Closing time

This is just a small paperback without an index, but there might have been a hardcover in 1973, when the author, a Professor of Humanities, was sixty years old. What I have is the first Vintage Books edition, September 1974. According to the Contents, the book has five parts. The best for me was: III. An Interlude of Farce (pp. 39-63). Page 45 quotes FINNEGANS WAKE and a songwriter who is now over 60: His farced epistol. [FW, 228] Subsequently the name for the interludes of impromptu buffoonery which the actors in the religious dramas were accustomed to interpolate in their text. Bob Dylan: There must be some way out of here Said the joker to the priest. The Preface balances four lines from FINNEGANS WAKE with five lines from Vico's NEW SCIENCE. What a mnice old mness it all mnakes! [FW, 19]