Gogolgirl

Elsewhere

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:56:00 +0000

I've decided to blog elsewhere for the time being, as there are things I want to write about/through that I don't feel totally free expressing in this space. Blogs do this, I suppose. Move and change, and become something different than when one started out...

Library porn

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:11:00 +0000

I love these photographs, mostly because of the way they convey the distinct beauty and personality of each space so immediately. And OMG, the Real Gabinete Portugues De Leitura Rio de Janeiro! So Spanish Baroque-feeling! So incredibly hot!

Dust

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:54:00 +0000

This article on the Perseid meteor shower is totally dorky, but good at explaining the different ways meteoroids collide with Earth's atmosphere.

This opinion piece in the NYT is not bad. I like the idea of dust telling stories.

(On another note, it was exactly a year ago today that I got on a plane and returned to the East Coast from Oakland. In the interim I've been neglecting Gogolgirl terribly, but I think I might start hanging out here again for a little while as I try to work through some things.

Even if blogging now seems so... retro.)

Someone told me recently

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:33:00 +0000

that it is unfair to update my blog without writing a new post. I haven't been here in a long while, so long that it feels strange to drop in like this. Like with a friend you haven't seen in ages, like maybe I needed an invitation. Gogolgirl definitely needs some re-envisioning in light of my curtailed free time -- and a brain that's mostly taken up with graduate classes and teaching. Had I purchased a camera over winter break as I'd intended, I would give a shot at populating this space with images. It's still a good idea, I think, but the camera has to wait until summer.

However, perhaps now that I've broken the silence, I'll come back again soon and do a little writing. I'm not quite clear what I'll write about (paper ideas? french translations? medieval reliquaries? my thoughts about what should happen to each of the characters on LOST?) but I'm also not quite ready to abandon ol' G.g. just yet.

Oh, and how are you, my two dear readers? I've missed you.

Objects and Things

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:04:00 +0000

"The testimony of objects, in other words, brings into the present not just what was lost but the tangible presence of loss, loss in the form of a thing. The recovery of history and its evidence is an imaginative and performative act. This is a fact often lost in the empirical presumptions of museums. The objects are not whole ("this is all that's left") and have lost the context in which they were used. Once staged -- in the theater or the museum -- they are no longer identical to themselves."

"Presenting Objects, Presenting Things," Alice Rayner

The city I hate and adore!

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:25:00 +0000

While others do their bloggerly duties, I have only lyrics to offer. Oh, there are posts in the works: a puppet review, an essay about my family's farm house in the wilds of northern PA, responses to the reading I've done lately. But I am too, too busy at the moment. Finishing and beginning. Writing fast. Grading slowly...

Autumn in New York
Why does it seem so inviting?
Autumn in New York
It spells the thrill of first nighting.

Glittering crowds and shimmering clouds
In canyons of steel,
They're making me feel
I'm home.

It's Autumn in New York
That brings the promise of new love.
Autumn in New York
Is often mingled with pain.

Dreamers with empty hands
May sigh for exotic lands
It's Autumn in New York
It's good to live it again.

Desire, Porter style

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:28:00 +0000

I'd like to make a tour of you
The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you
The East, West, North and South of you
I'd love to gain complete control of you
and handle even the heart and soul of you

(You'll have to forgive me if I randomly post song lyrics. I am beginning a torrid love affair with the poets of Tin Pan Alley.)

Another year

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:41:00 +0000

All in all, not too damn bad. Low-key, but happy. A few drinks with some of the nicest "cool kids" around. Randomly bumping into and having coffee with an old friend. Lots of messages from people I love.

Here's to a year of small, intimate celebrations. Of lovely little fireworks. Of tiny deaths. Of new frontiers.

Fashion and Academia

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 03:28:00 +0000

Perfect together?

(The rest of the magazine this week is rather interesting as well.)

Procrastination

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:06:00 +0000

Some of my very ugly habits are starting to rear their unattractive heads. I didn't have any delusions that writing magically would become effortless upon returning to the PhD. And I keep reminding myself that I do in fact know how best to proceed: in small bits, writing really, really rough drafts at first, only editing once I've filled at least a few pages with words. However, I still have a few leftover things to finish up and my self-imposed deadlines loom. And for some reason, all the rotten forces of self-sabotage seem to be attacking at once. They are a particularly sneaky and evil little army.

