VII/3 Based on the opening utterance of the Canto, the semi-gibberish cackled by Plutus, this verbal palimpsest refers forwardS in two ways; to further on in the Inferno where the same configurations of nonsense letters represent the incomprehensible sounds made by Nimrod (Babel's builder, King of Gibberish) in Canto XXXI/1, and to our own time when James Joyce acknowledged this passage as a high licence for his own experiments in language. The centre of the picture features a fragment from a TLS review which testifies to this. The stencilled text in turn plays with Plutus' words in the manner of Duchamp's patron, Walter Arensberg, whose Cryptography of Dante is a bewildering farrago of false wordtrails pursued with earnest lunacy. Thus we have gibberish begotten by gibberish overlaying a kind of primal gibberish with the studious Joyce at the eye of it all. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.