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Author	Message / Information
m8e Rank: Ozzy	Substandard attention to MEMEME replied on: 8/23/2005 3:04:07 PM quote: A few years after school, a friend I was sharing some digs with suggested we all go to the local theatre to see a 'great production of Waiting for Godot'. He reckoned we'd have a fine time and I thought well, it's the theatre, so there could be a chance of some gratuitous nudity No chance. When Kenneth Tynan characteristically added "including naked people" to the stage directions for Beckett's minimalist meditation on mortality, "Breath" (originally written to be included in the review "Oh! Calcutta!"), Beckett immediately withdrew the piece.
Russ-L Rank: Jasper	I'm getting fed up of this subject lark now. replied on: 8/23/2005 3:54:39 PM quote: I like Beckett myself - his work is thought-provoking and amusing by turns... Then again, I can think of nothing more uninspiring than watching 90 minutes of football or sitting through a 'Star Wars' movie... I... see. Have I missed a point somewhere, or was the latter paragraph simply the complete non-sequiteur it appears to be? What in the name of the deity or noteworthy figure of your choice do football and 'Star Wars' have to do with anything? quote: Here's a little blurb (I can't vouch for its efficacy) Russ: http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8883 I thangyew. I will read it presently.
Gravy Hole Rank: Oddie This message was updated on 8/23/2005 6:10:53 PM by Gravy Hole	Dog Gone! replied on: 8/23/2005 6:00:48 PM quote: So how about Rinka for female and Mutton for male. I'm really horrified! I've just had a phonecall from the dog breeder enquiring as to when we are intending to collect my bro's pup. In passing, he told me that they had given the dog a temporary name as an interim measure. And that name is nothing less than Chas! Having dusted off the seat of my trousers, I asked why they had chosen this particular moniker; apparently it's because the only other dog in the litter has been called Dave. It's all so syncro-co-incidentally-tastic to be believable, it ties in neatly with the other lame double acts mentioned. Chas Mutton wuddjabelieveit? Needless to say I told the owner we were no longer interested and before I slammed down the receiver, I asked him to stop bothering us and strongly advised him to take it immediately to the PDSA and have them put the devil dog to sleep.
Russ-L Rank: Jasper	Subsubsub replied on: 8/23/2005 6:08:49 PM quote: And that name is nothing less than Chas! Having dusted off the seat of my trousers, I asked why they had chosen this particular moniker; apparently it's because the only other dog in the litter has been called Dave. Get a Rabbit (Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit...) instead. Ooooooooh, I kill me.
Russ-L Rank: Jasper This message was updated on 8/23/2005 6:27:13 PM by Russ-L	. replied on: 8/23/2005 6:26:36 PM (Ignore me, just testing something)
racheymaus old hand Rank: Chinny	Substandard attention to MEMEME replied on: 8/23/2005 8:08:30 PM Not get Sammy B? The thought horrifies me. Are we not all stumbling around blind and crooked, more like Endgame's Hamm and Clov than the tramps of Godot. I always got the impression Didi and Gogo did it to themselves, there is something horribly avoidable about their predicament, always waiting for someone to turn up and bale 'em out. However the figures of Hamm and Clov are the epitome of inevitable human decay. Either we fall apart or we've already died. Tormented by loneliness or the hell of other people, incapable of helping ourselves, or worse still, depended on to help others. Augh! The humanity.
Barriminge Rank: Jasper	Dog Gone! replied on: 8/23/2005 9:25:08 PM quote: quote: So how about Rinka for female and Mutton for male. I'm really horrified! I've just had a phonecall from the dog breeder enquiring as to when we are intending to collect my bro's pup. In passing, he told me that they had given the dog a temporary name as an interim measure. And that name is nothing less than Chas! Having dusted off the seat of my trousers, I asked why they had chosen this particular moniker; apparently it's because the only other dog in the litter has been called Dave. It's all so syncro-co-incidentally-tastic to be believable, it ties in neatly with the other lame double acts mentioned. Chas Mutton wuddjabelieveit? Needless to say I told the owner we were no longer interested and before I slammed down the receiver, I asked him to stop bothering us and strongly advised him to take it immediately to the PDSA and have them put the devil dog to sleep. You had to post this on the 23rd....
