text—constitutes a living oeuvre that in fact recalls certain specific themes and linguistic operations of Joyce's final book. Language is the core of both Kealey and Joyce's respective philosophies, dispositions, and vocations. In both their cases, reworked syllables form the building blocks from which larger ideas are diligently constructed.[] As will be shown below, though their intricate "languaging"[] techniques are not exactly the same, both Joyce and Kealey break down words, move pieces of words around to form new meanings, recombine syllables, sometimes make use of accepted etymology, sometimes posit their own forged etymologies, often create anachronistic juxtapositions between wildly different cultural items, and engage in punning and name-calling. Both think of letters visually: while Joyce has his "sigla", some of which he rotates; Kealey concerns himself with "pictograms", which he often flips and turns in order to change one letter into another. Both seem to have formed their great themes by fixating and on certain primal, archetypal aspects of humanity and nature: metaphorical "sleeping" and "waking"; memory and forgetting; cycles of time; hearing language as opposed to merely seeing or reading it; compost heaps, hills, and mountains; sacks and bags and metaphorical containers (which are often associated with the feminine); fabulous creatures who live underground and under mounds; the dead rising and personas returning in altered forms, sometimes as mythic avatars; and lastly—most of all—water (for Joyce it is rivers; for Kealey, floods).

Spread out across a range of websites, message boards, audio files, video interviews, and long out-of-print self-published newsletters from the 1990s (few pages of which have been scanned and made available online), Kealey's material is extremely difficult to approach. There is no formal "page one" starting point; nor is there any linear, easy-to-follow chronological path through the labyrinth. Imagine if the pages of Finnegans Wake, instead of being numbered and bound between two covers, were all divided, let loose, and scattered among many non-user-friendly websites; and half the pages existed only as commentary-track versions, in large audio files; and there were tales of other pages found only in rare old newspapers. Every step of the way, the researcher encounters bizarre phrases and ideas that often become more bizarre as they become more comprehensible. The learning process sometimes becomes more unsettling the more one realizes just what Glen Kealey is saying, how he uses language to arrive at his conclusions, and the terrifying extent to which he believes in these conclusions. Frequently, however, the whole thing can seem hilariously absurd and unintentionally wonderful. Most of all, Kealey's material is overwhelming in much the same way Finnegans Wake is. There is no way to understand every word of Finnegans Wake, and there is no way to understand (or read, or even locate) every missive of Glen Kealey[].

Only after having grasped the touchstone ideas and themes of such works can anyone begin to make sense of them with any success. But summaries for such sprawling, multifaceted works are necessarily imperfect, inherently flawed, and not quite coherent. Nonetheless, the next section will attempt to lay out in as few paragraphs as possible Kealey's "Premise". After that, various linguistic and thematic overlaps between Kealey's work and Finnegans Wake will be compared and contrasted.

The present study is informed primarily by podcast audio files. With Kealey's consent, a handful of individuals interested in his work (mostly true believers of his message, along with a couple prank-callers) have in recent years recorded their telephone conversations with him and uploaded them to the TalkShoe website, making them available as mp3s for anyone to download. These conversations, each about an hour long, are like impromptu Socratic dialogues. Kealey indulges himself and spends long stretches of time making tangential word-connection chains—most of which have something to do with the vast, ancient, nearly omnipotent, nearly invisible conspiracy that he believes is occurring. Since the nature of the audios allows Kealey to answer questions and elaborate on his ideas—especially his methods of coding, decoding, and "sculpting" language—the conversations are far more approachable than Kealey's Internet postings are. Listening to these audios, we are taken through a series of step-by-step thought processes; each mp3 file further explicates a type of paradoxical, fantastical logic that reminds us of—and indirectly teaches us more about—the spirit behind Finnegans Wake. When Kealey posits the endless, imaginative linguistic links that he believes explain the secret nature of reality, we hear something akin to an extended commentary from Joyce on how the word magic of Finnegans Wake can provide imaginative reinterpretations of the underlying workings of the world. The difference is that Joyce could externalize and develop his simulacrum into an outlandish novel, whereas Kealey's radical ideas at some point "overwrote" his hitherto normal outlook on life and formed the basis of an outlandish world-view. A later section will further investigate the significance of Joyce's having declared his book—not himself—"crazy".

In addition to investigating Kealey's imaginative material on its own terms—a task which proves invigorating in itself—this strange journey helps us perceive, by contrast, an aspect of Joyce not often appreciated. "[W]e've lived in two worlds," says ALP toward the end of Finnegans Wake (619.11), and Joyce needed to live in two different worlds to be able to write it. For Kealey (as it was for Lucia, it seems), there is only one world: reality and imagination have collapsed upon each other; Kealey writes no formal book because he ostensibly lives inside his own "book of life", as he calls it[]; and his creativity, for all its ingenuity, needlessly makes his life tougher and scarier (though perhaps more interesting) as he projects it onto his living environment. Joyce, on the other hand, for all his idiosyncrasies and comical exaggerations about the power that Finnegans Wake had on the real world[], was able to function and perceive the world relatively normally when he was away from his writing. Ironically, the quality most necessary for Joyce to have achieved all he did with Finnegans Wake may have been his ability to know when to stop believing in his own engrossing fantasies and reconceptions of life and language. Though he made the most vainglorious statements concerning the existential primacy of his writing ("My art is not a mirror held up to nature. Nature mirrors my art" (JJ 729n)), he did not quite live in accordance with those stated beliefs. In Glen Kealey, however, we see a strange double of Joyce who, on the one hand, also uses imaginative languaging to build a deep, cohesive, fantastic world; but on the other hand, unlike Joyce, Kealey really cannot distinguish reality from his own artistic, linguistic reflections. By investigating Kealey, we can better understand the raw imaginative drives that Joyce experienced, indulged in, and had to master in order to write Finnegans Wake.

### The "Premise"

Though they share many of the same extended themes, the basic "Premise" behind Kealey's work bears scarcely any resemblance to what we might call the barebones "story" of _Finnegans Wake_. Nevertheless, the strange background plot of Kealey's philosophy needs to be explained before more detailed comparisons with Joyce's book can be made.

On a low-budget radio show broadcast in the American Southwest in early 2008, the haggard voice of an old man says many strange things. This is Glen Kealey's first interview in over a decade, the first since his days as a protestor of government corruption. One of the hosts, an old friend of Glen's, has asked him to come on the air and share some of the new material that he has been learning. In the later podcasts Kealey does not sound so morose and hopeless, but in this audio his voice is slow, gravelly and haunting:

What I have learned in my 67 years on this planet is that things are not what they appear to be at first hand. It took me a while to learn that, but, to make a long story shorter, I uncovered a code styled "Desdemona". It is a code based on pictographs of the English language alphabet . . . It is basically an allegory for the coming of the I.R.S. (Internal Revenue Service) to America. . . . The story derived from breaking down this code is that a plan was set up to transfer technology . . .

. . . I know nothing except what I read in their code, yet I have spent years—ten years now—studying the relationship between the code and our reality on the planet, and everything matches one hundred percent. What it says in the code is in fact happening on the surface of the planet, and I have no reason to disbelieve that the things I cannot see within the Earth—but know exist—are possible. . . .

. . . A group of people prior to the last Ice Age found refuge within the Moho discontinuity and have been managing—for lack of a better word—a toll-gating system of pirates on the surface of the Earth in order to achieve their goal. . . . [T]hey wish not only to control this planet but to control the universe. . . .

. . . [G]enetic engineering . . . is not new, as they want us to believe, but in fact Cro-Magnon man was manufactured at least 40-some thousand years ago, in a laboratory, before the last Ice Age.[]

His story is incredible in both senses of the word. Glen Kealey believes that human affairs are, and have always been, controlled by a group of 144,000 idiot savant Neanderthalers who live underground, in the Mohorovičić discontinuity between Earth's crust and upper mantle. These troglodytes (literally "cave-divers"), once lived above ground, Kealey contends, side by side with a species of hermaphroditic "Clan Mothers", all of whom had XX chromosomes and were perfectly self-replicating beings who lived in peace. As Kealey's mythology goes, the Neanderthalers convinced the Clan Mothers to allow themselves to be operated on: the Clan Mothers were then divided into two distinct sexes, male and female, from which the Cro-Magnon species evolved. Since the Cro-Magnons were psychologically and physiologically incomplete beings, the Neanderthalers could easily control them through social engineering. During the last Ice Age the Neanderthalers retreated underground, where they still reside and manipulate the ancestors of the Cro-Magnons—i.e., us—from afar. Over the ages, power and technology are transferred back and forth between East and West, civilizations rise and fall, and continent-wide, millennia-long business plans are rolled out and scaled back all according to an elaborate, scripted game of chess devised by our hidden troglodyte rulers. They exert commanding influence over our leaders, our monetary system, our media, and even our DNA. Their main objective is to recombine the human sexes while adding into the neck a customized portion of Neanderthaler genetics, complete with a remote-control device, in order to produce a "super slave" that can be sent out to colonize outer space.

Actually, Kealey says, the Neanderthalers themselves may no longer exist as such: long ago they uploaded their genius into a "self-teaching and self-learning" centralized computer, which may now be executing the plan all by itself.[] This computer is the equivalent of what human beings in recent millennia have called God. Kealey takes great pains, however, to make a distinction between "Creator" and "Creation": the latter is the true, anonymous, generative process of the universe; any supposed Creator, on the other hand, cannot really create anything, but is simply trying to take credit for Creation's work. Creator (used by Kealey as a catch-all term for the cult of personality behind the malevolent secret agenda) has been passing off re-creations and genetic manipulations as if they had been produced whole-cloth out of nothingness by an omnipotent, benevolent force. (Let us briefly note now what will be discussed at greater length in a later section: that Joyce too understood this distinction between creating and re-creating, and often described himself as being more like an editor than an originator: "I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man" (JJ 626).) Needless to say, Kealey believes that Creator is mentally ill and that Creator's influence is unhealthy. The Neanderthaler leadership (or their computer) has decided that soon it will be best to flood most of the planet's surface, thereby destroying most of the human race, because work on the astronautic super-slave model is nearing completion—and that will render terrestrial humans obsolete.

The only way to prevent this flood from happening, Kealey says, would be to gather together a "critical mass" of 13 special people who, after having woken up from the brainwashing to which the Neanderthalers subject all humanity, now "grasp the Premise totally."[] Kealey contends that this group of people, once they have made their way to his farm in Oxford Mills, Ontario, should be able to communicate telepathically with Creation and beseech it to intervene, prevent the flood, stop the power-mad computer, and give all life on Earth a bit more time (5,000 more years, in his estimation; the length of another macro-cycle) to arrive at a healthier, wiser, more cognizant way of coexisting.

Let us pause here to note that Kealey's concept of 13 "awake" people seems to play off Joyce's concept of "The Twelve" dreamers—i.e., "The Morphios!", the "component partners of our societate" who in some sense support the world of Finnegans Wake, in part by "condon[ing] every evil by practical justification and condam[ing] any good" (142.29, 8, 21-2). While The Twelve are analogous to a jury—and they certainly judge HCE harshly throughout the book—Kealey links his 13 to a "grand jury", a grouping which he defines as having more than 12 people, because 13 amounts to a sample size large enough to likely include at least one person with "a functioning brain"[]. Joyce's Twelve, on the other hand, predicate the status quo: a status quo that shifts, but only in predictable ways; a status quo that is irrational but reliable. Kealey also interprets the numerological value of 12 as, in some sense, system-supporting: the supposed Neanderthalers (unreasoning but firmly in control) number 144,000, which is a thousand times 12 squared. But whereas Joyce's text seems interested in exploring how the "societate" functions, Kealey wants to go beyond the 12-based system. He hopes 13 people with "functioning brains" can overthrow the status quo and lead us into a new uncharted future, because the world is crazy as it is and we sorely need a more sensible way of life:

If you put 13 people who grasp the Premise totally and work together . . . maybe Creation will hear, cause a reversal to occur. If not, the end result we know already is basically [that] the plan of the toll-gaters is continuing to its place where only two choices can occur. Creation can say, "Let it be, let it happen, let it continue"; or Creation says, "Okay, I've seen enough. Shut it down." And either way, we don't win. So hopefully we can cause reason to prevail by creating this critical mass of 13 people.[]

While Kealey admits that there is no direct evidence of any of this, he contends that an overwhelming "preponderance of circumstantial evidence"[] can be gleaned through intensive study of language coding. Throughout the podcasts he explains how he read nineteenth-century dictionaries and Masonic encyclopedias from cover to cover, pondered life, and then began to notice elucidating "linkages" between words of various languages (mostly English and, to a lesser extent, French).

### Language "Coding"

Joyce did not construct the portmanteaus of _Finnegans Wake_ according to any rules or bylaws. At most we could say that he crossed various words according to their homophonic qualities, but by and large Joyce simply combined words in ways that pleased him. Kealey's methodology, however, insists upon the existence of a formal "code". This section details the "coding", which Kealey cites as objective proof of his theories' veracity, and reveals it to be the inconsistent product of the WordSculPTor's own linguistic artistry. Recalling that Kealey does not admit to being an artist, we can see his reliance upon an externeral "code" as, in some respect, compensating for a lack of confidence, an inability to assert himself. In light of this, it becomes clear that in order to compose _Finnegans Wake_ Joyce needed to overcome certain fixations and further develop the self-assurance to do whatever he wanted to do with language, believing in the truth and value of the artistic process, without feeling the need to legitimize his word games by seriously positing a pseudo-scientific etymological basis behind them.

Kealey says that an important breakthrough in his thinking occurred when he observed the "Desdemona" style type font[] and "mirrored" each of its characters by drawing two of the same letter facing each other, front-to-front, or sometimes overlaid on top of each other. "Desdemona," he writes, "has provided me since 2002 with an 'overstanding' of the basic premise regarding who, why, and how our controllers managed the slave colony styled 'humanity'."[] In one of his out-of-print newspapers, Kealey is said to have produced an A-Z character map of the Desdemona type font alongside the caveat "Meet the actors that control your life."[] On one of his webpages he shows the numbers 0-9 "mirrored" in Desdemona above a reference to Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" adage, adding the words "Here are the main characters."[] Desdemona is, of course, a character in Shakespeare's Othello, the wife who is murdered for a wrongdoing she did not commit. Kealey takes this idea and uses it to assert that Desdemona stands for "Destroy the demon female", a mandate that in Kealey's mythology alludes to the Neanderthalers' eradication of the Clan Mothers. (The character of Iago would represent a scheming Neanderthaler.)

Although Kealey frequently alludes to the importance of the Desdemona font, the actual structure of the font, "mirrored" or otherwise, does not seem to ally with many of his "decoding" exercises. In fact, Kealey sometimes even cites the Desdemona "mirroring" when it does not actually prove his point. He says that a J can also represent a D because two J's together, one flipped upside-down, could resemble a D. (Thus, Jerusalem can become Derusalem, which coverts further into "The Ruse of the Lame Male": The is "D" phonetically, or in Ebonics; Ruse is "erus" reordered; and the Lame Male comes from "alem" doubled (or mirrored) and reordered twice, with males being lame because one "leg" of an X chromosome was broken to give them a Y.)[] The actual mirroring provided on Kealey's Desdemona font charts, however, shows the J's joined in a different way, producing a U shape, not a D.[]

At the risk of stating the obvious, at this point a clear disclaimer should be given: Kealey's supposed "coding" does not really follow any strict rules; he is not doing what he says he's doing. He makes use of a fairly distinct set of techniques to rearrange and transform letters, but this system is nowhere near as quasi-scientific or logical as he purports it to be, and it hardly derives from any particular type font. His "Word ScuPTor" epithet is more fitting than he acknowledges, for he definitely functions—as Joyce does—like an artist, not like an empirical investigator of objective truths. He possesses the talent to reveal almost any structure he wants to behold from the words his linguistic "chisel" meets, but there are no distinct "statues" waiting to be discovered. Kealey has devised a very creative process which he purports to be more like an empirical science; he "sculpts" until he arrives at an arbitrary "decoding" that pleases him and/or seems to fit in with the rest of his story. Nevertheless, his imaginative skills are interesting and notable in and of themselves.

