Cryptogrammic Cryptogams: Fungi in Finnegans Wake
http://www.fungimag.com/winter-2011-articles/UndergroundLR.pdf
Cage’s Roaratorio, for example, might serve as the audiobook of Finnegans Wake, and his Mushroom Book
begins straight off by juxtaposing a recipe for Polyporus frondosus with the voices of Joyce’s ten thunderclaps, a reference to the ten “thunder words” of Finnegans Wake that intimates a folkloristic theory of the origin of fungi (thunder causes the fruiting of mushrooms) found in Robert Gordon Wasson.
oranges have been laid to rust upon the green (3.23) a reference to plant diseases caused by parasitic fungi of the order Uredinales: rusts that destroy cereal grasses, conifers, and ferns.
rot a peck of pa’s malt (3.12). Rotting and fermentation, two economically important processes associated with fungi, appear together in this, the third sentence of the Wake.
Cage’s Roaratorio, for example, might serve as the audiobook of Finnegans Wake, and his Mushroom Book
begins straight off by juxtaposing a recipe for Polyporus frondosus with the voices of Joyce’s ten thunderclaps, a reference to the ten “thunder words” of Finnegans Wake that intimates a folkloristic theory of the origin of fungi (thunder causes the fruiting of mushrooms) found in Robert Gordon Wasson.
oranges have been laid to rust upon the green (3.23) a reference to plant diseases caused by parasitic fungi of the order Uredinales: rusts that destroy cereal grasses, conifers, and ferns.
rot a peck of pa’s malt (3.12). Rotting and fermentation, two economically important processes associated with fungi, appear together in this, the third sentence of the Wake.
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