Singing On JJ Day

Dear George


I, too, look forward to seeing you on Monday next, 16th June, James Joyce Day. Tune the piano, and if there wasn't one around, let them bring one, for I am going to sing James Joyce's favourite song which he sang when once at a party his turn came to sing a song, and that was on 14th June 1904, two days prior to that memorable day, "Ulysses" day, 16th June 1904, when he met Nora Barnacle. The song was originally one of King Henry VIII's favourites, and legend has it that it was King Henry himself who composed it. Anyway, whether composed and/or sang by King Henry, the song opens like this:

Pastime with good companee

I love and shall until I dee

 Sincerely

 Siddeek

PS Let 'em keep the soda bottles cool till better bottles arrive

the co-stars

In the past quarter of a century, I no longer go after the stars but the co-stars among whom are:




1--Timothy Carey, the weeping soldier on his way to face firing squad in Kubrick's really breath-choking Paths of Glory



2--Joseph Wiseman, Dr No and engineer of Marlon Brando's assassination in Viva Zapata. He is also wonderful in Wm Wyler's A Detective Story with Kirk Douglas



3--Nehemiah Persoff, hard-of-hearing mob chief in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot who in a Mussolini-articulate style gives his speech: "Some people say that Spatt went too far, but I say to err is human and to forgive divine. Some people say that ... " When I view Some Like It Hot dvd, I see only the first 10 minutes where there is George Raft and co-gangsters and the last 10 minutes when Bersoff gives that speech



4--Rod Steiger who in The Big Knife gives two fascinating tirades and in The Harder They Fall, he steals the show from great Bogie Bogart and does likewise in the taxi scene with Brando in Kazan's On the Waterfront



5--Lee J Cobb, Johnny Friendly in Kazan's above title and mob chief in Nick Ray's Party Girl with Robert Taylor



6--Vic Morrow, naughty student in Richard Brooks' The Balckboard Jungle with Glenn Ford



7--Dennis Hopper, youth gang leader in Key Witness and Peter Fonda's travelling companion in Easy Rider, the film I used to cite in my teaching tragedy, Shakespeare and modern drama to university students

Happiness tax

"Happiness tax" is an expression I always use with my family when things get rough. In an early 1960s Italian-produced film, titled Ashor, the Left-Handed, starring Gordon Scott, Scott burns his right hand deliberataly, telling the gods that that was his something like "happiness tax" so that the gods would let go of him to live his life free from troubles. The Chorus at the close of Euripedes' Alcestis chants, "Only to be safe from the envy of the gods, is enough happiness." Man is so great and important that he is enviable by the gods themselves, "the beauty of nature, the paragon of creatures", say Hamlet about man. Oscar Wilde says that man is so important that God created for him the universe which consists of billions of planets, stars, galaxies and whatnot

from Adil Kufaishi

I enjoyed reading your debate with Al-Mumaiz on the Renessiance and Shakesperaen Age. The Debate is intersting, fruitful and terrific.

I do not think I will provide you with as many details as you have provided me. Your personal style seems to be indentical to your literary style and I envy you on
that.

not become a witer

It is amazing why you still read and has not become an author of the best selling literary book after all this reading, experience, wisdom, even madness. All these are a combination of an outstanding writer.
Venus

bringing back memories

Hello hajj Demon,


Thanks for bringing back sweet memories. I have always considered you as a special person and will always do.