Kealey has dozens of guiding principles which he chooses from when analyzing words. For instance, amongst many other language-conversion tactics and one-of-a-kind etymologies:

• An _L_ can be subtracted from any word because "There is no _L_. . . . They tell you that at Christmas" ("No-el, No-el..."). This helps us deduce that every King Louis of France was nothing but a yes-man ( _oui_ being "yes" in French) for the Neanderthalers.[]

• An _L_ can be an _R_ and vice versa, because left and right mirror each other.[]

• Every vowel is interchangeable with every other vowel. This is so because vowels were frequently left out of ancient writings (most notably in the case of _YHWH_ ). Only those "in the know" can figure out what the _real_ vowels are supposed to be.[] (On the other hand, the original, pure, spoken language was made up _only_ of vowels: "Ay/Eh?", "Eeeee!", "I/Aye", "Oh/Owe", "You", and sometimes "Why?"[])

• The letter _W_ can be flipped upside-down to make an _M_ , and these letters can also be doubled. Thus, using multiple techniques, _Halloween_ becomes _hollow moon_ —another clue.[] (Cf. how Joyce flips and rotates the "E" and "T" sigla of _Finnegans Wake_. Whereas Kealey's use of letter-flipping is very extensive and unrestrained, Joyce's rotations of certain letters signify a handful of significant changes: the direction of the sideways "E" indicating whether the archetypal father is above ground or buried below, for instance; and the direction of the sideways "T" indicating whether we are dealing with Issy herself or her through-the-looking-glass twin.)

• The letters of a word or name can be scrambled to make anagrams. As will be noted below, Kealey places much emphasis on _rope_ being rearranged to make _repo_. (Joyce also plays with anagrams in _Finnegans Wake_. For instance, George Bernard _Shaw_ is associated with the terms _Haws_ (257.11-12), _whas_ (304.20), and _haws_ _ehole_ (323.6). Further, Glasheen connects _Shaw_ to Joyce's use of "wash".[])

• _UGH_ in any word ( _rough_ , _though_ , etc.) stands for "you genetic hen", an expression of disgust ( _ugh!_ ) that references the notion that we are all nothing more than the cowardly (" _chicken_ -hearted"), genetically engineered livestock of the Neanderthalers.[] (There does not appear to be much similarity between Kealey's "hen" motif and the hen character in _Finnegans Wake_ —but, nevertheless, it's worth noting that both Kealey and Joyce think about hens.)

• _Earth_ has an "ear" in it because beings underground are listening. And we call them _seas_ because someone's watching.[]

• If the letters _E_ and _C_ are found somewhere in a word, they can convert to "here" because _ici_ ("E-C") is "here" in French.[]

• The letter _D_ can be an _R_ because they are paired together in the abbreviation for _doctor_.[] Relatedly, humans, having been genetically altered, are all like _drones_ ("doctored ones").[]

• Since _Fe_ is the symbol for iron, the _fe_ in _female_ alludes to "Iron Ladies" such as Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir.[]

• "Any word with _IRS_ in it means it's part of the accumulation system."[] Thus Kealey cites _Pa_ _ris_ , _Pola_ _ris_ _,_ _Sri_ _Lanka_ , _hub_ _ris_ ("the _hub_ of the _IRS_ "[]), _K_ _ris_ _hna_ , _Ch_ _ris_ _tianity_ , _clito_ _ris_ and _sir_ as all being offending parties.

• An _E_ can be a _RE_ (no explanation given).[]

Joyce, on the other hand, as mentioned above, employed neither rules nor the pretense of an empirical language code when writing and designing the portmanteaus of Finnegans Wake. He simply joined words together in whichever fashion he wished. He had a penchant for blurring together the homophonic syllables of different words, was given to punning and playful alterations of familiar phrases, but such actions do not constitute a rulebook.

It should be understood that Joyce did not attain this level of supreme artistic confidence until Finnegans Wake. Not until then could Joyce finally claim "I can do anything with language I want" (JJ 702). In his earlier works the word games, intentional misspellings, and ungrammatical statements tend to be justified as products of stream of consciousness, unreliable narrative voices, or the dialogue of fallible characters. Only in Finnegans Wake does Joyce feel bold enough to change language to whatever extent he sees fit, rewriting reality and referring to his own artistic skill as reason enough to do so.

Curiously, before Joyce reached the point at which he could feel natural about creating his own etymologies and taking credit for them, he seems to have attempted to reinforce his own imaginative readings of words by positing false etymologies, much as Kealey does today. Ellmann notes that in the late 1910s Joyce's favorite conversational pastime was to make "wild and daring etymological speculation": for example, to justify his conception of the Jewish Leopold Bloom as the new Ulysses, Joyce constructed farfetched theories based on the alleged correspondence of various Hebrew and Greek words that sounded somewhat similar (JJ 409). Further, Aldous Huxley recalls Joyce making other dubious—quite Kealeyan—etymological contentions at a time when he was early in the composition of Work in Progress:

[Joyce] was a very strange man. I used to see him sometimes in Paris. Extraordinary in what may be called his magic view of words. . . . I'll never forget sitting next to him once at dinner and mentioning to him—which I thought would have given him pleasure and it did—that I had just been rereading the Odyssey. And his immediate response was [that] he said, "Now do you realize what the derivation of Odysseus—the name Odysseus—is?" I said, "No, I don't." And he said, "Well, it really comes from the two words oudeis meaning 'nobody' and Zeus meaning 'god'," and that "Odysseus is really a symbol of creation of man out of nothing." Well, this is exactly the sort of etymology which would've been made by Albertus Magmus in the 13th century. I mean, with absolutely no relation to anything which we would regard as realistic etymology. But this completely satisfied Joyce's mind, and this curious sort of magic approach to words as having some sort of intrinsic value apart from their references was a very characteristic thing in him.[]

Soon after that, however, Joyce would break through and start creating his own words, rather than reading his own multiplicative meanings into preexisting words.

Thus, proceeding along their respective lexical journeys with differing methods, guiding principles, and "rules" (or lack thereof), it is remarkable that Kealey and Joyce arrived at, and spun their linguistic skills around, so many of the same themes.

### Flowing Water: Joyce's Rivers, Kealey's Flood

The minute you have water, you have all the possibilities. The original life on Earth comes out of the core of the Earth from everything that existed there and comes in contact with water. And water is basically what expands possibilities. Things don't just live and die, but they can spend more and more time living, getting reconstituted, going another cycle, another cycle, getting used to pressures at different levels of the ocean, make their way up to the surface, change their shape, become worms, become eels, become alligators, crocodiles, work their way up onto the land . . .

—Glen Kealey, October 2009 podcast[]

The above quote not only delineates some of Kealey's philosophy, it nearly describes the aesthetic basis of _Finnegans Wake_ as well. As water provides possibilities for change on planet Earth, rivers constitute the ruling motif for Joyce's book (whose first word, after all, is "riverrun"). The metaphor of flowing water suggests cyclical alterations akin to the water cycle. In _Finnegans Wake_ voices "flow" into one another, and, as the mini-cycles of the book progress toward the final page before cycling back to the first, characters change and grow (in Shaun's case, literally) and become their parents as their parents die. Kealey seems to intuit the philosophical basis of all this, even if he has never read _Finnegans Wake_ (and there is no reason to believe that he has). But while Joyce, in his later years, seemed to consider the time he was living in to represent the beginning of a new age or a new cycle (thus his optimism for then-new media such as movies ("the reel world" ( _FW_ 64.25)) and television (the "tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler" (309.14)); Kealey, on the other hand, intuits himself to be living at the end of a cycle (thus, to some extent, his distrust of media and new technology). Accordingly, while _Finnegans Wake_ describes running water as being filled with beneficial potential, with floods in particular being linked to the literary arts ("a blessing paper freed the flood"; "the bookflood" (78.22-3; 118.12)), Kealey conceives of rushing water as a flood sent by underground villains to destroy not only human civilization but the habitable land itself.

In a bizarre coincidence, Kealey's portentous flood seems linked to Dublin, the city so associated with Joyce and the setting for much of Finnegans Wake. Kealey believes he has learned that scientists operating underground hadron colliders (such as the particle accelerator beneath the Frano-Swiss border) will eventually be tricked by the Neanderthalers to use these devices in a destructive way. The tectonic plates will shift; the areas just beneath the surface will in some way be fried and liquified; and the oceans, seas, and great lakes will rush over most of the continents. Once this happens, Kealey warns, most of the globe will become a dark, soupy "mixture of coal, petroleum, and earth all mixed together to create halfway between a liquid and a solid." In "the code," Kealey says, this substance is known as "blackwater", and it's "not an accident" that in recent years the United States government has employed a military/security company known by that same name (Blackwater USA/Blackwater Worldwide, which became Xe Services and then Academi).[] "Blackwater", or more exactly "black pool", is also the Irish meaning of Dublin (Dubh Linn). In imaginative linguistics, then, Kealey's doomsday prophecy is really about the whole world turning into Dublin!

### Finn on the Raft

Throughout _Finnegans Wake_ Joyce alludes to Huckleberry Finn and reuses (and alters) several snippets of text from Mark Twain's novel. Huck Finn shares part of his name with Finn MacCool; and Huck, like Tim Finnegan, was also believed to be dead, only to return to life at his own funeral. Joyce playfully exploits these similarities, making sure also to associate the character, who rode a raft down the Mississippi, with river- and water-imagery (see _FW_ 297 in particular).

Huck Finn figures into Kealey's work as well. Because of the forecasted flood, raft is a key term for Kealey. A raft is a means to survive in water; it represents our best-case scenario at the present time—and this is so literally, metaphorically, and linguistically. Kealey says that once upon a time we had a craft (a steerable vessel), but now we have lost control and only have a raft. Thus, our societal avatar is Huck Finn, who just "goes with the flow." (Things aren't so bad yet, though: after the raft is gone, we're destined to go aft as society falls backwards; then we'll be left lost and immobile, staring down at our feet (ft); and finally we'll be left hanging on a cross (t) until we waste away to nothing.) Kealey links Huck Finn to his nineteenth-century contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson: Ralph sounds like "raft", Waldo sounds like "radeau" ("raft" in French), and Emerson sounds like "emersion" (which connotes being dunked in a watery baptism).[]

Further, Kealey links rado ("radeau" spelled phonetically) to Leonardo da Vinci, radon gas, NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command), and radio, all of which he believes are connected to the long-standing plan to initiate the "blackwater" flood. Kealey's farm is near the Rideau River, and the surrounding area is called Oxford-on-Rideau: he converts the eau to an o via homophony, changes the i to an a since vowels "are interchangeable," and concludes that "the word can be rado."[]

Just as Joyce rewrote and reconfigured the landmarks and place-names around Dublin, Kealey transforms his surroundings to fit in with his own creative work. He makes much of the fact that he officially lives not in the "town of Kemptville", per se, but in the "Kemptville township", implying that he is destined to survive the flood by floating above it.[]

Rather than confine his creative, linguistically derived ideas to literature, however, Kealey has gone further, perhaps too far: As something of a warning or good luck charm, he has constructed a fairly large raft in front of his property, so passersby can get a clue about what (he believes) is coming. On the raft he has placed chickens, some of them caged, representing his neighbors.[]

### Neanderthalers Are Like Fairies

Before her husband guessed the real title of _Work_ _in_ _Progress_ , Maria Jolas astonished Joyce by guessing the nearly correct "Fairy's Wake" ( _JJ_ 709). Irish fairies are known as _shee_ , from _aos sí_ , the "people of the mounds". (And let us not forget that Irish legends say Finn himself did not die but dwells underground, sleeping in a cave.[]) So "endlessly" does Joyce connect the _shee_ with "she" that Glasheen in her _Census_ "ha[d]n't the strength to list" all the instances (261). Associated as they are with water and natural disasters, these mythical beings that Joyce understood as "usually malignant" ( _LI_ 355) bear stark similarities with Kealey's cruel and perverse Neanderthalers: "shee shee, all improper, in a lovely mourning toilet [...] hee hee hee, quaking, so fright, and, shee shee, shaking" ( _FW_ 395.15-16, 24-5). The metaphor of a toilet flushing away excrement is also frequently used by Kealey to describe how the flood will wash away humanity.[] As we've seen, Joyce and Kealey possess similar imaginations, and both took a creative interest in fantastic, similarly subterranean creatures.

Kealey connects his villains with fairies (and leprechauns) numerous times, both in posts on his website and in audio interviews.[] (He also links Cro-Magnons with gnomes.) Like quintessential fairies, the Neanderthalers are said to be "short and plumpy"[]. Kealey associates them with the term "wee-men".[]

Thus, just as Joyce connects his fairies to the feminine ("shee" to "she"), Kealey intentionally links his small troglodytes to the feminine as well ("wee-men" to "women"). For Kealey, the wee-men/women linguistic pairing indicates the Neanderthalers' plan of genetically engineering totally obedient hermaphroditic humans. Kealey believes each "super slave" will have the exterior of a woman, the "infrastructure" of a man, and a tiny ("wee") portion of Neanderthaler that will serve as a "control mechanism" in the neck.[] The Neanderthalers have not yet perfected their formula, but they are getting ever closer. Much as female suggested the "Iron Ladies" of decades past, Kealey cites more recent female politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Sarah Palin, and Agentine President Cristina Fernández as examples of the latest models.

Hillary Clinton is particularly significant to Kealey because of her first name. Hillary suggests hill, and, just as they did for the Irish "people of the mounds", hills play an important role for Neanderthalers as well. Kealey says that hills are actually "jacked up" from below, in places where the troglodytes want to set up an important location below ground—and above ground as well. Such locations as Capitol Hill, Parliament Hill, and the Seven Hills of Rome are simply where the Neanderthalers directed humans to set up their governments so that they could communicate with them in more convenient proximity. For Kealey, the most important human leaders get their orders from the beings below ground who inhabit hills and mounds: "Hillary Clinton tells you a little bit about the link she has to that."[]

Some minor but related points: Whereas Joyce compared hills to a sleeping male giant, Kealey identifies ritual mounds with symbols of female breasts[]. He also notes that the name of the first U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, suggests connotations similar to those of Hillary Clinton, and adds that Ridge implies the man's role as "the bridge to begin this new process of Homeland Security"[]. (Further, he believes the evidence shows that it is not our homeland being secured from terrorists, but rather the Neanderthalers' underground lair being further protected from us, by our own military and security efforts no less.)

Like many fairies or trickster imps, Kealey's Neanderthalers are mischievous: "The more trouble they can cause us, the happier they are."[] These nearly omnipotent beings are the enemies of "Creation"; hence, they practice an imitation of the original process: re-creation. Kealey riffs on this term by stating that rē-creation is their rĕcreational activity, and their rĕcreation is to "wreck Creation": "It's their fun way of spending eternity in the Moho discontinuity with nothing to do. So they basically get their fun by causing us trouble."[] Kealey refers to the "Celtic pagan tradition of the Genie in a bottle,"[] a cross-cultural pairing that is also found in Finnegans Wake: "Nap. That was the tictacs [tactics] of the jinnies [genies] for to fontannoy [the battle of Fontenoy mixed with annoy] the Willingdone. Shee, shee, shee!" (9.6-7). The "Nap" here not only refers to Napoleon but also brings in a connotation of "sleeping". For that, as Kealey would agree, is the "tactic" of the enemies of humankind: to lull us into dreamland!

Lastly, let us note that Joyce associates trickster imps with his Prankquean character: "A reine of the shee, a shebeen quean, a queen of pranks" (68.21-2). As will be noted in a section below, this denizen of the Wake also intersects with Kealey's mythology due to her magic red sack.

### Re-Creation Recycling: REGO and REPO

The endless cycling motif of _Finnegans Wake_ has been well noted. Even the name _Finnegan_ suggests "fin[nish] again". But for Kealey the operative idea is "begin again"— _fin_ _again_ 's counterpart—which he condenses into the term _REGO_. Let us recall that Joyce intuited himself to be living at the dawn of a new expansive age ("Here Comes Everybody"), and yet he branded his enterprise with a word suggesting an ending or finish. Similarly, Kealey believes himself to be living in the final years of a great historical cycle, and yet one of his greatest keywords suggests a new "go" or beginning. In both cases the dynamics seem ironic but oddly fitting.

