I can get “nothing” at home. Tell me something else.
Fair enough. It’s a surreal comedy about two guys who spend their lives waiting for something, and as the play goes on, it becomes obvious to everyone except these two guys that it’s never going to happen. Although if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you can’t handle the idea of something that’s never going to happen, you should present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
Sounds like my life.
That’s very much the point. While the audience laughs at the two idiots on stage who can’t see the obvious, at some point around the middle of the second act, you’ll understand that you’re laughing at yourself. Beckett is starting right into your soul and laughing.
A hiatus of disinterest | Burroughs meet Beckett (again)
A hiatus of disinterest | Burroughs meet Beckett (again)
I recall a personal visit to Beckett. John Calder, my publisher and Beckett’s, was the intermediary for a short, not more than half an hour audience. This was in Berlin. Beckett was there directing one of his new plays. Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag and myself were there for a reading. Also present in the visiting party were Fred Jordan and Professor Hoellerer, a professor of English literature at…
“I find myself really willing to declare I never finished a single book by Borges, but I’m much enamored of the idea of such an affiliation. I really can’t claim to having ever read a word of Ulysses, nor would I want to, and yet I feel myself in certain ways the result of my ideaof Joyce. I think Harold Bloom would claim that strong writers only read themselves, and that it is your misreading of your precursors that counts. So it is my misapprehension of Joyce, of Beckett. I can’t deny that for three or four years of my life I virtually saw my walk as consonant with the walk I imagined James Joyce had. But I was probably more taught by Joyce’s letters than I was by his prose fiction.” -Gordon Lish, from Conversations with Gordon Lish[eds. David WintersandJason Lucarelli]
Tom Beckett, the older brother of Dr. Samuel Beckett, died in Vietnam on April 8, 1970. After living with his brother’s death for decades, Sam would later make a quantum leap into the body of Tom’s SEALS buddy, Signalman 2nd Class Herbert “Magic” Williams. As Magic, Sam would uncover a spy in the soldiers’ midst: the Vietnamese woman who was supposedly helping the group. Sam-as-Magic would shoot and kill her just as she was drawing a weapon on Tom, saving his life and altering history.
(Quantum Leap, S3E2 The Leap Home Part II, 1990) (source)
Samuel Beckett wouldn’t need to dream of fair to middling women in this dapper, if risky, get-up. He wouldn’t have to wait eternally for the hotties either.
Stark and minimal, just like his plays, this black/dark grey two-tone outfit is muted. You’d normally expect a flash of colour or brightness to offset that, which actually comes from his hair more than anything. His pocket square, while seemingly coloured, barely shows. Beckett’s clothing is stylish, while restrained like actors in Endgame, encased in man-sized urns.
Aries: “I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.”
Taurus: “Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.”
Gemini: “Words are the clothes thoughts wear.”
Cancer: “A little darkness, in itself, at the time, is nothing. You think no more about it and you go on. But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.”
Leo: “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.”
Libra: “I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.”
Scorpio: “Nothing is more real than nothing.”
Sagittarius: “Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.”
Capricorn: “The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Aquarius:“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
Pisces: “Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was, forgot to be.”
