Cosmopoetica

Something you don’t see every day: portraits of literary icons made of toast. Pictured are Yeats, Wilde, and Beckett.

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"I sat on the wharf and watched the little steamers dipping their funnels to get under the bridge, and it opening for a big boat to go under. Tres emouvant. That’s all I do now–go out about 2 and find some place to sit till the pubs open and get back here about 7 and cook liver and read the Evening News. I couldn’t stand the British Museum any more. Plato & Artistotle & the Gnostics finished me. I bought the Origin of Species yesterday for 6d and never read such badly written catlap. I only remember thing: *blue eyed cats are always deaf* (correlation of variations). I finished Vanity Fair and Cunt Pointercunt. A very painstalling work…. I bought Moby-Dick today for 6d. That’s more like the real stuff. White whales & natural piety… I haven’t opened my mouth except in bars & groceries since you left this day week: to haughty barpersons and black-souled grocers. About going where I don’t know. I suppose I must go home. I haven’t tried to write. The idea itself of writing seems somehow ludicrous… if I could work up some pretext for writing a poem, a short story, or anything at all, I would be all right. I suppose I am all right. But I get frightened sometimes at the idea that the itch to write is cured."

–Samuel Beckett
from 1932 letter

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“More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused.”

–Samuel Beckett
from a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun

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