REGO means "go again", "begin the next phase [of the Neanderthalers' plan]", "be reborn [into a better slave]". It is anagrammed to yield gore, as in Al Gore, and rearranged again to form part of George Bush (since the Neanderthalers control both sides, and all of them are like ogres). Gore Bay is "the bay at the bottom of Sioux St. Marie's locks," which will one day overflow as part of the flood; and the "guy who made it all possible in Russia [who made it 'begin again'] is a guy by the name of Gorbachev—nickname is Gorby [pronounced almost like 'Gore Bay']."[] Lastly, noting that the word gore can also mean a triangular piece of land, Kealey says that the people who live across the road from him are named Gorell, their property is triangle-shaped, and their address includes a 911 in it—all clues into the overall REGO process.[]

REGO is complemented by REPO (short for repossession). While REGO signifies the Neanderthalers letting lose certain societal reins, setting humanity free to work toward certain goals, REPO signifies tightening the leash, cutting back, drawing in the rope (an anagram). In an anachronistic reading that makes it seem as if the European Union was planned before Europe was even named, Kealey further explains REPO by defining Europe as "an EU-rope".[] (Joyce obviously uses anachronistic pairings all throughout Finnegans Wake, playfully identifying, for example, Elizabeth II with Elizabeth I (the "Faerie Queene") and with Helen of Troy.[])

All such anachronisms and metaphors of cycling back and forth, those used by Kealey as well as those used by Joyce, can be seen as imaginative techniques to engage with historical processes and the lifespan of civilizations. Kealey, of course, believes his creative understandings to be the truth, but his mindset on these matters does provide an analogue to Joyce's thinking when he was planning Finnegans Wake. (After all, Joyce was interested in Vico for his mythic ideas, not for any actual scientific data.)

### In ALP's Santa-Sack: Quarks Fit for a Sac•red Hadron Bag Lady

One of the most amusing (and bizarre) commonalities between Joyce and Kealey comes in the image of Santa's red sack. Joyce gives this connotation to ALP's bag of miscellaneous goodies and tricks, itself identified with the "container" that holds the Letter, i.e. _Finnegans Wake_ as a whole. In section i.8 ALP distributes all sorts of "Christmas boxes" out of "her mixed baggyrhatty"—also known as her "shammy mailsack"—to "a thousand and one" of her "furzeborn sons and dribblederry daughters" ( _FW_ 209.27, 10; 210.4-5). Kealey's work relates to these concepts by way of a long chain of word associations and allusions.

To begin, Kealey breaks down the word sacred into sac ["sack" in French] and red. A "red sack" connotes Santa Claus, of whom Kealey is suspicious because Santa can be rearranged to form Satan, who gets people to lose their souls by convincing them to sign contracts (i.e. clauses). That Kealey connects Santa to Satan is perhaps predicable and dubious, but it proves noteworthy in light of the fact that Joyce connects Santa to Prometheus, the bringer of fire and a Lucifer analogue (see FW 307.16). Further, Kealey notes that Santa Claus has the alias St. Nick: "Old Nick" being an epithet of the devil.

St. Nick also suggests nickel, and since nickel is mixed with other metals to yield chrome, all of this links to the metaphoric "chrome" exterior that Kealey believes the "super slaves" (the ultimate version of the "Iron Ladies") will exhibit.[] Kealey refers to these beings as "Bag Ladies of the Universe": they will be homeless wanderers shot into outer space by the Neanderthalers, with nothing more than a life-support pod (a "bag") full of high-technology devices to aid them in colonizing distant planets. As such, these interstellar "bag ladies" represent an upgrade from the so-called bagmen who collect money from racketeering or other illicit activities. Bagmen will become obsolete once the Neanderthalers, now focusing beyond the accumulation of Earthly resources, can produce self-sufficient, perfectly obedient "bag ladies".[] Thus, in Kealey's mythology the concept of Santa aligns not with a "bagman" (who puts other people's property into a bag) but a "bag lady" (who lives off a bag and takes things out of it). And ALP could certainly be considered one version of this female Santa Claus figure.

Moreover, ALP is a "bag lady" not only because she carries a bag, but because her bag contains garbage:

all spoiled goods go into her nabsack: curtrages and rattlin buttins, nappy spattees and flasks of all nations, clavicures and scampulars, maps, keys and woodpiles of haypennies and moonled brooches with bloodstaned breeks in em, boaston nightgarters and masses of shoesets and nickelly nacks and foder allmicheal and a lugly parson of cates and howitzer muchears and midgers and maggets, ills and ells with loffs of toffs and pleures of bells and the last sigh that come fro the hart (FW 11.18-26)

This habit of collecting odds and ends and putting them in a bag doubles, of course, for Joyce's own process of picking through the collected compost heap of culture, looking for certain things to put into words and into the "container" of _Finnegans Wake_.

Though Kealey, whose words and ideas have proliferated haphazardly and incompletely across multiple formats, eschews such a tidy "container" in which to put his material, he nonetheless incorporates a comparably miscellaneous collection of cultural items into his personal mythology. (And as we'll see, he expropriates a popular song to support his theory concerning bags.) Kealey also describes his search for valuable ideas as "a filtering program" that extracts knowledge from "information, which is a pile of garbage."[]

In another happy coincidence with Joyce's work, Kealey conceives of the prototypical bag as a container of quarks, the subatomic particles named after a word in Finnegans Wake (383.1). In particle physics the containers of quarks are called hadrons, which obviously link to the hadron colliders that Kealey believes will be used to initiate the flood (with hadron containing rado, hinting that rafts will become necessary). He points out that "Stanford University's particle accelerator is called SLAC. Since there is no L, it's really SAC, [which is] basically the French word for 'bag'."[] Kealey defines hadrons as "bags" full of quarks, noting that the particularities of these bags define reality and give identity to every construct and entity.[] (For anecdotal evidence, Kealey cites the pejorative phrase "you sack of shit," which identifies a person with a sack and relies on the contents of the sack for characterization.[] He might just as well have used the terms "windbag" or "sad sack" instead.) Life, he concludes, is recombined by switching quarks between bags.[]

For Joyce bags are containers to use: ALP gives her children presents from her bag, and the book Finnegans Wake represents a container for Joyce's Letter—which is his gift to us, for us to make sense of any way we can and use as best we can. But for Kealey bags are the property of an external, malevolent system: the quark-containing hadron bags are microcosms of a diabolical plan against us; the Bag Ladies of the Universe will possess life-support containers that will help the Neanderthalers conquer space. Though they operate with the same themes, Joyce evidently attained a position from which he could take charge of certain concepts (in this case, bags) and represent them in literature that can benefit and in a sense empower those who read it. Note that literal portmanteaus—suitcases—could be considered "bags" of a sort. And by mastering the creation and use of portmanteau words, Joyce figuratively mastered the constructions and functions of various "bags" of words.

As Joyce refers to various popular songs throughout _Finnegans Wake_ (the book's very title being taken from a song), Kealey ties his mythology to songs as well. In fact, for Kealey songs can represent overwhelming circumstantial evidence for the validity of his language-based theories. This is the case regarding the tale of hadrons and bag ladies recounted above. Decades ago, Kealey believes, the Neanderthalers discovered how to produce different sorts of people via subatomic engineering. This was announced to the world, in a message with only slight coding, via the song "Poppa's Got a Brand New Bag" by James Brown: "What he was saying," Kealey discerns, "is _they've created a new version of life_."[]

### There's Nothing New, Just a Rein•car•nated Compost Heap

Joyce said of _Ulysses_ , "I made it out of next to nothing. _Work in Progress_ I am making out of nothing" ( _JJ_ 543n). _Nothing_ or _nothing new_ , as Richard Ellmann characterized the resultant _Finnegans Wake_ : "a wholly new book based upon the premise that _there is nothing new under the sun_ " (my italics; _JJ_ 545). The phrase comes from the book of Ecclesiastes, 1:9: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." Joyce uses the same verse as a motif in _Finnegans Wake_ ("no thing making newthing wealthshowever for a silly old Sol" (253.8-9)), once changing it to allude to the moon ("there is nihil nuder under the clothing moon" (493.18-19)). Kealey also cites the Ecclesiastes verse when he proclaims, in the most wide-sweeping and existential way, "There's nothing new."[]

The same story being told repeatedly, cyclically in ever-altering forms, is a hallmark of both Joyce and Kealey's respective works. For Kealey, all stories are the same in that they all allude to the "Premise": "The basic story's always the same"[]; it's the "same story just in different languages," and "You see it [the proof of this, the clues to the story] everywhere you go."[] In a comment that, in another context, would serve as a good description of Finnegans Wake (née Work in Progress, a looped text with many musical overtones, whose ultimate meaning is in the hands of its readers), Kealey speaks of all life as "the same story repeated over and over again without getting to a conclusion. That's why I refer to it as 'The Unfinished Symphony', waiting for us to bring it to a conclusion one way or the other."[] A symphony is literally a fusion of phonics, and there is no text more multi-voiced than Joyce's final opus.

Finnegans Wake is not only a story of recycling; it's a story of recycled material. A startling number of its phrases have been borrowed (and then altered) from other authors' works. We will never be able to locate all of Joyce's sources, and thus never know what percentage of Finnegans Wake is "unoriginal". Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, however, in their abandoned H.C.E. Project[] thoroughly investigated the notebook material that went into one episode (FW 532.6-554) and were able to "locate external sources in practically every case (95% of cases)." These workbooks themselves represented "about half of the text of the example (4000 words [8000 total])."[] Thus, within this one episode, either roughly half of the text is "unoriginal" (i.e., it amounts to alterations of other texts), or else the figure is closer to 95% and Rose and O'Hanlon simply lacked the documentation that would lead to all of Joyce's sources. David Hayman called the author of Ulysses "the Arranger"; in Finnegans Wake Joyce would more aptly be called "the Rearranger", having formed his book by adroitly manipulating selected preexistent pieces of text whose structures have been metaphorically decomposed.

"[T]hat original hen" found the Letter in a compost heap "(dump for short)"; she was "Dame Partlet on her dungheap" (FW 110.22, 26; 124.23-4), and the Letter turns out to be simply the latest microcosmic model of the ever-decomposing, ever-recomposing mound. A close examination of Joyce's text reveals it to be composed of the same rotted material having returned anew: "the same roturns" (18.5). And what is the "all-riddle of it," this strange book the contents of which it seems we have never seen before? "That that is allruddy with us" (274.2-3).

Likewise, Kealey freely admits that his own mythology and creative "languaging" are the results of external sources. "I use other people's materials," he admits. "There's nothing new in the world. Everything I write about has its origin in the Bible, or in encyclopedias, or in dictionaries. All I do is put them in context."[] This is true metaphorically and also textually. Metaphorically, Kealey understands all his work to be an exegesis of the "Premise", and in order to pursue that activity he must obviously collate, investigate, and put his own spin on other people's writing, on other stories and histories, and on language itself, a communal resource not owned by any one person. Thus, on a primal level, Kealey's work—like Finnegans Wake—understands itself to be the re-formed work of others. On a textual level as well, Kealey "use[s] other people's materials" in that a large percentage of his several thousand Internet postings are little more than unattributed excerpts from online encyclopedias and dictionaries, which he has copied and pasted between oddly worded headlines and coded, pseudo-explanatory summaries of his own devising. Some posts, such as the one given in this essay's introduction, seem quite original—perhaps only a line or two, or a couple keywords, were inspired by news headlines that caught Kealey's attention that day. His usual method, however, is simply to reproduce paragraph after paragraph from whatever research articles he himself is currently investigating. (The only references to Joyce on wordsculptor.net, posted also on the Yahoo! group, are found incidentally, within large amounts of quoted text. This makes it unlikely that Kealey has ever actually read Joyce's books—otherwise he would have almost certainly taken the opportunity to comment on them, and on Joyce himself as well.[])

Further, Kealey links recurrences of stories to recurrences of language: both phonics and phonetics, he says, came from the murderous Phoenicians (i.e., "Cain on the phone"[]), ancient watermen who did the Neanderthalers' bidding by circulating variations of the same coded system of narrative and narrative-making elements all around the world by ship.[] For Kealey, these words and concepts relate to phoenix as well: phonics and phonetics and Phoenicians—words and stories and those who bring them around—all in some sense die and are reborn again in fire.[] Joyce, of course, had long been interested both in Phoenicians (thinking them early settlers of Ireland and conjecturing that Ulysses was a Phoenician sailor) and in the concept of the phoenix (enjoying the idea of resurrections and noting the connection to Dublin's Phoenix Park). In Finnegans Wake various portmanteaus are made between Phoenicia and Phoenix (for example, "Phenicia Parkes" (576.28-9)), but curiously Joyce never crosses either of those words with phonics or phonetics.

In Kealey's mythology, the phoenix's "fire" quality is significant because it suggests the molten lava of the Earth's core, a literal "Hell's Kitchen" where he believes the DNA of the dead is eventually broken down into its basic elements and then recombined by Creation when it cooks up new forms of life.[] Just as the same words, stories and histories return, so do the same personages. Joyce famously alluded to this concept when he referenced the "transmigration of souls" in Ulysses; many of his characters are avatars or metaphoric reincarnations of other figures (historical, fictitious, mythic). For Kealey, the matter is much simpler: what people have called "soul" is the same as DNA.[] Moreover, he insinuates that this is a highly controlled and ordered process. Most read the word as "re-incarnation", but Kealey breaks the word down in a different way: he says it's really rein•car•nation, suggesting that each of us as we travel through time is simply a genetic vehicle ("car") kept on a tight leash ("rein") by Creation and by the Neanderthalers who have partially hijacked the natural process.

Joyce's preoccupation with reincarnation comes into better focus in light of Kealey's more extreme example. Finnegans Wake can be seen as the literal return of various archetypal concepts and personages that interested Joyce, and of the textual elements that Joyce found in other sources. When Kealey bases his ideas about reincarnation on the supposed workings of actual DNA, he attempts to lay claim to a scientific basis that is actually incompatible with his imaginative convictions. When trying to reinforce his convictions with science, Kealey inadvertantly sabotages the full creative potential of his work. Because Joyce does not demand that Finnegans Wake be interpreted as having one serious, singular meaning, each reader can take the book's notions concerning reincarnation in a variety of different directions, each to whatever extent the reader deems useful or interesting.

### "If I Go All Goes": Forget! or Be Re•membered with Creation

When you die, there's something that does not die. It's called DNA. And if you have lived a life in support of this Neanderthaler agenda—from a person English people call "God", who is a Creator [rot], not Creation [a positive (+) ion]—then you will be thrown in the kettle and melted down and remerged with other failures. [But] If you have been able to grasp the concepts and you have learned the Premise that I'm describing, your DNA will be re-membered with Creation. It will be placed into Creation and you will live forever as cells within Creation. [...] It's all up to you. You're given a task while you're on this Earth as life-beings to accumulate information, experience things, learn from it, and carry that message back to Creation. Most people choose not to go through that process but instead look for instant gratification—"How can I make my life here better?"—at the expense of eternity, because they don't believe there is such a thing as eternity. Well, surprise-surprise.

—Glen Kealey, January 2009 podcast[]

In Kealey's philosophy, the point of living is to be a sensor and learner for Creation. The process of the universe does not have an actual body or a brain; it needs us to experience reality, cogitate it in terms of reason and emotion, and finally report back, when we die, the sum total of our findings. As the stereotypical God judges souls after death, so does Creation judge one's DNA—with the difference, Kealey says, that our DNA physically changes by always recording our activity, and Creation can read this information[]. If our lives amount to the collection of meaningful, well-understood data, then Creation will _re-member_ us: that is, we will become like "arms" of Creation; Creation will attach our life-stories to itself if our inner diaries are worth remembering. On the other hand, if we can contribute nothing of value, then the pages of our "book of life"[] may as well be pulped, or burned: our DNA will be scraped and broken down into its most basic elements before being reused, probably to form a lower form of life. Kealey contends that those who are " _re_ - _membered_ with Creation" become reincarnated with much—if not all—of their DNA left intact. We all die eventually, but, as one of Kealey's _true believers_ puts it, life is "all [about] who gets remembered—that's what really counts . . . It's who's _re-membered_ with Creation—that's what really matters."[]

In general, Kealey posits that the more useful you are to the whole enterprise, the less you'll be broken down and the more often you'll be used again. This type of discernment seems quite similar to the method by which Finnegans Wake makes use of preexistent elements that are, to varyingly extents, "decomposed". To put it simply, when Joyce encountered items to include in his book, the more useful an item was, the less he altered it. This is the case on both the conceptual level and the textual level. Finn MacCool, his name and story, did not really decompose much under Joyce's pen—though plenty of other materials were "re-membered" to Finn. The title song, "Finnegan's Wake", required only slight decomposition—the removal of an apostrophe—far less alteration, for example, than Joyce's conversion of the song title "By the Feal's Wave Benighted" to "By the fearse wave behoughted" (18.2). When Joyce used himself as a narrative item in Finnegans Wake, he broke himself and his biography down quite radically in order to form part of the character Shem. (Note that in his earlier books he did not "decompose" himself much at all to form Stephen Dedalus.) As mentioned above, various parts of Huckleberry Finn reappear in Joyce's text, but they do so in drastically altered forms—only a few sentence fragments here and there. A very long sentence written by Edgar Quinet, however, taken from an essay about Vico and Herder's theories of history, reappears in full at 281.4-13—and Joyce makes only minor changes. The same sentence reappears elsewhere in the book, translated into English and with more extensive alterations: see 14.35 ff., 117.11 ff., 236.19 ff., 281.4, 354.22 ff., and 615.02 ff. The more use Joyce could get out of something, the more times he used it, and the less he changed it and its core meaning.

