Waste Books- "Watt" by Samuel Beckett

Join us for this episode of Waste Books as Jordan, Phil, Dan, and Eric discuss Samuel Beckett's oddball novel, Watt.

This episode's book was chosen by: Dan

Also available on iTunes!

Overview

Be prepared for Watt. Few novelists find the ability (or gall) to include the syncopated musical notation of three croaking frogs or a two-page description of the twenty ways four objects in a room are positioned. There are sentences written backwards, a man who eats the same meal every day, and an unseen dog that has its origins explained for longer than any other scene in the novel. This unseen dog’s story begins to feel more real than most of the surreal novel, and these moments clarify that amidst the abysmal tones and purgatorial drudgery, Beckett is trying to tell you the most important fact about life.

The story about the peculiar protagonist, Watt, is not a direct one. All that can be said of the plot is that our Watt ventures to a manor in the Irish countryside where he works for an obscure duration for obscure reasons, eventually leaving having learned nothing. Watt works for a Mr. Knott, even more enigmatic than our “hero” whose quotidian tasks epitomize the banal and tedious. The details surrounding Watt and his environs do nothing less than chronicle a prevailing sense of absurd purpose. The characters are ugly, their treatment of each other inhumane, and those considered the most sane are more vapid than the universe the audience is forced to recognize.

Heralded as the last modernist, Beckett stretches the movement to its disintegration point and exhausts the function of the narrative. He sequences the story out of order, distorts the events, enumerates catalogues worth of permutations resembling either pretzel logic or the most precise and thus insane depictions of analysis. Always, the metaphorical specter of death looms over the characters, influencing their nonsensical behaviors, the few most resistant to its terror are those most aware of the beckoning soil beneath their feet.

The mirror that Beckett lifts to our face through Watt is of an unmistakable absurdity in something unmistakably familiar, the two contingent on the other, the familiar birthing the absurd. As hopeless as Watt or Beckett appear, the two find a way to reconcile truth and existence, a means to abide with honesty and selflessness. Watt finds a way to speak of our eventual absence in the only thing more real, our presence: “For the only one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something…” the darkest iteration of affirmation in our modern times.

-Jordan Finn

Further Reading

Here's a review of Watt from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett-watt.html

Here's an interview with some shitbird whose favorite book is Watt:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/you-begin-to-breathe-again-samuel-becketts-humor-as-a-coping-mechanism/281642/

Here's an article about a gathering celebrating Beckett's death:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/theater/celebrating-beckett-against-his-will.html

Here's a longer piece about Beckett as a whole:

http://www.samuel-beckett.net/laughter.html

Here's a long piece on Watt by some bum:

http://samuel-beckett.net/Gyorgy/Dragoman.html

This episode's music is a track called "Levees" by Waste buddy Parker Brown. To catch up on the rest of our episodes and delve into some more great books click here!

Podcast Produced by Phillip Griffin

Beatnik City Council

Beatnik City Council is a group formed by Ty Herman, Brie Ripley, and myself, three twenty-somethings determined to bring an all-ages venue to a midwestern city whose leaders would rather pursue interests of industry and commerce. (The mayor, a real estate tycoon, once said in response to a question about youth leaving the city, "If millennials want to move because Billings is boring, I'll sell their home for them.") While parking lots and strip malls have sprung up like dandelions in west Billings, downtown has been left to largely fend for itself.

The three musketeers: Phil, Brie, and Ty. Photo by Hannah Potes.

After the closure of the treasured Mule Skinner, the last remaining independent and all-ages venue in Billings, we decided that the best way for us to encourage the city's artistic and cultural development would be to open a venue ourselves. Drawing from our experience in house shows, garage shows, all-ages spaces, and other DIY venues, BCC is organizing to foster a robust culture of the same to Billings, giving all people but especially youth a place to perform and practice.

You can follow us here on Waste Division as we work toward a legitimate  venue, starting with "pop-up" events to raise funds and public awareness of our goal. BCC will do our best to provide details of the trials and tribulations we find in the process of opening this venue, aiming to inspire folks who might want to do something similar in their own cities and towns. See below for our first installment!

See deets on the first pop-up event here.

