Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde writer, dramatist and poet, writing in English and French. Beckett's work offers a bleak outlook on human culture and both formally and philosophically became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
As a student, assistant, and friend of James Joyce, Beckett is considered one of the last modernists; as an inspiration to many later writers, he is sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is also considered one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called "Theatre of the Absurd." As such, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.[2]
Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 for his "writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".[3] Beckett was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. He died in Paris of respiratory problems.
The Beckett family (originally Becquet) were rumoured to be of Huguenot stock and to have moved to Ireland from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1598, though this theory has been criticised as unlikely.[4] The Becketts were members of the Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.[5]
Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906 to William Frank Beckett, a 35 year old Civil Engineer, and May Barclay (also 35 at Beckett's birth); they had married in 1901. Beckett had one older brother, Frank Edward Beckett (born 1902). At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool, where he started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsford House School in the city centre near Harcourt Street. In 1919, Beckett went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, which Oscar Wilde had also attended. A natural athlete, Beckett excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler. Later, he was to play for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel laureate to have an entry in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, the "bible" of cricket.[6]Early writings
Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927. While at Trinity, one of his tutors was the eminent Berkeley scholar and Berkelian Dr. A. A. Luce. Beckett graduated with a B.A., and—after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast—took up the post of lecteur d'anglais in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy, a poet and close confidant of Beckett who also worked there. This meeting was soon to have a profound effect on the young man, and Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, most particularly by helping him research the book that would eventually become Finnegans Wake.[7]
In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay entitled "Dante...Bruno. Vico..Joyce". The essay defends Joyce's work and method, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and dimness, and was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a book of essays on Joyce which also included contributions by Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams, among others. Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family, however, cooled when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia owing to her progressing schizophrenia. It was also during this period that Beckett's first short story, "Assumption", was published in Jolas's periodical transition. The next year he won a small literary prize with his hastily composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws from a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading when he was encouraged to submit.
In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. He soon became disillusioned with his chosen academic vocation, however. He expressed his aversion by playing a trick on the Modern Language Society of Dublin, reading a learned paper in French on a Toulouse author named Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called Concentrism; Chas and Concentrism, however, were pure fiction, having been invented by Beckett to mock pedantry.
Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, terminating his brief academic career. He commemorated this turning point in his life by composing the poem "Gnome", inspired by his reading of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and eventually published in the Dublin Magazine in 1934:
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.[8]
After leaving Trinity, Beckett began to travel in Europe. He also spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years later, in the wake of his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst, Dr. Wilfred Bion, who took him to hear Carl Jung's third Tavistock lecture, an event which Beckett would still recall many years later. The lecture focused on the subject of the "never properly born," and aspects of it would become evident in Beckett's later works including Watt and Waiting for Godot.[9] In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it; the book would eventually be published in 1993. Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel did serve as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.
Beckett also published a number of essays and reviews around the time, including "Recent Irish Poetry" (in The Bookman, August 1934) and "Humanistic Quietism", a review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy's Poems (in The Dublin Magazine, July–September 1934). These two reviews focused on the work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Blanaid Salkeld, despite their slender achievements at the time, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Revival contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and the French symbolists as their precursors. In describing these poets as forming 'the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland',[10] Beckett was tracing the outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon.
In 1935 — the year that Beckett successfully published a book of his poetry, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates —, he was also working on his novel Murphy. In May of that year, he wrote to MacGreevy that he had been reading about film and wished to go to Moscow to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. In mid-1936, he wrote to Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, offering to become their apprentices. Nothing came of this, however, as Beckett's letter was lost owing to Eisenstein's quarantine during the smallpox outbreak, as well as his focus on a script re-write of his postponed film production. Beckett, meanwhile, finished Murphy, and then, in 1936, departed for extensive travel around Germany, during which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen, also noting his distaste for the Nazi savagery which was then overtaking the country. Returning to Ireland briefly in 1937, he oversaw the publishing of Murphy (1938), which he himself translated into French the next year. He also had a falling-out with his mother, which contributed to his decision to settle permanently in Paris (where he would return for good following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, preferring — in his own words — "France at war to Ireland at peace").[11] His was soon a known face in and around Left Bank cafés, where he strengthened his allegiance with Joyce and forged new ones with artists like Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp, with whom he regularly played chess. Sometime around December 1937, Beckett had a brief affair with Peggy Guggenheim, who nicknamed him "Oblomov" after the titular figure in Ivan Goncharov's novel.[12]
In Paris, in January 1938, while refusing the solicitations of a notorious pimp who ironically went by the name of Prudent, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed. James Joyce arranged a private room for the injured Beckett at the hospital. The publicity surrounding the stabbing attracted the attention of Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, who knew Beckett slightly from his first stay in Paris; this time, however, the two would begin a lifelong companionship. At a preliminary hearing, Beckett asked his attacker for the motive behind the stabbing, and Prudent casually replied, "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse" ("I do not know, sir. I'm sorry").[13] Beckett occasionally recounted the incident in jest, and eventually dropped the charges against his attacker—partially to avoid further formalities, but also because he found Prudent to be personally likeable and well-mannered.

