The flat monotone, one hand protectively held against his face.
The sheer oddness of seriously depressive content coming from a tall handsome champion athlete… The oddness of soulfulness offered to a highly lit studio of jock-journalists…
In the midst of life we are in death. In the midst of superficiality we are in depth.
One source has him also saying that he wants “to solve myself,” which made UD think of her guru, Adam Phillips, who warns it ain’t gonna happen. Also Philip Larkin:
‘And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist.
But other good things can happen – settling into who you unchangeably are, and the suffering that life inescapably generates, in a such a way that your “appetitive” energy remains reasonably high (in this case, that a win on the court actually makes you happy and motivates you to win future matches). Since you’re never going to solve yourself, the better path is away from Who Am I and toward simply the daily appetitive enjoyment of your existence — an enjoyment that should indeed involve the enjoyment (or at least you find it interesting; or at least you find it tolerable!) of incessant conflict and uncertainty.
****************
And as happens so often in life, the Zverev scene was taken directly from Waiting for Godot:
the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones
HAMM (exasperated): Have you not finished? Will you never finish? (With sudden fury.) Will this never finish? (Nagg disappears into his bin, closes the lid behind him. Nell does not move. Frenziedly.) My kingdom for a nightman! (He whistles. Enter Clov.) Clear away this muck! Chuck it in the sea! (Clov goes to bins, halts.) NELL: So white. HAMM: What? What’s she blathering about? (Clov stoops, takes Nell’s hand, feels her pulse.) NELL (to Clov): Desert! (Clov lets go her hand, pushes her back in the bin, closes the lid.) CLOV (returning to his place beside the chair): She has no pulse. HAMM: What was she drivelling about? CLOV: She told me to go away, into the desert. HAMM: Damn busybody! Is that all? CLOV: No. HAMM: What else? CLOV: I didn’t understand. HAMM: Have you bottled her? CLOV: Yes. HAMM: Are they both bottled? CLOV: Yes.
Mo Brooks, body-armored rouser of insurrectionists, Trump’s La Pasionaria— until betrayal and defeat twisted her within so badly that she has now agreed to cry her a river to the committee — promises to keep us occupied with her long weepy plaints to anyone who will listen. Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned would seem the appropriate quotation here.
As for Stasigirl: Over the course of two days, would-be Justice Department czar Jeffrey Clark
stood outside in her pajamas in the street in front of her house as the FBI searched it for documents related to her treason.
THE RAID WAS EXACTLY LIKE STASI! she boohooed – until her interviewer, realizing that Fox viewers know fuck-all about Stasi, began calling it Stalinist. Whatever vile authoritarian Thing it was, Clark’s Golgatha (UD advises Clark to switch from historical to religious terminology – much more accessible) will, we have reason to hope, inspire her to unburden herself, at length, to many media outlets.
True, neither of these stopgaps represents our true heart’s desire – it’s Giuliani and Eastman we want, front and center, frothing at the mouth, bleeding from a dye job – but for the moment Mo and Jeff will do fine.
[In perhaps the most shocking declaration about a nuclear holocaust delivered on Russian television in recent months, Simonyan concluded that the idea “that everything will end with a nuclear strike, to me, is more probable than the other outcome. This is to my horror, on one hand, but on the other hand, with the understanding that it is what it is. … We are all going to die someday.“]
‘Two Russian soldiers have been caught venting about Putin’s “bullshit” war against Ukraine in an intercepted phone call as devastating losses reportedly led one soldier to drive over his colonel with a tank.
“Basically, it’s a shitshow here, I’ll put it that way,” an unnamed soldier near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine can be heard telling a colleague in a recording released by Ukraine’s Security Service late Tuesday.
After telling his friend that Ukrainian forces “tore apart” a column of Russian forces sent along with his own unit, he described complete disarray among the Russian military, with 50 percent of the unit suffering from frostbite on their feet…
“It’s such trash here… our own plane dropped a bomb on us,” he said.
“They couldn’t even send off the 200s here,” he said, using a Russian military term for dead bodies. “They rode with us for five days.”
“Even in Chechnya, there was nothing like this,” he said, describing the situation as a “madhouse.”…
[T]wo tactical groups of Russian soldiers in Makarov, in the Kyiv region, lost at least half of their men in battles against Ukrainian forces.
One of the Russian soldiers “blamed the commander of the group, Col. Yury Medvedev, for the deaths of his friends,” [a Ukrainian journalist] wrote on Facebook.