Keep in touch.
Cheers
Venus

Chekhov and the Actors' Studio

Anton Chekhov the dear darling of poetic realism, or naturalistic poetry is one of the few best playwrights ever. I relish his dialogue as the ice cream of that famous Mansour Ice Cream Stall in Baghdad in 1980s near which Oday's attempted assassination took place in 1996. It was Dr Fekhri Qustandi, Egyptian university professor, drama critic and amatuer theatre actor who in the 1967-8 academic year introduced us to Chekhov thru his The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov has been a popular author, both as playwright and short story writer all over the world. He was a close friend of Tolstoy whom he paid visits to at his vast farm. They used to discuss elaborately football as Joyce and Beckett used to do! Oh, no, of course! They discussed human fate and the art of writing. Gorky was a great admirer of Chekhov whom he plagued with beautiful letters. Shaw wrote Heartbreak House under the influence of Chekhov, subtitling it "A fantasia in the Russian Manner". Chekhov and the director of his plays Constantine Stanslavsky were always disputing, Chekhov wanted his plays to be treated as comedies whereas Stanslavsky directed them as serious drama. The man was right, for how come The Seagull, ending with the suicide of the major character, and Three Sisters ending with the death in a duel of the major character can be treated as comedies! Let's not forget, though, that Chekhov meant comedy in the sense which stems from Shakespeare's King Lear and leads to Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame, ie dark comedy which can be more hopeless than tragedy. In tragedy, the protagonist loses his life but retains his dignity, whereas in dark comedy, he loses both. From those disputes came two great books authored by Stanslavsky, Preparing the Actor and My Life in Art. It was thanks to these books that in the Actors' Studio in New York City in late 1940s, Elia Kazan introduced the Method--a style of directing the actors which gave us Marlon Brando, James Dean, Warren Beatty and later Al Pacino and Robert de Niro. Stanslavsky died in 1932 and in his last years after retiring, young directors sought his advice, but since he couldn't see them in person due to health reasons, he gave them his directions on the telephone

pen pal Angelo Garcia

In 1963 when I was 19 living in Mosul, Iraq, I had a pen pal from the Bronx called Angelo Garcia whose younger brother was 10 later became the famous Hollywood movie star Andy Garcia

fisn 'n chips literature

English literature is a  fish 'n' chips literature, and I recall a book titled, Tragedy and English Literature, where the author, Richard Dutton, an English professor of English Literature in the University of Lancaster in your county-borough back home, currently in a mid-western university in the USA, who says that English literature is originally alien to tragedy in the European sense, and that all tragic themes in English literary works are not English but are foreign and imported: Hamlet is Danish, Othello Italian, Macbeth Scottish, Spanish Tragedy Spanish, Dr Faustus German, Jew of Malta Maltese, and as for King Lear of England the story is, after all, mythical and therefore not authentically English

ambiguous and vague plays

After watching Widowers' Houses, a critic, finding the play too confused and vague, commented that he couldn't make head or tails about Shaw's intentions than he could about a tomcat's. Likewise, I find Euripedes' intentions vague in The Bacchae. Does Euri promote a rational (occidental) way of thinking or an emotional (oriental) one? Teiresias, usually the voice of common sense and wisdom stands on the side of Dionysus the god of wine, but Pentheus opposes this stance. Pentheus is punished in the end by meeting a horrible death, by having his head decapitated, a thing becoming and typical of Greek tragedy and present-day Moslem terrorist groups. Agave, Pentheus' mother, a devout Dionysian, celebrates the festivities of Dionysus. Agave, nonethless, is equally punished when she discovers that the head she had stuck on the spear she was carrying was not the head of a cub but her own son's. Only King Lear when realising his folly in giving up the kingdom to his two daughters that he asks "Can anyone tell me who I am", and Don Quixote, when in the end, looks at himself in the mirrors the knights held to his face do we come across such a moment of recognition which Joyce called epiphany

Plato rejects altogether wine and its god in his Republic because he considered wine to be an oriental, therefore, a barbarian invention and practice, a practice, like poetry, whose substance is wholly irrational, a thing totally anti-Platonic

It is curious that Mohammed, too, dismisses wine and poetry

some recent reading of mine

Paris

June 6th 1939

dear Tom

I gave the papers to Joyce. He was pleased with the Tristram quotation. Shaw doesn't change front very skilfully



