The ‘Information: Good-Bye’ Way

The following two-and-a-half-minute chestnut took my Performa-600 Macintosh desktop computer approximately 90 minutes to download back in 1995, and the poor thing was nearly as hot as a car radiator when the download was complete. It was worth it, though:

The passage being recited is from page 65 of Finnegans Wake, and the man performing it is one Albert Wiggins, at least according to the website I downloaded the file from: http://www.sonarchy.org/archives/wiggins.html.

Click the above link and you’ll immediately see why that audio-file was worth downloading and my soon-to-be-obsolete computer was worth overheating. Like so many others, the site is gone, and I don’t think it’s ever returning. A shame, for it was a true anomaly: just a single page with a banal sentence, something like “Albert Wiggins recites a passage from Finnegans Wake” – no date, no description of where the recitation took place or even who this Wiggins fellow was. Just a link to the audio-file, the sentence, and a cartoon caricature of Joyce wearing a wife-beater and a creepy leering facial expression were all it contained. It may wind up being the internet’s sole evidence that Albert Wiggins ever existed – I’ve been unable to find out any more about him. (If you’re reading this and knew/know him, please do drop me a line.)

So many Joyce websites that I used to frequent are gone now that I’ve gotten into the habit of taking precautions. For one thing, I copied the data from fweet.org onto my word processor – it’s just too precious to risk losing. If you think that might have been a bit paranoid of me, just consider the other websites we’ve lost from the 1990s…

The James Joyce Database

Reginald Webber’s simple (hence truly useful) e-text archive of Joyce’s published works is a truly lamentable loss. Webber had his archive set up in such a way that you could type in a word or phrase and all occurrences of that word or phrase would be listed – whether they occurred in Portrait, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegan, Exiles, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, the poems, or the critical writings. Webber announced in 2001 that he was planning to add the published letters to the archive, and less than a year later the site was taken down – presumably over copyright issues. The only thing I retrieved from it was a solitary e-text.

The Ulysses Hypermedia Project

Michael Groden’s spectacular vision for what the web could become died in the incubator – again because of copyright. Ulysses Hypermedia was going to be a one-stop annotation/genetics/e-text/edition-variora website for all readers of Ulysses, from beginners to veterans alike. Hardly any point in weeping for what never was, but still…

The Brazen Head (see addendum below)

The crash of Allen Ruch’s truly beautiful website on all things Joyce is a loss which I only just recently found out about and truly could not believe; it was the impetus for this blog entry in fact. No description I can give would do this site justice – it had image galleries, book summaries, newsflashes, links and references to everything you could hope to find on the web and elsewhere. The photo gallery alone was enough to make this my go-to website, and now that I think about it, its green and white color scheme was without question the model I used for JoyceGeek. As a stand-alone website The Brazen Head was unrivaled in terms of design and content, and believe it or not, it was only one of a whole network of pages Allen had created under the rubric The Modern Word, which served as homepage for sites dedicated to at least a dozen 20th century authors, including Samuel Beckett, Jorge Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez – all without exception gone down the “error 404” rabbit-hole.

The loss of this family of sites was so shocking that I actually contacted Allen as well as Tim Conley (his assistant on the Joyce and Beckett pages), who had both long since moved onto other projects but I never imagined would let the site decay. Allen told me that The Modern Word and all of its content had been hacked and that his CMS people were working to get it back up, so there is hope, I suppose. I have to say however that these six long and lonely weeks have me worried that we’ll never see it again.

Here’s hoping I’m wrong. I put those dead links into this blog-post for a reason; keep clicking them and maybe one will reappear some day.

So until then, we move ahead. I’ll do what I can to make this site as useful as possible, starting with something I lifted from Bill Cadbury’s and the late Donald Theall’s now defunct Finnegans Web Line Reference page. Cadbury and Theall had taken about fifteen books on Finnegans Wake and created a small database whereby you could travel from a passage in the Wake to where a scholar – say James Atherton, John Bishop, John Gordon, Roland McHugh, Margot Norris, etc – had made reference to that passage and in some cases had thoroughly explicated it. This web-page was so useful to my Wake studies that I finally just downloaded its content onto my own word processor. I had found most of the books in their list using bookfinder.com (still around, thank God), and with its help my Wake library grew. I added line references with each new book I received, editing for redundancies and misprints, and by the time I was ready to move onto other projects, “Finnegans Workbook” (as I had come to call it) had grown into an absolute behemoth – it is now about fifty times its original size. So for the sake of keeping it alive (and yes, the following link actually does work)…

HERE IT IS.

Enjoy.

You might want to create a backup, though…

…just in case…

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Addendum – February 13, 2015:

All hail the great Quail: The Brazen Head and all of its sister sites on The Modern Word are debugged and back in working order! Click the image below to go there, but be prepared to blow through a few hours just clicking around:

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Addendum – March 3, 2015:

…AND… it’s down again. Damn damn damn. This poor website is clearly in need of some kind of major overhaul therapy. Well, at least I got a snapshot of it.

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Addendum – March 19, 2015

Alright – it looks like The Modern Word might be up again. The Brazen Head link seems to still be broken (at least that’s how my 2014 Macbook Pro reads it), but I found something of a back-road to its content. Here’s a link to D.B. Weiss’s Trinity College dissertation on the Wake:

http://themodernword.com/joyce/joyce_paper_netwake1.html

You should be able to access most if not all of the Brazen Head content from there. Any of the sub-pages would have worked, but what with all the Game of Thrones brujaja, I figured that a link directly to the Weiss article would be fun. Thanks goes out to William K. Bohan for the heads up on the Weiss link, and enjoy.

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Addendum – November 14, 2015

How very depressing – the entire Modern Word site is almost certainly gone forever – including the Weiss dissertation. It crashed four-or-so months ago, and I sent another email to Allen Ruch. He never responded.

The lesson here – digital archives are every bit as susceptible to destruction as the Library at Alexandria.

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Addendum – November 26, 2018

Apparently Mr. Peabody is real, and the Brazen Head isn’t lost forever after all:

Follow this link.

Big thanks to “Shan” (see his post in comments below) for his link to the Wayback Machine and bringing it to this cyber-novice’s attention.

It really is an information super-highway, folks – you just have to dig for it.

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Addendum – October 12, 2022

All good things come to those who wait. Allen has been working off and on for the past several years to reinvigorate his website, and at long last, The Brazen Head (along with some of its sister sites) is back under a fresh new banner:

The Shipwreck Library: Joyce

As Allen’s comment below reminds, the site is still under construction, but already you can find a whole cache of new material: reviews, guest essays, and spanking new blogposts by Allen Ruch himself. Enough stuff to keep you occupied for a week if you let it, so what are you waiting for? Fresh material will be appearing on JoyceGeek soon enough, so in the meantime, don’t be afraid to get shipwrecked – the island Allen’s been building has plenty to nourish you.