proximoception | (no subject)

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

sorry, that was me.

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.