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Mosby Woods's avatar

A U.S. Army sergeant in the Korean War, my father wrote a radio play version of “The Cask of Amontillado" broadcast as propaganda to the North Koreans.

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John Pistelli's avatar

Amazing. What was the propagandistic message? Just that we tell cooler tales than the commies?

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Mosby Woods's avatar

I asked but never received a satisfying answer. Maybe it was entertainment to keep people tuned to the propaganda station. My dad did say that the CIA distributed radios to POWs.

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Gnocchic Apocryphon's avatar

You’re right about Beckett’s humor-in the way that Lacan is the French theory exegete of Joyce one could make a similar argument for Camus and Sartre with him, and in both cases the Irishman is the better for having a sense of humor the Frenchmen lack. My own suspicion of him incidentally is probably less about philosophy or biopolitics and more about the literary labyrinth of the recognition of the totality of human experience as artifice he leaves you in-the one where DFW perished, as I think you said somewhere else-which is while probably unavoidable something it’s worth being ambivalent about! I’m impressed that you put that much thought into interpreting Tori Amos lyrics-a noble if futile task.

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John Pistelli's avatar

I think for me it's the self-congratulation in the "I can't go on, I'll go on," the masturbatory marching orders of the adversary culture (just catching up with your neocon essay now) as opposed to Joyce-the-maximalist's actually much simpler "Yes." "I can't go on, I'll go on"—don't do me any favors!

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Gnocchic Apocryphon's avatar

I know what you mean, although paradoxically, I’ve never read it as such a bad thing-a bit distasteful sure, but writers tend to be megalomaniacs anyway-and it can provide a ladder if not out of the labyrinth, at least a way to project enough of yourself outside to keep writing even after we’ve found that we were never anything but demiurges or incompetent angelic craftsmen.

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John Pistelli's avatar

I guess what I ultimately think is that that should go without saying, literally.

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Gnocchic Apocryphon's avatar

Sure, not the Unnamable, but rather the Unsayable.

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John Pistelli's avatar

I do like Beckett's line, in a letter or something, that he wanted to "eff the ineffable."

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