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Distress, distress
Anyone who knew Sam well knew that his generosity did not stem from a deprived childhood for which he was trying to compensate; on the contrary, his early years had been happy, fortunate. He would even...
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Not Touched By The World
My unique relation with my work – and it is a tenuous one – is the making relation. I am with it a little in the dark and fumbling of making, as long as that lasts, then no more. I have no light to...
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Ricks on How to Read Beckett
So that although it makes sense to read Beckett, as many do, as a writer who is oddly criss-crossed, a writer who manages to be excruciatingly funny despite his possessing a deeply dispiriting...
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Christopher Ricks’s Beckett’s Dying Words
There is enormous expressive force in Christopher Ricks’s Beckett’s Dying Words; Ricks shares what Beckett fulfils for him. With a no-doubt decrepit OED by his side he analyses Beckett’s word choice....
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Beckett’s Search for a Form
‘Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them.’ Occasionally Pascale Casanova overreaches to support the supremely elegant argument of Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary...
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A Raid on the Inarticulate
There are insufficient words. Is that what I mean to say? Words are insufficient. Language is insufficient. How can language express emotion? I make a declaratory statement, “I love you” or “I hate...
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Music is Feeling
Clerkly Peter Quince, inept playwright of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is (loosely) the narrator of Wallace Steven’s early poem Peter Quince at the Clavier. I enjoy the poem for its “music is feeling,...
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2:00am Thoughts: Lacan, Beckett and Acker
There are rules to Insomnia. The second rule of Insomnia is: You don’t talk about Insomnia. I made that up, but there are psychological games insomniacs play, superstitions that go with the disorder....
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Beckett’s Secret
Samuel Beckett, Paris, 1964 Coetzee on Beckett (1992): Beckett has meant a great deal to me in my own writing – that must be obvious. He is a clear influence on my prose. [...] The essays I wrote on...
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The Highest Laugh
Officer and Laughing Girl (1657) – Johannes Vermeer Laughter evolved not for its health benefits but because of its impact on others, and therefore positive benefits should most reliably occur within...
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Remembering Heraclitus: Convergences
Some notes from starting to read Richard Geldard’s Remembering Heraclitus, which picks up on some of the converging themes in my recent reading (Hadot, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Aurobindo, Beckett,...
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December: Extended Reading Notes
Reading wildly all over the place, but with those converging lines I’ve written about providing more direction to my reading than I prefer to concede. To end my reading for 2013, a few thoughts on...
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An Idiotically Decorated Box
Both intrigued and undecided by Carole Maso’s Ava. A fragmentary novel, which impels with the force of allusion and cadence of the sentences. As with Markson’s fragmentary novels, I am not certain that...
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Nine Perfect “Products”
Fuji X100 camera The Cure’s Boy’s Don’t Cry album Beckett’s “trilogy” of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable Tony Scott’s film True Romance Dr. Marten 10-Eye steel toe-cap boots (Cherry Red)...
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Beckett’s Cascando and Pierre Tal-Coat
Samuel Beckett Cascando 1 why not merely the despaired of occasion of wordshed is it not better abort than be barren the hours after you are gone are so leaden they will always start dragging too soon...
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One Too Many Eyes
Coming across Clément Rosset’s work is akin to discovering a close new friend in adulthood; Rosset is an ally to add to that small list of thinkers, philosophers, writers (call them what you will) that...
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Pale Notes on Friendship
Agamben: “Friendship is inscribed in the most intimate experience, the one that is most one’s own, the very sensation that one exists. But this also means that in the consent and consensus of...
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Form Becomes the Preoccupation
Anthony Uhlmann quoted Beckett in Samuel Beckett in Context on language as a barrier to communication, and why, as a consequence ‘form itself becomes a preoccupation,’ so it was good to track down the...
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Comradeship and Silence
Words exist but the pump to bring those words from the bottom of the well to the surface is malfunctioning. Buried in the sand at the bottom of the well is a torrent of words, but if by chance the pump...
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To Speak and Yet Say Nothing
These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not be...
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