Goines On: Outside of a dog

Click image for more vignettes

While tidying his office, Goines spotted the bag Mrs. Goines was given a few years earlier at Shakespeare and Company in Paris to carry a book she had purchased there. The bag‘s front side quoted Groucho Marx:

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

    But Goines couldn’t help smiling at the whimsy that James Joyce might actually have penned the joke in a lighter moment during the writing of Finnegans Wake.
    Goines consulted his very well-read Montmartre friend about the possibility, but the friend didn’t think so:

I always thought that Groucho made that sage observation. But if I ever encounter someone who has read Finnegans Wake, I will not fail to pose the question.

    Goines had once attempted to be such a reader, and this new incentive might be just what he needed to try again. But he had started reading Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in the interim, and he really felt he should finish reading that before trying again to read Finnegans Wake.
    Anyway, if and when he finished reading Remembrance of Things Past, he was pretty sure he still had his copy of Finnegans Wake.

Copyright © 2023 by Moristotle