The Ondt and the Gracehoper

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I've just realized something. Hang with me a minute guys, it's /lit/.

A well-known area of the text of Finnegans Wake is the whole business about "The Ondt and the Gracehoper". This section is identified by name in the table of contents, and the important bit is on (Penguin's) 414: a one-hundred letter thunderword is given (husstenhasten) and the above phrase is invoked. "Esaup" clues us in that it's to do with Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper, but now the latter is a Christian wish, or something.

Just stay with me a minute.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (pic related) is now a famous early computer scientist, who is known for having /made the first compilers/ and for literally, /literally/ de-bugging early computers by picking a moth out of the guts, which is popularly where the phrases "bug/debug" come from. An ant is itself a sort of bug, and both Joyce and Hopper demonstrate themselves to be modern masters of language...

My only point is to point out this connection, and also to suggest that Joyce anticipates modern technology in a very happy way, in this case. In this, I am simply echoing McLuhan, who uses Joyce's thunders in "War and Peace in the Global Village", which despite being aware of, I have not actually read. It may happen that McLuhan mentions what I've just brought up, but if so, I was unaware of it at the time of writing the above. McLuhan instead compares "thunder 9" to "car and plane", and uses Finnegans Wake to describe technology.