Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?

When talking about portmanteau and specifically, luggage, in class, the image that came up for me was my Grandmother's old traveling trunk. She had found it in a house in Iowa where we lived when I was little. It was so much larger than anything she would ever need she sold it at a garage sale for something like $30. In hindsight it was probably work $300 or more. It was one of those old-time steamer trunks. Like this:

I also remember this type of trunk from one of the Harry Potter movies, one of the professors had a trunk like this and when he waved his wand, all the objects jumped into place and the trunk snapped shut.

While this is the image I have, it seems that the more prevalent design of portmanteau luggage is something smaller, like a small carry-on or purse. Something like this:

The image is from a auction house/preservation society specializing in handbags.

Brown Cylindrical Leather bag in portmanteau style with double briefcase handles.The subtle shading around the edges and decorative strapping accentuate the contours. The black faille interior is divided down the center by a metal zip pocket and open pocket combination built into the fabric side gussets.The side gussets are solidly riveted into the body of the bag. Slight oxidation of the metal frame but otherwise this handsome bag is flawless. It once carried a makers label but all that remains is a suggestion of adhesive. Measures 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 x 5 1/2”.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

Notable Notes on Nooteboom -

The Following Story is overflowing with quotable lines. I found it an interesting read and highlighted some of my favorite passages below.

• CAro DAta VERmibus - Cadaver - flesh given to worms. (p. 41)

Latin scholars joke. I wonder how often those who know Latin giggle at the things people say for just this reason. When my sister and I were in high school we use to curse at each other in foreign languages so our parents wouldn't catch on. Mine were always dirty and nasty in Spanish, hers were Latin and typically more clever.

• Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say. (p. 51)

• Love is in the one who loves, not in the one who is loved. (p. 51)

• Memory of lust is the most elusive of all, once lust becomes just an idea it becomes its own contradiction: absent, gone, and hence unthinkable. (p. 53)

• Sometimes there was just the unending night, and then the days would flit by like nervous moments across the horizon, pausing only long enough to paint the ocean twice over in all shades of red and then to restore it to the dark. (p. 67)

• I had a thousand lives and I took only one. (p. 70)

Of all the choices you can make in your life that have led you where you are, one of thousands of choices could have been made in a different way and you would be someplace completely different.

• It was, I had thought at the time, my last chance of experiencing real life, whatever that might mean. A sense of belonging--together, to the world, that sort of thing. (p. 75)

I have belonged to a few groups all of which were and are important in my life, Robertson/Knutson/Oscarson families, GHS, Rockford Crew, Lockwood Park, Rockford Park District, ISU/Willow Lommen, GVLT, MSU, OIP and Kingston Uni. More to come I'm sure!!

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any (wo)man in the face.

I must have driven past this street a hundred times on my way to school but I only just noticed it last week.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

I found myself "in" FW today. Page 619...

P.S. Soldier Rollo's sweetheart. And she's about fetted up now with nonsery reams. And rigs out in regal rooms with the ritzies. Rags! Worns out. But she's still her deckhuman amber too.

In searching for a possible meaning to this phrase, I found the following.

James Joyce on Finnegans Wake...

While looking for a clever title for another blog, I found a very interesting quote by James Joyce about FW. I had to giggle when I read it.

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

I can only imagine his delight that more than 70 years later, we are doing just that.

It's raining cats and dogs!

Prof Sexson asked us the other day to look up the origins of this phrase. I looked it up and found several different opinions but this seems to be the most agreed upon origin.

This is an interesting phrase in that, although there's no definitive origin, there is a likely derivation. Before we get to that, let's get some of the fanciful proposed derivations out of the way.

The phrase isn't related to the well-known antipathy between dogs and cats, which is exemplified in the phrase 'fight like cat and dog'. Nor is the phrase in any sense literal, i.e. it doesn't record an incident where cats and dogs fell from the sky. Small creatures, of the size of frogs or fish, do occasionally get carried skywards in freak weather. Impromptu involuntary flight must also happen to dogs or cats from time to time, but there's no record of groups of them being scooped up in that way and causing this phrase to be coined. Not that we need to study English meteorological records for that - it's plainly implausible.