The above is from a letter from Beckett to his friend Thomas McGreevy in London, and Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois Overbeck, editors of the Letters of Samuel Beckett, wrote in the endnotes:



McGreevy may have sent SB London papers with reviews of Finnegans Wake. SB's reference to the Tristran quotation, possibly supplied by McGreevy, or mentioned in a review, has not been identified. George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to the editor of Picture Post on June 3rd 1939 responding to the suggestion in an article on May 13th 1939 by English critic Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985) that he had been so disgusted by Ulysses that he had burned his copy: "'I did not burn it; and I was not disgusted'". (Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, III, 444-445)
1--Alan Duncan was a great admirer of Shaw and a close friend of Samuel Beckett who spent the night of 7th January 1938 with Alan and his wife Isabel at Cafe Zeyer in Paris. As the three were returning to the Duncans' apartment, SB was attacked by a stranger, apache as Martin Esslin called him a quarter century later, who stabbed him


2--WB Yeats and Lady Gregory, in their capacity as Abbey Theatre managing-directors, delegated Lennox Robinson to London to gain theatrical experience with Shaw who had established himself firmly in the wake of his overnight Pygmalion success. Robinson, however, resigned from the Abbey in 1914, following a dispute about his decision to keep the theatre open during the mourning period for King Edward VII

theatre memories

In 1988 I taught Lorca's Le Casa de Bernarda Alba to Iraqi undergraduates, and I showed them stills from the Spanish staging of the play with Nuria Espert playing Bernarda, presented in London as part of the international theatre festival, originated by a handicapped Englishman of the theatre, and which was held every 3rd year of the decade at the Aldwych Theatre, London. I wonder if the tradition is ongoing still. In 1973 I saw Ingmar Bergman's Swedish-language staging of Ibsen's The Wild Duck. The contrast between the entire setting painted in caledonia green and the father's mistress dressed in crimson red was too obvious about nature vs nurture. There is a couple of memorable scenes I have seen in stills and read about in notes and performances reviews, and these are of the actress playing the grandmother Maria Jusippa in that Nuria Espert production of Bernarda Alba and the other of Laurence Olivier doing the Captain's dance in Strindberg's The Dance of Death

from Eric Bentley

Dear sbt,

Your letters to R[uby] C[ohn] arrived. For me quite amusing stuff, but wouldnt be publishable here even if RC's replies and additions were included. Dublin would be the logical locale for it.Maybe the Beckett society could bring it out? Alternatively, translate it all into Arabic and start it out in Jerusalem or Cairo.

Or decline to take advice from me, because I can stand Beckett just up to a certain point...I dont share your attitude to him at all...so maybe am your worst adviser
thanks, though

eb

Beckett and Westerns

On p 69 of  "Beckett in theTheatre", Martha Fehsenfeld says, "According to Beckett, Waiting for Godot is a very active play, a kind of Western". Mentioning this to Ruby Cohn, she sort of couldn't find a logical association between Beckett and Westerns, whereas I, a staunch Becketteer on one hand, and a devout Westerns buff on the other, could

from Ibrahim Mumayiz

Sid,


You're a treasure! Thanks so much for this

Ib

from Lois Overbeck

Inquiring from Professor Lois Overbeck whether Beckett had been to any Brecht, she wrote back:

Dear Siddeek,


I have found that Alan Schneider took SB to see Brecht’s Galileo in Paris, and that he liked it.

Best, Lois

from Ibrahim Mumayiz

Dear Sid


The overall impression I got from your correspondents expressing their opinions about your letters, I came out with this result that as much as your letters contain elements of literary criticism and literary history and biography, they are basically pieces of emotive creative writing and hence they belong to the realm of literature not to the realm of criticism, studies, history or biography. I could sum up the situation by saying that I agree with Ruby Cohn who said to you in what I read in your blog: "I have never known someone who puts his personality in his letters as you do".

Yours, Ib

from Lois Overbeck

Dear Siddeek

Your letters are always fun to read, even if answering them is not always possible with such fullness – which I hope you will understand.

