Skimmed some Beckett. The genius of petulant penis-bearing beings shattered by the fact that shit doesn’t smell like ice cream and death is the end of life. Yes, a kind of greatness if you like that sort of thing.

Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known.–Samuel Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape”

So wonderful that he creates these pared-down landscapes. Genius of bareness, repetition. Humor of loneliness and stubborn continuance. Like a chicken w/ head cut off. But an awfully deliberate chicken.

A man may die at the age of seventy without ever having had the possibility of seeing Halley’s comet.–Samuel Beckett, “The Unnameable”

I’m sort of reading Beckett in an anthology of excerpts, dipping my beak at random into the bleak pool. It doesn’t seem to matter where I stop or start. It’s a dark wonderful lake in a cave, stocked with eyeless minnows, tiny meditative variations.

Lit has pitched her mansion in the place of excrement most definitely in the case of Mr. Beckett. One could write a paper on that particular function in world literature (now there’s an idea for a professional publication!–The Writer’s Chronicle must be waiting for just such a thing) and use him as the centerpiece. His preoccupation with male bodily functions oddly exalted/debased (erections, fucking, excretion all of a piece somehow).

Odd and indicative that gender persists so rampantly in the midst of Beckett’s wastelands. Yes, it’s the last thing to go! The male is plagued by solitude, sterility, the circularity of language, perhaps by the impossibility of squaring that circle i.e. producing further life out of his own constricted flesh.

The female, in my oddly complementary vision, is plagued by company. She “vants to be alone” but generates more–or somehow accretes others even when technically barren.

Or do I speak too narrowly from personal experience? Mine the cozy swarm, the teeming multitude that just won’t buzz off. My joy the stolen moments, like this eve of a holiday when there’s a sudden feeling (for 5 or 10 minutes) that everyone’s gone to earth, they’re off doing the biologic clotting thing. E-mail falls silent. What peace!

Method or no method, I shall have to banish them in the end, the beings, things, shapes, sounds and lights with which my haste to speak has encumbered this place.–Samuel Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape”

By the way, speaking of male bodily functions, I’m feeling bemused after months of being “interpellated” as a person with a penis by the subject heads of my spam e-mail. I think I’m almost starting to believe the hype–that I really might, with the utilization of a certain commercial product, experience the following: “She’ll fall down and WORSHIP your HUMONGOUS rod.” Someone should do some research on the psychological effects of this oddly egalitarian form of advertising. (Now it occurs to me that possibly e-mail users named Melissa or Catherine or Ann do not receive such messages. Am I thus honored only because my name sounds sufficiently androgynous to the spammers?)

You think you are simply resting, the better to act when the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything again.–Samuel Beckett, “The Unnameable”