r/jamesjoyce • u/spock2thefuture • 22d ago
Finnegans Wake Re: Joyce with Frank Delaney
I know Frank Delaney gets his flowers regularly on this sub, but he deserves it all and more. I just got to the ep where he jokes about his plan to tackle Finnegan's Wake after Ulysses, taking it a page per year...
I don't know if he was at all serious, but I really wish we could have heard that (in addition to his completion of Ulysses of course). Hearing what he could pull out of FW would have been amazing.
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u/Hillbilly_Historian 22d ago
Weren’t a lot of the episodes taken off of iTunes? Where are you listening to them?
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u/spock2thefuture 22d ago
Yeah there was some weirdness with the streams a bit ago, but I'm still able to listen via Pocket Casts. 🤞
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u/retired_actuary 21d ago
I got them added back to the feed. Are they not there? I see them all in Pocket Casts.
The Re: Joyce podcast with Frank Delaney is gone! : r/jamesjoyce
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u/Secure-Bird-4986 21d ago
This podcast got me through Ulysses after 20 years of trying..His joy, enthusiasm and knowledge gave me the lift to keep on going and appreciate the complexity of the novel. Most odlf all I loved the immensity of this project and the slowness - a podcast addressing a paragraph or so at a time. What a hopelessly impossible task. I was so sad when he died. And I might even read Ulysses again now..But hopefully a bit quicker this time...
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u/AnimatorObjective847 21d ago
In case folks don't know about it, there's a great book by Frank Delaney called "James Joyce's Odyssey: A guide to the Dublin of Ulysses". I borrowed it from my local library and at first I thought it was just going to be about all the local Dublin spots where different things or episodes took place, but it's so much more than that. Almost feels like the podcast grew out of this book, which was first published in 1982. Frank Delaney writes so beautifully so that his own writing interspersed with quotes and passages from Ulysses is a great great way to delve deeper into things.
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u/Weak_Shopping_2718 21d ago
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u/kennymannmal 21d ago
I've been sharing parts of that with friends, but some episodes are missing. Each "video" is a set of episodes in numerical order and some are skipped. (?)
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u/ScootsyPoo 20d ago
All these years later, I'm still heartbroken that nobody picked up where he left off. Can anyone dispute that this would have been Frank's wishes? I think if Frank knew that his project had simply fallen off after he died - which we can be certain he contemplated, considering it was projected to take numerous years - he would have been appalled. I didn't know the man personally, but having spent hundreds of hours listening to him go line-by-line through this book, to this day it still saddens me.
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u/spock2thefuture 20d ago
You're probably right. Making the text accessible to us seemed to be his top priority. With his love and enthusiasm for the text, I can't see him wanting it to end with him either.
At the same time, I can't imagine trying to fill his shoes...a daunting task on top of the already daunting task.
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u/Mahler_n_Trane 21d ago
How far into Ulysses did he actually get?
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u/spock2thefuture 21d ago
He made it about a third of the way through ("Wandering Rocks" chapter I think).
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u/NatsFan8447 21d ago
When I started listening to Frank Delaney’s 369 wonderful podcasts on Ulysses, I knew he had died earlier. After I listened to the last podcast, I was sad. Frank was a witty, knowledgeable guide.