Anonymous asked: Did you like Beckett's Endgame? I read Waiting for Godot and Molloy. I thought Molloy was excellent, Waiting for Godot less so, but still good. Malone Dies is boring me quite frankly. It's nowhere near as intriguing as Molloy. I must be missing something.
I have mixed feelings about Beckett. I read Godot and Endgame years ago (I had to reread it for class). But I’ve only read his plays, never actually seen one staged. I think it must be a totally different experience. When I read them, they usually seem funny, almost vaudevillian. A depressed Marx brothers, maybe. This must have more to do with me and my own ability to ignore ponderousness than the plays themselves, because when I try to look up adaptations on YouTube, I find them unwatchable. See for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb6cEPtp2Lg&feature=related
Completely different than I imagined it. None of Groucho’s speed: everything is so slow! (Compare it to this, which is how the material should be played: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dsw9jYU_rJI) Theatrical pretension hangs on everything; everything is so ponderous. Perhaps this is different when you see it staged, but I imagine it would only be more theatrical.
I care about art that has characters. I’m willing to overlook shallow characters when it’s for humor (see Dickens), but I don’t see much value in this kind of art, which takes itself so seriously as Art. I care about character, not Beckett’s minimalism or bleak little ideas.
I’ve never touched Molloy. Is this how he writes novels as well? If it’s different and less minimal than the plays, I might have to give him another shot.
The Street - Ann Petry
half of Hooking Up - Tom Wolfe
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Group - Mary McCarthy
The Armies of the Night - Norman Mailer
Endgame - Samuel Beckett
Day of the Locust - Nathanael West
The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin
…and a bunch of articles and theory stuff and religious books for class. This is considerably less interesting than all the Russian novels I was reading this time last year.
"He was amused by the strong feeling of satisfaction this dire conclusion gave him. Were all prophets of doom and destruction such happy men?"
— Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
"Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, like Homer, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can’t help crying."
— Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
"The spokesman was speaking in totalitarianese, which is to say, technologese, which is to say any language which succeeds in stripping itself of any moral content."
— Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
"He had come to decide that the center of America might be insane… Any man or woman who was devoutly Christian and worked for the American Corporation, had been caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery, the son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology. Nothing was more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ."
— Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
"All wars are bad if they consist of rich boys fighting poor boys when the rich boys have an advantage in the weapons."
— Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
"[That] noble common man was obscene as an old goat, and his obscenity was what saved him. The sanity of said common democratic man was in his humor, his humor was in his obscenity."
— Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
"…the truth of his material was revealed to a good writer by the cutting edge of his style…"
— Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
