Pee-wee

Quoted this week in The New Yorker in a Talk of the Town piece:
Pee-wee Redux by Michael Schulman

Poem: “Do you think I’m a mean person?”

Do you think I’m a mean person? I’ve put so much effort
Into not being mean. Not that I want to come off like
Being nice requires some special effort on my part;
I think it comes naturally to me. Or not nice exactly,
I’m not really nice; anyway, is nice the opposite of mean,
Or some other, neutered category of forgettable meh-ness?
Meh is one of the words of the year. That speaks volumes
About the year, huh? But what am I asking you for?
After writing poems for thirty years, I still think you can
Answer me?

12-17-09

Chickpea

Dream

I am working on a large manuscript made up of lots of unconnected notes, each a few words to several pages long. I decide to just string them together without trying to edit them into a whole. I am writing possible titles on a page of notebook paper in blue ink: "Because I Don't Care," and "Because I Can't Be Bothered."

Gov. Sanford's Affair

This letter appeared today in the Washington Post

Friday, June 26, 2009

I am a gay man. My partner lives 12 time zones away. We are in a monogamous relationship, and we do not cheat. We get to see each other only twice a year for less than three weeks. Although he is a professional in marketing, the United States will not let him immigrate because he was not picked in the lottery. The federal government would not recognize our relationship if I married him. The government will not allow us to be together.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford ["S.C. Gov. Sanford Admits to an Affair," front page, June 25] and Sen. John Ensign (and former House speaker Newt Gingrich and senator Larry Craig) oppose same-sex marriages even as they do their best to destroy the institution of marriage in the United States.

I pay my taxes. I served in the military. I was an Eagle Scout. In short, I am a good, but second-class, citizen. It's very hard not to be infuriated by the double standards.

WILLIAM McCOLL

Washington

I dreamed that Conan O'Brien died. Everyone was supposed to gather in a public square for a special announcement.

I'm a little hesitant to say so, but I think "Year One" is fricking hilarious. I realized I liked it because it recalled--very much--the "Carry On" movies I was crazy about as a kid. A totally non-hip movie, too. Everyone in it has found their inner borscht belt comic and does shtick (and how often these days do you see a movie where you have to be Jewish to get some of the jokes?), and Oliver Platt should get an Oscar for creating the kind of evil gay character you're supposed to be appalled by. Jack Black and Michael Cera have Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis chemistry; I hope they do a whole series of stupid comic romps through various historical periods. Then they should fuck all the Sex and the City women, make a comic version of Cloverfield, and retire after they finish their brilliant satire of The Wrestler with Michael Cera in the Marisa Tomei role.

From J. R. Coetzee's review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1: 1929-1940

A dictum he quotes from his favorite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669), suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don't invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power.

*

One of the more unexpected of his literary enthusiasms is for Samuel Johnson. Struck by the "mad terrified face" in the portrait by James Barry, he comes up in 1936 with the idea of turning the story of Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale into a stage play. It is not the great pontificator of Boswell's Life who engages him, as the letters make clear, but the man who struggled all his life against indolence and the black dog of depression.

I don't know why this should be unexpected--I can't think of a better match-up to an earlier writer for Beckett. There's something Beckett-y about Rasselas and maybe London, and of course there is a fascination with paring-away rather than adding to language in Johnson; he sabotages himself in his less successful work by getting carried away with his command of English.
Now I wonder if I hadn't come across Beckett's idea long before I got the notion of having Frank Barber narrate the story of Johnson and Hester Thrale.

* "I . . . seem never to have had the least faculty or disposition for the supernatural."

*

. . . one can venture to say that psychoanalysis of the kind that Beckett underwent with Bion--what one might call a proto-Kleinian analysis--was an important passage in his life, not so much because it relieved (or appears to have relieved) his crippling symptoms or because it helped (or appears to have helped) him to break with his mother, but because it confronted him in the person of an interlocutor or interrogator or antagonist in many ways his intellectual equal, with a new model of thinking and an unfamiliar mode of dialogue. Specifically, Bion challenged Beckett--whose devotion to the Cartesians shows how much he had invested in the notion of a private, inviolable, non-physical realm--to re-evaluate the priority he gave to pure thought. . . . In the psychic menagerie of Bion and Klein, Beckett may also have found hints for the protohuman organisms, the worms and bodiless heads in pots, that populate his various underworlds. Bion seems to have empathized with the need felt by creative personalities of Beckett's type to regress to prerational darkness and chaos as a preliminary to an act of creation.

This is something I'm going to want to return to a LOT. It seems like the Key to Everything--especially transcending the assumptions about character in realism in favor of something "protohuman." Oddly enough, this reminds me of Bert States' comments on dreams.

*

His guide here is Cezanne, who came to see the natural landscape as "unpproachably alien," an "unintelligible arrangement of atoms," and had the wisdom not to intrude himself into its alienness. . . . Cezanne has a sense of his own incommensurability not only with the landscape but--on the evidence of his self-portraits--with "the life . . .. operative in himself." Herewith the first authentic note of Beckett's mature, post-humanist phase is struck.