ROSETTA LIFE
Friday 8 November
6.00 - 7.00 pm

Join us for an exciting and innovative performance of "This.Here" by Rosetta Life, an exploration of fragility and embodiment amongst stroke survivors. You can also book on to a Taster Session with Rosetta Life, hosted by the University of Reading, on Wednesday 6 November, 2.30 - 5.00 pm: 
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/stroke-odysseys-tickets-76247744055.

Rosetta Life is a group of artists who aim to change the perception and stigma of illness and disability. They work with people living with life-limiting illness to shape and share their stories through movement, song, image, film and writing. 

Lucinda Jarrett and some of the performers from Rosetta Life will join us for a roundtable discussion about their initiative and performance on Saturday 9 November at 3.30pm, as part of the Beckett International Foundation Research Seminar. See below for details.

This performance event is free to all. Please book your ticket via this link. 

Reflections on Beckett and the Creative Process
By Tim Parkinson (Creative Fellow, 2018-2019)

1
June 2018 

It’s a great delight to have been invited to be a Creative Fellow at the Samuel Beckett Archive. I have a very well trodden path to Beckett’s door. I’ve known his work for most of my life now, I know it so well it has become subsumed along with a host of other life and years into whatever makes up my present self and being. I am familiar with the work as with old friends. There are shared sympathies and sentiments, in the voices and concerns and presentation, and my current experience would not be mine without his before it. And although I never met the man, his work remains a companion, and dear friend.
 
So of course I was excited to be made aware of the Beckett archive, and to be invited to make regular visits to explore what was there, and to get to know it, and to make some work in response.
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2
September 2018

One way in for me was to begin looking at what’s there from the early 1950s when Beckett was around my current age. I wanted to try to look beneath the layers of time that have been laid upon Samuel Beckett, a name which is now a giant cultural icon and property of the world, to try to find the person with whom I might have been able to relate as an artist at a similar age, at a similar time in life, looking for comparisons with his relationship with his own practice, and his ways of negotiating that with the world. For him, these are the years of emerging awareness of his work in the Parisian publishing community, of the exciting first publications of the postwar novels by Les Éditions de Minuit, the pages of which first editions are now browned and brittled with years, as well as publications of smaller texts and extracts in collections within journals which, as artefacts in the archive, serve as glimpses of curatorial platforms reflecting their times, both in their appearance, as well as in their choice of texts and authors, their gathering together of mutual endeavour, and of community. How did these objects end up here? Who owned them, read them, carried them around, before they arrived here?
 
Another focus has been to listen to the recordings that the archive holds. I looked for whatever scraps exist on tape of Beckett’s own voice, precious few remnants of the voice of this famously private person. (How would he have preserved this untouchable seclusion if he’d lived in our present times of mass digital documentation?) I have sat in the archive at the tape recorder like Krapp himself, squinting through ears to the hiss and blurry sounds of a few moments of past time, sound on tape being a closer semblance than photography or text to a feeling of an actual living person. Knowledge that these tapes are physical copies of copies, an invisible path leading backwards in time to its origin from Beckett himself, and that unless preserved one day the hiss will cover all. One tape is blank. What happened? 
 
Knowing of Beckett’s privacy, listening to his own voice on a home-made audio recording from almost 50 years ago, feels like an intrusion on that privacy. But then he is no longer alive to invite me to listen. And it is not Beckett’s voice; it is a recording of Beckett’s voice. There is no living self to offend any more by my intrusion.  

3
October 2018

Encounter with the Sam Francis notebook

​A path through the notebooks. Looking for the everyday, the familiar.
 
Going to the place he once was, notebook, the writer’s studio/workshop. The personal object. 
To ask questions of him as I do to my friends, other artists, composers, writers, to meet and talk, “What are you working on? How’s it going? How’s life?”
 
My internal image of SB’s work is of it in isolation, in a black box. Self-sustained. Attractive and addictive. Obsessive. Self dwelling. I relate to it. Circling around its own concerns. Playful. Playful with mind, playful with itself. Go to that black box. 
 
