Samuel Beckett

i just saw Happy Days with Fiona Shaw. it was really moving. i read Endgame in HS but didn't get it then. also will be seeing Endgame with John Turturro later in the season, which should be great.

Funnily enough I've got an exam on Waiting for Godot and Endgame tomorrow. You don't half get tied up in knots trying to analyse this stuff. I admire Godot but Endgame's more involving. Just when I think I have the point I read a line that comes out of nowhere and completely disproves it - but then that's probably the point itself.

i'm excited to revisit it -- i remember it being really interesting to have my professor break it down. now i'll probably be able to do a bit more of that myself.

g'luck on the test

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/60/Quantum_Leap.jpg

I had to read Malloy, Malone Dies, and the Unnamable during one of my last semesters in school. It was very cool of the prof to assign these, because they were really amazing, but I doubt I would have made it through as pleasure reading.

I discovered shortly thereafter that there is an audiobook of The Unnamable. I hope they paid the reader handsomely.

I love Endgame. Haven't read (or seen) Godot since High School.

I hardly ever see any theater, but I loved the Fiona Shaw Happy Days so much I saw it four times. Well, OK, I do live up the street from where it was playing, but it cost more than I could easily afford and yet I felt it was well worth it.

haha Kingfish.

I still have not read or seen any Beckett, much to my shame.

Deborah Warner (who directed that Happy Days) is probably my favorite director in the world, so I would love to see that Happy Days. (I saw her production of Footfalls in 1994 that the Beckett estate closed after a week.)

Last week I saw Peter Brook's Fragments, which is five short Beckett plays using three actors from Theatre de Complicite. Some of it was very good clowning, and some of it was great great drama.

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/764/covernfu.jpg

just reread molloy, which remains one of my favorites of all time. (not sure if that says good things about me but whatever.)

we need more beckett discussion here.

company was boring, when i was in school i used to take the complete dramatic works out of the library all the time, Murphy is one of my favourites, I have never read Watt but I have read extracts and it sounds hilarious/bleak/awesome/weierd which is the stando beckett state of being

i can feel the rings

i just finished Watt last week--first Beckett I'd gotten through except Molloy. the book gets taken over by this circular logic where every possibility of an event is jotted down. exhausting but fun.

Murphy is hilarious, everytime he explains a character's motives for doing something you just wanna go "how the fuck is that supposed to work?"

i couldn't finish Murphy, got about halfway through. took me the longest time to figure out what the fuck was going on in the opening scene

is that where the guy upstairs dies and he steals his room i can't really remember

that's later, i think. the opening scene, he's like tied to a chair

oh yeah lol everybody is insane in that book

the chick who's in love w. him later is a hoot

of the plays my favourites are come and go, not I and Play. I like the one-act high concept stuff like a lot

i still like endgame the best. molloy, malone dies & the endless have all kind of blurred together for me w/nothing really standing out but the potency of his frustration.

kinda skimmed endgame, the basic premise isnt something im so into i can prolly recide the first two pages of not i right off tho

lol

i havent read the one-act stuff or a lot of the short fiction and feel like i shld i occasionally claim hes one of my fave writers but i rarely read him. dude is p unique in his ability to portray despair buuuuuut thats a hard thing to pysch myself up to reading

shld see into which if any of his dramatic works are being put on that i cld get tickets 2

same with the short fiction, also the buster keaton thing is a fucking chore but if you haven't seen it its on ubuweb

http://www.ubu.com/film/beckett_film.html

i dont really care abt how he conveys anything really i just love the way his sentences kind of abstractly encircle each other, and the demented rhythms and tongue-twisters in esp. Not I which is so full of great lines, also you can watch it on ubuweb too and it is the billie whitelaw(it was written for her) vers

http://www.ubu.com/film/beckett_not.html

out, into this world, this world, tiny little thing...

Beckett never liked Mercier and Camier but its great - never trust a writer's judgement on his own work!

i just finished Watt last week--first Beckett I'd gotten through except Molloy. the book gets taken over by this circular logic where every possibility of an event is jotted down. exhausting but fun.