I'm ok with the idea that there will be some pain involved in getting this degree. I've (for the most part) decided that it's worth it. And I suppose it helps to be able to write about writing here and know that you, dear reader, are listening. Perhaps, for the time being, this blog will become a space for me to work on/work out my continued issues with writing. That sounds a bit dreary, but then again, it's my blog after all. Y'all* will just have to deal.

*I, despite never having had a southern accent, nor residing in the South, nor spending any significant period of time there except for the one week my family went to Myrtle Beach, SC for vacation when I was twelve -- I, the consummate Northerner, for some unknown reason addressed one of my classes as "y'all" the other day. It was the class I'm particularly fond of and so I'm assuming I meant it as a term of endearment.

Was I the moth or flame...?

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:38:00 +0000

Dear Ira,

Your slangy, modernist brilliance is more than worthy of a semester paper, one that might trace the influences of immigrant theater, vaudeville, and Russian Formalism in your work.

Love,
G.

Where we are

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:27:00 +0000

I didn't realize when I read In the Eye of the Sun at the end of July that it would stay with me this way. I didn't realize on that warm evening in Los Angeles when I swept slightly tipsily through the used bookstore on Franklin Avenue that the huge book I'd grab --because I knew the author's work, because it was a big fat novel and I can't resist them -- I didn't realize that this book would become a sort of primer for the coming year. As I struggle to do my work, to focus on the task at hand; as I learn to live alone for a time; as little wars are waged in my heart and I seek to make sense of my and others' positions. As I try to have compassion, to be logical and ethical, while often feeling only burning selfishness and blatant, implacable desire.

Of course, how could I not relate to Asya? A women whose understanding of the world is filtered through what she's learned from novels. Who worries that certain actions mean she's forever parted company with Dorothea. Obviously, we are not the same. Soueif is brilliant at situating Asya's story in specific political and historical moments, compelling in their own right, and her struggle is so much about creating an identity betwixt cultures, between the the conflicting pulls of home and elsewhere.

But my first impulse after finishing the novel was that I wanted to talk about the characters. Of course, it now seems that what I really wanted to do was talk about myself and those around me.

Where I fit

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 19:18:00 +0000

It's funny how sometimes, sometimes, when you wonder aloud about things, an answer comes quickly. I just found out about an interdisciplinary course that's being offered this semester by a visiting professor. It slightly overlaps with a course I'm already taking (because that course runs overtime) but I'm going to try to talk my way in regardless.

“In this workshop on literary journalism we will explore how nonfiction and fiction can resemble each other yet remain distinct. We will take as our models both journalists (like John McPhee, Jane Kramer, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion) who have reached beyond conventional news style to make their writing as compelling and graceful as that of the best novelists and novelists whose work contains significant journalistic elements (like Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Hemingway, John Fowles). Participants will read and analyze such writers, seek to understand the essential elements of their storytelling, and then undertake a few short writing exercises as well as one long article attempting to emulate the best stylists in the field, while at the same time developing their own distinctive voices. The aim is to practice the form of journalism used in magazines like Harpers, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and book-length works of literary journalism.”

Resume pause.

Vacillating

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:55:00 +0000

I've twice published a post, and twice taken it down. I don't want this blog devolving into some sort of cryptic personal journal. There are so many things on my mind, and so much work to do, and I'm not sure where Gogolgirl fits in. Certain threads run through this space, some that unravel and then reknot themselves. Emotions appear and disappear, present themselves and hide. If you follow closely, you'll catch hints. And hit dead-ends. Underneath it all, like hidden water: a secret.

This is an inbetween space. I started it when I began thinking about leaving my graduate program. Now I've returned.

Perhaps it's time for some reinvention. I'm not sure where this part of me goes at the moment. The writer I am here, the novel reader, the thinker... I'm not sure how she fits back into academia.