As Kealey's reading of the entire world is analogous to an astute reading of Finnegans Wake, it is fitting that he ascribes to "Creation", the force that decides which souls or DNA structures deserve to be reincarnated, a process of discernment similar to the sort that Joyce used when figuring out what to include in his book of recycled materials. Whereas Joyce painstakingly, conscientiously chose which ingredients and structures to include in his dream book or simulacrum of reality, deciding the extent to which they needed to be broken down, Kealey cannot bring himself to take personal responsibility as judge and filtration manager of the waking reality that he insists upon dealing with directly. Regarding Kealey as his thought processes seem to falter, as he proves unconfident and unable to aspire to the position of creative author, Joyce's authorial control over Finnegans Wake seems even more impressive. We note that Joyce came a long way, and put in a lot of work to justify his active engagement and radical reconstitution of creative material, which reaches far beyond his early, quite passive conception of an artist as "the God of the creation . . . paring his fingernails" (P 187).

For both Joyce and Kealey, the end of a life is akin to the end of a book, and the end always cycles back to a new beginning. The question is always: How much of what was gained at each ending can be passed on—or passed back—to the next beginning? When ALP nears the end of her cycle, in the waning pages of Finnegans Wake, she worries (not for the first time) that everything she's struggled so hard to learn and achieve her whole life long will be lost upon her death. She becomes somewhat frustrated that she has not been able to pass on her knowledge and meaning to those around her, who will remain after she is gone: "First we feel. Then we fall. [...] my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed [lost and loathed] to me" (627.11-17).

In reality, if ALP conveys her meaning and value to anyone, she conveys them to us, the readers of Finnegans Wake. Though Joyce's text is looped, understanding it as a monotonous Eternal Return does not take into account what does change with every read-through: every time we read it, though its words stay the same, our understanding alters, deepens and expands. One reading of Finnegans Wake proves insufficient to grasp its meaning, and this serves as a metaphor for how one lifetime is insufficient to grasp all that reality has to offer: in order to expand knowledge, we need to mark our understanding and pass it on. And though he couches it within his own personal mythology, Kealey echoes a similar sentiment, alluding as he does so to the familiar metaphor of the water cycle, though some of what he says is obviously not scientifically sound:

The point is: You don't live long enough in one lifetime in order to become strong and knowledgeable about the system. It's too much information to usually be able to come across it in one lifetime. So they [the processes of Creation] have to make you stronger and tougher, and the model for that is rain. Rain can be returned and made tougher by sending it back up into the higher atmosphere.[]

It is worth pointing out, however, that Kealey's actual practice does not inspire the same sort of open-ended, "domino-effect" of creative thinking that Finnegans Wake does. There is a spirit of generosity in Joyce's work that stems from the author's desire to create malleable, useful material. Kealey's work lacks this quality, insisting that his audience's ideas correspond to the blueprint already laid out in the Premise.

In Kealey's conception, the ultimate fate of our world and everything in it, including the fate of our personal knowledge, is very much out of our hands. We can only try to learn and experience as best we can, and try our best to pass the knowledge on. For Kealey, Creation is a perfect colander, sorting out what material is worth preserving and what thoughts are worth keeping around for further consideration. All potential knowledge is contained within the physical universe anyway: if we cannot convey a particular experience or achieve wisdom from it, then someone else will do so eventually, because the raw materials are still out there. We often become overly concerned with our own ending—our death—but we might better have put that effort into trying to do a better job of living and learning while we still have time. At the end, though we might like to live forever, we can rest easy as we pass away; because at that point the work is already over, and whatever has been left unthought, unlearned, or unsaid will remain cached in the universe's memory anyway, until someone else can explain it better than we could. At least, this is how things work according to Kealey's philosophy. And this thought process of letting go, trusting that the universe will fill in the blanks, is similar to what ALP undergoes in the last pages of Finnegans Wake:

How it ends?

Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend.

Forget, remember!

Have we cherished expectations? Are we for liberty of perusiveness? Whyafter what forewhere? [...]

Forget! (614.19-26)

And as Kealey would surely note, every _f_ _orge_ _t_ contains a _REGO_.

### Conclusions: Name-calling, Laughing at Madness, and Living in Two Worlds

Rot him! [...] Obnoximost posthumust! With his unique hornbook and his prince of the apauper's pride, blundering all over the two worlds! (422.9, 14)

we've lived in two worlds (619.11)

In the above excerpts from _Finnegans Wake_ , "two worlds" refers to the literary magazine _Two Worlds_ , in which portions of _Ulysses_ and _Work in Progress_ were published without permission. Joyce alludes to _Two Worlds_ and its founder, Samuel Roth, throughout _Finnegans Wake_. Below we will discuss how the text disparages Roth by playing with his name ("Rot him!") and how this contributes to our understanding of the "magical thinking" employed by both Joyce and Kealey. Then we will investigate in greater detail just what the "two worlds" concept signifies, and how Joyce's ability to "live in two worlds" is what ultimately separates his creative psychological process from that of Kealey, who "mirrors" many figures and concepts and finds himself trapped in a real-life _Through the Looking-Glass_.

Both Joyce and Kealey appear to attribute supernatural significance to people's names, and both seemingly attempt to hurt people by means of changing their names in insulting ways.

Joyce's practice of insulting people by name within a creative work can be traced back to the Irish bardic tradition, particularly to the poet Raftery (1779-1835; referenced in U 12.727-9), who was famous for giving bad luck to those whom he named in his songs. In general, however, this type of creative, irrational practice obviously has links to mythic thinking in general, across all traditions. It was Atherton who first noted his aspect apparent in Finnegans Wake:

Did Joyce, perhaps, adopt a principle described by Lévy-Bruhl as being almost universal among primitive people? They believe that there is a real and material connection between a man and his name; and many peoples are confused as to the difference between a name and a thing. . . . It is not impossible that Joyce himself had some such idea in mind, indeed he frequently claimed that to be mentioned in his book had an effect on the people named that was often drastic and sometimes fatal. He seems to have had some odd idea that his work could subsume the things it named, and it seems to have been something very close to the primitive belief which he must have thought to contain some element of truth. (45)

In Finnegans Wake Joyce seems to try to get vengeance on his enemies by pairing their names with unflattering connotations. Several times he crosses Samuel Roth's surname with negative words such as "rot" or "wrath" and alludes also to Roth's literary piracy as "wrothing foulplay" (589.27). Wyndham Lewis, sharp critic of Joyce, also reappears in the text, often joined with the figure of Lucian Lévy-Bruhl (see 150.15; 151.32-3), a pairing Lewis would hate since their philosophies were so contradictory. Joyce also, in Glasheen's reckoning, "retaliated" against Lewis's criticism by making him a major influence for Shaun at his most pedantic and lewdly professorial (166-7). To give a last example, Joyce puns on Wyndham with "Winden wanden wild like wenchen wenden wanton" (243.20).

We can never know just how likely Joyce thought it was that this type of creative name-calling would negatively impact its targets, but we cannot question that Joyce did believe in the supernatural power of names and coincidences. After all, he was prepared to turn over the composition of Finnegans Wake to the writer James Stephens, in large part because the latter's birthday was near Joyce's own and because his name seems like a combination of James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus.

Kealey reads much into names as well (as hinted at in the aforementioned connections of Al Gore, George Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Tom Ridge), and his (mis)readings of names often attempt to insult, cut down, or reduce the value of their bearers within the Kealeyan mythology. For instance, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who in Kealey's estimation does not truly wield much power, is rendered "Step-Hen": i.e., a "step and fetch it" for the Neanderthalers; just another one of their humanoid farm animals (another "hen") who is merely being used to bring about the next step of their plan.[] Kealey decodes the name of earlier P.M. Pierre Elliott Trudeau to reveal a "toilet" (Elliott rearranged, minus an extraneous l) and a "turd in the water" (Trud rearranged, plus eau ("water" in French)).[]

Non-famous people who run afoul of Kealey fair no better, nor do entire nationalities. A Swedish man named Mattias once questioned the "Premise" and was abruptly dismissed by Kealey via an email which read, in part: "Matthew was the tax collector [a reference to Saint Matthew's occupation prior to meeting Jesus] . . . TIMMY OWENS DIT IT BETTER (Not good but better) You'll both have to change your names to get beyond my filter. . . . Sweeds are weeds."[]

Kealey generates a particularly elaborate constellation of worrying connotations around a rival conspiracy theorist named David Icke, an Englishman who believes the world is controlled by interdimensional lizard people. D. Icke becomes dike, suggesting that Icke only serves to hold back the floodwaters until an appointed time. D. Icke also translates into pickle (a lowercase d becomes a p when rotated, and an l can be effectively added on this end of the "coding" equation because there isn't really an l in pickle to begin with ("No-el, No-el...")), which leads Kealey to contend that Icke's problematic theories only put us "in a pickle". Further, the name contains Ike (for Dwight Eisenhower) and also—somehow—translates into nickel, which suggests St. Nick and the nickel-plated chrome of the super-slave bag ladies. In summary, Kealey cautions us not to follow the teachings of David Icke: "His name is a problem," he muses. "Too many links" to "icky things."[]

However many links Kealey can find, _Finnegans Wake_ contains more: Kealey's process obsesses over a few dozen links, venturing to bring in additional words only when a noteworthy news item occurs, and then usually relating that new word back to the old familiar keywords and concepts; but _Finnegans Wake_ , though it does favor and reuse certain connotations, habitually forges and discards dozens of word-pairings on every page. The question then arises: How could Joyce write this book, put his all into forming so many word-connections, and hold onto sanity? Much has been made of Joyce's eccentricities—but why wasn't he weirder still? How did Joyce, who produced far more portmanteaus than Kealey has "decoded", maintain a comportment that seems almost _normal_ in comparison with Kealey's? The answer appears to lie in the modicum of willful separation that Joyce forged between his writing and the rest of his life. Because Joyce self-consciously made use of text that was unabashedly _literary_ , he was able to focus on the wildest, deepest, strangest, most subversive ideas and combine them into portmanteaus without feeling an overwhelming amount of what we might call psychological feedback. But this explanation does not quite suffice. We need to investigate as best we can the inner qualities and abilities that enabled Joyce to succeed in this way, to transcend and use to his advantage the same sort of fixations that have totally consumed Kealey.

Some scholars have smiled upon Joyce's eccentricities while considering, rather vaguely and sentimentally, that Joyce's life was his writing. Now, however, with the example of Kealey placed alongside Joyce, we must not only take the latter's strangeness much more seriously but also appreciate how much effort it must have taken him to resist becoming totally bewitched and spellbound (spell-bound!) by his own linguistic creativity. Joyce does seem to have, in various senses, believed in his writing far more than most authors of fiction do, but he did not believe in it completely, as Kealey believes in his own language-based mythology. When Joyce refers to Finnegans Wake as "this crazy book,"[] we should not take his characterization so lightly, nor should we casually dismiss Joyce's own concern that "Perhaps it is insanity" (JJ 590). The linguistic processes were truly akin to a madness or word-mania, and in some sense this craziness was probably necessary in order for the more profound aspects of the work to have emerged in Joyce's mind. But note that it is the book, not its author or the reality it pretends to describe, that is crazy. Joyce made sure to separate the book from reality; his writing was on one side of him, and the rest of life was on the other. The separation seems to have been a very thin line, but it proved to make all the difference in "two worlds". And though we might not be able to discern which world is fit for a "prince" or which one is that of "apauper" (FW 422.14), Joyce makes it clear that there are indeed two worlds and that they are very different from each other.

The title of Roth's publication was meant to refer to the "two worlds" of America and Europe, the two continents that formed his target literary marketplace. The various mentions of "two worlds" in Finnegans Wake are much more opaque in their meaning. At times the "two worlds" in question seem to be Joyce's authorized text on the one hand and Roth's illicit text on the other. In a more practical sense, the "two worlds" must also refer to the world of writing on the one hand and the real world on the other. It is hard to parse the meaning of "liv[ing] in two worlds" without suspecting that real life in the real world is part of what's being referred to—in contrast, it would seem, to the frozen life of characters and abstract concepts that "live" on the "world" of the page.

Though he sometimes exaggerated the power his writing could have on reality, Joyce never lost track of the fact that Finnegans Wake was a book, not reality itself. Even his boast that "Nature mirrors my art" (JJ 729n) entails an acknowledgement that nature and art are not one and the same—for if they were, there would be no need for the supposed "mirroring" function. The many references to the Letter in its "container" also acknowledge, in their way, the existence of a larger reality: there would be no need for a "container" if the Letter were reality itself; the author's "container" is necessary to separate his important text from the surrounding environment. The existence—to say nothing of the literary success—of Finnegans Wake actually seems preconditioned by Joyce's ability to divorce himself, at times, from his work's potentially all-consuming, infinite connotations. If Joyce could not pull himself away, then the text could never have been completed; it would have remained a work in progress forever (the way that Kealey's "book of life" does).

Joyce's process acknowledges that there are two separate "worlds" in play—his own imaginative world and the overall realistic universe that he lives in—and that acknowledgement is all the concession he needs to make in order to be able to function successfully enough. But for Kealey there are not two worlds; there is only one: he believes his creative (mis)readings of the world are equally as real as any other (more realistic) part of the world. For all the "mirroring" techniques, in his conception everything ultimately lies on the same existential plane. Whereas Joyce's mind seems able to have bounced back and forth between the two different worlds (perhaps we might call them arenas or theaters), Kealey's consciousness, for all its creativity, can at times seem sedentary and claustrophobic in ways that Finnegans Wake never does.

Kealey's truly singular way of processing things is apparent whenever he refers to multiple linked words as all amounting to one word. Mild and wild, he says, are the "same word."[] Gore Bay and Gorbi "are the same word."[] For Joyce, on the other hand, new words are being born all the time. Finnegans Wake serves as a breeding ground for new words; Kealey's philosophy seeks to reduce all real, existent words into a handful of keywords and concepts.

Kealey's inability to understand his creativity as separate from the surrounding reality seems to lead to a strange absence of humor in his work. It reminds one of Freud's notion of the mimetic aspect of humor, which posits a perceptible disjuncture between accepted reality and the fictional reality of a joke. Yet Kealey does not perceive any such disjuncture between reality and his "decoding" of it. That is not to say that Kealey himself is without humor—during the podcasts he makes many jokes and is often in good spirits—but he seems to find no amusement in his creative linkages, though many of them form wildly diverse, inherently funny juxtapositions. For example, in one short audio segment, which has been mocked in a YouTube video, Kealey links a certain type of sandwich offered at the Tim Horton's restaurant chain—its ingredients being bacon, lettuce, egg and tomato—to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, mittens, Michael Jackson's glove, a forecasted flood around Lake Michigan, a telephone company called Telus ("tell us" + "let us" + "lettuce" = "the lettuce is the telephone company"), the seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon, Porky Pig, NATO, bagels, and the "Bag Ladies of the Universe", amongst various other concepts.[] Though his true believers, happy to learn, often laugh when they hear such connections, Kealey himself seems to take the business deadly seriously. This is in stark opposition to Finnegans Wake, many passages of which are obviously funny and, by authorial admission, "meant to make you laugh" (JJ 755). Kealey does concern himself with foreboding, apocalyptic matters, so it seems understandable that he would not joke about them. But we would do well to remember that Kafka, who penned his personal nightmares, found much of his own writing hilarious and "laughed quite immoderately" when reading The Trial to friends.[] Kealey betrays no such amusement when sharing his creative work. It is not intended to function as any sort of literature or fiction. He takes it as seriously as possible; he truly is trying to warn people and considers his imaginative work to be the "decoding" of reality, not mere language games of his own ingenuity.

