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Pastimes : A CENTURY OF LIONS/THE 20TH CENTURY TOP 100 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Edwarda who wrote (1610)	11/14/1999 11:31:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

To be frank, Edwarda, that passage is a little too arch for me. And too overstuffed: too many adjectives, too many "thats" (..." And where the drama came in was that it was patent that his attention had not yet been drawn to the fact that he was being chivvied..."). But maybe it's just my own perverse sense of humor. Here's the type of thing that cracks me up(from a long monologue in Beckett's Watt): ....Haw! Hell! Haw! So. My laugh, Mr.---? I beg your pardon? Haw. My laugh, Mr. Watt. Christian name forgotten. Yes. 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. They correspond to successive..how shall I say...successive excoriations of the understanding, and the passage from the one to the other is the passage from the lesser to the greater, from the lower to the higher, from the outer to the inner, from the gross to the fine, from the matter to the form. The laugh that now is mirthless once was hollow, the laugh that once was hollow once was bitter. And the laugh that once was bitter? Eyewater, Mr. Watt, eyewater. But do not let us waste our time with that, do not let us waste any more time with that, Mr. Watt. No. Where were we. The bitter, the hollow, and -- Haw! Haw! -- the mirthless. The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well, well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout -- Haw! -- so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs -- silence please -- at that which is unhappy. Personally of course I regret all. All, all, all...

To: Edwarda who wrote (1610)	11/14/1999 12:07:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

Continuation of Beckett monologue (one of literature's funnier single sentences, although Lucky's monologue in Waiting for Godot is the funniest of them all): "...When I think that this hour is my last on earth on Mr. Knott's premises, where I have spent so many hours, so many happy hours, so many unhappy hours, and -- worst of all -- so many hours that were neither happy nor unhappy, and that before the cock crows, or at very latest very little later, my weary little legs must be carrying me as best they may away, my trunk that is wearier still and my head that is weariest of all, away far away from this state or place on which my hopes so long were fixed, as fast as they can move in and out the weary little fat bottom and belly away, and the shrunk chest, and the poor little fat bald head feeling as though it were falling off, faster and faster through the grey air and further and further away,in any one no matter which of the three hundred and sixty directions open to a desperate man of average agility, and often I turn, tears blinding my eyes, Haw! without however pausing in my career (no easy matter), perhaps longing to be turned into a stone pillar or a cromlech in the middle of a field or on the mountain side for succeeding generations to admire, and for cows and horses and sheep and goats to come and scratch themselves against and for men and dogs to make their water against and for learned men to speculate regarding and for disappointed men to inscribe with party slogans and indelicate graffiti and for lovers to scratch their names on, in a heart, with the date, and for now and then a lonely man like myself to sit down with his back against and fall asleep, in the sun, if the sun happened to be shining."