Holden Caulfield's Elephant

Oh my, it's going hard. I'm on the fourth chapter of the Wake and while it's not too bad, I'm not making sufficent time that I can sit down and concentrate on it. Instead I read three pages or so on the bus, and then forget where I stopped and just start it over again. And so on. By this hour I tend to give in to the temptation of reading another chapter of Very Good Jeeves instead. While the Wake is a lifelong neverending project, P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories are all short, digestable, and immediately gratifying. I'd like to write more about it, but I'd like to read another chapter right now more. Nevertheless, expect a post on the topic later, particularly drawing some connections between the Wake's language and that of good ol' Bertie Wooster, and Hugh Laurie's portrayal of Bertie as the ideal reader of the Wake.

For the time being, as I'm still blogging about the first chapter of the Wake, allow me to offer for your delight a complete list of HCE acrostics for chapter one, including some but not all stretches:

Howth Castle and Environs
Hod, cement, and edifices
Haroun Childeric Eggeberth
Hic cubat edilis
How Copenhagen ended
Happinest childher everwere
Hush! Caution! Echoland!
How charmingly exquisite!
Heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire’s
Hither, craching eastuards, they are in surgence: hence, cool at ebb, they requiesce
…when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth
A hatch, a celt, an earshare
Hark, the corne entreats!
Homerigh, castle, and earthenhouse
And honey is the holiest thing ever was, hive, comb, and earwax
Have peformed upon thee, though abramanation, who comest ever
He cursed and recursed and was everseen
Humme the Cheapner, Esc,
Our old offender was humile, commune, and ensectuous
He who will be ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough