(no subject)

[proximoception]

Is it really September 7th?

I wonder how my customary Summer-happy stupidity/Autumn-intellection/Winter-vague depression/Spring-exaltation cycle will be affected by the climate here, where, from an Ohioan perspective, January just disappears and the other months stretch out to fill the void. For that matter, how did Vancouver affect it? I remember being adrift a lot during the rain months. I have a bit of a craving for a classically harsh winter, actually, like I tasted in Hamilton while school-visiting. Which I'll likely get soon enough, thanks to BushCo.

Been reading Underworld and Franklin's memoirs this week, both great fun for the most part. The Crossing, Murphy and "Penelope" (yes, still) are lying handy, to be finished some weekend. The town library has several Galateas. My classes seem easy enough. Been 80% unpacked for weeks. The IMAX experience of a new place is settling down to sitcom routine at last.

We got TV, real TV, despite my fervent objections. Bill Maher and John Stewart went satisfyingly left during the eight years since I last had cable, clearly. And The Colbert Report is gold. We're also experimenting with Netflix, enjoying the Beckett on Film series and Burns' Civil War DVD set.

Also I have a cellphone, which got boring fast. And clearly I can't leave the country for three years without things going straight to hell: sold at the local Kroger's are frozen corndoglike products consisting of smoked sausages wrapped in pancakes full of chocolate chips.

Comments

[whatever-being.livejournal.com]

how are you finding the beckett on film series? other than enjoying it, which bodes well. i've been hesitant so far, don't know why exactly. i listened to the Three Novels on tape and didn't like it at all.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

It took me quite a while to begin to tolerate Beckett's fiction, super-oppressive as it is, but his plays are almost always enjoyable, except maybe some of the late ones, which are at least short. Try Murphy, maybe? It doesn't really have narrative drive but the prose is amazing, and some moments I laughed out loud at, and I don't laugh out loud--also a great chapter called 'Murphy's Mind'. Having rebegun it like twelve times I have some fondness for chapter 1 also. Mercier and Camier might be another way to wade in slow, as it's mostly in dialogue and prefigures Godot.

Godot was well enough done, though I take issue with a couple of the director's choices, like making Pozzo glaringly English. Krapp's Last Tape is the gem, but be sure to have read the play first. It's slow, and more or less depends on your already loving the piece. I do: it, a prose poem called Old Earth, and his late monologue Ohio Impromptu are the only Beckett pieces that don't strike me as oppressively bitter or cynical. Not that they celebrate life exactly, but an unmaimed humanity is given both dignity and a clear voice, for once.

Three Novels maybe I'll be ready for at forty. Beckett's works should be rated by Disillusion Factor. I can take up to, like, 6.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

Endgame I liked the best (having skipped Krapp's precisely because I hadn't read it), the Godot seemed a little gimmicky and clownish at times (TVization). But Gambon as Hamm - feels like there's no other way to do it, really. "Play" I didn't like at all, that's one of my minor faves. The implications are enough, no need to get obvious.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Dude, read Krapp. Thewlis seemed well-cast too, though I didn't watch much of that one. Endgame needs to be kept stagey, also: he's facing us, and in a multicamera world this would need explanation, whereas it has some intuitive correctness on stage. And you're only supposed to see a fragment of that room, damn it.

Godot also needs to be bound, but less strictly. They did that fine with their disembodied plateau and sound stage moon.

Wish my collection of his short plays weren't lost, I can't remember if I've read Play.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh I meant that I was hesitant to see the series of his plays televised, or on film, rather, not that I was hesitant to begin reading them. I saw one version of Godot a long time ago and hated it, which is perhaps the source of all my aversion since. But it doesn't make much sense - they are plays, after all, and presumably ought to be seen, not just read. I've seen a production of Krapp's Last Tape as well, actually before I had read or even heard of Beckett. I was mostly confused, I remember, but I would love to see it again now.

I actually prefer Beckett's fiction to his plays, but that's perhaps because I am more familiar with the former. The Three Novels were what made me really love him. The writing sample I used for all my grad school apps was actually on The Unnamable, which is my favourite. It was about 5 weeks of torture, I remember, because you have to dive completely into the book, and it's not the most comfortable place to be. I don't know that I would call it oppressive, exactly, though. Molloy is actually extremely funny, and by the time you progress to The Unnamable much of that humour is gone, so perhaps in that way, yes. I think the pain of that reading text comes from the kind of extreme boredom it provokes. I thought it would be good to hear it on tape because whenever my professor would read pages out loud in class, it was such a different experience of the text, but I didn't like the version of it I heard at all.

[whatever-being.livejournal.com]

sorry, that was me.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Hmm. A play is definitely hurt by a bad rendition, especially a movie one, which is around forever and usually more deeply cut. But the Beckett series is full text, and made by 19 different people, so some successes were inevitable. Who else has been honored this way? Branagh did Hamlet full-text, aside from rearranging a couple scenes, but his theory of the play was it was a whole mess of crrrrrazy crap, and Victorian for some reason, and so he let himself scream, gibber, mutter and hiss away half his dialogue to avoid substantive interpretation.

Probably the key is to have someone with vision, and non-contrary vision, doing the play. Egoyan's Krapp enriched, rather than replaced, my mental staging of it. That's pretty rare, though, and I can't seem to think of another example...unless Kazan's take on A Streetcar Named Desire? It does help when the playwright's directing: Stoppard's Rosencrantz is lovely. And Mamet's adaptations of his own plays are often superb, if you can take Mamet.

I've never been able to listen to taped books. The reader never seems to get the voice right.

[paris-hat.livejournal.com]

Kroger's has a great, um, vegetarian corndog from morningstar farms when you're done indulging in the other version. The outside is sweet, even polenta-like, and the dog tastes like a real hotdog, if memory serves.

I got turned off by many of those films, too, but there are some great ones: Billie Whitelaw doing Winnie, and "That Time" was good as well. I liked the Krapp, too. Also, a new recording on CD of The Unnamable is just fantastic.

I don't know where in Ohio you are but if you're near Dayton or Cinci there's an unforgettable experience awaiting you at Jungle Jim's.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, am in South Carolina now--which has apparently been colonized by Kroger's. And I'm not eating those chocolate sausage dogs! Yuck!

I've only watched a disc and a half so far...least favorite would be one where I couldn't penetrate the Irish accents, I think Rough for Theatre 1? Total lack of subtitles, quite cruel to the deaf. Also Julianne Moore's tone seemed wrong in Not I. But I'm not a fan of that one on paper either.

Is it fair to skip straight to The Unnameable if you're allergic to Molloy? That seems to be the one people swear by. Hard to think of anything less pleasant than Molloy.

[paris-hat.livejournal.com]

Kroger's mystifies me. I'm still in denial that I actually shop there. Except for cheese and bakery items and sushi.

Oh, wow. I'll be giving a paper at USC in a few weeks. Yes, skip ahead to Malone Dies first, then Unnamable. If you haven't read Watt it's better than all three. Also: you must see Buster Keaton in "Eh, Joe." Really powerful. I was in a course Christopher Ricks taught on Beckett when he showed that and afterwards he was crying so hard that he had to cancel the rest of class. Yeah--there's another film version with Irene Worth in Not I. She was perfect.

My sophomore year, I skipped school for a week to go to Dublin to watch every version of every Beckett play ever filmed. Bad for my grades but worth it.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I wish they'd included Eh, Joe and Quad and all those old ones in the new set. And wasn't there a TV version of Krapp, or was it Godot, featuring the actor Beckett had actually written the main role for?

So many of the most intelligent people have a real love for Beckett. Says something about me that I can't seem to get over certain reservations, though nearly everything I've read of his has been terribly impressive.

I miss those vegetarian sushi containers with their chrome soy sauce packets. Great 2 AM food. Though down here you can get a jug of cheese balls bigger than your torso.

Email me the what, where and when of your reading?

[paris-hat.livejournal.com]

It appears that your email address got lost in my crappy program! And I don't have the "where" part yet. The paper is part of an Eng. dept conference on Harry Berger, Jr.'s work on Renaissance lit the weekend of Oct 13-15 and I"m on on Sat. late morning. I can't promise a wild ride but a few smart people will be there too.

[paris-hat.livejournal.com]

At the risk of sounding like less of a diehard Beckett fan: I guess this is true of some experimental writing in general, but I think that a little of his work seems kind of dated. While I love some of the immersions into pure patterning or rhythm, they can come across as contrived, and so mainly the wit and the utter sadness sustain my interest and on another level get to me every time. That would be my reservation if I had one.