With my best regards, Lois

1949

Inspired by George Orwell's title for his novel, 1984, published in 1949, I raise two points about the year 1949: Martin Esslin's friendship with Beckett started from the time he brought the playwright a Grundig TK-5 tape-recorder from London to enable him to listen to the tape of his 1957 radio play All That Fall, as Beckett had complained that he wasn't able to listen to the BBC World Service broadcasting of the play due to bad windy weather. Beckett was so fascinated by the machine that it inspired him with the idea to write next year Krapp's Last Tape where in the winter 1973 Royal Court Theatre production, Albert Finney, headstrongly doesn't turn his head slowly. How come that Beckett was unaware of Arthur Miller's 1949 play, Death of a Salesman where there is a tape-recorder! I saw the Lyric-Shaftesbury Avenue Death of a Salesman during my July, 2005 Reading visit when I met you. Ruby advised me agaist seeing it. I, however, went to see it. Ruby was right. In 1956, in Telkaif, a village in Northern Iraq where the family lived, we had a Grundig TK-5 tape-recorder which my father bought to record his voice singing


This is point 1, point 2 is

In 1949, using the East Berlin ruins for a setting, Brecht staged a memorable production of his own Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. During my visit to Eric Bentley in his Manhattan suite in July 2004, Bentley told me that he attended that show. In his The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner mentions that he was at that show, too. One wonders if Beckett knew of that, or perhaps attended the show, especially that he was a frequent visitor to Germany?

unusual taste for literature

I may be judged to have a rather odd taste of literature, but I must admit and declare that in my heart there is a firmly seated preference of prose over verse on basis of which preference I say that I prefer Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus to the entire verse canon of her husband and that of their friend Lord Byron who was a frequent visitor to their house to sip port, eat pork and the threesome would indulge in a conversation which it is a pity there wasn't a tape recorder and video camera to capture
After all, my intellectual and literary taste is bizarre, perverse and ideocyncratic. Who would adopt mentors such as The Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound and the Mitford sisters? Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Keats and Shakespeare are the stuff that mentors should be made of

Thersytes the infrastructural character in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida--more than Achilles, Helen, Hector, Cassandra, Andromache, Ulysses, Hecuba and even Troilus and Cressida--is one of my favourite character in the entire Shakespeare catalogue

I prefer modern drama written in prose to Elizabethan drama written in verse. For me the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, O'Neill, Synge, O'Casey, Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Beckett, Osborne, Edward Albee, Joe Orton and Harold Pinter, all written in plain prose are far better than the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Webster, Beauemont and Fletcher, all written in verse. Shaw's plays written in prose are far better than TS Eliot's plays written in verse. The poetry in Chekhov's prose is far better than the poetry in Ben Jonson's verse


My mentor these days is Jessica Mitford of the five Mitford sisters, each of whom was amazing, fascinating and wonderful in her own unique way. Jessica loved post and her letters are a treat, always rushing to the heart of the matter, be it an analysis of some intricate and inscrutable aspect of human nature or culinary details. "I shall never, never read anything else, " she said about Hitler's Mein Kampf. The Fascism of her sister Diana, wife of Oswald Mosley, founder and secretary-general of the British Fascist Party, was a personal pose as much as a political ideology. Unity, the younger sister, was a great fan of Hitler who invited her to a tea afternoon and that occasion was the most important thing to happen to her. The Mitford sisters, close relatives of Winston Churchill, all agreed that they loved Hitler and Winston equally