The much more probable source of 'raining cats and dogs' is the prosaic fact that, in the filthy streets of 17th/18th century England, heavy rain would occasionally carry along dead animals and other debris. The animals didn't fall from the sky, but the sight of dead cats and dogs floating by in storms could well have caused the coining of this colourful phrase. Jonathan Swift described such an event in his satirical poem 'A Description of a City Shower', first published in the 1710 collection of the Tatlermagazine. The poem was a denunciation of contemporary London society and its meaning has been much debated. While the poem is metaphorical and doesn't describe a specific flood, it seems that, in describing water-borne animal corpses, Swift was referring to an occurrence that his readers would have been well familiar with:

Now in contiguous Drops the Flood comes down,
Threat'ning with Deluge this devoted Town.
...
Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all Hues and Odours seem to tell
What Street they sail'd from, by their Sight and Smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force,
From Smithfield or St. Pulchre's shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join'd at Snow-Hill Ridge,
Fall from the Conduit, prone to Holbourn-Bridge.
Sweeping from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.

We do know that the phrase was in use in a modified form in 1653, when Richard Brome's comedy The City Wit or The Woman Wears the Breeches referred to stormy weather with the line:

"It shall raine... Dogs and Polecats".

Polecats aren't cats as such but the jump between them in linguistic rather than veterinary terms isn't large and it seems clear that Broome's version was essentially the same phrase. The first appearance of the currently used version is in Jonathan Swift’sA Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation in 1738:

"I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs".

The fact that Swift had alluded to the streets flowing with dead cats and dogs some years earlier and now used 'rain cats and dogs' explicitly is good evidence that poor sanitation was the source of the phrase as we now use it.

A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

My paragraph from Finnegans Wake is from p. 336. I found it randomly but liked it instantly.

We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with the hen in the storyaboot we start from scratch.

So the truce, the old truce and nattonbuff the truce, boys. Drouth is stronger than faction. Slant. Shinshin. Shinshin.

One thing that I've found helpful in trying to read Finnegans Wake is reading not only aloud, as has been suggested and demonstrated, but reading it in accent. Having been to Ireland I hear an Irish brogue when I read FW. The language of this book is very phonetic, in my head anyway. Sometimes I hear a Parisian accent, or a New England accent. Sometimes when I read I even hear ebonics. Obviously, ebonics was not a language Joyce intended to use, but it's what my ear hears in certain phrases. I find that keeping my mind open, as well as my ears, is the best way to navigate this book.

Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late?

While I do have a bible in my bedroom, it's not as easily accessible as those hotel bibles. What I have in my bedroom is a multitude of books. One whole wall is covered in several hundred books, the largest section being the travel section (yes, my personal library is sectioned), next largest being the art history section at it's heart my prized copy of The (Official) Complete Works of the Uffizi Gallery.

A quick survey of the rest of my room includes my small desk, who's main purpose is as a drop zone for anything else that doesn't have a home, my printer and associated paraphernalia, dresser, the latest knitting/sewing project in a box, a pile of as yet unread magazines on my nightstand which is next to my fabulous, wonderful, amazing, life-changing, Sleep Number bed (I'm a 60 by the way). Just above one of my bookshelves hangs the last, best picture of my Dad and everyday I say good morning and good night so I don't forget.

A typical morning starts with me fumbling in the dark to find the glowing ring of my cell phone alarm that has been left across the room the prior night to ensure that I physically get out of bed. Some mornings I can do it with my eyes still shut. Once it is silenced, my bedside clock radio is typically the next (or first) visual as I try to figure the real time from it's 12-17 minutes ahead and decide if I have another 8 or 12 minutes to snooze. What I see when I finally do open my eyes is the glow from the power button on my speakers that I forgot to turn off... again. Although dim, the green light casts a glow on the white ceiling that reminds me of the time I saw the aurora borealis dance across the sky.

Awake or not, the next thing I usually encounter is a big, wet, furry, brown nose belonging to the 100 lb. chocolate lab Duke. There's no ignoring his palm sized tongue licking your face at 6:30 am so I get up and start my day.

Awake at A Wake

Since the beginning of our discussions around the term "wake", one of my favorite movies kept streaming through my head. The Shipping News, starring Kevin Spacey (among others), is set in a small Newfoundland village. The movie has a fantastic scene at a wake of a local fisherman who had "died" at sea. Once I heard the lyrics from Tim Finnegan's Wake I knew I had to post this scene from the movie. I hope you can play it okay.

In the beginning...

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. - Oscar Wilde

Every man's memory is his private literature. - Aldous Huxley