ekleksographia

Beckett born on a Friday April 13th that is Good Friday april 1906. Beckett’s stamp collection (71 stamps on October 24^th, 1915, 574 on April 10^th, 1917). Beckett and the hedgehog. Beckett and pebbles (his love of pebbles: he puts them carefully in his mouth or in the hollows of branches in the garden). Beckett and boxing. Beckett and cricket. Beckett playing rugby (three quarters). Beckett and the motorcycle. Beckett’s red hair. Beckett at the piano. Beckett reading Louise Labé. Beckett’s internal combustions ("it happens at night, mostly at night"). Beckett declaring that English is excessively abstract. Beckett’s German cooking. Beckett writing to Eisenstein to offer him his services (sent the cheapest way). Beckett and Ethna Mac Carthy ("he didn’t sleep with her nor she with him") Proust, Leopardi and Schopenhauer read by Beckett. Beckett and silent film. Beckett and chronology. Beckett and his mother ("I am what her fierce love has made me, and it’s a good thing that one of us has at last accepted that"). Beckett in Dresden, before two men contemplating Caspar David Friedrich. Beckett at Brunswick before Giorgione’s self-portrait. Beckett leaving Germany a few months prior to the exhibition of degenerate art.  Beckett and Orange Curaçao. Beckett and Fernet-Branca. Beckett imitating Joyce (shoes, cigarette, white wine) Beckett’s Irish accent. Beckett’s first French poems. Beckett in Paris (stabbed on twelfth night by a hoodlum named Prudent). Beckett reading Spinoza (the Ethics) and Frédéric Mistral (Lou trésor doù Filibrije). Beckett and Nancy Cunard. Beckett’s room at the Libéria hotel. Beckett at the wheel of a red Delage sports car (driving Peggy Guggenheim to Marseille). Peggy Guggenheim (for one year) in love with Beckett. Beckett and Suzanne. Beckett asked to translate the hundred twenty days of Sodom and accepting. Beckett refusing. Beckett and the resistance. Beckett at Arcachon (chess games with Duchamp). Beckett in the Vaucluse, a field hand (planting chick peas and preferring the squawk of the blackbird to the nightingale’s song). Beckett’s poverty. Beckett jumping into the French language with both feet. Beckett and Bram van Velde. Beckett reading detective stories. Beckett and "Nothing is realer than nothing." Beckett’s manuscripts sent off by Suzanne. Beckett and "I owe it all to Suzanne." Beckett and Godot. Beckett and Alexandre Dumas (especially "the red sphinx"). Beckett and Lindon. Beckett’s mother’s eyes. The red and white tile floor of Beckett’s house at Ussy sur Marne. Beckett at the Médrano circus one evening when Buster Keaton showed up. Beckett and his English novel rejected by a good twenty London publishers. Beckett’s mother’s hands. Beckett’s rolled-collar sweaters. Beckett writing to Pamela Mitchell "Ate a bouillabaisse the other night at the Marquises accompanied by the inevitable Sancerre and wished you were there." Beckett meeting Georges Carpentier. Nancy Cunard publishing Beckett’s Whoroscope. Beckett insisting that Nancy Cunard send him "Parallax" a poem she had written some time before. The trees that Beckett planted (plum, American maple, blue cypress, cedar of Lebanon). Beckett recalling a girl in an old green jacket on a platform at the train station. The first edition of Beckett’s Murphy: 17 copies sold eleven of them wholesale to city libraries overseas. Beckett killing moles. Beckett’s Remington. Beckett and Marguerite Duras. Beckett crazy about ham and spinach. Beckett studying again Beatrice’s explanations of the stains on the moon in "paradise." Beckett passing his days diving off a rock in Yugoslavia. Beckett alone at Ussy ("With the snow and the crows and the school notebook that opens like a door through which I can dive into a now comforting darkness"). Beckett ordering sole. Beckett and Racine’s monologues. Beckett and lieder. Beckett and (visual and aural) rhyme. Beckett and Stevenson’s letters. Beckett and Yeats’ last poems. Beckett wondering what Jesus wrote in the sand. Beckett noticing that the Divine Comedy takes place in 36 hours. Beckett proclaiming "I want to place poetry in the theater, a poetry suspended in the void taking a fresh start in a new space." Beckett in Portugal. Beckett in Sardinia. Beckett in Morocco. Beckett translating Juana Inéz de la Cruz with Octavio Paz. Beckett replacing cigarettes with cigarillos. Beckett accepting the Nobel Prize without going to Stockholm. Beckett’s secret marriage at Folkstone (he was 54, Suzanne 61).  Beckett and television. Beckett and the Mediterranean. Beckett’s postcard to Morton Feldman. Beckett’s "Mirlitonnades" (one of them scratched on the label of a Johnny Walker Black). Beckett’s notebooks.  Beckett and the winter voyage. Beckett and "One has to rediscover ignorance." Beckett defining a difference in nuance between "se faire avoir" and "l’avoir dans l’os." Beckett’s whiskies: scotch malt or Irish. Beckett and Berio.  Beckett and Dutilleux. Beckett and Phillip Glass. Beckett and Stravinsky. Beckett and remorse. Beckett’s blue eyes. Deleuze reading Beckett. Beckett in the end declaring "Language has gone. My heart is gone." Beckett in the vault in the Montparnasse cemetery. Beckett’s books. Today I turn sixty, he would be a hundred. I give myself a present: I read again Beckett’s First Love.