Stories That Matter (NC)

This month we will read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. You can find a copy of the play here. (and if you order using this link, I will receive a few pennies to help support the cost of the meet up)
Two tramps wait by a barren tree for a man who never arrives. That is more or less the whole plot, and it is why the Irish critic Vivian Mercier famously called it a play in which nothing happens, twice. Samuel Beckett went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, and the Nobel committee honored work that finds a strange elevation in the destitution of modern humanity. Few plays have so little going on and so much to say.
The play’s reception is part of its legend. When it opened in Paris in 1953, sophisticated audiences shouted insults and walked out.
Then came San Quentin Prison in 1957. The San Francisco Actors’ Workshop performed the play for roughly 1,400 inmates, an audience many expected to be hostile or bored. Instead they were riveted. Men who knew little about art or theater but who understood waiting, uncertainty and endurance recognized the play at once, and reportedly understood it better than many sophisticated theatergoers had. Accounts of that night helped cement the play’s reputation as one of the century’s essential works.
Why read it now? We live in an age of perpetual waiting: for news, for answers, for a rescue, for something to make the uncertainty make sense. We scroll, we speculate, and we keep each other company while we do. Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon ask what it means to go on when no resolution comes, and what we owe one another in the meantime. It is bleak, but it is also funny and tender, and it finds a kind of grace in persistence and companionship.
You can also watch the play online several places including here.
And a lecture I have found particularly useful is here.
A note before we begin: Waiting for Godot contains references to suicide, treated with black humor but also real despair.

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Note! Meetup recently doubled the cost of the meetup to about $352/year ($176 twice a year) Want to help support the group? A few of you generously offered. If you would like to contribute $5, $10, $20 or any amount, the easiest way is venmo: @JohnSeanDoyle or just reach out to me directly. Thanks for considering it!

This month, we’re reading the 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red by 2026 Nobel Laurette, Anne Carson. You can find a copy of here. (and if you order using this link, I will receive a few pennies to help support the cost of the meet up)

Autobiography of Red is a strange and beautiful novel in written in verse. Carson draws from fragments of poems by the ancient poet Stesichorus about Geryon, a red-winged monster from Greek myth who is killed by Herakles. Carson imagines Geryon as a sensitive, painfully self-aware boy who grows up to be a photographer and falls into a consuming first love. The result is part myth, part coming-of-age story and part love story. It mixes poetry, prose, interview and scholarly parody, and it is often very funny.

In announcing the award, the Swedish Academy noted her playful dialogue with the classical tradition, stating that she created new forms for contemporary literature.
Once Carson’s Nobel Lecture is posted in December, I will link to it here
Content note: The book deals with childhood sexual abuse, along with heartbreak and emotional pain. Please read with whatever care you need, and feel free to contact me privately beforehand.
Why read it now? Many of us have felt like the odd one out, too much or not enough, and have had to decide whether to hide that or turn it into something. Carson gives us a monster who learns to look and write, and who finds out that being known by another person is both thrilling and dangerous. It speaks to identity, desire, memory and the stories we tell about ourselves. It also shows how an ancient story can feel very current.

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Note! Meetup recently doubled the cost of the meetup to about $352/year ($176 twice a year) Want to help support the group? A few of you generously offered. If you would like to contribute $5, $10, $20 or any amount, the easiest way is venmo: @JohnSeanDoyle or just reach out to me directly. Thanks for considering it!