Anyway, there will be a pause. Dear reader, I am still here. I am just adapting.

Reasons it's good to be back

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:38:00 +0000

It looks like I'm going to be spending a lot of time at the 92nd Street Y this year.

(For the record, I've always though "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter would make the best theatrical adaptation. Like, since college.)

the known and familiar behaviour of the other

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:52:00 +0000

I just turned on some music and the person upstairs dropped something on the floor. Exactly like they've always done.

Oh, dearest upstairs neighbor I've never met and who may be two or three people for all I know. I realize you disapprove of every single album I own. But right now I love you for dropping whatever it is you drop. It sometimes sounds like a shoe, at other times like loose change. Occasionally I would imagine a single strand of pearls releasing itself from your neck and a shower of pale beads cascading to the floor.

Often, you decide to rearrange your furniture as if prompted by the opening strains of "Oxford Comma." Sometimes the things you drop sound dangerously heavy and I worry.

But then, wanting to be closer to you, wanting to revel in this strange, small homecoming, I turn the music up...

Rereading

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:15:00 +0000

All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

-Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje

Fooling around

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:46:00 +0000

I picked up a few men to take to bed with me tonight. Flaubert, Thackeray, Ondaatje, Murakami. There's nothing for me to read at my mother's house (I am sorry, Jennifer Weiner, but I cannot finish your novel) and all my books are either en route across this wide country or in my apartment in New York, which I don't move back into until Sunday. I was looking for some women too, but I only had five minutes in the bookstore and this is what I grabbed. An orgy of novels before I have to give them up for months? Perhaps. Or maybe a key to staying sane(r) this semester is to not deprive myself of the sweet voice of fiction before sleep.

I have one week to finish the papers and two days to prepare for teaching. I am nuts. However, I just might pull it off. I do think, in fact, that going back to graduate school is indeed what I want, even if I've gone about it in the most unstructured of ways.

Please cross your fingers for me or send me vibes or do whatever you do.

In case you were wondering

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:20:00 +0000

if a girl can bite her lip, pull out her hair, pace the apartment and occasionally collapse into a heap of nervous sobs all while writing a paper on phenomenology, well....

She can.

And once in a while she'll send a book or pencil hurling across the room just for effect.

My new hat and I...

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:11:00 +0000

took a vacation. The bf came too. The cats, sadly, had to stay home.

We three went to the Sierra Nevadas. On the first rather inauspicious night, I was attacked by bedbugs (yup, they're everywhere) and we had to sleep in the car. On the second day I was scared shitless by the steepest, windingest, no guardrailiest road I've ever encountered. Sheer 4,000 ft. drops. Gorgeous views I was far too nervous to fully appreciate.

But by the third day, things got better. I walked around the largest tree on earth. I stood beneath a waterfall. I stumbled upon a lush meadow. I recognized my boundaries and declined to climb up a huge rock overhanging the mountains. We cooled off in a pristine, placid swimming hole in the Kaweah river. My hat provided nice shade.

After a few more sweltering hours of driving and a long ferry ride, we indulged in a little oceanside camping at Two Harbors on Santa Catalina Island. Kayaked around some pretty cliffs and caves and watched bright orange garabaldi glide amid the underwater gardens in the clear, cool water beneath us.

Lastly, we did LA. Tar pits, Farmers Market, Hollywood, Venice Beach, Los Feliz. I finally saw the fantastic and long-anticipated puppet exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. And Japanese painting at LACMA. Sat next to this guy, and his dog, at dinner. Watched Hellboy II in Grauman's Chinese Theater. I even went shopping in Beverly Hills (okay so it was for tea, but it still felt luxurious)!

Finally, we drove back through the searing, dusty, agricultural San Joaquim valley to chilly temperatures here in the East Bay. This morning I made myself some organic Yunnan tea blended with French Provençal lavendar and bergamot, I'm now washing and drying all of our clothing and bags on hot hot hot, and I'm ready to write furiously.

Because I'll be returning to the East Coast in a few weeks...

And in this corner...

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:32:00 +0000

It seems to be a habit of mine to say a long, heartfelt goodbye and fairly soon after give in to the temptation of a little postscript.

