Just checking in

Oh, gosh, has it been two months since my last post? Ask me how much I care. Time flies when the world is coming to an end. Has anything important kept me too busy to write during this time? Ask me what I consider important. I was once criticized, by a friend who herself took things entirely too seriously, for my not taking music sufficiently seriously, to which I replied, “Music is entirely too important to take seriously.” It seemed like a clever paradox at the time, and had the desired effect of making her do a mild double-take, but in fact, not even music is that important. Yes it is; why did I say that? Because I’m trying to make a case for not taking seriously even things which deserve to be taken seriously. To quote the motto of the American Nihilist Absurdist Loafers (ANAL) Party: Nothing really matters; and even that doesn’t, really.

I waste hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on the computer. I almost wish I’d never gotten one. I originally got one—a model I can’t even remember the name of, back in the cybernetic Stone Age—for the purpose of processing music. Now, about 5% of my computer time is devoted to music-processing, about 45% to word-processing, and about 50% to web-browsing. I almost never walk any distance of more than 2 miles anymore, and most of that is around the city, not up in the mountains where I ought to be. My dog sits and looks at me wistfully and whines every once in a while. My health is going to hell in a hand-basket. The computer is ruining my life.

But I guess it’s still better than the idiot box. I find it easy to wean myself away from that because I don’t have cable and my reception of the mainstream channels is so lousy that it’s not very enjoyable to watch. So I read. Books. I gather I’m in a vanishing minority in that pastime. And the only one of any importance I’m reading now is Beckett’s Watt.

Beckett is well known to the cognac-scented, pardon me, cognoscenti, and perhaps to a large number who are not, or may arguably be, among the cognoscenti, as probably the greatest Irish writer since James Joyce, and was in fact himself deeply influenced by Joyce, as well as being considered, generally but perhaps arguably, an existentialist, and certainly and unarguably an absurdist, and in fact, one of the founders, so to speak, of the theatre of the absurd, as in Waiting for Godot, famous for the savage humor with which he portrays not simply the absurdity but, according to some, the pessimism of the human condition, although others argue that he is really not pessimistic, since, for all its absurdity, life, in his vision, has a certain grim nobility, this vision being expressed in a style which is noted, particularly in Watt, for sentences of labyrinthine and at times almost incomprehensible complexity, running on for pages on end, although still, at that, more easily comprehensible than, say, The unnamable, in which the text runs on for page after page without the slightest comforting landmark of any punctuation or any other sort of break whatsoever, reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s free-association soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, to refer back to Beckett’s indebtedness to Joyce, and reminding one, in the case of Watt, in terms of bewildering sentence structure, of some of the more distinctive idiosyncrasies of German, a language whose tendency to turgidity is perhaps most famously exemplified in the critical works of Kant, and which is notorious for its use of separable-prefix verbs such as, say, zurückhalten, to hold back, in which the prefix zurück may be separated from the root halten by twenty lines of text, so that, by the time one gets to the prefix, one may very well have forgotten what root it was attached to, although this does not, of course, occur in English, so that one of Beckett’s distinctive trademarks is the stringing together of subordinate clauses that have their own subordinate clauses, and subordinate clauses to the subordinate clauses of the subordinate clauses, and subordinate clauses to the subordinate clauses of those subordinate clauses, creating the same effect of losing track of whatever verb started all this, as well as running through all the permutations and combinations of a series of items, such as a series of people, or a series of physical attributes, or a series of dogs, such combinations, again, running on for line after line after line, and adding to both the humor and the absurdity, since it is, after all, both humorous and absurd to mention that a followed b and b followed c on Monday, but a preceded b and b preceded c on Tuesday, and both a and c followed b on Wednesday, and both a and c preceded b on Thursday, and so on, thus giving the impression that life is so pointless that one is reduced to such desperate devices to try to give it some meaning.

I don’t do it as well as Beckett, obviously. Imitation is the easiest form of laziness.

Time for a drink. My leg hurts. I’m probably suffering from some terminal condition—besides life, I mean. I’ll probably die soon. If you don’t hear from me for another two months, assume the worst. It’ll be Christmas then, which is an appropriate time for catastrophes to happen. A friend of mine actually told me she worried about me when I didn’t return her phone calls because she wondered whether I’d died or not. How touching.