My notebook containing my own work, as companion. I put mine next to his. Ordinary objects. 
The same size. 
I prefer pencil & no lines.
His has lines. Pen, biro.
I made mine from folded A4 sheets. 
His is bought from a shop.
 
How’s the work going? I can’t talk about it. Me neither. 
 
Instead observe the traces of activity of behaviour, and interpret it as once having been alive and in process, as I am now. He encourages me with glimpses of a self-made space infinite of possibility. Keep going. Questions of self judgment, self censorship, procrastination. Fighting against the noise, for clear personal space/universe. Parallels with my own process. Work, work more, judge, weigh, balance, compare to intention, step back, check, feel.
 
What draws me back? To see the pen marks on paper, indentations on page, scribbles to get biro working, signatures to get the ink flowing from a new ink cartridge, crossings out, dismissals, other work abandoned, not crossed out, still subject to thought, not dismissed, put aside forgotten, leave it, it ran dry. When to abandon and when to cross out. Keep going. Even abandoned work valued by author as time well spent but did not bloom, not used (or finalised) but unwilling to let go. 
 
Ongoing conversation, about working process & relationship with practice, feeling connections. Friends’ notebooks I’d like to see. The personal object. It feels so familiar as well. I know you. Hello.

4
November 2018
 
Continuing my journey through the notebooks. Now he seems to prefer squared pages. I still prefer blank. 
 
Dates and locations. 
Paris, 26.3.68, “Imagination morte”, scribbled out.
 
Comforted that the working process does not appear smooth for him either. Looking at these is a substitution for having a conversation with him about it. I interpret the handmade marks as evidence of behaviour, thought, energy. Pages filled with writing, crossed out, the usual verso and recto, then analyse, list themes, reorder, rewrite, retype, questions to self, try to write it again, be more accurate? 
 
Ussy, 3.4.68 “donc… continuer”
 
Jump cuts in the notebooks to years later. Different pen, different light. Plans for plays or prose stillborn. An image proposed, attempts to explore it, mysterious diagrams.
 
The joy of finding blank pages, following pages of concentrated energies over years. What might have been written on these blank pages? A blank page for me is a charged space of unlimited potential. Perhaps a new notebook was needed? Fresh pages, fresh time ahead, clean blank slate, no associations with past work, start afresh.
 
Trying to read the clearest of one set of drafts, the type is covered with noise from the pen and subsequent mind. Typed and handwritten, interrupted, crossed out, inserted, bracketed, numbered, analysed, illegible additions. Other phrases appear intact from draft to draft that seem to have avoided reconsideration, suggesting a fondness for them.
 
Having read through the noise, I now have something in my head. But what? Not his final intended experience. Yet some thing, some thought. Not a story which would have suffered from being incomplete, but a static prose image which perhaps might have been just that in its final state. My experience here then is of the repeated attempts to write the same image. An unintended form in itself. The different drafts show different sides of the same mind. However the received intention is that only one side should be turned to face the reader on permanent display. 
 
A final attempt, a later date, handwritten, renewed energy, commencing a plan to extend the image according to a preconceived structure balancing proportions (listed, numbered) of Themes (list of capital letters from A to I ). Theme A completed. Theme B one paragraph only then blank page. Abandoned. 
 
Why abandoned? Was the process a trap? A mind-occupying pursuit of method, trying to reignite the imagination into more action, but ultimately a distraction? Ran out of fuel? Or was there not enough there in the beginning to sustain itself?
 
I’ve been there before. I recognise it and share that feeling from past working processes. Pursuing a thought, getting stuck, run out of energy, lost it, leaving the blank page to return to at a later date.

5
April 2019

​Encounter with COMPANY notebook 09/01/19
 
Looking at a holograph is following a journey of composition. Seeing the working process. 
Choice of paper & pen important. (No pencil.)
 
With “Company” I am almost willing him onwards as I look through the pages. Next paragraph. Next paragraph. Are there 60? Predetermined amount?
Neat and consistent one after another.
No doodles.
All dated. Consciously so?
 