KingoftheHeath Rank: Jasper	I'm getting fed up of this subject lark now. replied on: 8/24/2005 10:57:39 AM I was thinking of almost polar opposites to Beckett's work - of the contrast between the open aspects of Beckett and the linear movement towards closure and towards certainty that prevails in sport and the majority of Western entertainment... A little obtuse, I'll grant you... Just ruminating...
Russ-L Rank: Jasper	Sub-causality replied on: 8/24/2005 5:53:13 PM Ruminate on brother, ruminate on. Is life itself intrinsicaly boring? I can think of no progression towards certain closure that's more linear.
KingoftheHeath Rank: Jasper	Sub-causality replied on: 8/25/2005 7:49:29 AM It could well be...
Gravy Hole Rank: Oddie This message was updated on 8/26/2005 1:09:13 PM by Gravy Hole	Substandard attention to MEMEME replied on: 8/26/2005 1:08:21 PM quote: Not get Sammy B? The thought horrifies me. quote: Yeah, but it's not like he was one of the literary heavyweights, is it? Not like Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler or Bill Bryson, any of whom could out-write Beckett standing on their head.
Derradah Rank: Toyah This message was updated on 8/27/2005 1:32:58 AM by Derradah	Back to Bruno. replied on: 8/27/2005 1:27:15 AM quote: I was thinking of almost polar opposites to Beckett's work - of the contrast between the open aspects of Beckett and the linear movement towards closure and towards certainty that prevails in sport and the majority of Western entertainment... A little obtuse, I'll grant you... Just ruminating... In the century before Proust, novels were frequently related by an omniscient narrator, who could see into every character's soul and reveal the innermost motivations. Emma Bovary is never mysterious to us; from the first moment we meet her, we know her better than we will understand Albertine at the end of Proust's huge book. Emma's husband Charles is also revealed to us, in all his workings, from the beginning. We know that there are things Charles doesn't know about Emma, but nothing is hidden from us as readers. In other works of the nineteenth century which relied upon surprise and mystery, such as novels of Dickens which take the reader unawares with revelations of identity or relation, the truth was at least absolute and ascertainable. It was not in the nature of the nineteenth century to leave a mystery unresolved at the end of a story. By contrast, the twentieth century novel postulates that the truth is frequently unknowable. Either "truth" is a meaningless concept, or a reality which escapes our inadequate sensory apparatus. Quantum physics suggests that we affect phenomena by observing them (much the way anthropologists know that the observer affects the group she is watching) and that there may be no phenomenon at all in the absence of the observer. In the parable of Schrodingers' cat, the cat is both alive and dead (or neither) until the box is opened. If humans aren't capable of opening the box, then there is no truth to be determined. This would have been appalling to the rationalists of the nineteenth century. The contents of Emma Bovary's heart may be unknown to Charles, but they exist whether he can perceive them or not. Similarly, we think of certain things as being "visible", perhaps by infrared or ultraviolet light, even when shrouded in darkness to us. To a rationalist, the idea that it is the act of perception that makes the thing exist would seem like sheer solipsism. Joyce departed from the prior century when he left certain questions unresolved. Has Molly Bloom been unfaithful to Leopold before? What did Stephen Dedalus do during the gap in his day? Beckett's Godot never arrives, and we never learn anything certain about him, leaving him a blank space to be filled in entirely by the audience. These precursors have led to the genre of the unresolved puzzle novel, a favorite of certain of the more talented (and literary) authors of our day.What about though " Dante... Bruno..Vico....Joyce. or whatever the dots mean......And then there is 'the conceptual brownness' of the Ketamine Kreeps.This leads us back to The Major Triad's insistence on the domination of conraries, opposites etc. as a fundamental energizing process even at the most mysterious and obscure levels.
