July 26, 1995 [edited March 24, 2025]
Here are some brief background notes about the story. As should be clear, it was an attempt to imitate Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The title is taken from the name of King Crimson's second album, and the headings are the names of the songs of that album. I wrote the story in one day, probably just a few hours, and it was done entirely stream-of-conciousness. Although a lot of it makes sense, particularly if you understand the obscure references, some sections were deliberate nonsense, words being chosen mainly for musical effect. This is probably the closest I've gotten so far [as of 1995] to writing literature as pure music.
A few changes were made in the electronic version. The introduction (which was rather lame) and table of contents (just a list of the song titles) were left out. The original was written with an electric typewriter with normal and italic-like fonts. It's impossible to capture some of the typographic features of the original. For example, the story was written using one side of each page, and all of "side two" of the story was written on the "back" of each page (as they were stapled together). The "nonono..." part near the end went off the page with the last o cut in half. The heading "side one" at the beginning was originally typed sideways in the margin, although I think that's just because I forgot to put it in originally. Finally, the last all-caps WILL was originally in lower case and underlined.
Using the PRE format of html I've been able to otherwise print the story more or less as it originally looked--thankfully PRE lets you still do italics and even keeps them uniformly spaced. I've broken lines exactly as they were in the original, and left gaps of several lines to indicate where the page breaks were in the original.
The story was written at the end of my senior year of high school and is essentially a summary of those four years. It helps to know a little (very little) French, and (the same advice I heard about reading Finnegans Wake) if you can't understand something, try pronouncing it out loud. Indeed, I learned more about Finnegans Wake by writing an imitation of it than I could have by merely reading it.