Irish Cultural Center
1106 N. Central Ave.
Phoenix, AZ 85004
602-258-0109 www.azirish.org

Dr. Patrick Bixby on Samuel Beckett

Fri. Feb. 9

7:30 PM $5

Readings of Beckett by Reader's Theater

Fri. Feb 23

7:30 PM $5

In 1969, Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize in literature "for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." While best know for his work, "Waiting for Godot", Beckett was a prolific playwright, novelist, poet and literary critic. On Fri. Feb 9, Dr. Bixby will explore the life of one of the giants of modern literature as part of Beckett month at the Irish Cultural Center. On Fri., Feb 23, Readers Theater will present exurps from Becket's work.

Samuel Beckett-Nobel laureate, icon of the avant-garde, and Irishman-wasn't big on birthdays. Even after his death, there remained some question with his biographers about the precise date of the writer's entrance into the world. While Beckett acknowledged his birthday as 13 April 1906, pleased no doubt by the ironic coincidence of Friday the 13th and Good Friday, his birth certificate marks the date as 13 May 1906. Perhaps this confusion helps to explain his fascination with a lecture by Carl Jung on the subject of "the never properly born," which the young Irishman attended in the mid-thirties. He liked to think of himself that way, never properly born, so it is all the more fitting to celebrate the centenary of his birth just a bit late. Beckett is, after all, famous for making us wait.

Come celebrate the life and work of the author of Waiting for Godot with a screening of that landmark play, preceded by a brief lecture from Dr. Patrick Bixby on Beckett's oft-overlooked Irishness. Although Beckett left Ireland all-but-for-good in the 1930s, and although his career first flourished in the artistic circles of Paris , his literary imagination never strayed far from his native land. The centenary is an apt occasion to remember his insistent attention to things Irish, from the landscapes of his writing to his eccentric Hibernian characters to the particular lilt of their language.

Patrick Bixby is Assistant Professor of British Literature at ASU at the West Campus and Consultant to the Editors of The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett, a four volume collection of Beckett's letters due from Cambridge University Press beginning in 2007.

More About Beckett (from http://samuel-beckett.net/)

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not f---ing me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.
His work is beautiful.
-- Harold Pinter

Samuel Beckett is sui generis...He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then, as metabolism lowers, amid God’s paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached... Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences, cannot help but stave off the void... Like salamanders we survive in his fire.
-- Richard Ellman

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