This one is just to say that I'm beginning, for possibly the fifth time, George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. The flagrant binarism of the title alone is shocking, isn't it? But what a lovely promise: to spend 368 pages (including bibliography and index) meditating on the differences between the God of T. and the God of D. It's absolutely everything my old-fashioned, Russian author-loving, metaphysical heart could desire.

The thing is, I've started this book many times before and never finished. I'm afraid to, honestly. I've built it up so far in my head that whatever it turns out to be could only be a disappointment, right? Maybe I shouldn't read it. (Unless I can somehow claim it's a work of reader-response criticism: "a reader's response, his preference between a Tolstoy and a Dostoevsky (a Corneille and a Racine, a Broch and a Musil) will point to, will enlist his own philosophy of life or lack thereof.... What is entailed by the greater trust we invest in the one rather than the other, neutrality being, I believe, factitious if not impossible.")

Leaving aside Steiner's sweeping delegation of each individual reader to one of two teams (of course, I'd be batting for D., but still), I came across a nugget in the preface to the Second Edition. Steiner goes on as usual about the limited shelf life of criticism (criticism needs refridgeration, literature is like canned goods -- this is my analogy, not his) and then talks a little about his critical influences. Focusing on the "New Critics," by whom he was shaped but ultimately found limiting, he writes approvingly of their quest to be "poet-critics" whose project "must itself seduce by complexity of nuance and rhetoric."

Criticism that seduces. Arguments that draw you in gradually, then slyly make you wait. Arguments built not only on discursive structures but also in the subtlety of phrasing. That pointedly leave a little to the imagination while promising the most pleasurable of resolutions.

Criticism that makes you work a little but ends with a very sweet reward.

It's something I'd been aiming for in my critical writing, something that I'd sensed was necessary -- this artfulness, this poetry -- but I hadn't seen it written about in quite this way before. It's not that I want to be a New Critic or anything (god forbid!)...

I just want to seduce you with my mind ;-)

*******

(and also, apparently, with my spelling mistakes)

A Hiatus

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:56:00 +0000

A kind of summer vacation, if you will. See, I have these papers I have to write if I want to go back to my Ph.D. program. And although it doesn't seem like I post very much here to begin with, I've been spending way too much time on the internet. And right now I have very little time to waste.

Beyond the papers, though, there are other things I have to sort out before I go back to NYC. Some difficult things. Some logistical things. Not necessarily things I can or want to blog about, but stuff that requires emotional energy. So: a little time off. To think and write and make decisions offline.

Anyway, I hope you'll keep in mind that Gogolgirl loves you and that when she's not spending time eating this, she'll be working very hard.

And missing you, of course.

Reviewing in typically self-indulgent style

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 18:49:00 +0000

Last night, the boyfriend and I watched Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming. We moved the TV into the bedroom, so for the first time since we've been in CA we were both able to stretch out comfortably. Movie watching on the little red toy couch had devolved into cramped, tangled affair, with me absurdly complaining of arthritic knees and the boyfriend constantly shifting his torso accompanied by exaggerated expressions of pain. Add to this two cats who insist on clinging to stationary human body parts against all attempts to detach them. We were a severely disgruntled pile of limbs and fur.

Movie watching on the bed, in contrast, is luxurious. Even the cats seem happier.

Kicking and Screaming, if it's not obvious, was my Netflix choice. The bf prefers obscure foreign documentaries on depressing subjects or Sam Peckinpah westerns. I, on the other hand, am drawn to flimsy, self-conscious indie flicks the way I'm drawn to Vintage paperbacks. It's a kind of shallow solipsism that I'm certainly not proud of, but what can I do? We all have our guilty pleasures.