During one of his bleaker days, Joyce wrote: "Perhaps I shall survive and perhaps the raving madness I write will survive and perhaps it is very funny" (JJ 683). It is the writing that is "mad", not the author, and the prospect of humor—hopefully his audience can share it with him—holds a redemptive value for the whole enterprise. The bizarre book initially seemed an ill-considered, quixotic task, not so very much unlike Kealey's quest to save the world by getting his own strange messages out. Joyce had embarked on a new path alone, and even some of those close to him, who had championed him in the past, declined to support Work in Progress. They could not comprehend what he was trying to accomplish. ALP's cry for a sympathetic rapport—"is there one who understands me?" (my italics; 627.15)—doubles as the author's own long, drawn-out, agonizing query, the emotional depth of which no other person could ever know or take seriously enough. Joyce worked for seventeen years on a book few other people, at the time, could comprehend. In Kealey we find another individual mentally racked by the burden of his own idiosyncratic, language-bound way of thinking; and he too searches for others who understand him, trying against the odds to gather 13 such people on his farm. Kealey compares the task of finding others who share his understanding with the Biblical story of Abraham trying to find a set number of righteous men in Sodom and Gomorrah, so that God would spare those cities—but in the end he can find only one righteous man, Lot. In Kealey's mythology, to get Creation to spare the whole world, the requisite number of "awake" people is 13; Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, functions because only one person (Joyce himself) is truly cognizant of all that's transpiring—and that is a tremendous burden. The more we consider Joyce in comparison with Kealey, the more it becomes apparent that keeping his sanity while completing the book was almost as big of an accomplishment as actually producing the hyper-connotative writing.

Though Joyce lived before the popularization of "conspiracy theories", the secretive, ontological intimations of Finnegans Wake share much spirit with other wild, paradigm-breaking readings of reality. When considering the matter this way, it becomes apparent that Joyce's artistry functioned by means of a kind of paranoia. Much like Kealey does today, Joyce while writing his last book was always on the lookout for anything new in his environment that might be incorporated, by means of word magic, into his fictional system. In the conventional definition, paranoia breaks down etymologically into "beyond-minded", but the first part of the word (para) can also mean "alongside", as in parallel lines. Joyce's portmanteau-yielding paranoia amounts to an "alongside-mindedness": he needed to switch back and forth, because he lived in "two worlds". In addition to being an "Arranger" in Ulysses and a "Rearranger" in Finnegans Wake, Joyce in his daily life could be considered a "Looker-Outer," always searching for any new item that could figure into his literary enterprise well enough to make his subversive ideas in his fictional world seem better supported, if not preordained.

"Chance furnishes me with what I need. I'm like a man who stumbles: my foot strikes something, I look down, and there is exactly what I'm in need of" (JJ 713n). It is significant that Joyce refers to chance, rather than fate or providence. On the surface, it appears that Kealey functions the same way: any new item or factoid he encounters, he fits it into his mythology and considers it to be the latest relevant clue. Kealey "do[es]n't believe in coincidence"[], and his every "decoding" exercise tells us as much: any connection that can be made is taken as an inherent, intended meaning of the words under analysis. Joyce, however, took coincidence as coincidence (rather than as fate) and in so doing was better able to use chance to his advantage, creating his own luck in expansive, literarily useful ways. Living in two worlds, paranoid in that his mind was divided between the two, he could channel what he noticed in the real world into the "container" of Finnegans Wake, where, in his words, the "madness" could "survive"—and so he too could "survive" without succumbing to "madness" (JJ 683).

The work of Glen Kealey lacks this dynamic feedback loop of creativity: though his ideas proliferate across various forms of media, aided by the Internet, they are still very much features—fictive curiosities—of one world, our world. His ideas continually lay claim to a reality that they can not possess. As such, for all their ingenuity, they can be reduced to one scream in the night—heroically raw, earnest of intention, perhaps inspiring, but ultimately ineffective. Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, has proven particularly effective in eliciting multiplicative responses from readers—insights about the text, our world, and the relation between the two—without much regard for whether or not Joyce himself would approve of these interpretations. It is common knowledge that Joyce wrote literature and considered himself an artist, not a philosopher, but we recognize new significance in these qualities—how they made his ideas communicable and useful to us, and how they may have saved his own sanity—when we measure them against the roughhewn example of Glen Kealey.

### Addendum: Five Final Coincidences

There are many other tangential similarities between Joyce and Kealey which, for reasons of space, could not be fully investigated above. Kealey's mythology itself is far larger than the present study could properly document, and many of his keywords and concepts had to be left out. A handful of the most amusing Joyce-Kealey correspondences are briefly noted below.

• In the early 2000s, when he was still very much figuring out the basics of his Premise, Kealey used "Work in progress" as his hallmark phrase. Those three words are found in the signature area of many of his cryptic messages still available online.[] In one of the telephone conversations, a _true_ _believer_ explains: "Yeah, that's what I liked about your older posts. You never said, 'This is the way it is,' you said, 'It's just a _work in progress_.'"[]

• Kealey believes in the existence of many things, such as subterranean Neanderthals and an ancient supercomputer, that he has no evidence for—things that no one has ever actually seen. He says: "I have no reason to disbelieve that the things I cannot see within the Earth—but know exist—are possible."[] This faith is thematically analogous to blindness, which Joyce famously battled all his life. Blind people cannot see many things in the world, but they trust that those things are indeed out there.

• Kealey's mythology makes much of genetics, particularly genetic engineering. Joyceans make much of the "genetic" studies of the various drafts of Joyce's books.

• Two of the major characters of _Finnegans Wake_ are Shem and Shaun, twin brothers. (N.B. Joyce also alludes to Samuel Roth as his "frother" at once point (464.24).) Kealey describes Neanderthalers and regular humans, who descended from the Clan Mother-spawned Cro-Magnons, as "twin" species.

Certain aspects of Kealey's "twins" align with Joyce's. No single twin of Kealey's pair matches exactly with either of Joyce's, but similar defining qualities recur: Humans generally play the role of pitiable victim in relation to the Neanderthalers, as Shem often does in relation to Shaun. Neanderthalers, rulers who are also mad scientists, have the sadistic traits of Shaun mixed with the somewhat masochistic reclusiveness of Shem the sham creator. Regular humans grew larger than Neanderthalers, much as Shaun did as he expanded to fill HCE's role.

Kealey says that the relationship between the two different types of humanoids was allegorized in the 1988 movie _Twins_ , starring Danny DeVito (the Neanderthaler) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (the peak human).[] DeVito's character is also a criminal (like Shem, who is a plagiarist), and Schwarzenegger took steroids (similar to how regular humans, according to Kealey's mythology, have been genetically tampered with).

• The title of this study suggests, facetiously, that Glen Kealey is James Joyce reincarnated. Joyce died on January 13, 1941; Kealey was born less than a year later, on January 8, 1942. This is, of course, just a coincidence.

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### Afterward:

### From Kealey's True Believers . . . to the Cult of Saint Joyce

If James Joyce really did come back from the dead, would Joycean scholars even want to have anything to do with him? Or would they, like the Catholic Church in various jokes about Jesus' return, deny him in an attempt to preserve some semblance of power, industry, empire, and self-importance? These are the sorts of questions I found myself considering more and more often after the above study was completed in early 2012. These thoughts and others demanded something of an exploration, and the very existence of the preceding essay demand something of an explanation, and the result was this perhaps ill-considered follow-up—part afterward, part confessional.

But first, I feel it's worth it—worth it because I have nothing to lose—to break character for a moment and say "Thank you for reading, whoever you are. . . . But you may want to stop reading here, because the tenor of this secondary essay will be very different from that of the main feature above."

My little Joyce/Kealey project was incredibly time-consuming and was done out of pure interest in the subject matter. It was not sanctioned by any institution, wasn't done for academic credits or résumé padding, and I never intended (or intend) to earn a penny from it. It was an addictive task—especially when it came to listening to, and taking copious notes on, all those podcasts. I didn't mind doing it—in some ways it was a lot of fun—but after I got into the material, I really had no choice but to see the long production all the way through, no matter where the road led. And the subject matter was such that the result couldn't be forecasted or planned. I did all this not knowing what the end goal would be, how the long essay could be distributed, or who would even want to read it. I did it simply because there is an obvious connection between Glen Kealey and the spirit of Finnegans Wake. I did it because, as a friend told me, I was the only person who could write this—because no one else knew enough about Kealey and Joyce—and this was something unique, so I had to write it.

About halfway through I became aware of the odd and potentially uncomfortable position the essay would put me in. I was living in upstate New York, less than an hour's drive away from one of Kealey's truest believers, and not that far away from Kealey himself. Friends and family cautioned me not to unleash the essay, for fear of what "the cult members" might do. I assured them that the Kealeyans, though they may well take exception to my study, did not have a habit of going out of their way to harass people. Then again, my mind began foreseeing angry messages or hexes that Kealey could formulate against me and post online. Would he say that "Donald Lashomb" was a "lad who nods," i.e. another nodding yes-man for the Neanderthalers? Was "Lashomb" trying to "lash the mob" or stir up a "flash mob" against Kealeyanism?

On the other side, there was also the consideration of how professional scholars might react. Would writing such a weird article be the equivalent career suicide if I ever wanted to go back to academia again? While exhibiting an understanding of Finnegans Wake, the essay had to be written in such a way that Kealey might be taken as seriously as possible, at least on the aesthetic and psychological levels. I didn't want academics to dismiss Kealey, or my essay, or myself, out of hand. This was a tough balancing act to attempt.

As it turned out, so far I've had nothing to fear from the Kealeyans. And I wasn't exactly ignored by academia, but my essay was totally misunderstood by a certain journal that could have easily brought it to the attention of many Joyceans (a target audience that should become—that almost needs to become—aware of Kealey). I initially had reservations about even trying to get the essay published via an academic channel, and rejection from a Joycean journal did not surprise me. In fact, the one aspect of the essay that I thought best to leave out, for considerations of politeness, was the one aspect reinforced and provoked by the way in which publication was refused.

This aspect in question, this final insight, is an unpleasant one, but it is one that soon becomes obvious when considering Kealeyanism alongside Joycean scholarship. Namely, the truth is that some (not all) Joyceans are themselves something like cult members: just as obsessed and obsessive, just as unwilling to accept anything that may cast the slightest doubt on the worthiness of their devotional or on the general irreproachability of their leader or figurehead.

Further, an essay suggesting that Joyce was only a stone's throw away from very real, very non-academic madness was unlikely to find its way into a literary journal published in conjunction with university Joyceans. My essay does go out of its way to flatter Joyce—a prerequisite for publication—and say that it's certainly to his credit that he was able to overcome and redeem his weird idées fixes by means of literary art. But still the suggestion that Joyce was nearly the sort of person whom most would consider a lunatic cuts too close to the bone. It unnerves the tendentious Joycean adoration; it blasphemes the master. In these circles a silent pact is made: we must never let the sacraments become exposed to any inconvenient reality that may diminish Joyce's supremacy or our infinite, passionate indebtedness which springs therefrom.

It is especially uncomfortable that this news of Joyce's non-uniqueness, which suggests that he may not have been perfect, comes via the example of a living, non-academic man. Kealey is a lowly farmer, but he naturally—and this is very, very obvious, if one can admit it—possesses a greater "Joycean" linguistic genius than any Joycean steeped in an ocean of books, guides, journals, dissertations, and conference pamphlets. Kealey possesses a multifaceted linguistic creativity that is comparable to the talents of Joyce himself. It may even be said that each of them is comparable only to the other in some regards. And yet Kealey is and will possibly always be verboten in academia simply because, in certain lights, he makes Joyceans look bad: he is so much more linguistically talented and innovative than they are in ways quite similar to those they have long valued and admired as decisively "Joycean". He proves that you don't need literary criticism to gain access to roughly the same spirit that Joyce evoked in his later work. You don't even need Joyce's own writing, because the basic spirit isn't really Joyce's at all: it's simply a conglomeration of archetypal ideas, many of which any other borderline schizophrenic, language-obsessed genius (we know of at least two so far) might well hit upon. Kealey's themes overlap those of Finnegans Wake, but he has never read Joyce's book. His signature linguistic technique—that of analyzing everyday words as if they were portmanteaus containing multiple words and a mythology of linked meanings—is simply, elegantly, and obviously the flipside of what Joyce did. And Kealey arrived at all this without being informed by Joyce at all. He is Joyce's natural counterpart, yet Joycean scholarship, so far, seems loath to recognize him. By all accounts the essential Joycean task should be to formulate a better understanding of Joyce's quiddity and process, yet Joyceans have so far failed to recognize—let alone study—a living, performing example who is very much like Joyce in certain ways. Why? Because they are evidently far more invested in the supposed unique perfection, and the supposed perfect uniqueness, of their old dead master.

That is not to say that their literary criticism hasn't proven valuable or useful in other ways. Much Joycean scholarship does exercise the mind and develop critical reading skills, and I would never renounce all that I have learned from certain Joyceans and their texts. Nor is it my recommendation, if you want to mainline Finnegans Wake's aesthetic, that you try to become schizophrenic yourself and/or immerse yourself in the writings and thoughts of an extremely paranoid person. But at the very least the case of Kealey makes Joyce seem a little less unique and a little less like God. When such sacrilegious ideas bring with them a fairly large amount of substantial, real-world evidence, they cause very negative—but probably also involuntary—reactions on the part of some (not all) devoted Joyceans.

At this point I must try, perhaps hopelessly, to convince the reader that this long afterward is not written out of malice or spite for not getting an earlier, shorter incarnation of the my Joyce/Kealey essay published in a certain literary journal. I never thought it would happen anyway. (The very idea of seeing Kealey's name in print next to Joyce's seems surreal; such things don't happen.) Nor do I wish (paraphrasing Chesterton) to pillory any modest schoolmasters who are only doing the best they can at the incredibly specialized, confining tasks to which they've sacrificed much of their freedom, and into which they've shoehorned their literary sensibilities. But (continuing to paraphrase Chesterton) I cannot be silent about the actual tendency of Joyceans' collective scholarship, which in its narrowness has now reached the point at which it rejects the closest thing to James Joyce himself having returned from the dead. Largely, it seems to me, this rejection comes because the figure in question is an unconventional non-academic; and some relatively influential Joyceans, evidently unaccustomed to much reality, do not know how to react to someone like him, so they invent excuses and push the news away.

The stated reason for the essay's rejection was as follows:

"The reader found both the essay's premise of encryption in the Wke [sic] and its argmentation [sic] to be unconvincing."

This came in an email from a high-ranking Joycean, a PhD-holder, professor of literature at a fairly prestigious university, and the editor of one of the major Joycean journals. It should go without saying that my essay simply does not posit any "encryption" in "the Wke" (i.e. _Finnegans Wake_ ), nor does it really make much of an "argment" about anything. I would fully accept rejection based on the essay simply being "too weird" or "not our sort of thing". I would more than understand rejection on the grounds that my writing style is perhaps too convoluted and long-winded at times, or that I simply need to cite more contemporary Joyceans in order to be let into the club. But being rejected for a reason that seems wholly invented has not sat well with me; and I do not think I am tilting at windmills to suggest that the nature of the rejection is symptomatic of noteworthy fault, rationalization, ignorance, and perhaps even fear on the part of certain Joyceans. Something _like_ this afterward would have been written anyway, but the fiasco with trying to get the essay published simply added a new element. As my "luck" would have it, the fact that Joyceans _wouldn't_ publish a Joyce/Kealey article actually serves to underscore, in a way, the importance of the subject matter and the indicative misunderstandings and sensitive issues that arise therefrom.

When alerted of the fact that the reader's negative criticisms as stated were simply incompatible with the very nature of my essay, the editor replied that there had indeed been a mistake. He then instructed me to simply, literally remove the word "encryption" from the rejection statement, as if that would suddenly make the given reasoning applicable and sensible. But doing this scarcely makes the judgment any less incomprehensible. Due to the inclusion of the word "premise" in the original statement, I began to wonder if the reader had mistaken Kealey's fantastical Premise for my own. That probably wasn't the case, but it's difficult to understand how the only premise I had—the simple notion that Joyce could be compared to another wordsmith who plays with language in much the same way, and who has developed a mythology along many of the same themes as Finnegans Wake—would in and of itself be "unconvincing". Even if a reader might not agree that Kealey's example sheds light on certain psychological trappings that Joyce was able to overcome, it's still hard to fathom how anyone who paid attention to the essay could think that the comparison was flawed in its very premise. Yet that is what the gatekeepers of a Joycean organization told me.