Kermit Roosevelt

I've read in Mosul Museum library Longrigg's in its first 1924 edition. An ever green classic in its own right it is. I've also read, in Mosul Museum library in its first 1924 edition, a novel by Kermit Roozevelt, the US President's son. The novel is set in Iraq in late 1910s during which period the author was in Iraq, his stay co-inciding with G Wilson Knight's period of serving as dispatch officer in the British Army in 1917.
Kermit Roosevelt, son of US President Theodore Roosevelt by his second wife Edith Kermit Carow, was author of 1919 novel, War in Eden, set in Tikreit which he found to be living in mediaeval times. Kermit joined the British campaign to supress Sheikh Mahmood revolt in 1917. In 1926, Kermit left Tikreit and went to Afghanstan. His brother Theodore, Jr was a CIA man who was instrumental in crushing the Musaddaq movement in Iran in 1951. I remember all important events of early 1950s thanks to my dad who had bought a Siera radio set, and who was a subscriber to the daily Iraqi newspaper, Az-Zaman and to the Egyptian weekly magazine, Al-Mosawer, and through these audio-visual media, I kept a good pace with the world's goings-on, like the death of Queen Alia in 1951, the Mosaddaq movement to nationalise Iran's oil, the death of King George VI in 1952, Mohammed Najeeb's Abdul-Nasser's 23rd July 1952 Revolution, Stalin's death on 17th March 1953. Kermit Roosevelt who was born in 1989 died in 1943 of lung cancer complications or suicide by choking himself in a unique way which is still an unsolved mystery to date

hodgebodge

Richard Hakluyt, Shakespeare's close contemporary, dying the same year, 1616, was a Welsh collector and editor of narratives of voyages and travel and other documents relating to English navigators and voyagers. The zest for good old Hak is still alive and inspiring, as indicated in recent and contemporary research work.

Dorothy Middleton edited in 1969 The Diary of AJ Mounteney Jephson: Emin Pasha Expedition 1887-9. Middleton edited this volume in collaboration with Maurice Benham Jephson, great grand-son of AJ Mounteney Jephson of the title page

If you travel nowadays to County Somerset in southwestern England, you will find the cottage where ST Coleridge lived in 1797-8, a brief spell indeed in terms of chronology, but vast in literary, as well as social achievements, as during this period Coleridge wrote his three masterpieces, "The Ancient Mariner", "Kublai Khan" and "Chritabell", and on the social level, that was the golden age of the Coleridge-Wordsworth friendship, and the first thing you will read upon your entrance to the cottage will be Coleridge's words:"The light shall stream to a far distance from the taper in my caottage window". Didn't the light reach us in Baghdad when reading Coleridge!

amidst a labyrinth

I am amidst a labyrinth different from that of G Wilson Knight's in his wonderful book, The Golden Labyrinth. Knight's labyrinth was in the bushes of modern drama and literature, concerning Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and the play Hassan: The Road to Samarkand by what's his name, whereas my labyrinth is in the dingles of Mediaeval literature, concerning the French Arthurian cycle romance and the multilingual contexts for the production of literature, together with translation between languages and with translation within its broader context of metaphor and poetics. In responding to available litrerary vernacular Arthurian traditions, Malory transformed constructions of masculine heroism as part of his exposition of the tensions and illusions of the Arthurian project. How does the old song go? G Wilson Knight soloved James Elroy Flecker's play, "Hassan" that he would break into singing that refrain, "And we will go on the way to Samarkand'

a Hollywood story

After a 6-day tour to Stanford and Michigan Universities, Hollywood director Stanley Kramer, director of such classics as The Pride and the Passion, Judgment at Nuremburg, The Defiant Ones, was taken to a saloon by new-coming actress Catherine Houghton, playing daughter of Spencer Tracy and Kathyrin Hepburn who wants to marry black Sidney Poitier in Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and he sat down in the front booth of the saloon which he had never been before, and he found an enormous photograph of Brendan Behan, staing at him in the face. "Whose idea was it to come here?," exploded Kramer referring to the man in the photograph. "What's wrong with it? This is the Rump Room and the man is wearing a tie," said the barman, adding, "You are, after all, sitting in one of the most famous places in Hollywood. In the seat you are sitting sat John Wayne, Alfred Hitchcock and Bob Mitchum." Turing to the other side to get relieved from Behan, Kramer's eyes caught sight of photograph of Pauline Kael, the harsh Hollywood critic whom Kramer hated immensely. "I'm really poisoned today, " said Kramer, adding, "This Kael woman wrote 9,000 words about Bonnie and Clyde in The New York Times when 90 would have been enough. "Critics, I know about critics," joined Groucho Marx whom we discovered sitting solo in a dark corner within an earshot. "Critics, I know about crititcs," said Marx, "When I was working in a musical in Chicago in the 1930s, I used to go to the movies with Carl Sandburg the poet who was a movie critic of The Daily News, and he always instructed me to wake him up 10 minutes before the movie was over."

