BECKETT

Having finished "The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989: Samuel Beckett," I am convinced that if there'd been no Samuel Beckett who lived from 1906 to 1989, and he was instead born sometime in the 1960s or 70s, there would still be no Samuel Beckett known to us because there is no way he could publish any of this anywhere today, let alone get a Nobel Prize for it. Not because it is no good, but because there are few places good enough to use it left or heard of in the marketplace anymore. He is a perfect genius, in my mind. But readers today don't want to bother with the cryptic, or the thing that tells the rules to bugger off. They don't want to stretch it. They want to get there fast, save their time (gawd knows to do what), not be challenged all that much.

The guy who wrote (excerpt from "All Strange Way")

"Imagination dead imagine. A place, that again. Never another question. A place, then someone in it, that again. Crawl out of the frowsy deathbed and drag it to a place to die in. Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again. Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there. Stool, bare walls when the light comes on, women's faces on the walls when the light comes on."

...wouldn't stand a chance in the crusty halls of modern literature. There's no way to make a movie out of it. There aren't enough suspects. There's no love interest, obvious anyway. There's only a direct translative line from the deep consciousness to the page, and that will never sell books. The places Beckett would find paper and ink to showcase his stuff would be in the alternative press, the ghostly presence of the can't-get-a-grant publishers. And I highly doubt he'd want to be seen in the hallowed pages of mainstream's usual suspects. The rewards of finishing this book are incalculable, right now. I've soaked it in like a sponge and I am determined to happily alienate many more people along the way in the defense and the use of its ability to collide atoms together to form new elements.

The corporate press, like the corporate movie makers, have only one obvious goal. And in a capitalist society it is the only way they can see to function. You have to look for the unobvious. You have to search for the heart of it. There is nothing but sequel-madness and remaking the same old story with different names. Urban angst. Feelings about the children. The rotten neighbor across the hall.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'm tired of the same old shit written in the same old way. I'm even tired of the same old shit written in a new way. I want to read new shit I never heard of written in a way nobody ever tried before. I know it makes me insane, but I'm not sure what the makes everybody else.