Loose Cans

I hate, Hate, HATE this fucking essay. Beckett. You fuckhead. 1 500 words and it's barely functional. It's unbearable. It's ghastly.

DIDI: It's horrible.

GOGO: It's awful.

DIDI: It's horrible.

Jesus H. Christ you can't imagine. Or maybe you can, and you have, so you know. I want it to go away. I want to shrivel up and die. The more you think about it, the more you want to put every word "sous rature," "under erasure," because maybe, MAYBE that way it might make some fucking sense, which is of course ridiculous, the thought that putting something sous rature should make it CLEARER. But this is what that fucking fucky fucker does to you. Never again, you son of a bitch. Beckett and the Essay. They just don't go together, it's like water and the Wicked Witch of the West: the whole fucking essay just melts, and the water boils, spits and pisses.

Buy a book in brown paper
From Faber and Faber
To see Annie Liffey
Trip, tumble and caper,
Sevensinns in her singthings
Plurabelles on her prose
Seashell ebb music wayriver she flows.

and also:

Humptydump Dublin squeaks through his norse
Humptydump Dublin hath a horrible vorse
With all his kinks English
Plus his Irismanx brogues
Humptydump Dublin's grandada of all rogues.

No, I didn't write them. Wish I had. But you get one guess who did.

It's just that they've been in my head all morning as I've been doing literary circuit training since friday--you know, ten reps on one machine, ten on another, etc. It's like ten pages of deconstructionism, now twenty of Beckett crit, then on to Joyce, and so on. Small wonder that all these three things are gelling in the essays: I found myself automatically deconstructing Godot and Portrait. It's one of those inevitable things. No doubt I shall soon turn into this guy.

Now I go make an omelette and get to work. By the way, I leave tomorrow for Sligo, for an Ultimate tourney there, and between playing, partying, and sleeping on some strange guy's floor (the TCD team decided not to spring for the hostel, so apparently this guy is housing all of us, which is fine with me), I doubt that I will have much time to post. But take heart! I'm back home on Monday...

I think I finished the Joyce essay this morning. As I was vetting it last night, trying to find ways to slash 1 500 words, I realized that I had actually written two entirely different essays answering with surprising focus two different questions from the topic sheet, The Role of Power and the Role of Myth. On further inspection, I found there was a point at which I could simply separate them like siamese twins, perform a modicum of cosmetic surgery (you know, touch-up and spackle jobs), and both would live quite happily on their own. So I did. I sliced it neatly down the middle and threw out the first five pages, leaving me with a pretty well-focused discussion of Stephen Dedalus' mythic heritage. And it's not a bad essay. Certainly it answers the question, and it satisfies me insofar as there's some measure of innovation going on. This is good because I have another essay to write tonight and tomorrow, one which promises to be considerably harder.

But this post is so titled because I found myself this morning extremely concerned with my bibliography, and whether it was correctly done or not. This is not because the format of the citations is of great concern to the marker (they're not compulsive jerks about it), but simply because I was suddenly very preoccupied with my bibliography looking professional. VERY preoccupied. I had been spending so much time using other books' bibliographies, and had developed such a burning hatred of the MLA style--I hate it I hate it I hate it--that suddenly, quite unexpectedly, I found myself obsessing over every little detail of my own method. Anthony Burgess' invaluable book, ReJoyce, was driving me insane because he has NO citations or bibliography, none at all. And I realized. It's happening. I'm turning into one of them. It's the bridge on the fucking river Kwai.

I am in dire need of the brothers Marx.

I am a sick man. This morning, I found myself eating Cookie Crisp, watching Stargate Sg-1 on TV, and reading Rick Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. The contents of my wastepaper basket were a sock and a tea bag. I listened to Bolero three times. I think my liver hurts.

Or, more accurately, my head. My liver has had a well-earned vacation these past few days.

It's spring. Really, we mean it this time. There are birds twittering. There are wee purple crocuses sprouting out of the grass. Trees are flowering, bit by bit. It's warming. There is sun, now. It's the sort of day where you feel, for the very first time, like Yes, I made the right decision coming here. I think I'll stay a while.

'Happiest moment of the past half million.' And fuck you, T.S. Eliot, with your April is the cruelest month and Winter kept us warm. Go back to Boston.

Of course check back with me next time it rains like hell. This goddamn country with its goddamn climate. Some days it's like the only thing to do is get a corner table at the pub and sit and drink and drink and wait for the end of time.

Exegesis: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins thus: Once upon a time and a very good time it was, there was a moocow coming along down the road...and so on. In Finnegans Wake Joyce mocks this line many times. Two notable examples are: "Once upon a drunk and a very good drunk it was and all the rest of your blatherumskite" and "Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse." I made my own humble version: Erse is a corruption of Irish, that is, the language, otherwise known as Scots Gaelic. "Bareleywined," suggesting the most potent kind of beer, and at the same time lamenting my recent dryness, is a comment on the queer situation of my prose, which is still drunk as ever, even in the face of a rather long spell of sobriety. By the way, Duncan has given up alcohol for lent. We are appalled and shocked and demanding that he buy us all dinner with the money he will save by not buying alcohol for forty days. Dog is a reference to Beckett's Endgame, where Hamm, I believe, demands that Clov bring him the dog. Clov accordingly clouts him with it. Everything else I think is clear as mist.

