Ms. Poiesis

Damn – why, why, why? Courtesy Snackbox Diaries and Nat King Coleslaw.

Is this the face of innocence?

Nice coat.

Have they no couth?

From The Onion April 26, 2006 | Issue 42•17

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47722

PARIS—Just weeks after the centennial of the birth of pioneering minimalist playwright Samuel Beckett, archivists analyzing papers from his Paris estate uncovered a small stack of blank paper that scholars are calling “the latest example of the late Irish-born writer’s genius.”

The 23 blank pages, which literary experts presume is a two-act play composed sometime between 1973 and 1975, are already being heralded as one of the most ambitious works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting For Godot, and a natural progression from his earlier works, including 1969′s Breath, a 30-second play with no characters, and 1972′s Not I, in which the only illuminated part of the stage is a floating mouth.

“In what was surely a conscious decision by Mr. Beckett, the white, uniform, non-ruled pages, which symbolize the starkness and emptiness of life, were left unbound, unmarked, and untouched,” said Trinity College professor of Irish literature Fintan O’Donoghue. “And, as if to further exemplify the anonymity and facelessness of 20th-century man, they were found, of all places, between other sheets of paper.”

“I can only conclude that we have stumbled upon something quite remarkable,” O’Donoghue added.

According to literary critic Eric Matheson, who praised the work for “the bare-bones structure and bleak repetition of what can only be described as ‘nothingness,’” the play represents somewhat of a departure from the works of Beckett’s “middle period.” But, he said, it “might as well be Samuel Beckett at his finest.”

“It does feature certain classic Beckett elements, such as sparse stage directions, a mysterious quality of anonymity, a slow building of tension with no promise of relief, and an austere portrayal of the human condition,” Matheson said. “But Beckett’s traditional intimation of an unrelenting will to live, the possibility of escape from the vacuous indifference that surrounds us—that’s missing. Were that his vision, I suspect he would have used perforated paper.”

Scholars theorize that the 23-page play might have been intended to be titled Five Conversations, Entropolis, or Stop.

In addition, an 81-page document, also blank, was found, which, for all intents and purposes, could be an earlier draft of the work.

“I suspect this was a nascent stream-of-consciousness attempt,” O’Donoghue said of the blank sheets of paper, which were found scattered among Beckett’s personal effects and took a Beckett scholar four painstaking days to put into the correct order. “In his final version, Beckett used his trademark style of ‘paring down’ to really get at the core of what he was trying to not say.”

Some historians, however, contend that the play could have been the work of one of Beckett’s protégés.

“Even though the central theme and wicked sense of humor of this piece would lead one to believe that this could conceivably be a vintage Beckett play, in reality, it could just as easily have been the product of [Beckett's close friend] Rick Cluchey,” biographer Neal Gleason said. “And if it was Beckett, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that, given his sharp wit, it was just intended as a joke. If Beckett were alive today, he might insist that it’s not even a play at all. It could be a novella, or a screenplay.”

Enthusiasts still maintain that the “nuances, subtleties, and allusions to his previous works” are all unmistakably Beckett. They also claim to have found notes and ideas for this play in the margins of Beckett’s earlier works.

There are already plans to stage the play during the intermission of an upcoming production of Waiting For Godot.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did:

Divil a bit

Tuesday was the sixth of June.That may not mean diddly to your average potatohead, but if you write the date down…then you get 06062006.Okay, that doesn’t look particularly sinister, but if you remove all the zeroes…then you get 6626.Look, fuckit, just forget about the 2! THEN you get…666.

This, according to the Book of Revelations, is Satan’s number. It was designed to allow for easier dialling by the single-clawed beasts and ogres and whatnot.

So on with the divilment, as we give a nod to three reliable satanic fixtures in the world of art.

Representing the world of film, we have The Exorcist.
Fr Merrin: “Karras. Karras! It was deceit. Mockery!”
Fr Karras: “I tell you I am sure! I saw her! My own mother!”
Fr Merrin: “But how can you be so sure?”
Fr Karras: “Because she said ‘When’s-a you Dolmio day?‘”
Fr Merrin: “Ah. The demon has many Dolmio days. I hope you did not tell her.”
Fr Karras [pounding forehead]: “I DID. I DID. I told her…that it was Tuesday. I also told her that I now prefer the chunky vegetable one. I have failed us!” [wails]
Fr Merrin [sighing]: “Okay. Have some rest. I will take over.”Representing the world of music, or at least the world of hairy jug-bands, we have Morbid Angel.

This is MORBID ANGEL.

They’re METAL. And SATANIC.

Their guitar player is TREY AZAGTHOTH.

He plays VIDEOGAMES.

His online Quake team are called the SAILOR SCOUTS.

That is NOT a GAY NAME.

IT IS NOT SO SHUT YOUR FACE.

SHUT UP OR I’M CALLING MOM!

MOM!

ahem

Trey took a STRICT VOW of dual-fingerism when he joined Morbid Angel in 1983.

Trey has since had to learn how to WASH, EAT and WIPE HIS HOLE using only these two fingers.

That’s cause the middle two fingers are WUSSIES.

And finally representing the world of literature, we have H.P. Lovecraft.

Details are sparse on the life of H.P. Lovecraft.

However, we do know that the world of condiments and sauces would be a much poorer place without him.

He also famously discovered that a cigar tube filled with angry bees made quite the bedtime companion for the dowagers who could afford it at the time.

