things move around

Three Beckett plays tonight, and three episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is grossly unfair; at this rate we will be clear of Beckett before we’re a tenth of the way through the 186, or something like that, episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The C4 adaptation of Beckett’s Rough for Theatre II features an all-star cast of Jim Norton, Timothy Spall, and Hugh B. O’Brien, a.k.a., respectively, Bishop Brennan from Father Ted, Rosencrantz from Brannagh’s Hamlet, and some other bloke you’ve never heard of. But what does that matter, when all he does is stand in a fecking window and die?

In the playground today there was a four year-old boy with some sort of handheld video game, standing motionless but for his thumbs, which tapped like those of a WWII (not ”Wii”) morse operator, eyes flickering like fireflies, with two other kids hanging on his shoulders watching, when they could all have been eating soil and fighting like boys ought to. Even though I carried the day morally, the boy’s mother beamed on, adoringly, wallowing in the wrongness of the situation.

Or did they use other digits for morse, in WWII, their index fingers, or their ring fingers, or some combination of the four?

I’ve got the week off work, so instead of blogging Kate and I will be enjoying the spoils of Christmas: whisky, music, Beckett and Star Trek¹, and our little daughter in stripes, gallivanting about the place, a giant in the body of a midget. Happy Christmas to anyone who reads this! Hic.

^{1 There are 178 episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, but only 19 Beckett plays. And only four of them are over 20 minutes. Both are equally great, but it’s frustrating because you think if only Beckett had upped his output, his works would have gone down in history as a great and visionary landmark, an artistic totem, like “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. You may scoff - “quality”, you may say, “is what counts” - but you don’t see Beckett fans congregating in their thousands at Beckett conventions, freakishly dressed and made-up, talking in made-up languages that no-one else understands, do you? Except in academia of course.}

Today I’ve been talking to a woman called Shirley, an enthusiastic IT professional sent by our auditors. I’ve noticed that young women of East Asian descent often have English names which are shockingly out of fashion. In the almost three years I’ve been in Vancouver, I’ve worked with a Mabel, a Florence, a Pearl, a Vera - actually two Veras - and an Olive, all of Chinese or Korean extraction, and none above 30. No Gertrude or Mildred as yet, but I’m working on it.

I don’t know why the Chinese do this; perhaps they’re transliterating their foreign names or possibly it’s just that they are crazy foreigners, but I like it. For a while I wanted to name my daughter (even though she’s not Chinese) Dora, until someone informed me of the ghastly multimedia fictional character Dora the Explorer.

But getting back to Shirley, the thing which struck me about her was that her top two incisors appear to be filed to vampirical points. When she smiles, which is often, you see her fangs flashing wildly, like daggers unsheathed in a murky souk.

Teething, eh? You’re lying there in bed, slumbering peacefully, drooling more than usual but whatever, and then you wake up with a crazy throb in your mouth, and the skin of your gums is literally being pierced and split apart by sharp tooth-like things, which, as you will eventually understand, are teeth.

Sure, it’s easy to laugh now, but imagine having a little stub of bone razor its way, without warning, from somewhere you never thought would spout a tooth - your eyeball for example. That’s what it’s like for babies! Don’t even get me started on caterpillars.

Mark M*dryga
is unfailingly eager
to explain
why Vancouver gets so much rain.

El Presidente is lean, long-necked, and plain. What would you say to him, if you could say anything? He would extend an arm, and a smile, and say “hello”, and it would occur to you that the famed intelligence and acumen, the always-on analytical mind, and the legendary charm, these are just the skin, like the skin of an automaton, a thin frame, and beneath the frame is what? Blank, fathomless calm, a cavernous monochrome room, illuminated thinly by a tiny or very distant flame.

“And how is El Presidente today?” fawns a junior exec. El Presidente smiles and says “Never been better”. Which is true, but equally, he’s never been worse.

“Inscrutable” doesn’t even come close.

More from the BBC: data on the global distribution of Brits. Pensioners are listed separately, so we learn that there are exactly ten British pensioners resident in Albania, four in Azerbaijan, and just one in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Dr Livingstone, I presume.

Azerbaijan is famous for the production of pomegranates. I tried to research statistics on pomegranate production, but instead I learnt that Iran has a Ministry of Agricultural Jihad. Coming soon to a field near you: the suicide farmer.

Ministry of Agricultural Jihad: official site.

9% of people in the UK “have been physically attacked by a drunk woman” according to a BBC survey. This is double the percentage of Brits who reported adverse reactions after eating quorn. So next time your nine year-old daughter cracks open a bottle of Lambrini scuzzante before breakfast, take it away and give her a quornburger instead.

The Beeb piece is a plug for its classily-titled snuffumentary “Bashing Booze Birds”. Like all the other articles on the BBC website, the best bit is the feedback from hoi polloi: as Jason from London comments, “there is nothing worse than an otherwise well-presented, well-spoken, girl totally out of her face and abusive to everyone around her”.

Or, in the words of fellow Londoner Abe, the whole thing is “just another sad indication that society is unravelling like a big wooly jumper snagged on the exposed nail of decadence.”

23 July, 1913. Kafka is having doubts about his proposed marriage. His observation that “I am incapable, alone, of bearing the assault of my own life” is a palpable score in the ‘pro’ column, but not so fast with the hat, mother: “I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to my soul.”

Obviously he never tried kite-surfing. 

Franz sums up today’s entry with customary pith: “Nothing, nothing, nothing. Weakness, self-destruction, tip of a flame of hell piercing the floor.” Ouch!

I’d never heard the phrase “it’s a gong show” until I moved to North America. Now I wonder how I lived without it. Hardly a day goes by without me saying of some debacle, “it’s a total gong show. The boss is going buck-wild!”

Of course it’s not as good as “like a mad woman’s shit”, but it has the advantage of being acceptable for use among middle-class people.

And the leader of the Fijian coup is a bloke called Frank Bainimarama. I don’t know if he’ll ever be brought to justice, but I know one thing: he’s guilty of love in the first degree.