PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Beckett’s pauses / Students’ Warning
Two letters in the Guardian this week past caught my attention. The first concerns the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Murray Marshall of Salisbury writes:
- The obituary for Timothy Bateson (Obituary, 8 November) mentioned the difficulties that original cast had with grasping the meaning of Waiting for Godot. The author himself was apparently not a lot of help. A friend of mine was assistant stage manager on the first production, and the cast and crew eagerly awaited Beckett’s visit to a rehearsal. They assembled after performing to be enlightened by the great man. After a suitably Beckettian interval, he said: “The pauses were not long enough.”
I also have a story about this, which comes from the horse’s mouth, or anyway, Peter Hall, who directed that first production in 1955. Many years ago, when I was taken to visit him at his house near Wallingford, he told us what happened when they played in Blackpool before coming to London, and the audience was mystified and bored. Someone noticed that the last train back to London on a Saturday night left before their scheduled finish, so in order to catch it, they decided to eliminate the pauses. The play went by like a flash, the audience found it very funny and laughed a lot, and they got their train!
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The second letter is an altogether more serious matter. This is from almost 200 student union officers warning MPs that unless they sign a pledge to vote against an increase in fees, they will be named and shamed. Read more
Curtocircuito: Materia
Here’s the third film from the Curtocircuito workshop, Materia by Pablo Fontenla and Marce Magán. This one hardly needs subtitles. The text at the end says ‘Everything exists or doesn’t exist. Something can be at the same time itself and something else.’ A quote from Engels’ Anti-Dühring (although I believe Wittgenstein said something very similar).
[wpvideo sLxR3yDr]
Non-compliance
This morning I caught the end of a story on the BBC news which concluded ‘The government says it wants universities to treat students more like consumers’. I respond by emitting an exclamation which cannot be repeated in polite language. How long have we been suffering from this worse than asinine instrumentalism? This kind of consumerisation is the negation of all pedagogic values, which depend on a dialogue between teacher and pupil which does not exist between buyer and seller. Teaching and learning are not separate processes but a dialectic. To ignore this is a violation of the student’s humanity, a denial of the hope that education offers to intelligence and imagination (or what’s left of them after getting through the school system). I therefore refuse to comply. To do so I should consider to be a dereliction of my responsibility as a professor to show academic leadership. Read more