The only explanation I can see is that these Joyceans are, on some level that may not even break the threshold of their conscious awareness, scandalized by the very idea of a living, non-academic man who has inadvertently and effectively surpassed their own understandings of certain "Joycean" aesthetics. Whereas they (somewhat like myself) are pedantic and academic, Kealey boldly lives his life based on linguistic precepts that they (and I) only dare write about. Their safe, overly precious literary criticism claims to value certain types of ideas and notions, but Kealey's living example makes these scholars seem cowardly. What many literary scholars do is simply dream up, from their bureaucratically handicapped position, a lot of necessarily flawed theories about the way these sorts of aesthetics would function. Rarely do their immaterial theories or polite arguments even venture to say anything of much importance or pertinacity to life off the page. (I know this practice very well, having participated in it myself.) But Kealey, on the other hand, is a real, observable subject living in the field. (And why would anyone read so many more books on someone's idea of what a supposedly extinct animal was like and how it behaved, when a near relative of this animal has just been discovered, and you can examine this true, wild specimen in its own habitat?) Kealey's presence not only leads to a clearer understanding of Joyce, but it also provides a better perspective on Joyceans as well. In light of Kealey we might see some of the most devoted Joyceans for what they really are—and none of this is comfortable or pretty. To the extent that Joyceans would deny Kealey, they would also in a sense be denying the living, breathing, evolving reality of the "Joycean" traits they so long championed on so many static pages. Evidently they would rather dismiss Kealey before it ever got to the point of having to explain or rethink some of their previous work in this new, more realistic context. They are like vampires turning away from a mirror, afraid to face the truth. And the truth is that these aesthetics live, off the page, in ways that many current modes of literary criticism cannot comfortably cope with or understand.

As evidenced by their own words, neither the evaluative reader of my essay nor the editor/ombudsman really understood what I was saying. On some fundamental level they simply seem incapable of grasping any discussion of Joyce that brings in a modicum of non-academic existence. Such Joyceans appear to have a vested interest in keeping their literary sensibilities cloistered and closed to anyone (and anything) not already deemed germane to the sacraments of Saint Joyce's church.

By the time my essay was rejected by the journal, it had already been read by several other people: some of them experts in Joyce who had never heard of Kealey before, some of them people with great familiarity with Kealey who had never read any Joyce, and some of them lacking any prior familiarity with either Joyce or Kealey. All of them understood what I was saying. None of them would have made the mistake of thinking that I was "arging" for the existence of "encryption" in Joyce's text. The essay does not make much of an "argment" about anything; for the most part, the essay simply lays out the case of Kealey and notes the obvious similarities to later-period Joyce. That Joyce and Kealey are similar is obvious. Is there anything that resembles the word magic and language games of Finnegans Wake more than the lifework of Kealey? (Perhaps some ancient Irish literature might. But Kealey is alive, and Joycean scholarship knows of no one else whose aesthetics are so reminiscent of Finnegans Wake.) Is more of an "argment" necessary to convince one that both Joyce's book and Kealey's mythology share the hallmark themes of flowing water, universal recycling, impish subterranean tricksters, "nothing new", remembering vs. forgetting, dreaming vs. waking, and creative or superstitious name-calling? The similarities are obvious. One of my early readers could be described as one of the most highly respected Joycean scholars in the world—more renowned than the journal editor—and upon learning about Kealey he noted: "I can see why you thought of Joyce, and of Finnegans Wake in particular". I do not understand, or accept, how other Joyceans could have examined the same essay and honestly concluded that the very premise itself was wrong.

I realize that all this may make it seem like I am laboriously seeking recompense for perceived wrongs done against me. But I don't feel wronged. It isn't the fault of the editor or the reader in question. They are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. They seem so distracted by technology and so overworked by bureaucracy that they cannot think or communicate clearly. Every missive I received in this affair was plagued by misspellings and evident misunderstandings on their part. And these are well-respected academics in the field of English literature. But their attention seems shockingly fragmented. They can't even spell simple, usual words correctly (not Wake but Wke!) and don't have the energy or time to proofread brief, professional correspondences before clicking send. None of this inspires any confidence. These sorts of oversights and faults should be pointed out so as to increase the likelihood of correction and reform. Admittedly, I've had to fight the temptation to oversimplify things and declare: "They're cult members; they can't help but react this way." But, again, I never expected the essay to be published; I knew a Joyce/Kealey comparison would be turned down for one reason or another. This afterward is necessary, however, so that relevant facts and honest impressions can be recorded and preserved. Perhaps these words might someday pique the attention of someone who may want the professional study of literature to improve, to come to grips with itself, and to grow healthy to the (almost unthinkable) extent that it could cope with a brief injection of living, non-academic reality every once in a while. In fact, it would not be unrealistic to predict that in order to survive literary criticism will eventually, absolutely need to start becoming reacquainted with aspects of reality other than those items and situations tailor-made for aloof professors or fussy dilettantes (not so unlike myself).

In orchestrating a confrontation between Joyce and Kealey I had to go far out of my comfort zone. I did so because such an infusion of outside material seems absolutely necessary in the case of contemporary literary criticism. Within ideological systems that some might call over-specialized and self-serving, allusions to outside reference points must sometimes be attempted, at least, in order to potentiate change and lessen prejudice. Everything should be done to embolden the freethinking scholars of the future to speak out against the unjust separation of reality and literary studies that has slowly been imposed—as if the two were utterly incompatible and at odds. It is my hope that someday within my lifetime we will see an end to the cowardly, all-too-convenient segregation of reality from literature within all academic settings.

In order for this to happen, however, it will take far more courage than can be found in today's literati, many of whom seem content to masquerade as literary kings and queens in their tiny academic castles in the sky. They are either utterly oblivious or shamefully unconcerned with the increasingly anti-literary—and indeed anti-human—countenance of the general culture outside their classroom walls. They pretend they can ignore this reality indefinitely. They form tiny groups, mentally sequester themselves away, and devote themselves to the ersatz biblical scholarship of various arcane texts. It is worth noting that much of the literature they worship was written for a far more general, far more open-minded audience. Many contemporary professors of literature have done the books and authors they purport to love a great disservice by running so far away from the greater part of humanity. In the process of flight, they have all but ceded reality to non-literary sensibilities—without a fight. And this loss, this large-scale diminution of the truly literary (as opposed to the commercialized, dumbed-down faux-literary) doesn't even seem to bother them. As caretakers of the readerly and writerly values they profess to find so important, some professors today actually seem quite proud to preside over the general fall of literature in the cultural mind. For as long as they can still retreat to their cushy isolation, they remain quite happy. Indeed, their behavior suggests a great dedication to making sure that no one other than themselves and their paying students can ever access various literary sensibilities, many of which are nearly extinct. Meanwhile, it is clear that literary skills and aptitudes are decreasing across the board, in almost all disciplines, even where you'd least expect. To this end, I could provide certain literature professors' emails that evidence poor spelling, chronic distractedness, and awful reading comprehension.

But all this is getting somewhat off-topic. In my defense, I have only written this because I care.

I certainly do not want to call all Joyceans "cult members". Personally, I wouldn't consider the Kealeyans a proper cult either, though they likewise exhibit certain cult-like behaviors. From what I can tell, Joyceans are, like the Kealeyans, nice people. I studied under two Joyceans and learned a great deal from them; I do not regret my university experience in the least. All the Joyceans I ever met always treated me kindly when I moved among them. They are polite to a fault. They address you as "Dear ____" even when they've never heard of you before. I have absolutely no desire to upset them, but the indicative failings of Joyceanism, as they relate so strongly to Kealeyanism, need to be addressed in the hope of curbing them. There is indeed something amiss with a good number of Joyceans, and many of them have very large blind spots, examples of which will be noted below. Ironically, as the Joyce industry developed and extended its purview, it somehow became more parochial, insensate and intolerant of external sources that are not 1) already alluded to in Joyce's texts, or 2) already sanctioned or sanctified by academia. For comparison with Joyce or his texts, one must only offer someone or something that proves readily compliant, spinelessly acquiescent for use in the further glorification of Joyce and the further expansion of the Joycean enterprise.

In graduate school I proffered various commonsensical metaphors to describe certain aspects of Joyce and Joycean scholarship, but most of the concepts fell on deaf ears. For example, we know (though some Joyceans don't like to acknowledge it) that Joyce reused many snatches of other authors' texts in Finnegans Wake, often changing them to suit his purpose. I compared this practice to that of a remix DJ, a metaphor that I thought worked particularly well because Joyce's work is so often hailed for its "musical" qualities. But few understood this. Some didn't even know what a remix was or what a DJ did exactly. I also compared the process of understanding Finnegans Wake to reverse engineering; because we basically work backwards, look at Joyce's finished product, unpack the text, and try to figure out what exactly is in there and how it works. No one understood this metaphor, either. And these are basic concepts that have been around for quite some time now, but they are evidently incompatible with Joycean scholarship simply because the church only allows different music (more passive, less relevant music) and does not want to know anything about actual engineering operations (preferring instead calculations that are more frivolous, pointless, and impossible—such as the one about reconstructing all of Dublin from the pages of Ulysses).

Perhaps more troubling, from the consideration of pseudo-cult dynamics, is what I've found in Joycean reading groups run by students. They often prescribe to Joyce such an absolute mastery over detail and design that it soon becomes outrageously unrealistic and worrying. It seems these students pick up on certain academicians' worshipfulness of Joyce and seek to join their ranks by insistently overestimating Joyce's authorial control to absurd lengths. I knew one student who maintained that the first letter of the first word of every line of Finnegans Wake always meant something, and if you read down the column of first letters on each page you would eventually pick up on secret messages that Joyce was trying to convey (as if he had control over how the book was printed to that extent!). Another student held an unshakable belief that Joyce's grasp of ancient Greek had to be supreme. When I told him that a professor of ancient Greek pointed out to me some relatively minor grammatical errors in a snatch of Greek that Joyce had jotted down, I was informed that either Joyce was making a mistake on purpose, to suggest some as-yet-undiscovered but surely brilliant allusion, or else Joyce simply knew more about ancient Greek than teachers of the language did. These cases accurately represent the mindset of a good portion of young Joycean scholars. Their default position is to worship Joyce and assume that he knew, directed and manipulated reality to a quasi-divine extent—and perhaps he still does so from beyond the grave—despite common sense and ample evidence to the contrary. For example, there are multiple instances in the standard Ellmann biography noting that Joyce often bemoaned his ignorance of ancient Greek (see JJ 108, 408, 512)—but such notable failings of the Saint never seem to circulate very well amongst the churchgoers.

Many published scholars are just as ridiculously hyperbolic in their overestimation of Joyce. Upon the release of a CD containing old recordings (amusing but very scratchy) of Joyce's shrill voice reading choice selections from his works, one Joycean's review proclaimed: "henceforward James Joyce will be viewed not only as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, but as one of its finest performers as well."[] Firstly, I must mention my surprise that this scholar wasn't immediately excommunicated for having slightly qualified Joyce's greatness as a writer. Secondly, the core statement here is preposterous and embarrassing to consider. No one besides the most committed, delusional devotee would believe that Joyce ranks among the best performers of the last hundred years, let alone that he could earn such a distinction due to that small collection of shoddy old recordings.

Elsewhere we read the similarly amusing conjecture that Joyce "anticipated the guitar-playing culture of the age of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix" simply because he once asked a man in London to make him a lute (to no avail) and was once photographed holding a guitar.[] You can't make this stuff up. There is no limit to how much they have overrated Joyce's influence, knowledge, and abilities. There is no reason for them to have done this; Joyce was pretty great as he already was—as he really was. But it seems they can't rest until they turn him into some sort of hybrid entity that is part popstar god, part benevolent dictator of all literary value, and part wizard. The only use of such grandiose conceptions is for Joyceans to revel in blind, supine worship.

The worst example of this (that I know of) is an essay that appeared several years ago in the most prestigious Joycean journal. The author tells of how he consults Finnegans Wake "as one would a horoscope" by "calculating birthdays and anniversaries and dates of important upcoming events to page numbers".[] Moreover, he believes to have found references to contemporary figures such as Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton within Joyce's book. This is not a joke. The writer says he "began seriously to question how this seemingly inscrutable text could inject these quite striking examples of prescience . . . or outright prediction" into real life.[] At the time, when I mentioned this just-published essay to other graduate students, and to a professor or two, I was shocked that no one else seemed bothered by it. To me it seems almost a harbinger of a new Dark Age. It is a lackadaisical return to bibliomancy and the practice of Sortes Virgilianae, in which sections of the Aeneid were chosen at random and consulted for advice or prophecy. In and of itself, one scholar doing this sort of thing with Finnegans Wake is hardly significant. In a way, it is but one more example of how those who are already in the club can write and publish any silly thing they like, and receive polite applause for doing so, just as long as the work in some way extends Joyce's reach and presses us all to be even more awestruck by his holy writ. But that a straight-faced, first-hand account of such superstitious foolishness could get published in the premier journal for Joyce studies without anyone being too concerned about it is more than worrying. It threatens all credibility and standards.

But wait: Couldn't it be argued those who use Finnegans Wake as a portentous, supernatural text are simply behaving in creative ways quite in keeping with the magical thinking of Kealey or Joyce himself? The difference is that, unlike the brilliant paranoia of Kealey or the self-aggrandizing apophenia of Joyce, the odd behavior of their most enthralled devotees is very reactionary and derivative. Throughout the hundred-plus hours of TalkShoe audios, there are exceptionally few instances in which the true believers of Kealeyanism come up with their own word games. (I honestly cannot remember any instances, but there may have been a few.) Instead, the Kealeyans simply recount the word games and super-meaningful terminology devised by their guru. A similar lack of initiative is found in Joyceans: they often celebrate Joyce's literary techniques, but rarely if ever do they make use of them, or anything like them, in their own writing. Most prefer simply to retrace Joyce's steps, dully document and pretentiously praise his wild language for its deftness and wide-ranging utility; but they hardly ever stray from their standard, bland academese. So how super-valuable can Joyce's linguistic gifts truly be, how super-generous is he really, if so few people who understand his most innovative literary techniques can actually make much aesthetic use of them—if even those who celebrate his tricks and innovations rarely seem inclined to put them back to work for any new, different cause, academic or otherwise?

Joyce even admitted that Finnegans Wake was devised, in part, as a bunch of busywork for "the professors" to argue about in circles "for centuries," just so long as their bloviating might ensure him a sort of "immortality" (JJ 521). Unfortunately for Joyce, it no longer seems a certainty that literature departments themselves will be around for very many more centuries, and thus Joyce's egomaniacal, borderline malevolent tactic seems increasingly likely to backfire. Unlike so many other authors, Joyce needs his literary reputation to be subsidized by those who proselytize and pay tribute. Otherwise his inflated importance comes crashing down to earth, and the notion that he might outlast, outrank, or even compete with Shakespeare suddenly seems totally ridiculous.

There was a tremendous neediness in James Joyce that projected itself into posterity: a desperate, pathological drive to amass a society of sycophants; an appetite for adulation. It is like the psychodynamics of a cult leader who seeks the company of those who will worship him in ways that justify and replicate his madness. And yet there is no doubt that many cult leaders (note: this does not apply to Kealey) look down on their followers. It scarcely seems possible that Joyce himself would not look down on the Joyceans: all he'd find valuable in them would be the aspects of himself that he saw mirrored back at him. And in some way the most extreme Joycean circles actually seem to sense what the master would want. They forbid converts from bringing in anything from the outside that the Joyce program cannot assimilate. Figuratively speaking, they do not allow Joyceans to take any of the master's tools with them whenever they leave the cult compound on a daytrip. In other words, they seem unable or unwilling—as if it would be a religious violation—to use the insights and techniques that they learned from Joyce in any context in which Saint Joyce cannot be paid homage, or in which a high priest of Joyceanism cannot collect a sort of literary tax on the Saint's behalf.

So well have Joyceans' spirits been throttled that sometimes they don't even recognize fairly "Wakean" puns if Joyce himself was not the originator. To a top Joycean I once made the joking remark that I didn't feel safe at a conference held in the "Huntingdon" room of a university building. Because it was the "Hunting-don" room. "Hunting Don." Though he knew my name, he didn't get the joke and needed to hear it explained four or five times. This is an excellent scholar and professor who has parsed thousands of Joyce's portmanteaus, but all of that practice on the difficult puns of Finnegans Wake did not convert into the ability to bisect a simple portmanteau in the real world.