Very briefly: The film was made in 1995. It involves a group of (male) friends who've just graduated from college and are having a difficult time making the transition to the post-college world. In the first scene we learn that the main character, Grover, was looking forward to moving to Brooklyn with his girlfriend, but she's unexpectedly landed some kind of writing fellowship in Prague and plans to abandon him for a European adventure. The nerdy-neurotic/sexual escapades of the friends and their witty verbal exchanges are intersperced with flashbacks to the couple's senior-year courtship, now sadly cut off. The guys lope through the next 12 months, still living together near campus, still immersed in the cycle and structure of the academic year, repeatedly attempting to extricate themselves and eek out new identites and repeatedly failing. Or almost failing. On the whole, the film was mildly funny, a tad too long, and otherwise pretty innocuous and enjoyable.

Still. It took me back.

I graduated from college in (gasp. choke.) 1996. I took off for my own European adventure not long afterwards, and returned close to Thanskgiving, full of culture and grand ideas and perfectly primed to make an emotional mess of my romantic life. Which I did, stunningly. I didn't so much lope through that first year out as I barrelled, like a woefully misguided freight train. A curiously malleable and lightweight freight train. A freight train who spent most of the time with her head in a book or sleeping with the wrong person. Possibly on occasion doing both at the same time.

Honestly, the uncanny thing about the movie, perhaps the thing that brought that post-college year back so vividly, is how Grover keeps telling everyone that his ex-girlfriend is in Czechoslovakia so that his father finally has to inform him that actually it's the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic and Slovakia. Two separate countries. I'd done exactly the same thing when I was telling people about my upcoming trip, describing how I'd be going from France to Hungary and then to Czechoslovakia. Until a brand new friend corrected me, in an abrubt way that made me laugh. It was perhaps one of the first things he said to me and I was just slightly taken aback. But I liked that, to him, precision mattered. It mattered to me too.

And then, in the end, I didn't make it to the Czech Republic after all. I got terribly homesick in Budapest, started running low on cash, and after repeatedly annoying the intimidating Hungarian ticket agent by buying and returning a ticket back to the States, twice, I finally got on a plane and flew home. To get a job and mess up my life a little. The Czech Republic and I... it simply wasn't our time, I suppose. Kind of like Grover's spontaneous and grand attempt to talk his way onto a flight to Prague at the end of the film, only to realize he doesn't have his passport. Just not meant to work out.

***************

And yet, Czech Republic, you've remained near to my heart over all these years. It's more than a little mysterious, really. This steadfastness. Despite our distance now, at times I feel so incredibly close it unnerves me. I long for you with abandon.

My life is rife with uncertainty

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:27:00 +0000

For example, I'm not sure which is more quintessentially French: escargot or Opération escargot.

And I'm not sure which gets me more excited: this critical review of the works of religious thinker/historian Michel de Certeau or this.

How 'bout you?

Sunday (Meditations on) Style

noreply@blogger.com (Gogolgirl) — Mon, 26 May 2008 02:31:00 +0000

In which I foist another old (and luckily, short) paper on you in lieu of writing a new post. Because I can. And because I have lots of them hanging around.

I'm dredging up this one because I've been thinking a lot over the past few days about the ethical implications and possibilities of style. And about the sensuous, intoxicating, dangerous potential of language. Asking myself where my responsibilities lie.

Here's some purely old-fashioned, texual criticism of Samuel Beckett's Endgame that also begins to suggest larger questions about our complicity as pleasure-seeking readers. If I were writing this paper now, instead of in my first semester of graduate school, I'd certainly have thrown in some reference to Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text.

And yes, I know in this essay I'm grouping all readers under the umbrella of an unindividualized, universalizing "we." I'm sure the upcoming weeks of reader-response theory will rid me of any such tendencies. I'm letting the paper stand in all its gaps and inadequacies.

(For the record, I'm also sort of involved in a project of looking back on where my proclivities and inclinations have led me so far in grad school as I attempt to make a big move forward. Trying to return to myself as a thinker, ground myself in a way, as I have a strange feeling that certain doors are soon to be burst wide open.)