An accounts ledger. Was it given to him? (Seems arbitrary.) Or conscious choice? Small writing. Sense of conscious orderliness? A place completely removed from anywhere one would write literature. Not squared anymore but one step even more scientific. Perhaps chosen because of this. Fresh foreign land to think afresh. 
 
At last a long scale structure. Forward progress, inching along by repeating and building on the static forms of Fizzles. From where he got stuck with the Ray.
 
On versos analysis of work already done. Or summary. Themes. An overview of the landscape. Seems after the fact. The process led the way, small packages of thought spilled into small paragraphs, nose close to the page, don’t look back. It feels like this, maybe not true, but a way of working I connect with. Then afterwards zoom out, rediscover these condensed fruits of thought from past time. Read it all afresh with critical eye/ear, as if by another. 
 
Hardback notebook. Looks neat and well kept. Corners rounded. Atoms lost along over time, in bags from Paris to Ussy. 
 
May 77 to August 79. Like a diary. Written chronologically. Writing more legible? Final page of English the corner cut off. To find the end again? Then begins the French translation. Completed a month later in Tangier.
 
The smell of it. Old. It can’t have retained smell from 40 years ago. Old, musty, I associate with bags, coats, age, dust.
 
Grey green hardback cover. “Olympic”. About A5. Something illegible written on the back in pencil, faded, erased by travel. Short paragraph. The only pencil I’ve encountered.
 
Neat, portable. Now enclosed in a box made by Reading University, perfectly fitted, with catalogue number embossed on the side in gold, 1822, like a treasure. Then contained within soft cardboard A4 wallet, with information written on front in pencil, tied closed by a ribbon in a cross embracing both sides and top and bottom. Then to be returned to larger thick cardboard box, to be laid flat amongst other treasures unseen, on a shelf, in the archive building, itself a giant windowless rectangular box. 

22 – 24 November 2018

• Modernist Archives in Context: Periodicals and Performance
• Q&A with award-winning novelist, Eimear McBride 
• Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Beckett International Foundation

 
Registration is now open for our annual Beckett Week conference, Modernist Archives in Context: Periodicals and Performance. A full programme will be published soon.

KEYNOTES
Our two keynotes will be delivered by Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University) and Dr Jonathan Herron (University of Warwick). 

WORKSHOPS
There will be two workshops:

1. "Periodical Cultures in transition" - led by Dr Adam Guy (University of Oxford)
2. "The Billie Whitelaw Archive and Staging Beckett" - led by Dr Matthew McFrederick (University of Reading and University of the Arts London)

EXHIBITION
During the conference, there will also be an exhibition with paintings by Avigdor Arikha, Henri Hayden, Geer van Velde, and Matias, as well as artists’ books and a selection of notebooks and letters from the Beckett archive. 
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BECKETT INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION 30th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
Saturday 24th November 
The Beckett International Foundation will be holding a seminar with invited speakers, 
Dr Julie Bates (Trinity College Dublin), 
Dr Lucy Jeffery (University of Reading), 
Dr Pim Verhulst (University of Antwerp), and Professor Shane Weller (University of Kent).

REGISTRATION
For conference fees and registration please follow the link:
https://www.store.reading.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-arts-humanities-social-science/english-literature-department/modernist-archives-in-context
For BIF Seminar fees and registration, contact m.nixon@reading.ac.uk.
Please note that registration for the BIF Seminar is separate to the conference and Q&A session. More information is available from Dr Mark Nixon.

The commissioning and screening of Beckett’s plays by the BBC demonstrates a linkage between British television and an experimental Modernist aesthetic that Beckett’s name already represented in the later decades of the twentieth century. The formal experimentation, theatrical background and complexity of Beckett’s TV plays supported the Public Service claims of the BBC to present the best of contemporary arts practice despite, but also because of, the distance between some of that practice and the mainstream forms of television drama. The Modernist experimentation in Beckett’s plays on television can be seen in their pared-down verbal and spatial textures, and their concentration on geometrical forms and static or very slow physical action.

She seems unable to take on the subjectivity that language would define for her. As the play progresses the mouth’s shape, movement and materiality (the detail of lips, teeth, saliva) become mesmerising, both intensely physical but also abstract and disassociated from the rest of the body.
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