Robert M. Adams on Finnegans Wake
in The New York Times
on Sunday, January 18, 1987:
"There is a great passage in the 'Wake' where Joyce — if he was not
just a phantasm in the mind of HCE — appears to address his reader
directly, jocularly and sympathetically:
'You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says:
It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out:
Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest
notions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly!'
For there's a bird in the case, and if we follow her hen scratches,
we may be able to 'pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of
auld hensyne.' That's what keeps the 'Wake' fellowship awake at night . . . ."
Not to mention "skreaking and skrittering" —