What is the longest running lie of your life?Met a few old writer friends for pasta, beer and ice cream. I notice how I’m relentlessly trying to stir the discussion away from trivialities and towards writing: technique, process, books, samples, stories of writerly failures and successes. On the way I read how self-devalorizing Beckett was, apparently unconscious of his own place in the canon. As if he was trying to evade or ignore the building of momentum that would eventually lead to his canonization. He didn’t get much recognition before his fifties. And when it came, it paralyzed him almost entirely. Success for some writers is like a virgin falling among vampires.
Samuel Beckett:
“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”
I like this mantra. I fear this mantra. (from: The Unnamable, 1954).
![What is the longest running lie of your life?Met a few old writer friends for pasta, beer and ice cream. I notice how I’m relentlessly trying to stir the discussion away from trivialities and towards writing: technique, process, books, samples, stories of writerly failures and successes. On the way I read how self-devalorizing Beckett was, apparently unconscious of his own place in the canon. As if he was trying to evade or ignore the building of momentum that would eventually lead to his canonization. He didn’t get much recognition before his fifties. And when it came, it paralyzed him almost entirely. Success for some writers is like a virgin falling among vampires.
Samuel Beckett:
“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”
I like this mantra. I fear this mantra. (from: The Unnamable, 1954).
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