Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, dayholes

In my January 25 post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge," instead of using a common expression like "full circle," I instead appropriated a famous line from Finnegans Wake and wrote of how something "brings us by a commodious [sic] vicus of recirculation back to the chameleon." For those of my readers who have never attempted this self-described "usylessly unreadable" book, here is its iconic first "sentence," James Joyce's answer to "Call me Ishmael":

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

The recentness of this random allusion on my part made me sit up and take notice when yesterday's post by William Wright, "Key-Stones and the Hill-Murray Pioneer," happened to mention how he and his wife had taken "the River Run Gondola" at a ski resort.

In the same post, William mentions Kubla Khan (referencing one of my own posts). When I looked up the first sentence in Finnegans Wake so I could paste it into this post above, I got it from this site, where mousing over the word riverrun causes a lengthy note to pop up, which includes this:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea."

Actually, William made a mistake and wrote "Kubla Kahn," which made me think of Alfie Kahn, a Jewish education theorist in whom my mother used to put a lot of stock. Looking him up just now, though, I found that I had made a mistake, too, as his name is actually Alfie Kohn. Anyway, Alfie is a link to Alph. Alph, by the way, is a bit of Elvish I know without having to look it up, remembering it from my childhood reading of Tolkien: It means "swan" and is derived from the root ALAK, meaning "rushing." Do swans rush? Maybe the incongruity is what made it memorable.

William Wright's post also mentions "White Holes" (opposite counterparts to black holes). This synched with dayhole, a word from my childhood which I had suddenly thought of a few days before. This was a word invented by my brother when we were kids. Since a bedside table was called a nightstand, he decided that the gap between a bed and a wall, if there is no furniture in it, should be called a nighthole. The space between a church pew and the wall was then dubbed a dayhole. If you happened to be sitting far from the aisle, you could get out of the chapel more quickly at the end of the service by "escaping through the dayhole." All this was brought back to mind a few days ago when I ran across a reference to one Chad Daybell, a fringe Mormon and accused murderer, dayhole being similar to his surname and also associated with Mormon churches. Later I found myself singing Harry Belafonte's famous calypso song, but with "Day-O" changed to "dayhole." Some of the lyrics tie in with the "banana spider" urban legend, which I mentioned in my December 19 post "RV and preparation."

A beautiful bunch of ripe banana

(Daylight come and me wan' go home)

Hide the deadly black tarantula

(Daylight come and me wan' go home)

On the road this morning, I had Finnegans Wake on my mind. I'm not sure why my train of thought went the way it did, but I ended up thinking about the name Mamalujo -- generally agreed to come from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John -- and wondering what the Old Testament equivalent would be. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers -- Geln? For the sake of euphony, we might need to throw in a few second letters, as Joyce did -- Gelen? Gelnu? Gelenu?

I had breakfast at an American-style diner in Taichung and stayed there for some time drinking coffee and reading. There was a TV on, showing some sportsball something-or-other, and a loudspeaker playing some extremely profane and sexually explicit rap, the sort of thing that would never fly as a background music in a family-friendly restaurant in the US but is fine in a place where most people don't know much English. I thought: These lyrics are like if Arnold had had leave the Demiurge's Reality Temple early, after replacing only 25% of the words in the English language with nigger.

In certain moods, though, I actually like having lots of background noise as I read.

Since I had just been thinking about "riverrun past Eve and Adam's," the rap on the loudspeaker got my attention when it mentioned those two names:

Adam, Eve with the fruit

Why we need new new?

Only got two seats, why we need new coupe?

Only got two feet, why we need new shoes?

Papa need new shoes, baby need new shoes, Imma need new shoes . . .

At this point, I glanced up at the TV and saw a commercial for, appropriately enough, shoes. Shoes called GEL-NIMBUS:

The reason the "new shoes" rap had gotten my attention was that it mentioned Adam and Eve, like the opening of Finnegans Wake. Earlier, on the road, I had been thinking about how to make a Mamajulo-like abbreviation out of Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers. Now here's a shoe called GEL followed by a word very similar to Numbers.

After breakfast, I looked through the small English section of a used bookstore in Taichung. One of the books they had was John Man's Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's Discovery of the East. A week earlier, on a visit to the same store, I had picked up a copy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, which consists largely of a fictional conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.