Terribly sorry for that. You will excuse me. I have been these past three days arse-deep in Jonah Samuel Joyce-Beckett and whatever grip I had reestablished on the English language is become so fragile as to let the whole bloody thing slip from sight completely. My reading has been so various and velocitous and fucking constant that the brain hurts. It hurts! He wants to know if it hurts! Having barreled through gobs of Joyceana courtesy of Burgess and Ellman and Beckett himself, I moved on to Beckett criticism, which is very possibly the most futile exercise one can engage in. We shall not cease from reading and the end of all our reading shall be a state of perfect navel contemplation. The Joyce essay is nearly complete; if I may say so myself it ends with a real zinger, though I will not bore you with the details because it regards Ovid and the only ones who would apprehend its inherent zing are Joyce wonks like myself. There are more of us than you think. It's like a cult. It is a cult. Joyce would be horrified:

"But I must not accounted be
One of that mumming company."

The problem with the essay (the function of power in A Portrait) is that it didn't actually lift of until page three, at which point the jet engines unexpectedly kicked in and we went zooming down the runway and into the air, leaping like it had the lift of the cold war-era U-2 spy plane which could shoot 70 000 feet up in the air just like that and which figures prominently in Libra which is the Don DeLillo book I am presently reading to divert myself from all the other reading I'm doing. So I'm a little frayed, and as a result, yesterday the essay suddenly bloated to 700 words over budget (1 500-2 000), and now I have to take my machete off the wall again.

On the other hand, I'm feeling very tranquil. My desk is buried in books and stray notes, my room stinks, and my wee small computer has been crackling, cracking under the strain (on the other hand it got a huge shot in the arm today when I took it to the clinic at IS Services and bought it clothes for its upcoming coming-out party. That is, I set it up with all the proxy information and antivirus whatnot so that when Halls goes live this month, it will be ready to elegantly sashay into society. When we plugged in the network cable and Safari leapt to life, it--hand to God--visibly orgasmed. Or that might have been me. Not quite sure). But all the same, I've had a wonderful weekend. Peaceful and serene. I just holed up in my smelly little cell, bent over my books, and worked. Really worked. The great secret about me is that I love work. I live for work. I hate drudgery and pointlessly exhausting toil (math homework and the five-paragraph essay being the perfect examples). There is a difference. Work gets you somewhere. I must be turning Protestant. One of the happiest days of the school year was the morning after I had been out on a yellow drunk--well, not so much the morning, really, more like the late afternoon after I'd removed the steel staples from my skull--when I spent a good three hours cleaning the bathroom, trying to get the smell of sick out of there. Despite what I was handling, it was immensely pleasant. I just put on some music, pulled out the bathroom cleaning fluid, rolled up my sleeves, and went after it. It put me in a wonderful mood. I was rather disappointed when I realized I'd finished.

The best thing about this weekend was the quiet. We were all working, Sadie, Duncan and I (they have a weird thing with commas here where, in an enumeration of three, they don't put a comma between the second noun and the conjunction. I'm trying to get used to it but it's still pretty disconcerting), and Caitriona and Stephen had cleared out to go picnic in Iveagh Gardens behind the National Concert Hall, which is a lovely lush (what is it with the alliteration today?) green spot hidden by towering stone walls. Nothing to distract me. I had masters, present and future, in front of me. I have decided that while Joyce is not going anywhere, I need to find another master to balance out Jim the Penman's occasionally singular influence (less singular now than it was erstwhile, but still pervasive). DeLillo was a consideration; he has certainly affected my style and my smeltingsong (weltanshauung--I must say that's one of my best puns right there), but there are two problems with tying myself to him: a) he's not iconic enough, and what is more, b) he's not dead enough. Not dead, at all. So I've settled on Beckett. The real-life link between the Irish exiles is more than enough to make the adoption go smoothly (Beckett was extremely close to Joyce; indeed they spent so much time together that Joyce's daughter Lucia fell hopelessly in love with her father's young disciple. Beckett had to reject her, which Lucia, who was to spent the bulk of her adult life in a hospital, did not take very well). On the other hand, their styles are polar opposites, which is perfect. Joyce unmade language so he could recast it in a more useful mode; Beckett stripped language down to its essential meaninglessness and just left it there. I could go on, having this past weekend read a good chunk of a book called Beckett and Joyce, but as the book turned out to be pure, unmitigated bunk, I won't. It was really a crap book, though. The point was to illustrate the literary influences of Joyce on Beckett, the nonexistence of which is roundly agreed upon, and in the end the points made are so weak and sparse that the author only ends up reconfirming the aforementioned general consensus. It's a bad example of an academic publishing for the sake of publication.

Oh, by the way, I popped into the music section of the library today, and discovered a wealth of books on Schoenberg edited by some guy named Walter Frisch. No, I didn't check in Brahms. I also found that Trinity are in possession of eight different pieces by one Anthony Piccolo. Nor was there any shortage of Kander. I always get a big kick out of seeing the names of people I know popping up in libraries and bookstores. A little frisson, eh what?

I think I shall go home soon and begin the Beckett essay (something like Discuss how Waiting for Godot functions or does not function as a dramatic allegory). I've decided that in order to voluntarily undertake to pen a scholarly analysis of Beckett one be either hopelessly infatuated with him or a raving madman. I scarcely need to say what you're all thinking; that I'm floating about somewhere in between. Purgatorial, in limbo. Just the way that fucking vultureface Irishman would want it.