Lots of letters & many whiches December 12, 2008
Posted by Olivia McDowell in Art, Design, FFFFOUND!, Helvetica, Pretty!, The Ether, Typography.Tags: deviantART, Finnegans Wake, Helvetica, James Joyce, SwissMiss, Train of Thought, Typography
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An anomalous mass of assorted letters can look nice even when it doesn’t spell anything in particular. Just ask anyone who’s read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake *.
{ Able Parris via FFFFOUND! }
… which reminds me of:
{ ‘Death by Typography’: GCore on DeviantART }
…which reminds me of:
{Brigiet vd Berg via swissmiss }, a chunk of Dutch Helvetica lead type which, when inverted, reads verbatim: “een thuis – een thuis weet ik nog, dat is onder je grond en ruimte boven je en daar dan zijn en weten waarom”, which, when translated, says: ‘”a home – a home I still remember, it’s ground beneath you and space above and being there and knowing why”. Which is sweet, and wistful, and rather Finnegans Wake-ish, actually.
* [Wikipedia may categorise Finnegans Wake as 'Language: English', but that's a pretty generous classification if you ask me].
RELATED: That reminds me…
Blogs of fun in your wake! So, what should you call the language, if less generously? Joycean? (Nowp.) Wakese? (Trivial.) Eurish? (Plagiarised).
Definitely Joycean. If only because it’s the product of his singular mind. You can almost see the thought processes when he slips into French/Latin/Irish/Gobbledegook.
Not quite definitely so. I can’t call it Joycean as there are other Joyce’s works that are not given in the same language.