“Having waited for the right moment, during battle, he ran over the commander with a tank as he stood next to him, injuring both his legs.”‘
[Squid Game‘s] plotline center[s] around games resembling viral challenges that then translate seamlessly into memeification, particularly on TikTok, where much of the buzz for the [extremely violent] show has grown among a young audience already used to making nihilist jokes about school shootings and societal collapse.
Written at breakneck speed in response to dramatic political events, Beckett’s En Attendant Mon-Vote was originally composed in French and subsequently translated into English by the author. We have signaled that unusual creative history by retaining the French title for this translated edition.
Notorious for the absurdity and nihilism at its core, En Attendant introduces the world to the bitter bickering, the pointless game-playing, the shameless histrionics, the conspiracy-theory paranoia, and the sheer human pathos of its central characters, Trumpimir and Giulagon — two men whose desperation to remain “center-stage” in their own lives is continually undone by their sense of the almost comic futility of existence.
Thus burdened, both men alternate grandiose aggressive activity with long stretches of withdrawn enigmatic silence, a silence broken, for Trumpimir, by repeated rounds of golf (see the character Luckleigh’s famous speech about golf, as well as tennis, late in the play), and, for both men, by farting in public. Indeed it is the combination of meaningless trivial activity (golf) and the reduction of the human, with all its metaphysical striving, to the lowest animal forms of expression, which gives En Attendant its peculiar tragic/comic power.
We offer an excerpt from the play here.
***************************************
Characters
Trumpomir Giulagon Luckleigh Pozzeo
ACT I
A country road. A tree. A derelict landscaping company with a sign in front reading Four Seasons.
Evening.
Trumpomir, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take apart a voting machine. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Giulagon.
TRUMPOMIR: (Giving up again). Nothing to be done.
GIULAGON: (Advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart) I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Giulagon, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Trumpomir.) So there you are again.
TRUMPOMIR: Am I?
GIULAGON: I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone to Mar-A-Lago forever.
TRUMPOMIR: Me too.
GIULAGON: Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
TRUMPOMIR: (irritably). Not now, not now.
GIULAGON: (hurt, coldly) May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?
ESTRAGON: On the phone.
GIULAGON: (admiringly) The phone! With who?
TRUMPOMIR:(miserably) Raffensperger.
GIULAGON: And he didn’t back you?
TRUMPOMIR: BACK me? (Lets out an enormous fart.) Certainly he didn’t back me. Refused to pick up the phone eighteen times before he finally answered and then he mocked me and then he released a recording of the call! … I’m still waiting… for my vote…
Here’s one from a theater critic who gets it: He doesn’t mention the character this blog has been mentioning from the moment the current president took office: Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu. (Here’s last night’s debate. Settle in.) But in a short piece he makes two other stops along the Theater of the Absurd: Sartre’s No Exit and Carroll’s Wonderland.
And what in particular he gets is that Carroll, Jarry, and Sartre (throw in Beckett and Kafka and Ionesco) deal in tragicomedy – the grotesque mix of violence(“Stand back and stand by.”), farce, and despair that characterizes human beings abandoned by a world of meaning and spirit and therefore no longer human beings at all, only empty angry creatures mired in the thing we’ve got left when humanity vanishes: “primate-dominance.”
Still having trouble grasping the tragicomic absurd, the agonized incredulity we feel again and again at the spectacle of our shabby, vacuous, almost unbearably stupid world? Try this: Our country’s most intensely Christian, most deeply born-again, population, has anointed as its savior, its avatar of spiritual transformation and transcendence, a stillborn baby, one of the dead bundles tossed onstage in another absurdist drama, The Marriage of Bette and Boo. That’s what we’re worth! That’s the value of human life in a dead world!
And that’s why the theater critic writes this – of a political debate! –
“No other presidential debate, ever, has been so personally painful, or made one feel one’s mortality more.“
Why the hell does one feel one’s mortality during a presidential debate?
Because this husk, lent artificial animation with rouge and roughhousing, embodies our fears about about our own death-in-life — he’s Gustav von Aschenbach at the end of Death in Venice, a corpse painted and pomaded in an effort to disguise itself as infused with vitality, spirit, and meaning. The pointlessness of the debate, with Ubu doing his terminal rattle over the thing until time ran out, is the futility we feel when we allow ourselves to contemplate not just the death that awaits us, but the life-in-death of our absurd world. Mr Trump, last night, staged the personally painful possibility that nothing – including us – means, or is, anything.
