Belgium Day here - which means most things are closed but not (thankfully) the pool.
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La Meteo: clammy & wet. Armpit weather.
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Insanely, a day spent tidying.
I go through a cupboard and dust off so many blank notebooks it leaves me feeling a) embarrassed, b) utterly worthless, c) ridiculously profligate.
Question: who - in their right mind - would buy so many?
Answer: an Eternal Optimist.
The Tantalizing Promise of Writing.
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This said, the sheer process of sorting through old files - that's actual card & plastic ones - unearthing aborted projects, scraps of paper with forgotten scribbles, notebooks with the first few pages filled, lists of To Dos ... is oddly therapeutic. Stirring things up from the silt of years gone by. The same principle as composting, I suppose.
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My black cat/is in the living room
with a motorbike
I seed it
I sawed it
apple bleeding
(When, where... why ... did I write this?)
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Tomorrow we're back to what passes for 'normal' in this house.
So, no more excuses.
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Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
4 comments:
You have my sympathy. I always find it rather dispiriting. The worst thing is plastic folders so old that they stick together and have to be peeled apart to reveal -- a project you laboured over, abandoned, forgot about. And yellowing scrapbooks never fail to make one feel rather old. Still, they say Beckett threw nothing away, tossing it all into a big trunk . . .
Interesting about Beckett. I suppose one could glibly say that everything he did was abandoned in one way or another.
For many years - roughly '79 until '88 - he was my key literary figure & yardstick (no small measure due to two inspirational teachers at school & university - Richard Jacobs & Val Cunningham). The first phase of my aborted thesis was even based on Ill Seen Ill Said.
Looking back, I sense that this wasn't the best choice - at least, the most enabling. I'd probably have been a lot happier & well-balanced chancing upon Frank O'Hara at an earlier age.
I really should go back into Beckett's work - I loved Murphy, Watt, & Molloy in particular* - and read some of the many biogs that have come out since the Deidre Bair one years ago. There are his letters, too, I think.
On Monday evening I was in Tropismes - the very chic (one might even say too precious for its own good) French language bookshop here in Bxls. Above the counter was a photograph of a laughing Samuel Beckett. I'd never seen such an image of the man - only those dour looking ones. It really threw me.
(space here for your favourite Beckett anecodote)
Cheers
the C.
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* for me Beckett is a novelist, then a dramatist, then a poet. However, I've read an interview with Brian Catling where he rates Beckett's poems very highly. What's the Walrus line on this?
Hello again,
I'm surprised it was Ill Seen Ill Said -- how does that relate to Zuleika Dobson?
I too admire Beckett, though I have to say I haven't read any recently.
He's underrated as a poet -- I wonder if that has anything to do with Calder publishing the poetry, rather than Faber...
I like 'Sanies I', 'Echo's Bones', 'Saint-Lo', 'Roundelay', 'Song', 'Dieppe', and the last half of Six Poemes 1947-9. I'd like to see a good translation of the Mirlitonnades too.
There is so much to admire in Beckett's oeuvre generally -- the trilogy (esp. Molloy), almost every play -- but each work is so distinctly Beckettian I'm not sure they offer a way forward for anyone else (Joyce is the same, perhaps) . . .
A friend of mine did a PhD on Beckett and typically ended up despising him slightly -- and he is convinced that Beckett wrote the way he did because he couldn't write any other way -- i.e., he lacked the talent and application to write a conventional novel, so wrote anti-novels -- perhaps the same could be said for the anti-plays and even the anti-poems . . .
But there are plenty of other people out there writing conventional works -- and even if my friend is correct, Beckett was only doing what the best writers always do: making a virtue of his limitations . . .
W
The connection between Ill Seen & ZD? Um ... what happens when your brain is pulling in different directions (art ... literature ... theory...?), your heart breaking apart (sob), you've worked for a year and enjoyed Real Money and now your grant is diminishing & loads of other miserable stuff I don't want to go into anymore.
The joke was that I had hit upon what I thought was a world-shattering new reading of Beerbohm - i.e. as magic realist. The Oxford of ZD is (I would argue) deliberately fragmented & reimagined. Furthermore, Beerbohm's text was a haunted text of writings blah blah blah. Add my first reading of Derrida's The Post Card and you can see why it all went to my head.
Little did I know (i.e. I was too stupid to do a search through current publications) but Robert Viscusi (one-time amour of Bernadette Meyer it seems!) had just published his book on Max - working a similar line and even a chapter about the 'Boy Jones' who used to break into Buckingham Palace.
Kind of creepy.
Anyway, I'd lost heart with the whole academic scene - the joy of reading and talking about books had become narrowed into thesis-envy and protectionism. I started life drawing to get back in touch with making marks on paper.
Looking back, I would have been better off flying to America and doing an MFA or such like. Get taught by Creeley or other exciting types. Yes, America just does it better, it seems.
I think you hit the nail on the head - Beckett's work is pretty much self-sealed. Not someone it's very helpful to emulate. In the U.K. I used to teach Beckett a lot - these days he tends more to be mentioned in passing. It saddens me that my colleagues in the Fr. Dept. seem to be hammering the Godot=God line and unrelieved pessimism. I'd argue for Beckett being a great Comic writer and the whole Laurel & Hardy/Buster K. lineage.
As for using one's limitations - I think that's precisely what I'm doing in the current series of texts. Somewhere I read that much the same was said about Miles Davis - he couldn't do the kind of trumpet fireworks of a Dizzy Gillespie and so went for the fragmented phrase, the chiselled utterance.
But how did you know about Zuleika? Did I mention this before - or do you have strange powers of Walrus divination?
I'm tempted to put up the new crop but am fearful that it will break the spell. You understand, I hope.
Cheers
The C.
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