The three things a film needs, Jean Luc Godard said, are a girl, a gun, and a car.
The three things a song needs, Tom Waits, are a car, a place name, and a sandwich. Or something like that.
The three things a good book needs are...? Suggestions please.
I propose:
1) Touaregs with guitars.
2) An industrial estate.
3) A chinchilla.
'Goat fronting', that's what the pronunciation of the letter o in these parts is called. As in (does the sound) 'I don't know'.
A man from round here was up in court for having sex with a goat. He was spotted from a train by someone who rang the police. He denied all charges, but fibres of goat were found in his underpants.
More a case of goat-rearing than goat-fronting, to be pedantic, depending on how many ecstatic O's he gave vent to during the incident.
There is no animal-themed linguistic name for the other distinctive local vowel pronunciation, of the long i sound. As in the exchanging of palm-slaps while listening to a stereo in an apartment block: ah fahves to the ah-fah in the ah-rahse.
Except there is now because I've just invented one. Stoat-worrying. That's what it's called.
I was in the local pet superstore yesterday and noticed they had this big sock thing in the guinea pig enclosure. A guinea pig would go in one end, and a minute or two of rummaging around later would emerge at the other end. Sometimes a group would go in together and emerge in nothing like the order they went in. It reminded me of a particle accelator. Just think of the hell on guinea pig earth inside there, the gamma rays and sodomised electrons bombarding their poor little bodies tossed this way and that. And all in the name of so-called 'science'.
Not many people know this, but Paul Robeson once went through a profound hypochondriac stage. He stayed in his hotel room with cold compresses on his head drinking Lemsip all day. His manservant felt very left out. Then one day he got in the lift only to find himself standing opposite American Nazi Party founder George Rockwell. He lunged at him, planting his teeth in the loathsome racist's wrist, then got out at the next floor and ran to join his boss in bed for a Lemsip. 'What's all this then?' inquired Robeson. 'I'm just like you', explained his manservant, 'a valet chewed an Aryan.'
You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first beneath
The sheets of paper lies the truth
I have to go, I have to go
Your hair was long when we first met
You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first
Regina Spektor, 'Samson'
Failure of eighty-thousand blazer-wearing southside Dubliners to tear English rugby team limb from limb during performance of God Save the Queen at Croke Park marks solution to all problems of Irish history, simultaneous end of Irish civilisation.
The going of the glade-boat
Is like water flowing;
Like water flowing
Through the green saw-grass,
Under the rainbows...
It was not far to the pub but the swing bridge was out. It was a damp night. I stood by the railings and watched the spar of the low-lying barge pass by and the wipers on the car on the far side wag at me, tut tut. There was a smell of plastic and hops in the air. On New Cleveland Street I had crossed a bridge over nothing. Where maybe once a river and now nothing and the nothing filled in. The barge passed, the bridge swung back into place and I crossed. On the next bridge up is a house, a signal box once where the coast railway ran and now nothing. The barge chugged on and vanished.
I've always liked Alexander Payne's films, and am glad to see his I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is out this summer, but when I watch Sideways always feel the one scene in it that jars on me (where the Virginia Madsen character, Maya, starts holding forth on her philosophy of wine) is the key to a common misreading of the film's ending. If she is right for Miles (the film ends with him knocking on her apartment door) it is not just because he's ready for happiness again, but also because he has finally let go of his misplaced desire to be a writer. She is all right with his failure and confirms him in it, in other words, and far from being a happy ending it's a damning reminder of how what we class as happiness is usually just another word for failure.
(Said by Squadron Leader to Flight Officer Perkins):
“I want you to take up a crate, Perkins.”
“Sah!”
“Fly over to Jerry.”
“Sah!”
“Take a shufti.”
“Sah!”
“And don't come back.”
“Sah!”
“You are going to lay down your life, Perkins.”
“Sah!”
“We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.”
“Goodbye Sah! – Or is it au revoir?”
“No, Perkins.”
(...) But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
Beckett fact no. 84.
10 Beckett stages
1) The Peacock, Dublin. Junior relation to the Abbey and scene of Beckett’s performance, for two nights only, in Le Kid. ‘The Infanta might have cantered /like a shopwalker /through the Dämmerung /but she was not in training’, he helpfully explained in ‘The Possessed’, in reply to an unfavourable review.
2) The Abbey, Dublin. Murphy requests in his will that his ashes be flushed down an Abbey ‘necessary house’ ‘if possible during the performance of a piece, the whole to be executed without ceremony or show of grief.’
3) The Gate, Dublin. When Mary Manning (the Caleken Frica of Dream and More Pricks Than Kicks) asked for Beckett’s help with a production of her play Youth’s the Season, Beckett offered a character named Ego Smith whose philosophy of life might have interested Eleutheria’s Doctor Piouk: ‘My conception of the universe is a huge head with pus-exuding scabs – entirely revolting.’ When this failed to get past Edwards and MacLiammoir, Beckett proposed an offstage character who would spend the play noisily flushing a toilet. Not for the first time then, Beckett’s contribution to Irish theatre looked like going down the tubes. Mary Manning was the mother of American poets Fanny and Susan Howe, and brother of Beckett’s childhood friend John Manning, who accompanied Beckett on swims at the Forty Foot (as described in Company). Many years ago now I picked up John Manning’s copy of Endgame for a song in Greene’s Bookshop, Dublin, just opposite Beckett’s father’s offices, in whose garret Beckett had written More Pricks Than Kicks. Still on the Gate, early drafts of Krapp’s Last Tape indicate that he lives in North Great George’s Street, just round the corner from the Gate.