For other updates:

Our Process Thus Far

We started by simply meeting once a week, talking and writing to refine our goals and boil them down into the following mission statement:

 MISSION STATEMENT

to provide a communal space in which all people, especially youth, can express themselves through art, whether that be in the form of a music concert, art exhibit, or other medium.

to provide a space that encourages individual growth and expression, as well as that of the larger community of which the individual is a part.

to provide a safe and sober space, especially for youth, in which members of the community can learn creative and practical skills ranging from sound engineering and meditation to reading and fermentation.

to provide the space and the tools necessary for people to express themselves through any art form they’d like. This includes the provision of practice spaces for bands, learning spaces for workshops, or simply a space to discuss ideas and plans.

to provide passionate youth an outlet and space to hone their craft, bringing fresh blood into the Billings art community. We see a lack of these spaces in the Billings area, and think that the health of the larger artistic community hinges on the willingness of individuals, particularly youth, to stay in Billings and feel invested in a project they care about.

to create an artistic community in which artists can challenge and improve themselves and their craft alongside their peers.

GETTING HELP

But we soon realized that we needed more than ideas. We needed to do stuff. But we didn't have the social, political, or financial resources to really get going. We used our meeting time to brainstorm who in our community might be interested in helping us by serving on an advisory board, particularly older adults with connections who could help us further organize and promote our vision. Many of them we already knew from our involvement in the creative scene, so we'd just email them, telling our story and presenting the mission statement.

SERENDIPITY

One of the people we met with, Anna Paige, a local writer and teacher, was working on getting an Artspace established in Billings and agreed to meet with us to see about our common goals. Artspace is a national group that helps communities build affordable work-live spaces for artists. Prospects did not look great for Artspace; their project had been trying to get funding from the city for almost ten years.

Ty and I testified in favor of funding the project in front of city council as a gesture of solidarity with the Artspace folks--and also because I was tired of hearing old people grumble about young people "not being involved." I wanted to make an appearance as a member of the creative class and remind the council that we still exist. I also hoped it would be good to get into the public eye a bit.

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Artspace did not receive approval for the $500,000 they had requested. Shortly after the city council meeting, a newpaper article came out detailing the evening's discussion, giving the council some flack for being backwards in their priorities and for one council member's remarks about "beatniks" on social media after the meeting. I was not surprised by the reaction of the council: many of the members are old white men--people with the time for a four hour meeting on a Tuesday night and little patience for something as impractical as art.

But the article helped us get in touch with a professor in town, Aaron Rosen, who asked to meet with us and talk about our plans, as he had plans of his own for an industrial sculpture garden or warehouse space. We decided to collaborate on a "pop-up" event as a way to garner attention and support (and some $$$) for future events, with the larger goal of opening our own venue ASAP.

Phil and Ty with London artist G. Roland Biermann and Dr. Aaron Rosen for Beatnik City Council's first "pop-up" event. Photo by Casey Page.

These events will hopefully serve as solid grist for grant-writing, demonstrating to a potential benefactor that youth in Billings are hungry for spaces where they can comfortably express their autonomy through art.

RESOURCES

We only recently got what seems to be a must-have book for anyone looking to organize like this, In Every Town: an All-Ages Music Manualfesto. Shannon Stewart recounts her own experience founding Seattle youth space VERA, but also includes oodles of others' accounts in doing similar work around the country. This book is out of print, so a little rare and expensive--about $65 bucks. But we got a cheap one that popped up on Amazon for $20. Either way, the book is well worth the money, especially if you can pitch in with some friends.

Stay tuned for photos and more!

-Phil

*Cover photo from Richard Dreyfest, a community festival organized in Billings, MT the last four years. Captured by David Jacoby.

Waste Books- "No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy

Join Cooper, Jordan, Phil, Dan, and Eric as they talk about No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.

Also on iTunes!

Overview

The highway that is No Country for Old Men gets you lost even though the two-lane blacktop never deviates in direction. It’s just that that first wrong turn screwed everything up and turning back now is as impossible as turning back time itself.

For those who’ve seen the Coen Brothers film, the novel No Country for Old Men is just as blood-soaked and cerebral as the silver screen ever portrayed it. Only a novelist as commanding as Cormac McCarthy can juxtapose sobering meditations on determinism and entropic decay with brutal tableaus of grisly violence along with their lurid aftermath on the body and soul. Because McCarthy is such a deliberate writer, aiming for palpable precision over entertainment, the violence he depicts is rendered all the more visual, all the more real in its considerations to weighing each word in measurements of time and mass. Violence here is not the murders of a few men, it’s the medical examination of death with the reader bearing witness as if you were pumping gas across the street, the bitter taste of iron in your mouth.