Groucho Marx

At 74, with his voice soft and serpentine, Groucho Marx said, "Critics, I know about critics." Then a waiter came and Groucho said that when he needed a waiter he'd make his desire known and call for one. He said in a tone that required a sip of water afterwards for timing that in those days there were twelve books on the Marx Brothers, not counting the one they, the Marx Brothers, ie Groucho and his two brother, wrote. He hollered and a new different waiter appeared. Groucho ordered orange juice and eggs. The orders arrived, and Groucho performed an intimate and delicate operation on one of the eggs. With the tip of a knife and the edge of a fork, Groucho performed an intimate and delicate operation on the eggs, then he sipped his juice. Now Groucho lit a long and expensive, and he enhaled in meditation, then as if resuming a chat, he said that his two brother were dead. He said that he and his brothers discussed the hereafter before they died but they were in doubt about whether there was a herefater, so they agreed that if any one of them died, he would be in touch with the others if there was a hereafter. Examining his ashtray, Groucho said he never heard a word from them

Harun AlRasheed

Harun Al-Rasheed, whole world's emperor in whose times Baghdad was as great and significant as today's London, Moscow, Washington and New York, was a big eater and a great appreciator of things artistic, aesthetic and poetic. One day he was enjoying his lunch when a story-teller was narrating a story so effectively that Harun so liked that he refrained from eating and ordered the food to be removed saying (referring to the story being recited): "This is more delicious than all food."

Ancient Iraqi Correspondence

Ever since the dawn of man, Iraqi history has always and constantly been--and hence, no wonder it still is--eventful. For the past 6000 thousand year, hardly a century, nay, hardly a decade passed without some event, major or minor, taking place in Iraqi history. Consider the history of Switzerland. Apart from cookoo clocks and and banking businnes, hardly can one recall anything else. Niniveh, modern Mosul, witnessed the birth of business letter-writing and correspondence. No wonder I, being a native of that part of world, am well versed in letter writing and correspondence. I used to write letters to Hollywood movie stars ever since 1958 when I was mere 14 years old. The ancient local Niniveh government administrator would send letters to his representatives in the country-side to give him an inventory of the year's harvest and produce. Before Niniveh there was Babylon which witnessed the Amarna letters or correspondence which took place when the Kassite King of Babylonia wrote letters to Akhenaton King of Egypt courting his daughter. It is a pity indeed that in writing down (up?) the Bible, Ezra eclipsed all that--to use dear goold old Wordsworth's words: "glory and splendour"-- of ancient Iraq's heritage