*****************************

Words and Pleasure in Samuel Beckett's Endgame

Although I am certainly not unique in my approach, there is not an overwhelming amount of commentary on the nature and function of language in Samuel Beckett's Endgame. This perhaps could be attributed to some of the popular critical notions about Beckett's relationship to language. In her essay "Words About Words: Beckett and Language," Dina Sherzer outlines common approaches to the subject, including "that Beckett distrusts language, that he thinks that language is inadequate, and that in his works he demonstrates the bankruptcy and the nullity of language." And indeed, Martin Esslin, in The Theatre of the Absurd, has pointed to this mistrust of language as a defining aesthetic factor for Beckett and his contemporaries: the poetic image which is physicalized on the stage; the intuitive, rather than discursive, vision of reality which the absurdist playwrights attempt to communicate is for Esslin a result of their belief that language can no longer express anything about the human condition. As Sherzer explains, this attitude is indeed partly true for Beckett and she posits a possible influence of the German philosopher Fritz Mauthner, "who repeatedly discussed the vanity of words and the impossibility of knowledge through language."

And if we look within Endgame, we can certainly find an apt example of this viewpoint in Clov's final monologue: "I ask the words that remain -- sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say." Or earlier on: "I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent." It's also significant that Beckett is an Irish, English-speaking author who began to write in French precisely because he perceived that in the French language he had no style. Among other things, this seems to indicate a suspicion of language, as if one's style, the way one wears language, has the potential to obscure or obfuscate the thing that needs to be said.

But, as Sherzer also points out -- and what I think we can find from looking closely at some examples from Endgame -- Beckett's relationship to language is not quite that one-sided. And indeed, when approaching the work of a writer who began -- and continued -- as a novelist, who spent years teaching language and literature, and who was the protégé and friend of no less that James Joyce -- that dizzying inventor of words -- it does seem hard to believe that such a relationship would be very easy to categorize as one thing or another, or so seemingly dismissive as some critics have suggested. Within Endgame itself, there appears a remarkable amount of linguistic play, poetry, and discourse on language. In this paper I propose to touch upon a very small corner of the play's textual landscape, exploring a few landmarks that have emerged abruptly and stunningly in my reading of the play -- expressions and, more specifically, single words that seem to me to rise up from the flatness like plateaus, and from which I think we might gain access to potentially new vistas.

Paul Lawley, in his essay "Symbolic Structure and Creative Obligation in Endgame" describes the textual landscape of the play as "grey." But he finds that when the characters are describing worlds beyond their own, worlds from the past or worlds of a wishful, imaginative elsewhere, they use single words of description (like "Ardennes", "the road to Sedan", "Lake Como" -- or in Hamm's case "Flora! Pomona! Ceres!"), which, like tiny bulbs or candles, light the text with a "mytho-poetic" glow. I propose that a similar effect is taking place in certain instances when Hamm and Clov make reference to their births, or their beginnings (which could also be considered a foreign territory in this land of endings). There is a slight shift we feel in the use of certain words, a strangeness, a very precise and subtle difference in the air, which has some profound effects.

The first instance I'll mention is Hamm's line: "Something dripping in my head, ever since the fontanelles." Hamm is speaking of the duration of the dripping of what he calls the heart (also at one point a vein, or a little artery) in his head, which he has experienced, ostensibly, since he was an infant. There seems to be a Formalist objective to Beckett's use of the word "fontanelles": it's a surprise, a tiny little shock that jolts us slightly. Beckett could very easily have written "ever since I was a baby," "or ever since I was young," and have kept very much in the "style-less" tone of the dialogue. But he uses instead this evocative and strange (and yet, achingly specific) word which appears to come out of nowhere.

Fontanelles, of course, are the fibrous membranes that connect the bones of the skull in a small infant. During childbirth, the fontanelles allow the bones of the head to overlap their edges so it can pass through the birth canal without compressing and damaging the baby's brain. These bones ultimately fuse together once a child reaches between a year and a year and a half of age. Beckett's word choice here is rich and suggestive and avoids the cliché, "ever since I was young," which would barely register to an English-speaking audience, using instead a word from which immediately blooms images of fragility, vulnerability, tenuousness, smallness. Who hasn't been warned as a child, when holding, or playing, with a baby, to be careful of the "soft-spot:" the tiny, pulsing, downy indentation that seems to mark a being not yet fully-formed, a mind not yet sealed and determined and all the more vulnerable for it. It is a word firmly connected to the body, to birth, to growth. My illustrated Oxford English Dictionary includes with the definition of "fontanel" a diagram of a baby's skull, the bones and the membranes labeled; it's a tiny, peaceful-looking, semi-transparent head floating unattached to any body.