At 81, Harvard’s highest-profile emeritus has chosen to close out his life anticly and frantically suing everyone in sight. And in return getting sued.
Like his doubles in desuetude, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, he has long been a naughty boy, a game-player, a rule-breaker, and he intends to go down swinging as the rule of law catches up with him. But as he is very old, his punches aren’t landing. He and his doubles are hollow men.
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless
Observers try to capture the convoluted farce Alan Dershowitz has made of his life:
[E]very argument he makes creates even worse fallout: Don’t just deny… demand they sue you! Then get sued. Don’t just litigate the case… get [David] Boies kicked off! End up facing [brilliant litigator] Chuck Cooper. Don’t just claim [Virginia] Giuffre’s mistaken [about your sexual crimes]… accuse Boies of blackmailing you! Get sued by Boies.
He might have quietly settled various cases against him; he might have retreated to Martha’s Vineyard, as the lights dimmed, with a little dignity. Instead, this bizarre American figure, this deflated pop-up doll, keeps trying to pop. We cannot help watching him. And his doubles.
Here we go round the prickly pricks Prickly pricks prickly pricks Here we go round the prickly pricks At five o’clock in the morning.
No, no, don’t go all Macbethian! Eliot Cohen confuses farce with tragedy; and thing of it is, he knows he’s wrong.
To be clear, these are very different people. Macbeth is an utterly absorbing, troubling, tragic, and compelling figure. Unlike America’s germaphobic president, who copped five draft deferments and has yet to visit the thousands of American soldiers on the front lines in Afghanistan or Iraq, he is physically brave. In fact, the first thing we hear about him is that in the heat of battle with a rebel against King Duncan (whom he later murders) Macbeth “unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops.” He is apparently faithful to his wife, has a conscience (that he overcomes), knows guilt and remorse, and has self-knowledge. He also has a pretty good command of the English language. In all these respects he is as unlike Trump as one can be.
Uh, yeah; and that’s why the play du jour ain’t Macbeth, you silly, but Alfred Jarry’s incomparable travesty of Macbeth, Ubu the King!
King Ubu is a stupid babbling conscienceless coward, a walking abomination of vulgarity, appetite, grandiosity, and paranoia.
In the winter of 2012, we met up in Dublin, where he received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College. He was often embarrassed by accolades but embraced this one, coming from the same institution where Samuel Beckett walked and studied. He loved Beckett, and had a few pieces of writing, in Beckett’s own hand, framed in the kitchen, along with pictures of his kids. That day, we saw the typewriter of John Millington Synge and James Joyce’s spectacles, and, in the night, we joined musicians at Sam’s favorite local pub, the Cobblestone, on the other side of the river. As we playfully staggered across the bridge, he recited reams of Beckett off the top of his head.
FIFTY FAILED ELITES! That’s all they are! By my green candle, Madam, I’ll chop every one of them up into tiny bits and flush them down this gold-plated crapper!
Mère Trubu:
OOOOhhh but ooh Père Trubu also that nasty Senator Collins called you a nasty little merrrdddrrrrre plus she’s not voting for you. What’re we gonna do, Père Trubu? Your campaign’s the one in the crapper! How’re you going to be PRESIDENT and eat all the Boston Cream Pie you want and sit around and tell everybody what to do? Come on Pa Trubu: BE A MAN.
PT:
Pschittabugger and buggerapschitt Ma Trubu another word out of you my lady and I’ll shove your stinking face in the crapper! [Rushes into the bathroom; returns brandishing an unmentionable brush.] DON’T MAKE ME USE THIS. [Chases Mère Trubu about the penthouse. She screams.]
MT:
You MORON. You COWARD. You must capture the Clinton woman and JAIL HER.
PT:
Fuck me Madam brilliant idea HOW do you propose that I do it?
MT:
You must sneak up behind her while she’s giving a speech and scream THUS EVER TO TYRANTS and give her a big fat rap on the head with your brush and drag her off.
PT:
You’re a genius my fine woman but wait what if it doesn’t work and I get caught and I get put in jail?
MT:
You MORON. You COWARD. No one will expect a presidential candidate to do something like that so you will have the advantage of surprise. For once in your life SHOW SOME GUTS.
PT:
Call me a coward again Ma Trubu and I’ll smash your teeth in! [Again runs after her with the brush. She screams. End of Act Two.]
Tweet from Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist Joel Benenson: “Polls drop. Trump dumps mgr. — S. Beckett: ‘There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.’”
However — UD has long argued that the urtext for the Trump phenom isUbu.