Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Best list poem ever, Christopher Smart, My Cat Jeffrey.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.
 
Not read any Pynchon but the scatalogical parts of Burroughs are my least favourite bits, call me squeamish. I generally dislike Joyce for other reasons apart from that, but it definitely puts me off him even more. I really wish I could unread those notorious letters to his wife that someone posted on here once, yuk!
I showed them to a fella in a pub last night and he was crying with laughter, couldn’t speak. Put them into text to speech and choose a posh English accent and get stoned and have the best time of your life
 

jenks

thread death
I’m reading Beckett’s essay on Proust as I’m just finishing my re-read of A Recherche - he’s very good on how Time works in the novel - it has that utterly rigorous and forensic nature that you get from his fiction - an unflinching and unwavering focus.
 

catalog

Well-known member
This is a list of "suicide saints" from Jeet Thayil:

“What are you working on now?” I asked. His blue notebook had been in his hands the entire time. I pointed at it. “Is it a poem?”

He said he liked to make lists because a list was a way of shoring up your ruins. He was making a list of suicide saints, he said, a partial list because a complete list would be endless.

“Where would you stop?”

“I’d like to hear it,” I said.

“Are you sure? It does go on a bit.”

“I’m sure.”

He opened the notebook and said the list would begin at the beginning with the Book, because nowhere does the Bible condemn self-murder. How could it when martyrdom was an early variant of suicide? And if suicide was a religious act then suicides were the unacknowledged saints of the universe.

Beginning with Samson under the pillars. Or Saul taking to his sword, his name cursed for all time, like Saint Judas, the second most famous Biblical suicide. Or Jesus himself, whose death was a pact the Son made with the Father, Jesus and all his apostles, self-made suicides to a man.

He said he had come to the conclusion that a complete list was too difficult an enterprise even for him, akin to making a world-sized map of the world. Instead he would begin with the poets and proceed not chronologically but sideways, starting with the earlier Romans such as Lucretius and Lucan and Labienus. Or Attila Jozsef who answered to the name of Pista, because after consultation with the neighbours his foster parents decided that the name Attila did not exist and when he found it years later in a story about the King of the Huns he threw himself on literature as on a sword.

Mayakovsky the gambler, partial to Russian roulette, failed prophet whose gunshot was heard around the world. Sergei Yesenin’s blood-written goodbye, his patent leather shoes and the handheld noose like a scarf around his neck because there was nothing new in dying or in living. And Marina, unable to work, penniless from slaving on the hard ship, her husband and daughter taken, abandoned by her lovers and begging in advance for her son’s forgiveness.

The pharmacist Georg Trakl, whose sweet secret was colour, the white sleep, the silver hand, the silver scent of daffodils, the red body of the fish, the red poppy, the red wolf, the purple clouds, the purple grape, the green silence, the green flower, the black rain, the blue grief, the soft blue footsteps of those who had risen from the dead.

Gérard de Nerval, who told his aunt, this life is a hovel, don’t wait up, and hanged himself with an apron string. Renaldo Arenas sick in New York City, and his note, Cuba will be free, as I already am. Ana Cristina Cesar harnessing the evil of writing to confront desire, who gave in on a London street.

And Celan deep in the Seine, free to be Ancel again. And the outlaw poet Johnny Ringo, his boots tied to the saddle and horse run off, feet wrapped in his undershirt, dead in the fork of a tree from a gunshot to the head.

Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale happy in the wide starlight because the dead are free if only for a single hour. Sylvia, classic head on a kitchen towel in the oven. Assia, acolyte of Sylvia, also by gas. Anne Sexton in furs, sipping a martini in the garage. John Berryman off a bridge into the frozen Mississippi, whose last lines were, I didn’t, and I didn’t sharpen the Spanish blade.

Randall Jarrell’s dark overcoat stepping into night-time highway traffic. Lew Welch, disappeared into the wilderness. Hart Crane, disappeared into the sea. Weldon Kees, disappeared. Harry Crosby, priest of the black sun, who crafted images from the air and gave himself a twenty-five calibre black sun hole.

Reetika Vazirani with a borrowed kitchen knife, taking her infant son first, in a house borrowed from friends. And after the poets, the others. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, pioneer writer in exile, never white enough or warm enough in America, never Indian enough in India, marginalized by preference, performed the rope trick at home. Hargurchet Singh Bhabra, in his leather and shades, smashed dinner plates to the floor of the lecture hall as a writing exercise and with the sickness upon him he changed the name of his novel to Faust.

Andrés Caicedo on a failed mission to Hollywood, returned to Colombia to follow his own rule that young men should not live beyond the age of twenty-five. Géza Csáth, neurologist, violinist, music critic, painter, writer, seducer, wife murderer, morphine addict, whose study of pain led to brilliant complications and poison at the border. Jerzy, who wrote, I’m going to sleep a bit longer than usual, call it eternity. Virginia, bombed from two homes, left on the banks of the River Ooze her hat and cane and a letter to Leonard: everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.

Walter Benjamin in Spain on a trudge to nowhere, transit cancelled, delivered by morphia, whose friend Koestler borrowed some and tried it too, but failed, and tried again forty-three years later, this time taking with him a wife. Malcolm Lowry, buried in Ripe, dead by misadventure or alcohol and barbiturates, rich man’s son who never recovered from early happiness, author of impossible instructions to himself: describe sunlight.

The novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who inherited his mother’s madness, took Veronal for the vague uneasiness. Dazai Osamu, Akutagawa worshipper, five-time attempted suicide, thrice with women, who succeeded alone in a canal. Yukio Mishima’s short sword on its left to right trajectory, then the difficult upward pull; two years later his friend Yasunari Kawabata, who for two hundred consecutive nights saw Mishima in his dreams.

Harry Martinson, killed by critics in a Stockholm hospital, seppuku with scissors; Richard Gerstl, seppuku with butcher’s knife raging against Schoenberg’s wife; Emilio Salgari, seppuku in a park, raging against his publishers, to whom he wrote, at least have the decency to pay for my funeral.

Diane Arbus who said if she had photographed Marilyn, suicide would have been writ plainly on her famous face, as it was on her own, Diane, with her downers and slit wrists and overkill. John Minton, friend, drinking partner, hoarder of Tuinals, painter at odds with an abstracted time. Ray Johnson’s backstroke from the Sag Harbor bridge, Frida’s painkillers, Dora Carrington’s pistol, Pollock speeding and the tree he aimed for, the miniaturist Daswanth’s dagger, Witkiewicz tied to his lover, who revived, Arshile Gorky wifeless, studio burnt down, broke and yearning for clarity. Dalida and her luck the third time round.

Richard Brautigan and Freddie Prinze and Leslie Cheung, who stepped from the Mandarin Oriental in Central, twenty-four floors to the street below.

And the actresses of the Indian south. Silk Smitha, who took the poor woman’s recourse and wound dupatta to ceiling fan. Lakshmisree and Nafisa Joseph, also Monal, also Shobha, all of seventeen. Fatafat Jayalakshmi’s sleeping pills. Prathyusha’s juice and poison in a parked car. Divya Bharati, fooling on the ledge under her window. And my old friend and collaborator, the poet Narayan Doss, dead drunk and dead on platform two of Churchgate Station, and if the cause of death was a heart attack the true cause was suicide by alcohol, the Bombay poet’s recourse.

And the list would end as it began, with a Roman poet, say Cesare Pavese on a hotel bed, writing, “Okay, don’t gossip too much,” because he knew that gossip would become part of his myth, the poet’s suicide myth, which, as we know, is the most powerful of all suicide myths.

When he shut the notebook I told him to pay the bill and take me to his hotel. We held hands in the cab to Connaught Place and kissed in the lift. He told me I tasted nice, strange but nice, a taste he couldn’t place. I laughed and told him it was the taste of clitoris. In the room I looked at myself in the mirror. I told him, take off everything except my panties and scarf. Watch, I said, and turned to lick his face.

He stood behind me and watched the images in the mirror shift and coagulate. Squeeze my ass, I told him. I was cupping my breasts and he was too and it was hard to tell who was doing what to whom, there was so much going on, so many hands. My breasts were sore from my period but I squeezed them together and watched him stare. Never fails, I said, cleavage. Months later he told me that his future paintings flashed then in his head with such clarity that his erection disappeared.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Read act 1 of Godot today, thought it was hilarious. Looking forward to it starting all over again in act 2 tomorrow. Amazing how he manages to string out total inertia for so long and still keep you reading to find out exactly what isn't going to happen next.
 
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woops

is not like other people
Tonight... I've dug deep for mindtwisting rarities to open your third eye & lead you through the doors of perception, across the black seas of infinity to the hill of dreams... if you leave now you have time to get there, so see you later!
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I thought I knew who that was for a sec, but I was mistaking her for Sylvia Beach,


Wow, what a great interview.

Finished Godot today and halfway through Endgame now. More of the same inverted wit as Godot so far, but I'm still laughing at it. It's his ability to sustain all these endless permutations without becoming boring (or rather the boredom's the point) that's so impressive.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Hamm: One day you'll be blind, like me. You'll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me.
(Pause.)
You'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down, and you'll go and sit down. Then you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up. You'll say, I shouldn't have sat down, but since I have I'll sit on a little longer, then I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up and you won't get anything to eat.
(Pause.)
You'll look at the wall a while, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll close them. And when you open them again there'll be no wall any more.
(Pause.)
Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I forgot to quote the funny bit that comes straight after that:


Clov: It's not certain. (Pause).
And there's one thing you forget.

Hamm: Ah?

Clov: I can't sit down.

______________________________

Well, it made me LOL anyway.
 

version

Well-known member
"As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through."

Beckett, letter to Axel Kaun, 1937
 

luka

Well-known member
"As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through."

Beckett, letter to Axel Kaun, 1937
 

luka

Well-known member
its mental when i see the quality of mine own writing cos it just looks like a classic of all time
 

jenks

thread death
I guessed it was probably from Three Dialogues. I spent far too much money on a copy just because I wanted the Proust essay.
 

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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I suppose I'll always be held back intellectually by my lazy inability (or pissy refusal) to read stuff like this.Screenshot 2023-10-28 at 14.37.01.png
 

jenks

thread death
Been reading quite a bit of Beckett recently - a bunch of the shorter plays, the trilogy. Who’s a decent critic on him? Did Kenner write much about him? I somehow missed Beckett when I was young and impressionable. Reading him as an older man now it is pretty painful stuff at times.
 
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