4) The Arènes de Lutèce. This Roman arena has yet to stage a Beckett performance, to the best of my knowledge, but is the subject of an early French poem in which Beckett describes a doppelganger-style experience. Gabriel de Montillet, mentioned in passing, was a geologist. On my most recent walk around the area I found a plaque to Jean Paulhan, who lived nearby.
le socle du savant Gabriel de Mortillet
5) The New Arts Theatre, London. Home, briefly, to the first London production of Godot, subject to the Ego Smith-like scatological preoccupations of the Lord Chamberpot/Chamberlain, one of whose petitioners complained that ‘One of the many themes running through the play is the desire of two old tramps continually to relieve themselves. Such a dramatisation of lavatory necessities is offensive and against all sense of British decency.’ The production transferred to the Criterion Theatre after 31 performances. You may remember Peter Bull, who played Pozzo, from such Stanley Kubrick movies as Dr Strangelove, in which he played Dmitri, the Soviet ambassador.
6) The Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami. Handy for palm trees, but less so for Beckett productions, to judge from Godot’s disastrous first American run there, featuring Bert Lahr (of Cowardly Lion fame) as Estragon, whose belief that he was ‘top banana’ (rather than radish) in the production led to constant attempts to upstage Vladimir.
7) Pike Theatre, Dublin. Site of the first Irish production of Godot in Ireland in 1955, with director Alan Simpson changing the play’s first line to ‘Nothing doing’, much to Beckett’s annoyance.
8) San Quentin. Site of a 1957 production of Godot which had a life-changing effect on future Beckett actor and collaborator Rick Cluchey. If Cluchey had gone to prison twelve years later he could have caught Johnny Cash’s famed San Quentin gig and been inspired to pursue a lifetime devotion to black pants and shooting men in Reno just to watch them die, instead.
9) The Youth Theatre, Sarajevo, scene of Susan Sontag’s 1993 production of Godot. Amazingly, Sontag decided to dispense with the play’s second act, for the equally amazing reason that ‘Perhaps I felt that the despair of Act I was enough for the Sarajevo audience, and that I wanted to spare them a second time when Godot does not arrive. Maybe I wanted to propose, subliminally, that Act II might be different.’ I remember a cartoon from the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje at the time, showing a man with a noose around his neck walking despairingly through a wood all of whose trees had been reduced to stumps. Which suggests Sontag may have underestimated her audience somewhat. One of the Bosnian Serb leaders on the hill, by the way, Nikola Kolevic, was a English Literature academic and Shakespeare specialist.
10) Outer Mongolia. One of the great things about Godot is that the frustration of endless waiting is a universal theme, one we can all relate to, blah blah blah… except that’s not quite true. Sarah Jane Scaife has directed the play in Outer Mongolia in 2002 to an audience of nomads (lots of guitar-playing Touaregs, I hope) whose reaction to a play about sitting around doing nothing all the time and waiting for something that never happens was… yes, so what? What are you getting at here? ‘Their cultural and spiritual influences were Buddhism, Confucianism and Shamanism. They had grown up as nomads and waiting was simply a part of life’s journey. They did not seem to get the master-slave relationship and did not understand the West’s preoccupation with angst and personal space. They were used to living closely together.’ What emerged from the production, rather, was a concentration on how sound, form and silence combine to create meaning.
As recent posts may have hinted, no one loved a good ethnic generalisation more than Emil Cioran. And, sometimes as a direct corollary, no one loved an auto-revisionist hand break turn more either. I've mentioned the Jewish and Hungarian examples before, but here's another.
Writing on Beckett in Exercises d’admiration, he claims:
Il est important et il n’est pas important du tout que Beckett soit Irlandais. Ce qui est sûrement faux, c’est de soutenir qu’il est le “type même de l’Anglo-Saxon”. Rien en tout cas ne saurait lui déplaire davantage. Est-ce le mauvais souvenir qu’il garde de son séjour d’avant-guerre à Londres? Je le soupçonne de taxer les Anglais de “vulgaires”.
In this morning’s post came, at last, my copy of the Gallimard Œuvres (dig that ligature), and in among various goodies I didn’t have before, such as Le livre des leurres and Le crépuscule des pensées was a glossaire, a Cioran A-Z, under which we find the following entry for Beckett, as reported in conversation with Gabriel Liiceanu in 1990:
Il était resté intégralement anglo-saxon, et cela me plaisait terriblement. Il ne fréquentait les cocktails, se sentait mal à l’aise en société, il n’avait pas de “conversation” comme on dit. Il n’aimait parler qu’en tête à tête, et il avait alors un charme extraordinaire.
Anglo-Saxon? To be fair he did lose his mind in his last years, to Dr Alzheimer's sempiternal penumbra, misdiagnosed Anglo-Saxondom being one of the telltale early warning signs.
