Somehow On

Some of Beckett's prose is being performed on stage this week in New York. I don't live in NYC, but if I did, I'd be there for at least two performance.

And maybe, just maybe they'll think to throw in that bit about laughter from Watt.

Oh course they beat me

Waiting for Godot. In New Orleans.

Pure Joy

Once again Samuel Beckett proves his enduring populism and relevance across social milieus (most specifically here, across the generations).

I give you, Beckett for Babies.




Via the biggest baby of them all, Gerry Canavan.

funambulism

One thing that I really like about reading Beckett is that even amid what seems minimalist, his texts are full of the most luxurious vocabulary. Here's a smattering from Watt.

* funambulist: A performer on the tight (or slack) rope, a rope-walker, a rope-dancer. [as in: In attempting to maintain a blog and work at a brisk pace, I am attempting a funambulistic feat.]

ordure: Excrement, dung.

ataraxy: Freedom from disturbance of mind or passion; stoical indifference.

exiguous: Scanty in measure or number; extremely small, diminutive, minute.

pruritus: Itching; esp. itching of the skin without visible eruption.

* battology: A needless and tiresome repetition in speaking or writing. (this might be the key word for the entire novel)

flocculation: The movements of delirious patients, as if searching for or grasping at imaginary objects, or picking the bed-clothes

velleity: the fact or quality of merely willing, wishing, or desiring, without any effort or advance towards action or realization.

gloam: Twilight, gloaming.

Why a blog?

Let commence the writing of the blog!

I intend this space to be less a site of regular, well-crafted thoughts, observations, and arguments than a series of links, quotes, videos and other media that randomly comes my way. Given my recent (and not altogether welcome) foray into the blog world of others, I feel that I need a space in which to draw attention to, comment upon, deride, pillory, praise and celebrate the various comings and goings of the lives, thoughts and writings of others.

The name "Bitter Laughter" comes from today's reading of Beckett's Watt: "Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation, only three I think need detain us, I mean the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless . . . The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh" (48). For Beckett (or at least his narrator), the bitter laugh is the basest form of laughter, while mirthless laughter is the "risus purus . . . the laugh that laughs . . . at that which is unhappy" (48). I mean this site to be a source of ethical laughter--not moral superiority, per se, but a healthy finger-pointing at the bad, rather than the unhappy. To laugh at the unhappy may, perhaps, be to laugh in its fullest sense, but it lacks humor; its intent is less to bring to light the hidden than a form of self-referentiality by which the self maintains itself through self-identification. As Tyrus Miller notes about such pure laughter, "It is the self-reflexive laughter . . . of the survivor in the face of alterity and death, the subject's minimum self-confirmation, the minimal trace of the instinct for self-preservation. I laugh, therefore I (still) am" (Late Modernism, 49).

I leave the mirthless laughing for some other blogger. This blog is intended to induce bitter laughter.