I can't channel this wretched knot of paranoid energy I have today into composition, so let me just share this unrelated(actually, now I really wonder about that) quote from a footnote in Martin Amis's memoir, Experience:
"It has been said that there are only two types of Irish male: the hard man, and the desperate chancer. In life, Joyce was a desperate chancer. But in his work he was a hard man. Tell a dream, lose a reader, said Henry James. And we all know that the pun is the lowest form of wit. Joyce spent seventeen years punning on dreams. The result, Finnegan's Wake, reads like a 600-page crossword clue. But it took a hard man to write it."
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