Friday 16 February 2007

The ghost of Samuel Beckett, ah

Did a double-take when I opened my mail inbox at work this morning and found what at first sight looked a message written in homage to Samuel Beckett, or maybe even sent by Sammy himself. I naturally thought to myself, 'Hah! Here's an opportunity to lift the blog into the stratosphere of the high brow and dispense with toilet humour and naked men's buttocks (no names, Bedrich).' So imagine my surprise when upon closer inspection I realised it was clearly one of the those well-known and considered panegyrics from the legendary 'ah' alluding to his recent discovery of the half-dozen emails from Kivak lying dormant in his own inbox:

"ok i've got over ionital hurdle and actually looked at it tiny steps my friend it's lunchtime and the pub awaits ah"

Note the worldly-wise use of the famous Beckettian literary tool of blending sentences together in a sort of stream-of-consciousness slurge on the keyboard and the eye-catching and distinctive lack of punctuation. Here we also note ah's brilliant mimicking of the stark and fundamentally minimalist approach of Beckett. We also see here ah's depiction of life's obstacles (having to get over an "ionital [sic] hurdle" together with the comedic ruse of affecting somebody afflicted with dyslexia and hence placing further emphasis on the sense of battling against the elements), while ultimately mitigating the perceived pessimism by demonstrating that the journey is finally worth the effort and can be achieved through an inherent optimism in the human condition (the awaiting "pub" providing the imagery for mankind's salvation).

Whether this message acts as a precursor to a fuller disclosure of the complete range of ah's literary prowess remains to be seen. In the meantime we shall dig through the photographic archives and see what we can come up in the way of an old image of ah before he does a salinger on us.

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