Found the logic stuff a drag after a while, but the whole research trip & natural mathematician section is a blast. Somewhere on a what r u reading thread there's also admiring chat about the contiguous-gardens Sam-and-Watt section. Those little blasts of unbuckling or loosening kill me with Beckett - he's got an a1 sense of beauty & landscape, can realise that v precisely & knows how to hold it back.

"Dante and the Lobster" is an all-time classic of Dublin masochism and weird Christianity

endgame is my favorite as well, wrote a pretty significant paper on it in lol college

http://twitter.com/molloy51

loooool omg love the five day gap between tweets

I just started Watt and have laughed aloud three times ("Halting, he looked at the seat with greater care").

Murphy has one of my favorite opening sentences: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Have saved up my moneys and splurged on this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0802145140.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Looking forward to having those craggy features looming at me from the bookshelves

watt's a fave of mine

i don't know, watt?

the beginning of murphy is great. count the number of restraints and the given number.

Murphy has one of my favorite opening sentences: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

murphy is really great, took me a while to get into it but loving it now.

But nothing beats the trilogy.

Murphy does.

http://filmbysamuelbeckett.com/

Saw Stirrings Still being read to on piano at Cafe Oto last night. Liked John Tilbury's voice a lot (even when he let out a cry of...agony I suppose). Introduces pauses and semi-pauses to the text in a way that gave even more of a narrative-like quality. I've really no idea how I'd read it, looking at it now.

I have my ups-and-downs with Beckett so I found myself really interested in him again.

I forgot about this!

his poetry got crapped on in the NYT Book Review last Sunday

... by his (para-)countryman Paul Muldoon, no less

can't say I disagree with Muldoon tho, as I've never gotten much out of SB's poetry (I own vol. 3 & 4 of the Grove Centenary edition, one of which shoehorns a hundred or so pages of Poetry in with the Short Prose)

er, make that 50 pages (just googled the table of contents). either way, it was more than I needed

the letters ('57-65) volume sounds amusing though. Did not know Krapp was written for Patrick Magee.

Sad day for Beckett aficionados like me. Billie Whitelaw died at 82 and Jane Bown, who took this iconic photo of him, also passed away at 89.

http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-700/h--/q-95/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2009/10/14/1255538257206/Samuel-Beckett-by-Jane-Bo-001.jpg

"Whoroscope" has a couple of muffled zingers.

While reading Dierdre Bair's bio, I also read his earliest novels (would have read the very first play as well, but it was still unpublished, cos he was still alive and kicking, being helpful to Bair, whom he'd picked). Really enjoyed them: he def. sounded like himself, but with an unmistakably youthful, exploratory vibrancy (though he'd prob hate that last word tough shit). Also, I re-read some things I'd always liked, and suddenly felt like I really got them.

breaking character:

http://www.matacandelas.com/img/Samuel-Beckett-2.jpg

Beckett didn't pick Bair to write his bio, it was unauthorized. The authorized bio by James Knowlson came later.

She described querying him, and they developed a correspondenc; he told her "check with this guy, re-read this," etc, and gradually got more personally responsive. I should acknowledge that Bair's bio was written in the 70s, the revised trade edition I read was published in 1990, maybe a year after his death. Knowlson'sDamned To Fame is official and supposedly comprehensive, but I've always been put off by the title, and anyway need to read the rest of the novels.

She said he ended up being a lot more helpful than she (or several who knew him) thought possible, so in that sense, he picked her, while ignoring, brushing off or being much more guarded with many others (not that they were pals).

I covet his teeth.

Samuel Beckett is designed to carry remotely operated submersibles and a decompression chamber for divers.

