Me to play

Hello. This is U-En. If you remember me from the Homecoming blog, you'll remember that I sometimes get a little tipsy and then I ramble on and on and on. Anyway, I play Hamm in Endgame. I'm not about to wait for the long-haired weedy git (i.e. Gavin) to give us all proper introductions, so I'll tell you a story. (The rest of the cast will join us soon and I shall duly shut up.)

This year is the centenary of Beckett's birth. A contemporary of Joyce's he was an Irishman who lived most of his life in France. He won the Nobel in '69 and died twenty years later. That much I got from some articles I have lying around.

Now for the human-interest story.

I first came across him at University, where, to impress a very beautiful woman, I went to see a straightforward production of Godot with her at the Union. The woman was partly Irish and partly Goth. She had big, um, eyes. She was quite passionate about things in general. Actually, I am a bit unclear about whether or not she was the woman in question. Anyway, to make it short, I went, I saw, and then I went home. I thought the two fellas in Godot, Vladimir and Estragon, could go on waiting for all I cared.

What I learnt subsequently was that Beckett wrote stories as well. I llked these. Partly because I felt that reading Joyce was the literary equivalent of being covered in soft fuzzy crap, and partly because Beckett plays with language the way a cat plays with a mouse--not to show how clever he is (like Joyce) but simply because he's a cruel bastard who wants to kill you slowly.

Very well. The first and last play I did was with Gavin (chronologically speaking, that is. You work out the grammar for yourselves); namely, Harold Pinter's Homecoming. This is what Pinter says about Beckett:

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him.

He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.

His work is beautiful.

I like the bit about leaving no maggot lonely. I am a lonely maggot. I like being a lonely maggot so fuckoffandleavemealone. But lonely maggots have unmaggoty hearts, in case you didn't know and

Where was I?

Tonight we had our second reading of Endgame. Of course, it's early days and we're still trying to figure out how the play goes but I have good maggoty feelings about this. I'll leave it to the others to say more. Assuming they get round to sending me their email addresses so I can sort out this blogger account business.

Ah. How the hell do we get one of those hit-counters here?

... hit counter thinggie is there, but there is an ad thing. We will have to live with it. Now... let's see how embarrassing this proves.