"
Logically, these boards should replace muslims" - curse your meddling, Caldwell *
swallows capsule*
Pared sequel to
Godot. From 2006:
Beckett estate fails to stop women waiting for Godot. Paul Zukofsky being a sort of
half-likeable twat about people quoting LZ's stuff (I'm like 99% sure U.S. Fair Use / U.K.
Fair Dealing is against Zjnr: quoting for review/criticism is not something he can forbid, "except perhaps by spells.") The usual utilitarian (incentivize!, fructify!) and Lockean (it's fucking mine my fucking dad gave it to me) arguments vs. plagiarism (or v. I guess) are applicable with tweaks to justify the belligerent administration of literary estates. They are rubbish. What's more interesting is to
reverse the flow, & apply our more well-disposed thoughts re the Beckett estate watchcerberuses (like, "
well it
is kind of a relief to see a system run again & again with rigorously minor variations, instead of just
Troilus and Cressida set in a sandwich to make it relevant ...") to the ethics of plagiarism. In brief, perhaps plagiarists intensify their complicity with "entropy of thought" (RT @JonathanLear via @KestonSutherland); perhaps plagiarism, as a kind of prototypical "vulgar" practice, contributes to the "grow[in'] mean" of words (@JosephSpence via
ibid.)?
Oh well some
Molloy workshopped:
Could a woman have stopped me as I swept towards mother? Probably. Better still, was such an encounter possible, I mean between me and a woman? Now men, I have rubbed against a few men in my time, but women? Oh well, I may as well confess it now, yes, I once rubbed up against one. I don’t mean my mother, I did more than rub up against her. But another who might have been my mother, and even I think my grandmother, if chance had not willed otherwise. Listen to him now talking about chance. And if you don’t mind we’ll leave my mother out of all this. She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could do it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? She favoured voluminous tempestuous shifts and petticoats and other undergarments whose names I forget. They welled up all frothing and swishing and then, congress achieved, broke over us in slow cascades. And all I could see was her taut yellow nape which every now and then I set my teeth in, forgetting that I had none, such is the power of instinct. We met in a rubbish dump, unlike any other, and yet they are all alike, rubbish dumps. I don’t know what she was doing there. I was limply poking about in the garbage saying probably, for at that age I must still have been capable of general ideas. This is life. She had no time to lose. I had nothing to lose, I would have made love with a goat, to know what love was. She had a dainty flat, no, not dainty, it made you want to lie down in a corner and never get up again. I liked it. It was full of dainty furniture, under our desperate strokes the couch moved forward on its castors, the whole place fell about our ears, it was pandemonium. Our commerce was not without tenderness, with trembling hands she cut my toe-nails and I rubbed her rump with winter cream. Poor Edith, I hastened her end perhaps. Anyway it was she who started it, in the rubbish dump, when she laid her hand upon my fly. More precisely, I as bent double over a heap of muck, in the hope of finding something to disgust me for ever with eating, when she, undertaking me from behind, thrust her stick betweens my legs and began to titillate my privates. She gave me money after each session, to me who would have consented to know love, and probe it to the bottom, without charge. But she was an idealist. I would have preferred it seems to me an orifice less arid and roomy, that ould have given me a higher opinion of love, it seems to me. However. Twixt finger and thumb ’tis heaven in comparison. But love is no doubt above such base contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose. And when you add a little pedicure and massage, having nothing to do with the instant of bliss strictly speaking, then I feel no further doubt is justified, in this connection. The other thing that bothers me, in this connection, is the indifference with which I learnt of her death, one black night I was crawling towards her, an indifference softened indeed by the pain of losing a source of revenue. She died taking a warm tub, as her custom was before receiving me. It limbered her up. When I think she might have expired in my arms! The tub overturned and the dirty water spilt all over the floor and down on top of the lodger, who gave the alarm. Well, well, I didn’t think I knew this story so well. She must have been a woman after all, if she hadn’t been it would have got around in the neighbourhood. It is true they were extraordinarily reserved, in my part of the world, about everything connected with sexual matters. But things have perhaps changed since my time. And perhaps the fact of having found a man when they should have found a woman was immediately repressed and forgotten, but the few unfortunate enough to know about it. She too was an eminently flat woman and she moved with short stiff steps, leaning on an ebony stick. Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. It is quite possible that she held hers tight it her hand, on purpose to avoid it. And it is quite possible that everybody knew about it, and spoke about it, with the sole exception of myself. But there is one thing that torments me, when I delve into all this, and that is to know whether all my life has been devoid of love or whether I really met with it, in Ruth. What I do know for certain is that I never sought to repeat the experience, having I suppose the intuition that it had been unique and perfect, of its kind, achieved and inimitable, and that it behoved me to preserve its memory, pure of all pastiche, in my heart, even if it meantt my resorting from time to time to the alleged joys of so-called self-abuse. Don’t talk to me about the cambermaid, I should never have mentioned her, she was long before, I was sick, perhaps there was no chambermaid, ever, in my life. Molloy, or life without a chambermaid. All of which goes to demonstrate that the fact of having met Lousse and even frequeted her, in a way proved nothing as to her sex. And I am quite willing to go on thinking of her as an old woman, widowed and withered, and of Ruth as another, for she too used to speak of her defunct husband and of his inability to satisfy her legitimate cravings. And there are days, like this afternoon, when my memory confuses them and I am tempted to think of them as one and the same old hag, flattened and crazed by life. And God forgive me to tell you the horrible truth, my mother’s image sometimes mingles with theirs, which is literally unendurable, like being crucified. I don’t know why and I don’t want to. But I left Lousse at last. one warm airless night, without saying goodbye, as I might at least have done, and without her trying to hold me back, except perhaps by spells. But she must have seen me go, get up, take my crutches and go away, springing on them through the air. And she must have seen thewicket close behind me, for it closed by itself, with the help of a spring, and known me gone, for ever. For she knew the way I had of going to the wicket and peeping out, then quickly drawing back. And she did not try and hold me bak but she went and sat down on her dog’s grave, perhaps, which was mine too in a way, and which by the way she had not sown with grass, as I had thought, but with all kinds of little many-coloured flowers and herbaceous plants, selected I imagine in such a way then when some went out others lit up. I left her my bicycle which I had taken a dislike to, suspecting it to be the vehicle of some malignant agency and perhaps the cause of my recent misfortunes. But all the same I would have taken it with me if I had known where it was and that it was in running order. But I did not. And I was afraid, if I tried to find out, of wearing out the small voice saying, Get out of here, Molloy, take your crutches and get out of here, and which I had taken so long to understand, for I had been hearing it for a long time. And perhaps I understood it all wrong, but I understood it and that was the novelty. And it seemed to me I was not necessarily going for good.
Also:
swop “frantic”/”desperate”?
“all” pastiche?
idyll nr duration / pandemonium? (but “heaven”)
“utopia” instead of “idyll”?
“about in the garbage saying probably”
“knowing it was love, for she told me so”
“none does not beat in [?] retreat”
“but retains its tumefaction [?]”