Derradah Rank: Toyah	Substandard attention to MEMEME replied on: 8/27/2005 1:54:07 AM quote: Not get Sammy B? The thought horrifies me. Are we not all stumbling around blind and crooked, more like Endgame's Hamm and Clov than the tramps of Godot. I always got the impression Didi and Gogo did it to themselves, there is something horribly avoidable about their predicament, always waiting for someone to turn up and bale 'em out. However the figures of Hamm and Clov are the epitome of inevitable human decay. Either we fall apart or we've already died. Tormented by loneliness or the hell of other people, incapable of helping ourselves, or worse still, depended on to help others. Augh! The humanity. Some modern methodologies incorporate a "spiral" approach, where doing some analysis leads to some design and development, which discloses some new requirements, leading to more analysis, and so on. Just as the spiral more closely fits the way po-mo blues projects are done, life itself is more of a spiral than a straight line. In a perfect spiral, you would end up back where you began, meaning nowhere; but in a real-life spiral, you get closer, if not to the goal, than to some result (if only entropy, age and death--this is where time sticks its head back in.) Joyce said, "Sometimes the long way round is the shortest way home"--a nice, strange device for the banner of twentieth century literature. 'Ulysses' is a spiral: taking place on a single day, it follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they spiral around Dublin; we follow much longer, and stranger, spirals, in the minds of the characters (and of the author), into mythology, psychology and other destinations. Samuel Beckett's projects proceed in a spiral from less entropy to more. Time is almost irrelevant, because he gives us no clue how much has passed. When in Happy Days the second act curtain rises and the protagonist is now buried to her neck in the sand, instead of the waist, there is no way to tell if we are now in the next day, or twenty years later. Similarly, Didi and Gogo in Godot may only have experienced a single night, but the profound changes experienced by Lucky (loss of speech) and Pozzo (blindness) suggest that there's been a hell of a lot of entropy under the bridge. Why is this a spiral rather than a (blues) progression? Because the characters are exactly where they were, only worse. In Beckett, no-one proceeds from a castle to a beach via a blasted heath. Everything begins, proceeds and ends on the beach, with everyone the worse for wear. Proust said, "If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure is not less dreaming but more..." Beckett's version of this statement would begin, "If a little entropy is dangerous..." In Dante...Bruno. Vico...Joyce, Beckett (discussing Finnegan's Wake, then known only as "Work in Progress") says: "Consequently transmutations are circular. The principle (minimum) of one contrary takes its movement from the principle (maximum) of one another. Therefore not only do the minima coincide with the minima, the maxima with the maxima, but the minima with the maxima in the succession of transmutations. Maximal speed is a state of rest."
m8e Rank: Ozzy	The future's uncertain but the end is always clear replied on: 8/27/2005 12:24:44 PM quote: Is life itself intrinsicaly boring? I can think of no progression towards certain closure that's more linear. Alternatively, life can be thought of as a fractal. A fractal line between two points (in this analogy, birth and death) is infinitely complex and thus infinitely long. The degree to which this can be appreciated in life will depend on the subtlety of one's perception, such that in rare instances it may be possible, in William Blake's famous words: To see a world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. Also an hour spent listening to Charlie can often seem like eternity.
Russ-L Rank: Jasper	The future's uncertain but the end is always clear replied on: 8/27/2005 12:48:13 PM quote: Alternatively, life can be thought of as a fractal. A fractal line between two points (in this analogy, birth and death) is infinitely complex and thus infinitely long. I wouldn't dispute that. The fact that the interesting part comes between the necessity of birth and inevitability of death shouldn't really surprise anyone who doesn't subscribe to this fatalistic 'closed endings are bad' theory. It all applies itself comfortably to the ninety minutes of football maligned by our man earlier. The potential for happenstance in the match is limitless, only the fact that there will be a result is (nearly) inevitable. And, as a non-fan, it too can seem like a bleedin' eternity. "Life's a journey, not a destination" - Aerosmith Ooooooh, I kill me.
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