To the extent that many Joyceans understand and support Joyce, they seem to reside in a fiefdom in which they are endlessly indebted to their literary lord and can never escape the borders of his territory. Moreover, they are evidently content with this arrangement. They scarcely recognize their position as unjust or servile. They don't mind that so much of their effort, so many of their insights, such a quantity of their own writing, and so many hours spent with others, all necessarily press for the saintly canonization cum deification of the most self-absorbed, delusional narcissist in the history of world literature. Joyce was a most elitist one-man-clique and _über-_ individualist who would surely sneer at his own followers for their submissiveness. He would appreciate these intellectuals only as "useful idiots" to his cause. These statements may seem hyperbolic, but the truth is that Joyce cared next to nothing for academia, loved to ridicule orthodoxy of all sorts, and had an almost Luciferian aversion to working for other people (cf. "non serviam: I will not serve" (P 109)). Joyce would have hated the Joyceans on a personal level and would have felt no guilt about using them to his own end. Yet more than a few of them seem quite puppy-doggedly devoted to him as if they constantly, hopelessly seek his approval and friendship. The more they study his features and rhapsodize about them, as if to flatter and win Joyce's affection, the deeper they sink into aesthetic indebtedness and the further they would, in fact, fall in his estimation if he could somehow see them now. But they don't mind. They suffer from a sort of literary Stockholm syndrome.

Much is made of the welcoming "universality"—or, if you prefer, the ballyhooed "democracy"—of Joyce's later works. Many scholars enjoy extending Joyce's reach into external sources that his texts reference or at least seem to reference (and every possible benefit of the doubt is given). Almost any cultural item from any time and place is fair game, as long as its constitution proves docile enough for a Joycean takeover. (And, obviously, a source of comparison like Kealey is not wholly supplicant, to say the least.) This sort of missionary work is done to "help us better understand and enjoy the text(s)," but I contend that—in addition to whatever else it may be—this is all very much like an enterprise of imperialism. But it is not the real world, or history books, or even hypertexts that many Joyceans keep colonizing under their master's flag. Rather it is their own minds that are infiltrated and subsumed by the Joycean cult of personality. If they see Joycean touches in so many different places, it is partially because they look with eyes connected to brains that may as well have been invaded, co-opted, and commandeered by Joyce's ghost. This metaphor is an exaggeration, I admit, but even if something like it is only slightly present in some Joyceans—and it is—then it should be identified and guarded against for their own good.

In the above essay I noted that Joyce's creativity in Finnegans Wake seems predicated by a sort of paranoia. Extending this line of thought, it seems as if Joyce himself, with his hyper-connotative writing style, posits an endless number of literary conspiracies: his readers must entertain and work to substantiate every possible extra-textual connection, every potential reference and shade of meaning. All of these rabbit holes lead toward the greatest literary conspiracy theory of all: that Joyce knew everything, is behind all of this, is a master manipulator worthy of endless attention. But this is simply not the case, and such interpretations—or even incremental tendencies toward them—must be curtailed. Otherwise we allow the edifice of an authoritarian personality—glorious, perfect, attractive, and totally selfish—to be construed above so many people's understandings of literature.

Seven years ago, when I signed on to do three years of graduate study centered around _Finnegans Wake_ , I went into it with a belief that I would—and should—in a sense _battle_ with Joyce. The difficulty and formidability of Joyce was in fact why I chose him. It was not that I thought I could "best" Joyce; there was no belligerence involved. But with Joyce I did hold something _like_ —but not _quite_ —an _agon_ , in Harold Bloom's conception of the term. Though Joyce was not my favorite author, reading _Finnegans Wake_ for the first time when I was 20—side by side with Campbell and Robinson's _Skeleton Key_ , for 16 hours a day over the course of six days—had been the greatest literary experience of my life. Because Joyce was so great, so formidable, and full of so much, I wanted to test myself against him in some way. I wanted to write something in his literary presence that held up for its own sake. I never considered myself a Joycean, because to me that would mean I had lost the battle in the most disappointing way, had not learned anything _new_ or _for myself_ , and was eternally consigned to the status of something like "literary chattel". To me—but not to others, I understand—being a "Joycean" would mean that I was not my own person, was in a deeply personal sense indebted forever, working always for Joyce and _willing his will_ rather than willing my own.

I only realized much later how odd it was for me to enter into an academic study this way. I had the conceit that everything—all of the discussions, the essays, the dissertation and the thesis—could simply amount to externalizations, residue or debris, from some imaginary jousting match. As I saw it, I could use grad school as an opportunity to orchestrate this good-spirited, hypothetical skirmish between Joyce and myself, thereby providing a unique sort of learning experience. Joyce was dead but his form reanimated in my mind when I called it forth. And whether any of this imaginary stuff was ultimately worth it—that would be a matter of private aesthetics that had nothing to do with tuition payments, rough draft deadlines, approvals or rejections. At the time, none of this sort of thinking seemed strange to me. Only when I could look back on it with some distance did I begin to question myself and consider how I may have gone about things unusually or incorrectly. I may have simply been wrong, on multiple levels, and I may still be wrong, on slightly different levels, today.

Certainly none of my fellow students had an attitude remotely similar to mine concerning how one might relate to Joyce's greatness. I remind the reader that, despite the battle metaphor, I did not have an antagonistic approach to Joyce at all. For the most part, it was simply the case that I could hear his name without dropping to my knees. Others did not possess the same degree of renitence. I remember one instance in which I startled a young adjunct professor by expressing the notion that Joyce "shouldn't be blamed" for something or other. He was indignant almost to the point of incomprehension that the very consideration of finding fault with some aspect of Joyce had entered my mind, even if I had then promptly decided not to charge his God with imperfection.

I think a lot of this comes down to will. Maybe I have too much free will for my own good or for anyone else's. (I don't say that facetiously, either.) Whether I do or not, it's clear that many of those who sign on to follow leaders or movements, the way cult members follow their guru, have comparatively little will of their own. A major tenet of Kealeyanism is in fact the idea of willing your own will vs. willing someone else's will. In Kealeyanism, those who do not accept the Premise are ostensibly willing the will of the Neanderthalers. On the other hand, it could certainly be argued—if not proven—that the Kealeyans themselves simply will the will of Kealey. Both Joyce and Kealey have private fantasies which they get their respective followers to endorse and act out. Kealey's fantasy, taken on by the Kealeyans, involves believing in a conspiracy of Neanderthalers, investigating alleged word codes, and trying to save the world. Joyce's fantasy, on the other hand, involves activities and beliefs that are slightly more grounded but much more selfish. And his followers are happy to work very hard to increase his posthumous prestige by any means possible, no matter how skewed or parochial their scholarship may become.

What is interesting is that Kealey consistently refuses credit. In order to support his personal view of reality, Kealey must maintain that his work and insights are not the products of his personal creativity but are rather simple deductions, reasonable conclusions concerning how the world really works and how anyone with a "functioning mind" should believe and behave in it.

Joyce, on the other hand, takes the opposite tact. As noted by Bersani, Joyce's insinuation to his readers as they examine his words—as they consider what's on the page and how the text might function as some sort of epistemic index of the universe—is always: "let us see how much I can be credited for"[]. This underhanded mandate, which I really do think has had harmful effects, is Joyce's will in multiple senses: it is what he wants and it is akin to a binding document left after his death. In-depth study of Joyce is like the continual rereading of this will, and every new reader brings a new set of eyes with which to look for ever more loopholes, ever more benefits of the doubt, ever more ways to expand the meaning of the legalese to grant his metaphysical literary estate ever more property. In the end, however, all Joyce's name can ever really gain—all that has ever really been taken away from, or forfeited by, anyone—is the willpower of readers who obsessively read his will and will his will.

As the only PhD candidate in a Finnegans Wake reading group organized by students, I often found myself trying to dissuade the others from voluntarily forsaking so much of their discernment, self-esteem and agency as readers. Whenever they were unsure of how to make sense of the difficult text, they would continually defer to whatever possible interpretation would make Joyce seem as mighty and as far beyond our mortal minds as possible. Looking back on it now, it seems that they were prescribing omniscience to Joyce in much the same way Kealeyans prescribe omniscience to the Neanderthalers (or their supercomputer): nothing could ever be a coincidence or an imperfection; everything was almost always spun as a challenge to deduce what secret, infallible message was hiding behind it all. "Figure out a way to force this part of Joyce to seem really complicated and interesting in heretofore unforeseen ways" was the constant, unspoken directive. And every convoluted textual speculation brought with it an intimation of Joyce's infinite goodness and meaningfulness. At the time I felt slight embarrassment for my fellow students. I still respected them; I still learned from them and with them; but there seemed to be a quadrant of their thinking that was unnecessarily servile, servile in a way that would depress me if I thought about it for any length of time. Their wills were bent to Joyce's own; they'd been trained (or had trained themselves) to feel pleasure whenever the text was used, directly or indirectly, to praise Joyce. Through a sort of operant conditioning they became compelled, again and again, to keep inventing new reasons and new ways to interpret Finnegans Wake as if every word, every phrase, further proved the existence of truly celestial adeptness on Joyce's part. And they derived a sort of addictive, masochistic relish from this, from casting their own non-omniscient humanity down in the dirt at Joyce's feet. They were too far gone to admit that not all of Joyce's portmanteaus are brilliant, endlessly interesting, or even worthwhile.

In Finnegans Wake it often seems that Joyce favors quantity a bit too much over quality. He draws together a lot of connotations that are too obvious. He shows off just for the sake of showing off, and the inherent self-aggrandizement of it all sometimes becomes quite laborious. Many of the portmanteaus don't have any conceivable point beyond giving the readers more homework. A lot of his long, twisting streams of thought prove wastes of time to go down; they turn out to be boring dead-end creeks that don't recirculate. The punning isn't always that clever or amusing. The jokes aren't always funny. There are a lot of groaners, and a lot of word gags so heavy-handed that they aren't even worth groaning over. Some of this comes down to matters of taste, but we shouldn't be afraid to say so if we think that Joyce, not infrequently, exhibits bad taste and is very obnoxious.

It is true that to a large extent literary criticism withholds these sorts of judgments of taste because it is more interested simply in how texts function. But with an author like Joyce we are sometimes not dealing with function but rather dysfunction: weird, interesting, borderline dysfunctional texts from a weird, interesting, borderline dysfunctional man. However impolite they are to note, Joyce's failings and manias must be recognized in order to understand his work and its coercive power. This is not an author you would want to be around for very long if you could meet him in person. And this is not a personality you should want to help accumulate power of any sort, least of all power over your own mind. Yet this is the quite unspoken, rather unexamined assumption behind much Joycean criticism: that we should pledge ourselves to the task of spinning so many texts, positing so many allegedly strong "connections" between them, and propagandizing everyone who reads our work (including ourselves) until as many people as possible believe that Joyce's authorship is virtually all-powerful and that his writing basically amounts to the source code of reality itself. That is all delusion. It isn't even true metaphorically, and to seriously entertain such notions is an unhelpful sort of slavish, cult-like behavior.

I've had many of these thoughts for years now, but _still_ I returned to Joyce to write an essay comparing _Finnegans Wake_ to Glen Kealey. And the essay moderately praised Joyce. In many ways, Joyce is still worth praising, and there is much in his writings worth investigating and thinking about for many years to come. This afterward has simply addressed the more overriding negative drives of the Joyce industry and its more cult-like members. These academic impulses, which seek to colonize external texts but end up colonizing readers' minds, seem quite obviously seeded by Joyce for his own onerous, onanistic glorification. Metaphorically speaking, Joyce's will is not a benevolent document. As the example of Kealey causes many aspects of Joyce and Joyceanism to snap into clearer perspective, I would have been remiss (and perhaps even cowardly) not to examine the extent to which Joyceans themselves may resemble the "cult members" of a fallible guru.

Just because Joyce had Stephen Dedalus, when discussing Shakespeare, say that a "genius makes no mistakes" (U 9.228) does not mean we have to apply that overdone, bated statement to Joyce himself. Everyone who studies Joyce's biography should be able to list various mistakes he made: unnecessary trouble and misery that he put himself and others through simply for the sake of his own pride. As already mentioned, both Kealey and Joyce put themselves through personal hardship because of their beliefs and weird aesthetic proclivities. But whereas Kealey's beliefs concern the world and how to save it from a perceived threat; Joyce's protestations, on the other hand, seem a self-serving way to assuage the pain of his own self-inflicted egomania. Further, aside from his biography, anyone who studies Joyce's books for any length of time should be able to notice imperfections or "mistakes" in his work as well: for one, a relatively small but very significant portion of his content really is difficulty for difficulty's sake.

I am not suggesting that Joycean criticism should turn itself into an anti-Joyce movement—and I myself am not anti-Joycean!—but the lack of honesty and reality-based awareness on the part of many Joyceans must be noted. And they should each, on a personal level, deal with these failings as best they can, with as much courage as they are capable of mustering. As the case stands, it seems that many cling to Joyce's supposed "perfection" because it seems a justification and validation of their own scholarship in an era when literary criticism (and even literature itself) seems less and less relevant.

As Joyceanism serves as the literary studies group par excellence, it is only fitting that we find the most overblown statements of literary value centered on Joyce. Without ever quite putting the case in such stark terms, Joycean scholarship insinuates that Joyce himself functions as a savior of some sort. There is no doubt that Joyce serves as the personal savior for many Joyceans; whether they will admit it or not, their idol-worship is quite obvious—and, in my opinion, sort of cute and, in and of itself, innocuous. The problem arises when they project their own private images of Joyce onto the larger culture and venture to apply their idiosyncratic mentality onto matters that relate to the rest of humanity. There is even the suggestion, alluded to in more Joycean articles than can be listed, that Joyce's encyclopedic texts in some sense "redeem" Western culture. As the West experiences a growing number of "crises" with every forthcoming year, it is hard not to smirk and ask the high priests of Joyceanism to please, please, go ahead already and redeem it all for us, if you can do so in any way that isn't hallucinatory. And while you're at it, do rebuild Dublin circa 1904, since for 90 years now you've been telling us that Ulysses could do that as well, in a way that wasn't quite insignificant. (I hasten to add that I personally have no nostalgic fondness for the West or for the Dublin of bygone days. The diagnosis of the current general decline interests me far more than any quaint, alleged greatness of the past.)

According to Emily Dickinson, words only begin to live when they are communicated. According to Nietzsche, however, we can only find words for ideas that are already dead in our hearts. Luckily for the two of them, their imaginative and useful conceptions of language did not have to endure the presence of contemporary academic writing, which is neither alive nor dead but rather a sort of zombified screed. Had Dickinson and Nietzsche encountered such a prosaic abomination, it may have been too much for them; the overwhelming affront might have caused them to give up even trying to express anything at all to anyone. For it is a great indignity to know that you live in a society in which many literati aspire to such an inhuman, decadent writing style that amounts to a sort of refined uselessness. In my estimation, this mode of communication should be considered more or less deathly and inert—especially when it attempts to express anything to do with art, humanity, or the humanities—and yet it does still stumble around awkwardly, moan much like a zombie would, and seek to convert everything around it to its own fairly uniform way of speaking, writing and behaving. Academese is a dead thing that thinks it's alive. Until the final death rattle sounds, it will demand as much attention, funding, and quite unwarranted respect as it can extort from the living.

Thus, knowing full well that academic prose tends to suck the life out of every creative thing it comes in contact with, I actually brought Joycean scholarship to bear on Glen Kealey in order to kill my interest in the latter. It seems to have worked: I have no interest in listening to another Kealeyan podcast or following his or any of his true believers' online posts. My Kealey study was an all-too-engrossing, all-too-amusing episode that I experienced and am now done with. From an investigative and evaluative perspective, there does remain much more scholarship that could be pursued. For instance, the Kealeyan podcasts in which Kealey himself is absent could be analyzed in their own right. In these audios the true believers and some skeptics chat and debate amongst themselves, sometimes for nine or ten hours straight, mulling over weird word magic and trying to apply it to reality. But all of that fascinating material must await another outside thinker, a braver, more patient scholar. It would not be a thankless task: I've no doubt that a brilliant doctorial thesis or highly original book could be written on the group psychology dynamics of the Kealeyans.

There is much more I could write here about cult-like dynamics and how they may apply to those souls who enter the humanities, of which the Joyceans are but an illustrative microcosm. Indeed, I have excised a large section here from this long afterward's (even longer) first draft. The topic is a huge one, but I think it might prove worthwhile if a careful, honest scholar had the time and space to investigate these matters fully. In brief, my hypothesis is that a student entering the humanities is like a new cult member in that both individuals are, in a sense, too sensitive for their own good. They feel the need to seek out genuine humanness and acceptance that they cannot find in the general society, which is increasingly technological, artificial, anti-human and thus anti-humanities. In neither case, however, is real human contact, or even satiating humanistic representation, ever found. On the one hand, the cult is but a pathological copy of a truly humanistic group. On the other hand, much of the real human content in the humanities is inevitably nullified by the necessarily bureaucratic organizational structures.

