My first encounter with Beckett was when I was studying in Minnesota and I acted in a student production of Krapp's Last Tape.

...

Since then I must have read Waiting for Godot – of course – a hundred times. Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets any easier.

Nick Clegg in today's Guardian

This would be unremarkable in a French politician; I can't remember the last time a British or American politician chose a literary favourite that didn't look calculated to reassure, one way or another.

B, B

...la jeunesse est aussi ce fragment d'existence où arrive aisément que l'on s'imagine très singulier, dans le moment où l'on pense ou fait ce qui restera comme le trait typique d'une génération.

Badiou, Beckett

(fail better)

why no novelist should EVER be asked to go on a book tour PROMOTING what ONCE looked like a brilliant idea

Me and Samuel

I've been reading reviews of Beckett's letters; a common theme is the amusement at what, to the reviewer, looks like Beckett's obviously ludicrous attempt to find another way to make a living.

I've just come across a link to a piece in the NYT on DFW's commencement speech at Kenyon College. Not only does no one invite me to give me a commencement speech, schools I have actually attended are strangely unkeen to have me come and teach for them - even when staff at the school are enthusiastic about my work.

Early last year I wrote to X at a school I had attended for a year. X had contacted me about a year earlier speaking of his enthusiasm for TLS; we had corresponded; I was not sure I had the energy to haul coal from the cellar for another Prussian winter, so wondered whether the school might have accommodation and some kind of teaching I could do. The school had closed one of its campuses but still owned the site; I thought there might be a place there I could live.

X apparently made inquiries, but thought I must like Berlin so much better, and also thought I would surely be better off teaching creative writing in a college or something. I replied:

Dear X

It's terribly kind of you to look into this.
It's hard to know what to say to your questions. If a publisher bought one of these books I would probably prefer to stay where I am (thought I wouldn't back out at the last minute if I had agreed to go). But I have no idea how long that might take. I had an image in my mind of the empty campus, covered in snow; it seemed as though it might be possible to combine solitude with teaching.

I don't think the notionally higher-powered places you mention would be better. A job that did not involve working with words would probably be better for writing - something with animals, or plants, or food. Or bicycles. That's harder to set up than teaching because it falls foul of a lot of cultural stereotypes.

I've just taken delivery of all the things I put in storage 8 years ago, so pretty worn out; realised I'd been shockingly delinquent in not replying sooner. Picture me surrounded by boxes and a battered piano.

Helen

Answer came there none.

I read somewhere that Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in 6 weeks while working as a night security guard. That's a job I would love to have, but I just don't have the connections.

SB

Mark Sarvas, on the Elegant Variation, links to John Banville's piece in The New Republic on Beckett's Letters.

Banville's review is odd in various ways. He seems to feel that something is badly wrong if a writer is not warmhearted and candid. (Qualities for which, of course, readers have been flocking to Beckett for close to a century.) Joyce, it seems, was manipulative, cunning, cold and a cad - unlike Beckett, the Man of Feeling.

There's an odd determination to reclaim Beckett for banality. Here's Banville on Beckett in Paris:

Despite poverty and a propensity to melancholy--as the narrator of From an Abandoned Work says, "an unhappiness like mine, there's no annihilating that"--Beckett in those years lived the not-uncongenial life of the artistic expatriate, eating and drinking in the bars of Montparnasse and spending much time in the merry surroundings of the quarter's numerous brothels.

("spending much time in the merry surroundings of the quarter's numerous brothels" - well, if Beckett were with us today I feel sure he would enjoy this, which you can't say of every review)

I was going to comment on other oddities, but weary bafflement triumphs.

Packstation awaits

Got an e-mail saying I had a new package at Packstation. Went to the Post Office with my card, typed in my ID, tapped the screen a few times and a yellow door swung open. Sure enough, a package. Took it home: it was Beckett's Letters! Have not had a chance to do more than dip into this, but one thing is terrific: they have published all his letters in French and German in the original, as well as with translation. (If people ask me if I'm fluent in German, I can now say, Well, it's about as good as Beckett's.)

stop beckett

When, in 1984, The Times asked Samuel Beckett for his New Year’s resolutions and hopes, he responded with a brief telegram: “resolutions colon zero stop period hopes colon zero stop beckett”.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Telegraph on Beckett's letters, the rest here.