(And there are a number of critics who have read Endgame as happening inside a skull, perhaps inside the head of Hamm: the set design, with its two small windows placed up high (two eye sockets), is seen to support this reading. The play thus becomes the internal drama of a man who is dying, ending. "Fontanelles," then, could be read as a time before the skull had closed, before Hamm had become trapped within his own mind.)

Lawley speaks of an "echo principle" in Engame, a concept which he derives from Beckett's own comments on the play: "There are no accidents in Fin de partie. Everything is based on analogy and repetition." Hamm's "ever since the fontanelles" is a kind of echo of a line Clov speaks earlier in the play. In that scene, Hamm tells him "I thought I told you to be off," and Clov responds, "I'm trying." The stage directions indicate that Clov then goes to the door and halts, and says, "Ever since I was whelped."

In this instance, the expected "Ever since I was born" (Clov has been trying to leave Hamm every since he [Clov] was born) is replaced by something stranger, unanticipated, and again, highly evocative. It is dogs that are whelped: tiny, squirming puppies emerging bloody and squealing. When used to describe the birth of a human being, it has highly derogative connotations emphasizing the bestial aspects of procreation. This word prefigures Hamm's "fontanelles" in its specificity and its evocation of a kind of beginning, of birth. And in its specificity, it lies in stark contrast to other lines spoken by Hamm and Clov. For example, Hamm implores Clov "What's happening?" and Clov replies "Something is taking its course." This line is ominous, almost chilling in its vagueness. Or Hamm, struggling to describe to Clov what has gone on for too long: "This…this…thing." The characters thus seem to be able to use words quite pointedly at certain times, to describe specific events; at others, words utterly fail them as they attempt to grasp the mysterious and the immense.

Hamm, I think it is useful to point out, is an author as well as an actor. As he tells his story, and the story of the vassal who comes to him imploring for shelter for himself and his son, Hamm frequently edits. For example: "You prayed -- (Pause. He corrects himself.) You CRIED for night; it comes -- (Pause. He corrects himself.) It FALLS: now cry in darkness." He also takes much pleasure in the well-placed word, the finely-turned phrase: "You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness. (Pause.) Nicely put, that." In a similar way, I'd like to suggest that in the pauses after the phrases "…ever since the fontanelles" or "Ever since I was whelped," in the way Beckett frames them within the text, there is the sense that we can almost hear Beckett's own, reflexive, "Nicely put, that." These words certainly give us a sense of pleasure in their strangeness and aptness, a pleasure of which it is highly doubtful Beckett was unaware, or to which immune.

But there is another side to this pleasure in the well-chosen word. Take the exchange between Hamm and Clov as Hamm searches for the right word to describe the landscape outside:

HAMM: Nothing stirs. All is --
CLOV: Zer--
HAMM: (violently) Wait till you're spoken to!
(Normal voice.)
All is…all is…all is what?
(Violently.)
All is what?
CLOV: What all is? In a word? Is that what your want to know? Just a moment.
(He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope turns toward Hamm.)
Corpsed.
(Pause.)
Well? Content?

There is pleasure, contentment, that Clov, perhaps Hamm, and of course, we -- the audience or the reader -- get from this utterly specific, redolent, and strange word. Beckett gives us a full pause so that it can be fully absorbed. It seems to convey everything we know of misery, waste, loss, and decay within the single heart-beat of its one elegant syllable. But should we be taking pleasure in such a finely-wrought description? Are we not acting in the same manner as Hamm, who in telling his pitiful story of cruelty and degradation is above all finding pleasure in the way it is told? Lawley points out in his essay that Hamm's values are "aesthetic rather than ethical." I think we can see Beckett using words within Endgame to subtly challenge us to face our (and perhaps his) complicity with Hamm. What does it mean to enjoy the perfectly-formed description of something wretched and debased? And what does it mean to author it?