craner

Beast of Burden
The first person to publish anything by Samuel Beckett was the person who was the subject of my MA dissertation, Nancy Cunard.
 

version

Well-known member
I thought I knew who that was for a sec, but I was mistaking her for Sylvia Beach,

 
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craner

Beast of Burden
Reading Representations of Nancy Cunard, 1923-28

Not very catchy, but it gave me some latitude.
 

woops

is not like other people
I got a nice book of his poetry just before the lock down. I'll type some of it out for you lot 'cos it defies my powers of description. One of the odder books on my mantelpiece

Dortmunder

In the magic the Homer dusk
past the red spire of sanctuary
I null she the royal hulk
hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K'in music of the bawd.
She stands before me in the bright stall
sustaining the jaded splinters
the scarred signaculum of purity quiet
the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east
shall resolve the long night phrase.
Then, as a scroll, folded,
and the glory of her dissolution enlarged
in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners.
Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd
puts her lute away.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
This is the one published by Cunard:

Whoroscope

What’s that?
An egg?
By the brother Boot it stinks fresh.
Give it to Gillot

Galileo how are you
and his consecutive thirds!
The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler!
We’re moving he said we’re off — Porca Madonna!
the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoes charging Pretender
That’s not moving, that’s moving.

What’s that?
A little green fry or a mushroomy one?
Two lashed ovaries with prosciutto?
How long did she womb it, the feathery one?
Three days and four nights?
Give it to Gillot

Faulhaber, Beeckmann and Peter the Red,
come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi’s sun-red crystally cloud
and I’ll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones
or I’ll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst of day
To think he was my own brother, Peter the Bruiser,
and not a syllogism out of him
no more than if Pa were still in it.

Hey! Pass over those coppers
sweet milled sweat of my burning liver!
Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing Jesus out of the skylight.

Who’s that? Hals?
Let him wait.

My squinty doaty!
I hid and you sook.
And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-parlour foetus!
What an exfoliation!
Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils!
My one child
Scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood-
Blood!
Oh Harvey beloved
How shall the red and white, the many in the few,
(dear bloodswirling Harvey)
eddy through that cracked beater?
And the fourth Henry came to the crypt to the arrow.

What’s that?
How long?
Sit on it.

A wind of evil flung my despair of ease
against the sharp spires of the one
lady:
not once or twice but?
(Kip of Christ hatch it!)
in one sun’s drowing
(Jesuitasters please copy).
So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid leather-
What am I saying! the gentle canvas-
and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,
and farewell for a space to the yellow key of Rosicrucians.

They don’t know what the master of the that do did,
that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul and sweet air,
and the drums, and the throne of the faecal inlet,
and the eyes by its zig-zags
So we drink Him and eat Him
and the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of Hovis
because He can jig
as near or as far from His Jigging Self
and a sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks
How’s that, Antonio?

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.
Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?
Anna Maria!
She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.
Leider! Leider! She blomed and withered,
a pale abusive parakeet in a maistreet window.
No I believe every word of it I assure you
Fallor, ergo sum!
The coy old fr?r!
He tolle’d and legge’d
and he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat.
No matter, let it pass.
I’m a bold boy I know
so I’m not my son
(ever if I were a concierge)nor Joachim my father’s
but the chip of a perfect block that’s neither old nor new,
the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.

Are you ripe at last,
my slim pale double-breasted turd?
How rich she smells,
this abortion of a fledgling!
I will eat it with a fish fork.
White and yolk and feathers.
Then I will rise and move moving
toward Rahab of the snows,
the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon,
Christina the ripper.
Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank
Who has climbed the bitter steps,
(Ren頤u Perrron?!)
and grant me my second
starless inscrutable hour.

Notes
These notes were provided by the author.
1. Rene Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting. He kept his won birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity. The Shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days.
2. In 1640 the brothers Boot refused Aristotle in Dublin.
3. Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytical geometry to his valet Gillot.
4. Refer to his contempt for Galileo Jr., (whom he confused with the more musical Galileo Sr.), and to his expedient sophistry concerning the movement of the earth.
5. He solved problems submitted by these mathematicians.
6. The attempt at swindling on the part of his elder brother Pierre de la Bretailli貥 — The money he received as a soldier.
7. Franz Hals.
8. As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl.
9. His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six.
10. Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had explained the motion of the heart.
11. The heart of Henri iv was received at the Jesuit college of La Fl裨e while Descartes was still a student there.
12. His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto.
13. His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his doctrine of matter with his doctrine of transubstantiation.
14. Schurmann, the Dutch blue stocking, a pious pupil of Vo봬 the adversary of Descartes.
15. Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul.
16. He proves God by exhaustion.
17. Christina, queen of Sweden. At Stockholm, in November, she required Descartes, who had remained in bed till midday all his life, to be with her at five o’clock in the morning.
18. Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes
 

woops

is not like other people
cheers craner, that's the first one in my book as it happens
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
He seems to have been slightly obsessed with shit, as Joyce was.

I've read some of his short stories and they're absolutely full of turds.

(Joyce was a big fan of Rabelais, who wrote a lot about turds and farts in the medieval style.)

Beckett in general I've not read much of at all. I read half of that huge biography of him "Damned to Fame". It was well written but workmanlike, so every nugget (or dunghill) of Beckett stood out a mile.

Put off by his reputation for being miserable and bleak, which I've got quite enough of going on in my head already, thankyouverymuch.
 

version

Well-known member
I read his first published writing a while back, the piece on Finnegans Wake when it was "Work in Progress". A lot of it went over my head and I had to keep sticking the Italian quotes into Google Translate, but it was intriguing.
Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read -—- or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself. (A fact that has been grasped by an eminent English novelist and historian whose work is in complete opposition to Mr Joyce’s). When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep. (See the end of ‘Anna Livia’) When the sense is dancing, the words dance.
 
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luka

Well-known member
It's good to read things which are too difficult for you. It's like taking a cold shower or doing 12 swift star jumps or eating your broccoli.
 

luka

Well-known member
Another friend of mine said almost exactly the same thing to woops when they met one another at the coffee cart I was running at the time
 
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