And the wind is howling...

Doh! Too late. The ship went down.

Now, now, I wouldn't go that far. Maybe a tad under-qualified for First Mate, is all ... but you'll make a fine 7th or 8th mate someday, I'm sure. Or a check at the very least.

Always check, it might be a mate. And you'll be a discovered check very soon ... if you need a minor piece to sacrifice, I'm at your service.

I saw a play last night you'd have enjoyed: The Third Policeman, adapted for the stage (by a 'dramaturge', no less). Excellent acting, movement, lights, set, staging etc. Dark and edgy with a Kafkaesque feel ... yet I didn't like everything about the way it was adapted.

Not enough De Selby, for one thing. I appreciate that it's hard to do footnotes on stage - so either cut him entirely or find a way of integrating him properly. A few passing references, as in this, doesn't work.

And - the effrontery - your fave line "I hit him ... until my arms grew tired" was dropped: instead we saw the character (played by an androgynous woman, which worked well) actually doing the hitting and then slumping with exhaustion. Trite.

But I don't blame the actor: she did her best with the material. I blame the writer/adapter/dramaturge who thought "here's a prime bit of action where the old show-don't-tell adage applies" ... not understanding that it's a very funny line, a very crucial line, and much better spoken flatly than literally acted out.

There, now. Some actual theatrics. All the watertight compartments in my Titanicesque life are breaking down. But I remain unsinkable.

Abandon sheep all ye who enter here.

Have you tried the Noah's Ark Trap lately? Or the Evans Gambit, invented while the doughty Captain Evans steered his mailboat into the teeth of a gale.

If his boat was any smaller, they'd have had to call it the Surfer Dude Gambit.

Thanks SO much for that concise, but wonderfully detailed critique of our man <Myles> on stage.

Thank God for Ireland.

I agree with you about "the line."

It's timing, and it's deadpan declarative form, is shocking-- and, as you point out, I'd think it would be "necessary" in a theatrical treatment.

Because it's <Really> shocking.

Like, as in <Heidegger's moment of the broken hammer> shocking, or <Brechtian blowing cigar smoke in your face during the play> shocking.

Any hope the reader had been holding out that she could identify with the protagonist in a favorable sense is suddenly and brutally dashed by this, one of the most brilliant sentences in modern literature.

In my opinion.

<O'Nolan> as expert at "pulling the rug out from the reader..."

He'd be of great interest to a <narratologist>.

I think we have one of them around here too, but he's very busy being an actual <narratologist> at the moment.

Well <Eyal> see you later <Dom>

HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

(I would have loved to have seen the play with you).

It was a crazed British prof in Vancouver with a Pynchont for the incomprehensible novel who turned me on to <O'Nuallain>.

And Joyce and Beckett, for that matter.

HEY THEY ARE ALL IRISH!!

I may have been brainwashed...

Until somebody lights a fire under your Erse, I suppose.

Speaking of brainwashing, I just tried to play a DVD of The Manchurian Candidate (1960s version) - but the bloody machine kept telling me there was no disc in the drive. I think those Korean Johnnies have 'got at' my computer. I caught it trying to register to vote Republican yesterday.

<'Yesterday, after playing chess, ****** said: “You know, when ****** comes, we really ought to work out a new game with him. A game in which the moves do not always stay the same, where the function of a piece changes after it was stood on the same square for a while it should either become stronger or weaker. As it is the game doesn’t develop, it stays the same for too long."'>

A four-part quiz. Identify

a) the first ******, he who put forward this crazy idea; b) the second ******, for whom the conspirators were waiting; and c) the author of the above passage.

And, as a tiebreaker:

Tiebreaker: the proposition is bollocks because all propositions are. This may not yet be a truth universally acknowledged. But just you wait.

Alternately: because there are at least two types of time in chess - clock time and move time - and it isn't clear which kind of time dictates the mutations.

Anti-per the above, one of my all time favorite lines was in the dismal sitcom Laverne and Shirley. It was far funnier acted out than it will sound flatly written. In fact, I doubt the writer realized how funny it was when he wrote it.

Someone: Any fool knows that.
Squiggy: I knew that.

Perfect character to say it, perfect subtle nod of the head to the side in self appreciation, perfect timing to hold the Iiie just long enough to suggest boasting, perfect slight increase in decibles of the i, perfect inflection of the whole phrase.

Robert Falcon Scott of the Antarctic, the emblematic Great British Noble Failure? Or maybe Sir Walter S. But why would anyone swear by a novelist, even the author of Ivanhoe?

If it *was* the novelist, we could imagine a contemporary equivalent ... Oh, Burroughs! ... Sarraute! (excuse my French) ... By Mailer, that's Bellow the belt, a Vonnegutsy trick.

Pynchon preserve us from novelists.

As Gore Vidal wrote: "The popular novel of the last century was, more or less, a sort of religious tract warning against intemperance, disobedience to authority, sexual irregularity and ending, often, with a marriage, an institution guaranteed to control the worker whose young children, hostages to fortune, would oblige him to do work that he did not want to do."

Myles would also have very much enjoyed the inverse of this - wordsmitten compulsive punster that he was - viz, "pulling the reader out from under the rug" ...

- Why, dash it, sir, that's not your real hair. It's a ... a wig! Hypocrite lecteur!

<The expression dates back at least to the American Civil War, and may refer to a real person, the one-time commander of the U.S. Army, General Winfield Scott. In a May 1861 edition of the New York Times was the sentence:

These gathering hosts of loyal freemen, under the command of the great SCOTT.

In an 1871 issue of Galaxy magazine, there is:

‘Great—Scott!’ he gasped in his stupefaction, using the name of the then commander-in-chief for an oath, as officers sometimes did in those days.

The phrase also appears in the 3 May 1864 diary entry by Private Robert Knox Sneden (later published as Eye of the Storm: a Civil War Odyssey):

Speaking of which: the now-departed Irish PM Ahern addressed Congress recently, and said something about the relationship between our countries going back to 1776 or thereabouts. Which strikes me as illogical ... the relationship between independent states only goes back to 1920 or so, when Ireland quit the United Kingdom. While the 'relationship' between peoples was operating well before the US Revolution, when we all chafed under King George's yoke together.