Word: seavers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wicket to most people that they turn away from even the intrinsic pleasure of his works, and at the same time so enchantingly open to interpreters that the PMLA index mushrooms yearly with new entries under his name. The flood of criticism is growing so rapidly that Richard Seaver estimates in his introduction it will surpass in bulk by the year 2000 the secondary work on any other writer in English besides Shakespeare...
...Seaver underlines the irony of Beckett's creative impulse ("The expression that there is nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express") in the title he has chosen for this anthology, but he makes his selections in order to expose the remarkable continuity of Beckett's expression. In view of his fairly consistent production from 1929 through 1975, Beckett's labors seem less a romantic existentialist's anguish of creation than a diligent craftsman's continuing search for innovative forms...
Equally difficult to find are Beckett's first published poem, "Whoroscope", and selections from a later volume, Echo's Bones. And with almost the excitement of a new gadget from Popeil, the anthology boasts a new play, That Time (1975), published here for the first time. Seaver doesn't overemphasize the short period of Beckett's greatest productivity, 1946-1950, at the expense of the lesser known previous works. Naturally, this earlier fiction, depending more on conventional plotting and narrative line, suffers more by the ellipsis--only the first three chapters of Murphy, a novel that is actually going somewhere...
...Seaver's introduction sketches Beckett's biography as clearly and completely, if melodramatically, as any around. The melodrama consists in Seaver's role as one of Beckett's first advocates in the publishing world, where Beckett was accustomed to little success in the early 50s. Seaver's struggling literary magazine, Merlin, encumbered itself (in the market) by publishing sections of Beckett's anti-novel, Watt. Recounting the trials and small victories of this and subsequent publishing ventures, Seaver recalls his impressions of this awesomely enigmatic man. After refusing to reply to Seaver's entreaties for a manuscript, Beckett first appears...
...lead characters in your article, Tom Seaver, is a graduate of the Fairbanks semipro team, the Gold Fanners, and this year's first major league draft choice, Steve Kemp, played for Fairbanks for the past two seasons. In all, nearly 40 major leaguers have played for the Fanners. The Fairbanks team won the National Baseball Congress championship in '72, '73 and '74, and nearly repeated in 1975 before being nosed out by those archrivals from the "Deep South," the Anchorage Glacier-Pilots...