Posted by Nat King Coleslaw on June 7, 2006 10:53 PM

Not excepting even the credulous Kraus (see his Do Selby’s Leben), all the commentators have treated de Selby’s disquisitions on night and sleep with considerable reserve. This is hardly to be wondered at since he held (a) that darkness was simply an accretion of ‘black air’, i.e., a staining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye and also to certain ‘regrettable’ industrial activities involving coal-tar by-products and vegetable dyes; and (b) that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a). Hatchjaw brings forward his rather facile and ever-ready theory of forgery, pointing to certain unfamiliar syntactical constructions in the first part of the third so called ‘prosecanto’ in Golden Hours. He does not, however, suggest that there is anything spurious in de Selby’s equally damaging rhodomontade in the Layman’s Atlas where he inveighs savagely against ‘the insanitary conditions prevailing everywhere after six o’clock’ and makes the famous gaffe that death is merely ‘the collapse of the heart from the strain of a lifetime of fits and fainting’. Bassett (in Lux Mundi) has gone to considerable pains to establish the date of these passages and shows that de Selby was hors de combat from his long-standing gall-bladder disorders at least immediately before the passages were composed. One cannot lightly set aside Bassett’s formidable table of dates and his corroborative extracts from contemporary newspapers which treat of an unnamed ‘elderly man’ being assisted into private houses after having fits in the street. For those who wish to hold the balance for themselves, Henderson’s Hatchjaw and Bassett is not unuseful. Kraus, usually unscientific and unreliable, is worth reading on this point. (Leben, pp. 17-37.)

As in many other of de Selby’s concepts, it is difficult to get to grips with his process of reasoning or to refute his curious conclusions. The ‘volcanic eruptions’, which we may for convenience compare to the infra-visual activity of such substances as radium, take place usually in the ‘evening’ are stimulated by the smoke and industrial combustions of the ‘day’ and are intensified in certain places which may, for the want of a better term, be called ‘dark places’. One difficulty is precisely this question of terms. A ‘dark place’ is dark merely because it is a place where darkness ‘germinates’ and ‘evening’ is a time of twilight merely because the ‘day’ deteriorates owing to the stimulating effect of smuts on the volcanic processes. De Selby makes no attempt to explain why a ‘dark place’ such as a cellar need be dark and does not define the atmospheric, physical or mineral conditions which must prevail uniformly in all such places if the theory is to stand. The ‘only straw offered’, to use Bassett’s wry phrase, is the statement that ‘black air’ is highly combustible, enormous masses of it being instantly consumed by the smallest flame, even an electrical luminance isolated in a vacuum. ‘This,’ Bassett observes, ‘seems to be an attempt to protect the theory from the shock it can be dealt by simply striking matches and may be taken as the final proof that the great brain was out of gear.’

A significant feature of the matter is the absence of any authoritative record of those experiments with which de Selby always sought to support his ideas. It is true that Kraus (ace below) gives a forty-page account of certain experiments, mostly concerned with attempts to bottle quantities of ‘night’ and endless sessions in locked and shuttered bedrooms from which bursts of loud hammering could be heard. He explains that the bottling operations were carried out with bottles which were, ‘for obvious reasons’, made of black glass. Opaque porcelain jars are also stated to have been used ,with some success’. To use the frigid words of Bassett, such information, it is to be feared, makes little contribution to serious deselbiana (sic).’ Very little is known of Kraus or his life. A brief biographical note appears in the obsolete Bibliographie de de Selby. He is stated to have been born in Ahrensburg, near Hamburg, and to have worked as a young man in the office of his father, who had extensive jam interests in North Germany. He is said to have disappeared completely from human ken after Hatchjaw had been arrested in a Sheephaven hotel following the unmasking of the de Selby letter scandal by The Times, which made scathing references to Kraus’s ‘discreditable’ machinations in Hamburg and clearly suggested his complicity. If it is remembered that these events occurred in the fateful June when the County Album was beginning to appear in fortnightly parts, the significance of the whole affair becomes apparent. The subsequent exoneration of Hatchjaw served only to throw further suspicion on the shadowy Kraus.

Recent research has not thrown much light on Kraus’s identity or his ultimate fate. Bassett’s posthumous Recollections contains the interesting suggestion that Kraus did not exist at all, the name being one of the pseudonyms adopted by the egregious du Garbandier to further his ‘campaign of calumny’. The Leben, however, seems too friendly In tone to encourage such a speculation.

Du Garbandier himself, possibly pretending to confuse the characteristics of the English and French languages, persistently uses ‘black hair’ for ‘black air’, and makes extremely elaborate fun of the raven-headed lady of the skies who deluged the world with her tresses every night when retiring. The wisest course on this question is probably that taken by the little known Swiss writer, Le Clerque. ‘This matter,’ he says, ‘is outside the true province of the conscientious commentator inasmuch as being unable to say aught that is charitable or useful, he must preserve silence.’

HAVING placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimiliar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

Examples of three separate openings – the first:

The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. He was seated at his diptych or ancient two-leaved writing-table with inner sides waxed. His rough long-nailed fingers toyed with a snuff-box of perfect rotundity and through a gap in his teeth he whistled a civil cavatina. He was a courtly man and received honour by reason of the generous treatment he gave his wife, one of the Corrigans of Carlow.

The second opening:

There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr John Furriskey but actually he has one distinction that is rarely encountered – he was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with a memory but without personal experience to account for it. His teeth were well formed but stained by tabacco, with two molars filled and a cavity threatened in the left canine. His knowledge of physics was moderate and extended to Boyle’s Law and the Parallelogram of Forces.

The third opening:

Finn Mac Cool was a legendary hero of old Ireland. Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horses belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was large enough to halt the march of men through a mountain-pass.