Beckett said it all

I was just now entertaining (if that's the right word) myself with Samuel Beckett's Molloy, in which one page before Beckett plunges into another of his frequent existentialist abysses, he writes of a brief encounter:

She had a parrot, very pretty, all the most approved colours. I understood him better than his mistress.... He exclaimed from time to time, Fuck the son of a bitch, fuck the son of a bitch.

This evening just seemed like a good contextual time for a great, albeit non-Wisconsinite, parrot quote. And there you have it.

Comments

[You Don't Say]

Thanks for the smile after some dreary days.

[Jim Milstein]

Apropos Beckett, he had something to say on the topic of laughs that may bear on Romney's repeated (and unsuccessful) attempts to laugh. This from Watt:

"The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. . . . . But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh . . . . It is the laugh of laughs, the 'risus purus', the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs . . . at that which is unhappy."