The Castle of St. Francis Xavier -- an original piano work by David Hart

The Yalli Dance

Michelle reads Sueno Delicioso Por David Hart

Metamorphosis by David Hart

Monday, April 19, 2010

ProseHose and Sprinkler by fsbof jsty

He used to get sick to his stomach riding in cars. They called it car sick or car sickness and they would push the dramamine tablets in his mouth. He also got sick in class because two students from the same family would rarely bathe and also it was rumoured that they had cooties or lice at least and that also would turn his stomach sour. Then there was the sawdust poured over students who would puke in class. That smell always seemed to linger. One black and white dressed frocked nun made
Dex knell in the corridor where all the students went from one class to the other just because he laughed in class. He was not fond of that penguin for the remaining time in that school. She also brutally smashed down on the tops of his hands with a yard ruler and one time broke the ruler being she enjoyed a sadistic session with the young boys on a regular basis.
There wasn't alot to do on a house boat--sit on the upper deck, ring for tea and
cookies or summon the servants for a bath to be drawn or a time to prepare a lunch or a dinner. Dex would read a thick book on the top deck when the weather permitted. In India that was usually every day.
Sometimes they would row him into the area where the stores were to buy Coca Cola or 35 mm film.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

A Tryst at the Blue Angel by David Hart

The Hands of St. John the Baptist

ProseHOse and Sprinkler by Fsbof Jsty II.

Prose Hose and Sprinkler by Fsbof Jsty II.
Starring at the floor shadows black grey tiny floor sparkles shining up changing tints morphing glimmers, now looking down and downing bobbing head, thinking low and lower and then the terror thoughts terrorizing--puddles of thick coagulated and fresh alizarine crimson sloopslopslipsliding gory blood. Entrails too. That sticky sickening
stench--red mud reded mud sand and brick muddied red blood under
red smeared crying tears of bloody crimson leaves upon rotted guts and
carrion. Dex was having one of his moods this day.
Up now, press the filthy snotanddirt minuterie électrique, up these hundred year steps exuding sexurinedopesnotsandspit to his room in
a 12 room hotel rented by whorehookersdopersheroinaddictsdrunksalcoholics and Dex. Inside
an overusedoverworked bed un grand lit as the French called it with one
giant tubular had pillow that must be removed before sleeping unless you are masochist, a small sink, a great armoire and a table and chair.
Down the hall to the toilet with raised foot pads of cement that strattled
a four inch hole and a cord to pull that splashed water every where upon pulling the cord, unless you pulled the cord and hastily ran out the door.
Dex called this arrangement home.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Prose Hose and Sprinkler by Fsbof Jsty

Riviere rouge, past the misshapened stones small medium browngraywhitepaleandspotted
over crested cement fissured inandout cracks cricketycrackfricketywackbacktackpeeseandtrack and boy she was as usual on her calloused unwashed albinopale mattress back awaiting her daily and sometime hourly sessions of
thrustywusty inandouting of the luckylivelyboingbongboingeddyboingjollyrogerplungeandlungebackandforthinsmallcircles-fleshprobehewangatang.
A popcycle stick on the pavement. Dex always seemed to look down. Step on crack, she won't want you back or was it you're mother would punch your back? Now passing beside old worn scrapped cracked crackalure layers on
fences and raillings on the way to the rooms smelling of sawdust and old cleaned up puke. The 300 pound ogre with one leg shorter that the other and a thick black rubber heel to help even those fat misshapen legs out and help him to walk better came to his mind. It seemed the female students didn't the ogre like that much or was it they had some perverse fantasies. Dex didn't care.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

L'homme de coucher par David Hart

Dormir maintenant et maintenant
L'homme de coucher avec ses rêves de la nuit
Arrive
Son sommeil pure fumée subtile est proche

Maintenant, la pointe des pieds dans le royaume de Morphée
Vibrants vive anon visions semblent

Incrédule rêve incolore
Un rêve de
paradoxalement, passionnément
Marchés

Et puis, être constamment avec prudence
Poursuivi dans une hantise mélodieux
Humeur.

Quelques faibles furieux vision brumeuse fantastique -
un sentiment de luxe perdu -
délicieusement désorienté.

La poussière dense plaisant délire
Et, brumeux musquée maraude méandres
Mélodieuse rendements vue trouble à
grande tempête dominant
Haut de miel heureux peignées appartement
Bâtiments

De la construction éclat de
bâtiment Behemoth - cherche paresseux,
sereinement la recherche,
Ludique poursuite
Et, avec des gens il ya
perçant brille

Jusqu'à ce que la lumière en sortant languit -
ses paupières sanglantes -
Ascenseur ----
Pour un nouveau jour.
USAdavidhart2010

В дождь "Дэвид Харт

В дождь "Дэвид Харт
Постоянная, прислушиваясь, ждут.
Слушания много звуков
И приглушенные голоса.
В дождь, щелкнув,
пощелкивание капель
брызг и капель
сочащийся
отскакивая вниз. Мокрой шелковистой
Серое небо синее прибое.
Ропот.
Стоя,
прослушивания, ждет.
мокрой природы ласки.
Шум дождя.
DavidHart2007USA

在雨“由大衛哈特

在雨“由大衛哈特
身高,聽力,等待著。
聽證許多聲音
與沉悶的聲音。
在雨中,點擊,
CEO的滴
和液滴飛濺

彈跳下來。阿濕柔滑
藍灰色的天空旋轉。
雜音。
站在
傾聽,等待。
大自然的濕愛撫。
在颼

In The Rain "van David Hart in Dutch

In The Rain "van David Hart
Permanent, luisteren, wachten.
Hoorzitting veel geluiden
& Gedempte stemmen.
In de regen, te klikken,
verslappen druppels
en druppels spatten
druppelen
stuiteren naar beneden. Een natte zijdeachtige
blauwgrijs wervelende lucht.
Mompelt.

Les Brocadeurs

Une personnne triste sur un broche (skewer)
C'est comme ca pour une personne qui est brime (bullied)
Le Brocadeur (bully) brigandes (robs) l'esprit
d'un personne

On doit grelotter(tremble)
On ne peut pas pardonner les brocadeurs
par-dessus et par-dessus et par-dessus
on pense devenir a l'ermite
2010DavidHartUSA