Unlike the film, the novel underscores the loneliness of characters like the desperado Llewellyn Moss or the anachronous sheriff Bell ruefully looking back at his past as the future comes slamming at him. These existentialist undercurrents rise up like oceanic groundswells in the hushed moments of a firefight – a Kierkegaardian angst where a bullet between the eyes signifies more than just the end of one’s life. And then there’s the isolated terror of the film’s central antagonist, Chigurh: an entirely human force with an inhuman drive as inexorable as fate itself, whipping between the Texan counties as a sort of grim reaper hellbent on quashing man’s attempts to break away from a system of a demented (or natural) order of power, domination, and inevitability.

Perhaps the highlight of the work is McCarthy’s adroit handling of the prose. It’s as if the man is not writing a novel but crafting some sort of austere furnishing for a friend, planing and sanding the wood with a carpenter’s finesse. The words are active and direct, the sentences laid bare as sun-streaked bones, paragraphs with such a strong physical sense they feel as if one can lift them out of the page and place them on a table.

As dark as the mood and themes may be, everything is exposed and nothing is hidden, reminding one of what Stephen King once said about horror being a substitute for a far greater horror: the lack of meaning in the everyday. What’s truly frightening about NCFOM is how McCarthy redlines inhumanity not in Vietnam or Darfur but in the mid-afternoon sun of the American Heartland, the perfect setting for a case study in fate, violence, and meaning for our time.

-Jordan Finn

Further reading/listening

Partially Examined Life podcast

http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/09/21/ep63-cormac-mccarthy/

New York Times review

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/books/review/no-country-for-old-men-texas-noir.html?_r=0 

Music for this episode comes from producer Piecemeal. The track is titled "Chartreuse."

Produced by Phillip Griffin.

To catch up on the rest of our episodes and delve into some more great books click here.

Waste Books- "Sabbath's Theater" by Philip Roth

In this episode of Waste Books Cooper, Jordan, Phil, and Eric discussed Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theater.

Also on iTunes!

Overview

“Sabbath did not care to make people suffer beyond the point that he wanted them to suffer; he certainly didn’t want to make them suffer any more than made him happy.” At 64 years old, the Mickey Sabbath of Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater lusts for female flesh as if (and maybe it does) his life depends on it. The master puppeteer who once used his finger puppets as a dignified career is now riddled with the aches of osteoarthritis and finds old friends and a laundry list of lovers as his remaining fodder fora relentless and hilarious week of manipulation and shameless seduction.

A man with no credo, Sabbath finds his only purpose in life cheating on his wife with the voluptuous and equally prurient Drenka Balich, who at the novel’s beginning, succumbs unexpectedly from ovarian cancer leaving Sabbath with only memories of a sordid lifetime to parse. A man in bed with the days of youthful philandering in the merchant navy and ‘60s free love, Sabbath flees his unhappy New England home forNew York City and confronts the realization that at the end of the century nothing is left for him but a tête-à- tête with a haunted history of death and trauma.

Roth’s writing is that of a craftsmen, presenting characters and situations with a relaxed grace that embodies the loquacious confessions of a protagonist spilling his guts, but without even a paucity of contrition. He fleshes out Sabbath’s saga by providing rich flashbacks, initially overloading readers with a dense history of references to Sabbath’s terrible losses, but slowly unraveling who his disappeared Nikki is, how he lost his credibility with the off-off- Broadway crowd in the ‘70s, and why Drenka’s highway patrolmen of a son has it out for ol’ Mickey. The writing is informal but wise, tight but loose – like Mickey – the narrator delving into decades old anecdotes, ribald fantasies that are confused with reality, and a twenty-one- page footnote-cum- phone sex transcript. In other words, it’s an accessible yet serious novel and gets the blood flowing in all sorts of organs.

And yet, Sabbath isn’t merely a lecherous pervert nor a villain. Our anti-hero bears much more resemblance to a Falstaffian anti-hero, a doggedly resilient man who refuses to move on or grow up, a quality both redemptive and damning. The freedom he showcases is a guiltless one: a liberation driven by his guile, lust for life, and independence. And while his obdurate isolation may appear as a shortcoming, he understands that “it’s the best preparation I know of for death,” the central preoccupation of the novel. Touché Sabbath. We’ll see you in hell.

-Jordan Finn

To catch up on the rest of our episodes and delve into some more great books click here!

Show Notes

Music for this episode comes from wasteoids Idaho Green, featuring the track "Seouled Out."

Podcast Produced by Phillip Griffin.