What would be on an Irish navy highlights reel?

so there is a docu feature on the making of Film

http://www.filmlinc.org/films/notfilm/

(that's 130 mins long)

^and it has a week's run in nyc beginning tomorrow

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/ross-lipmans-doc-notfilm-actually-enriches-samuel-becketts-only-film-work-8450766

One time free showing in DC of Notfilm and Film at the National Gallery of Art on April 24th

http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/calendar/film-programs/spring16/notfilm.html

The doc is a must-see if you are into Beckett, Keaton or Film in particular, and has what must be among the final interviews of Billie Whitelaw and Barney Rosset. It may be too long, and the narration slides into pomposity often.

Most of the archival 'scoops' covered here:

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/making-film-behind-the-scenes-with-samuel-beckett/

Ugh I hope this comes to SIFF

saw the new digital edition of Film too, which i found quite haunting and effective if not precisely as envisioned by Schneider Beckett et al.

https://i.imgur.com/rp7s3xd.jpg

Iconic.

Would anyone be up to simultaneously watch Beckett on Film with me and discuss it? We could do one a week or something. Think that could be cool.

i would love to! i grabbed them all off of shady torrents a few years ago but only watched the first few (i had a similar watching project going with a friend but it fizzled out quickly)

Yeah same for me! I've only watched a couple, years ago. What Where is the only one I probably watched ten times? But I'd love to do something like this - not unlike the Pharoah Sanders thread I suppose - and tackle one of these every week or so. Lets get some more people in, we'll start a thread!

*pre-bookmarks*

I saw a couple too, but I don't think there's any way I could get my hands on all of them now.

(also, most of them were not well-reviewed?)

No problem, I'll hook you up via wetransfer or whatever

Hmmm, yes, didn't really like the ones I saw tbh. (xp)

Is ilx still fussy about ysi/wetransfer links? (if noone can obtain the videos it's a pointless exercise)

KM: how's about I start a thread, see if more people are up for it besides us and the Dr., and take it from there?

i'm in and already have them. good idea.

sure!

Yes, Jed!

Done with work in an hour, will start the thread then

I am alone. In the present as were I still. It is winter. Time passes. Make sense who may. I switch off.

Came across this really nice interview/discussion of his work:

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/samuel-beckett/

"our Irish brother"

If you do one thing today, watch this clip of Cornel West on CNNpic.twitter.com/QarHhvj0J5

— ex-twink persister🍥#blacklivesmatter (@twinkpersister) May 30, 2020

omg that is not an inspirational quote

I don't think he is treating it like that

The full quote: 'that's the blues line from our Irish brother'.

Strange how the interviewer didn't know of it.

It had to be *that* quote. I guess

So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim. Utmost dim. Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst.

doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

For real, though, that clip is awesome. I know Cornel West already has a fair amount of clout, but I still feel like he's way underrated.

Amazing clip and speech.

From André the Giant's wiki page.

While growing up in the 1950s, the Irish playwright and Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, Samuel Beckett was one of several adults who sometimes drove local children to school, including André and his siblings.[24] The Irishman and Bulgarian-descended French boy had a surprising common ground, their love of cricket, with André recalling that the two rarely talked about anything else.[25]

Beckett's sometimes called 'The only Nobel Prize winner to play First-Class cricket' (in the cricket-sphere, at least).

This is a nice story: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/aug/21/samuel-beckett-sportsman

On 'Waiting for Godot' being a cricket metaphor: https://www.cricketcountry.com/articles/samuel-beckett-the-only-nobel-prize-winning-author-to-play-first-class-cricket-25173

He loved Golf:

https://www.bookforum.com/print/1805/the-second-volume-of-beckett-s-letters-finds-the-author-refining-his-severe-style-8889

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856CfM64w8

Waiting for Godot (to hole out)
Malone Drives
The Unplayable

... etc.

Fore again. Fore better.

You must golf on. I can't golf on. I'll golf on.

Reading a biography and didn’t know he was such a jock as a young man.

The only Nobel Prize in Literature laureate to have an entry in Wisden Cricketer's Almanac, as I believe the trivia runs?

We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.

I just watched Pinter's Krapp's Last Tape. Happy Sunday.