As an agnostic, it is with a touch of irony that my final charge against the more cult-like Joyceans is that their failings seem most essentially a religious disorder: an ultimate lack of faith in the Saint they would deify. At root, their behavior indicates that they do not believe Joyce's aesthetic could survive a confrontation with the true reality outside of their rooms and books. With just one caveat, I believe they are absolutely correct in their suspicions: _In the sheltered, neurotic, fussy yet megalomanical form in which they know it_ , Joyce's aesthetic certainly cannot survive contact with much of anything from the outside world that literary academia has not first sterilized and disenfranchised. (In fact, even placing an item for comparison within a field known as _Joyce_ _studies_ in some sense, by definition, forces that item into an inferior position in relation to Joyce. To some degree, these problems arise from the very existence of this all-too-well-defined subgenre of literary criticism.) But if Joyceans would only renounce their idol's claims to Godhood, instead of following and helping him on his mad, selfish quest, then they would find that high literary aesthetics—when reasonably interpreted, guided, and applied—really _can_ withstand a far greater reality than those who dwell in classrooms, offices, and conference halls might even be able to imagine.

Dissent sometimes needs to come in the form of a very commonsensical, very obvious proof if it is to inspire fresh thinking within an established body that has trained itself to get in its own way. This is what the case of Glen Kealey should provide to committed Joyceans. Here is the closest thing to their supposed savior returning, and yet they have thus far denied him. They have thus far failed to give him much of a glance, lest they recognize something all too familiar in him. The problem lies within their inflated views of Joyce: if they were not so uncritically worshipful of Joyce, they would have an easier time understanding Kealey for what he is and for the use he may provide them. At the same time, they would begin to recognize how literature and the strange, imaginative goings-on of real, contemporary life may coexist.

Unlike the belief suggested by many professors' self-imposed limitations and clannish behavior, I believe that literature, life, and reality really can coexist, even in the twenty-first century. Whether literary criticism and what has come to be known as the humanities can also continue to exist very much longer in their current state, however, is an unanswered question. Perhaps they will need to "get real" before too many more decades pass. Perhaps literary studies will need to learn how to accommodate reality, lest reality cease to accommodate literary studies. This afterward and the essay that preceded it were inspired—not by exponentially abstract texts or immaterial arguments—but by as much life and reality as I could possibly fit into a bit of contemporary criticism, given the current circumstances.

I am very fallible and do not have all the answers. If Joyceans disagree with the spirit of my words, they should look again at the objective facts and anecdotes that I have detailed: these things are all true, and they suggest great, inarguable failings on the part of some Joyceans. How did these problems and shortcomings of theirs arise? How do they propose that these embarrassing things might be corrected or avoided in the future?

I admit my own faults and wish others would do likewise. I hope only to have offered something helpful, interesting, and perhaps—eventually—even worthy of further investigation by literary scholars less hapless than myself. Though I am not fishing for sympathy, I must note that this has all required courage (or stupidity) on more than one front. Nevertheless, I deemed the production worthwhile if only for the small chance that it has to inspire some sort of positive, unique change. At the very least, perhaps all this has amused you, whoever you are.

In closing, I can't resist paraphrasing and repurposing something Joyce wrote to a publisher upon the rejection of Dubliners, because it is the truth:

I seriously believe that, in not learning about Kealey, Joyceans are retarding their discipline. If they would like Joyce studies to increase in relevance, health, and sanity, some in their ranks need only do one simple thing. They must find the bravery and honesty to take a good look at the cult-like pawns, the well-intentioned hirelings, the true believers in the literary conspiracy theories of Saint Joyce, whose faces now appear, thanks to Kealey's fine example, in my only slightly warped mirror.

•

### NOTES

Relevant Kealey TalkShoe archives

Kealey in conversation:

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=29721

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=37354

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=41583

Kealeyans chatting amongst themselves:

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=25180

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=76496

Relevant Yahoo! Groups

(Search for "Kealey")

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ctrl

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dracodebates

Blog providing Kealey's current transmissions

http://antinewworldorder.blogspot.com

[] Glen Kealey, post on Draco Debates Yahoo! group, <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dracodebates/message/6642>. Much of this message remains a mystery to me, even after listening to many hours of Kealey's talks. I do know that Kealey usually casts "GE" to refer not so much to the General Electric Company but to genetic engineering. When you "REDEEM" your "Chips" at a casino you are indeed "Cashing-In": Kealey plays with the meaning of redeemer this way in several audios. Elsewhere Kealey has broken down "LEMUR" into "le mur": "the wall" in French. "Wall" backwards is "law", and Kealey has used this metaphor to describe the legal system as a sort of barrier. "[T]o-get-her" is obviously together, with an allusion to the hypothetical war on the Clan Mothers (and by extension all non-genetically modified females), to whom Kealey often alludes. The "money pulley" allies with Kealey's notion of the "EU-rope", the "repo" device that can rein in or let lose each and every national economy. "SESAME SEESAW" probably refers to the transfer of power and technology back and forth between hemispheres; "SESAME" can be rendered into the French ses amis ("its friends"—"it" being the hypothetical master computer of Kealey's mythology), and SESAME becomes SEESAW by rearranging the letters and flipping over the M to make a W. (There's also probably an intended allusion here to the Holy See, and to the "seas" between continents. The phrase could also reference how we perhaps "see the same that we once saw", no matter how many big changes are made.) "To be or not to be" is obviously from Hamlet, and somehow the question of living or dying seems connected with the "mortgage" (which contains mort, "death") mentioned a few lines above. 1776 and 1867 are the respective birthdays of the United States and Canada, but I'm not sure what is meant by the span between those years. The kealey.net website is no longer available.

[Note: Just before digital publication in Spring 2012 I noticed that Kealey's wordsculptor.com website has been discontinued as well. Many of the pages have been saved on various Internet archiving sites, however, and the Yahoo! Groups will bring up the bulk of his thousands of daily postings made between from early 2003 to early 2011. Kealey currently posts messages only via: <http://antinewworldorder.blogspot.com>.]

[] Samuel Beckett, "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce," in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 13.

[] Glen Kealey, Talk Shoe podcast, January 15, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-440330.mp3>.

[] Clyde H. Farnsworth, "Kickback Scandal Is Rocking Canada," New York Times, July 25, 1991, <http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/25/world/kickback-scandal-is-rocking-canada.html> (accessed November 2, 2011).

[] Campbell Morrison, "Key Leaders Face Changes in 'Canada's Watergate,'" Buffalo News, July 21, 1991. Snapshot blurbs of this and other relevant articles are viewable by searching for "Glen Kealey" in the paper's online archive (http://www.buffalonews.com/newslibrary).

[] Many news articles easily accessible via Google tell snapshots of the saga (just search for "Glen Kealey kickback scandal"). In the early 1990s the New York Times and Buffalo News in particular published several articles documenting the affair. Kealey himself also recounts and alludes to aspects of his trying time between the mid-'80s and the mid-'90s in almost all of his downloadable conversations.

[] Glen Kealey, "Sculptor," <http://www.wordsculptor.net/content/Glen/index_bio.html> (accessed November 2, 2011).

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, November 20, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-29721/TS-295170.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, November 22, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-295879.mp3>.

[] James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), 14. Further citations to pages of this work will be indicated by parenthetical citations in the text.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 22, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-442796.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, "Sculptor," <http://www.wordsculptor.net/content/Glen/index_bio.html> (accessed November 1, 2011).

[] Robert Driscoll, Introduction in New World Order Corruption in Canada (Toronto: Saigon Press, 1994, online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/51943125/New-World-Order-Corruption-in-Canada-Robert-Driscoll-Introduction-Only), 30, italics mine.

[] This system of composition, in which the manipulation of tiny linguistic elements seems to form larger themes in a very organic way, is similar to the operation of the traditional oral singer, as described by Milman Parry: "His major theme can be made up only of minor themes, his minor, only of lesser, and his lesser, only of the verses and phrases which he has heard from other singers" (The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 450). I have found that Joyce—regarding his interests in orality, in mythologies, and in representing the ruling cultural items of his day in literature—is especially reminiscent of the bards and singers who worked in oral traditions.

[] Though Kealey did not coin it, languaging is a favorite term of his.

[] I have not read all of Kealey's thousands of online posts, nor have I read every page of his awkwardly arranged websites. I have listened to most—but not all—of the approximately 100 podcast audio interviews.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 24, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-228938.mp3>.

[] For instance: "As soon as I mention any person in it I hear of his or her death or departure or misfortune and each successive episode, dealing with some province of artistic culture leaves behind it a burnt up field" (LI 129). For similar comments and a discussion of them, see Atherton, Books at the Wake, 14-15.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, March 21, 2008, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198342.mp3>. A version of ths same interview, with clearer audio, can be found at: <http://www.archive.org/details/Mfginterviewglenkealey3.21.08partialBoost>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, March 14, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-203174.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, February 15, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198515.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 22, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249787.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, February 15, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198515.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 11, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-246851.mp3>.

[] For an example of this font, see http://www.fonts101.com/previews/611/Desdemona_font_preview_11440_2.png (accessed November 11, 2011).

[] Glen Kealey, "Reply to bRAnDOn 2," Silence is Betrayal (blog), September 10, 2011, <http://antinewworldorder.blogspot.com/2011/09/brandon-i-hope-that-you-are-not-reading.html>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 24, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-228938.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, "world_is_the_stage," http://www.wordsculptor.net/content/Desdemona/world_is_the_stage/world_is_the_stage.html (accessed November 12, 2011).

[] Though he makes much of the word Jerusalem, and though he is paranoid about international banking and the media, Kealey is not an antisemetic conspiracy theorist. He denounces the notion of elite Jews being behind the world's problems, calling it "terribly wrong" (see http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-83957/TS-401070.mp3). According to his personal mythology, Jews have been unfairly blamed because the Neanderthalers like to use them as scapegoats. In several podcasts Kealey breaks down the word Jewish to mean "I [in French, je] wish", as in "I wish I was as powerful as they think I am" or "I wish my lot in life was different."

[] Glen Kealey, image, http://www.wordsculptor.net/content/Desdemona/sm_desdemona_letters_vertical/j.gif (accessed November 11, 2011).

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 31, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198367.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, April 5, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-211143.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 2, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-220043.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 15, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249581.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 21, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249776.mp3>.

[] Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of "Finnegans Wake" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 261. Further citations to pages of this work will be indicated by parenthetical citations in the text.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 1, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198355.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 11, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-246851.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, April 18, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-220049.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 13, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249489.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 20, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-228909.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 10, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198357.mp3>.

[] See Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 10, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198357.mp3> as well as a TalkShoe podcast of March 15, 2009 (http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-83957/TS-401070.mp3).

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, February 28, 2010, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-328757.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 2, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-220043.mp3>.

[] Aldous Huxley, "Aldous Huxley interviewed: part 1," YouTube video, posted by "bernardocantu77" on June 6, 2011, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oInatjbMkw4>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, October 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-37354/TS-283067.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, March 21, 2008, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198342.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 22, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-442796.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, February 12, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-452073.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, December 26, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-29721/TS-306611.mp3>.

[] Photograph of raft outside Glen Kealey's farm, http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YiJHquY40x8/TdDrac-xIoI/AAAAAAAAB68/we0X3LbPJLo/s1600/raft.JPG (accessed November 11, 2011).

[] See Lady Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men (London: John Murray, 1913), 435-6.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 22, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-442796.mp3>.

[] See these archives of Kealey's posts: <http://kealeyne.ipower.com/content/Archives/2006_08_21_archive.php> and <http://membres.multimania.fr/thesculptor/public_html/2003_12_01_archive.html>. One of Kealey's true believers makes the fairy-Neanderthaler connection on his blog as well: <http://antinewworldorder.blogspot.com/2011/02/bev-odas-little-coprolite-green-man.html>. (All three webpages accessed on November 11, 2011.) Leprechauns are mentioned in this TalkShoe podcast from February 19, 2011: <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-454785.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, February 3, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198630.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 11, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-246851.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 8, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-437153.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 8, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-437153.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, "Marriage is Media Fabricated Contracted Prostitution," YouTube video, posted by "gwap360" on November 29, 2011, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ByiNxlrGOQ>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 18, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249751.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 11, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-246851.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 11, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-246851.mp3>.

[] See http://www.wordsculptor.net/content/Archives/2007_02_05_archive.php (accessed November 11, 2011).

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, April 30, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-29721/TS-483683.mp3>. The "ogre" reading of REGO is given in a June 11, 2009 TalkShoe podcast (http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-246851.mp3).

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 8, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-437153.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, March 21, 2008, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198342.mp3>.

[] Glasheen notes this connection especially on FW +561.24-5.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 20, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-228909.mp3>. Though Kealey never mentions it, I imagine the "chrome" super-slave bag ladies to be inspired by the female robot in the movie Metropolis.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, October 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-283067.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, November 22, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-295879.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, December 9, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-301641.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 22, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249787.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, December 9, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-301641.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 11, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-246851.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 20, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-228909.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 15, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249581.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 22, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249787.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, March 28, 2010, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-29721/TS-340812.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, November 20, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-29721/TS-295170.mp3>.

[] The H.C.E. Project was halted due to opposition from the Joyce Estate. The same findings would have also gone into Rose's government-supported "MaMaLuJo Project", which the Estate also halted by means of copyright.

[] Danis Rose & John O'Hanlon, Understanding "Finnegans Wake": A Guide to the Narrative of James Joyce's Masterpiece (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), 333.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, April 12, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-83957/TS-401083.mp3>.

[] See the following webpages: <http://www.wordsculptor.net/content/Archives/2003_10_01_archive.php>,

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dracodebates/message/4058>,

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dracodebates/message/1798>,

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dracodebates/message/1589>,

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dracodebates/message/5432>,

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dracodebates/message/1157> (all accessed November 11, 2011).

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 13, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249489.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, February 12, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-452073.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, December 26, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-29721/TS-306611.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, March 14, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-203174.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 22, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249787.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, January 10, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198357.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 15, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249581.mp3>. Also see a TalkShoe podcast of June 22, 2009: <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249787.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 24, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-228938.mp3>.

[] Jerd Guillaume-Sam, TalkShoe podcast, Feb 28, 2010, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-328757.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, April 5, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-211143.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 28, 2011, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-29721/TS-494499.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, December 13, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-303010.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, post on Draco Debates Yahoo! group, <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dracodebates/message/5724>.

[] See Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, May 20, 2009, http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-228909.mp3 and also TalkShoe podcasts from March 22, 2009 (http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-205805.mp3) and October 25, 2009 (http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-284711.mp3).

[] Eugene Jolas, Man from Babel (New Haven: Yale, 1998), 166.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, March 7, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-200649.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, December 9, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-301641.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, "The Glen Kealey Sandwich Theory," YouTube video, audio from a TalkShoe conversation, posted by "MemeScythe" on December 16, 2009, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsYeo3KQiJY>. Francis Bacon is not mentioned in this exact clip, but Kealey does bring up him during various podcast discussions of these same matters.

[] Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), 178.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, November 20, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-29721/TS-295170.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, post on Draco Debates Yahoo! group, <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dracodebates/message/4074>.

[] Jerd Guillaume-Sam, TalkShoe podcast, December 19, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-305303.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, March 21, 2008, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-198342.mp3>.

[] Glen Kealey, TalkShoe podcast, June 21, 2009, <http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-41583/TS-249776.mp3>.

[] James Sauceda, "'His Silvery Incantation': Assessing James Joyce as a Performer of His Works," Text and Performance Quarterly 11, no. 2 (April 1991), 98.

[] Richard Brown, "Joyce's Englishman: 'That Het'rogeneous Thing' from Stephen's Blake and Dowland to Defoe's 'True-Born Englishman'," Joyce, Ireland, Britain, eds. Andrew Gibson & Len Platt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 40.

[] John A. Snyder, "Confessions of a Wakefiend: Bibliomantic Readings in Finnegans Wake," James Joyce Quarterly 41, no. 3 (Spring 2004), 519.

[] Ibid. My italics.

[] Leo Bersani, "Against Ulysses." James Joyce's Ulysses: A Casebook, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 220.

•

•

###  About the Author:

Don Lashomb was born in upstate New York on December 26, 1981. He holds a PhD in English & Related Literatures from the University of York (UK) and is the author of several other works, including Analog Austerity, the Complete Stories poetry cycle, Kafka the Joker & Letter to a Friend, and Akrasia.

donalashomb.wordpress.com (now)

www.donalashomb.com (soon)