ECT in Shakespeare's King Lear

In an interpretation of KING LEAR to students during a class in Al-al-Bayt University back in 1999, I said that the play arouses in us the feeling that things in the course of time increase, widen and deepen that we feel lost the more we try to control them. Later I brought up the same topic with a colleague, a professor of physics, and he agreed with me quoting The Quraan انا له لموسعون"We are ever enlarging the universe", meaning the universe is ever-widening and broadening. Earlier, I had read that madness is a state where the atoms of the brain disintegrate and flow out of control and it is the function of ECT (Electro Convulsion Treatement) popularly known as electric shock. Shakespeare, in King Lear who goes mad, dramatised ECT. After an ECT dose, patients become unconscious and when they come to they wonder where they are and what has happened to them. An ECT dose creates a state of temporary death. Cf: Lear when Cordelia rouses him after the physician had treated him with a sedative herb. Says Lear addressing Coredelia: "You do me wrong to take me out of the grave. I may be a fond old man, but I think you are my child Cordelia."Towards the closing years of the eighteenth century, there appeared a race of men-of-letters who badly needed doses of ECT, and a quick list would include Mary Lamb, William Cowper, John Clare and Christopher Smart. The Marquis de Sade was their contemporary across the le Manch between Dover and Calais. In the 2000 Hollywood film,"Quills", the Marquis de Sade receives a sort of primitive ECT treatment. It is a fiendish irony that in King Lear this area figures, and in my communication 24 hours ago I brought up the topic of King Lear's madness which required an ECT dose. Among twentieth-century authors who took ECT doses, introduced by two Italian doctors in 1933, were Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Robert Lowell. Actress Vivien Leigh, 2nd Mrs Laurence Olivier, twice-Oscar winner as Scarlet O'Hara in Gone with the Wind in 1939 and as Blanche de Bouis in A Streetcar Named desire in 1953 took ECT doses more frequenly than she saw her dentist. Sometimes she would take a dose after finishing a performance on the stage near mid-night, to come back following evening to appear on the stage

from Ibrahim Mumayiz

 Dear Sid: Pray, do go on, you remind me of Jacquez in AS YOU LIKE IT, admiring Amiens' singing, and tells Amiens the page to go on singing

Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Stewart Granger

The first time for Elizabrth Taylor to appear on the set of CLEOPATRA to play the title role of the film was in Rome in late 1961 when she entered in full costume and make-up, then turning to the main actors Rex Harrison (Julius Caesar) and Richard Burton (Antony) and the director Joseph Mankiewicz, and, stretching her arm with the palm downwards, she said, "I am your Queen." Mankiewicz rushed and kissed her hand, saying, " Your Majesty." After shooting the first scene, Liz was sipping Irish-coffee and Burton surprised her from behind her back by sniffing her shoulders and when she turned to him totally flabbergasted, Burton rushed to say, "Eh, short but with a beautiful face." To make Burton understand a mute message, Liz rushed to sit on knees of her husband Eddie Fisher to let Burton understand, "No, thank you, I've got a husband."

Liz first met Richard Burton at the home of Stewart Granger in Los Angeles when Granger and wife Jean Simmons hosted what was phrased as a "Sunday cocktail brunch". She barely paid attention to him, instead she sat in a deck chair by the pool reading a book while every now and then, Burton reciting Shakespeare, his big booming voice travelled into her ears. Next time they met again by chance at a cocktail party hosted by Tyrone Power at his Manhattan penthouse. The strengest of all meetings was at a luncheon thrown by 20th Century-Fox executives in honour of Niknita Khrushchev where in the end, Burton, outraged by Khrushchev, flayed him and communism

While making CLEOPATRA in 1962 in Egypt, playing Antony and Cleopatra, Dick and Liz were both bitten by the bug of love of the characters they were enacting, and to their situation apply very accurately Donne's lines in his poem "The Good Morrow": I wonder by my troth what thou and I did till we met? ....Were we slumbering in the seven sleepers' den?.... But now good morrow to our waking souls who watch not each other in fear, etc .. Dear Ib, in your e-mail message where you say: "Pray, do go on," you remided me of Jacquez in AS YOU LIKE IT, admiring Amiens' singing, tells Amiens the page to go on singing



Stewart Granger's original name was James Stewart, but when he came to Hollywood in 1950 there was already a well established actor called James Stewart, so Stewart Grangers made his name Stewert Granger, but friends kept calling him Jim. Circa 1982, in my regular haunt in Exeter, the Edgerton Park Hotel in whose upper bar called the Tudor Lounge I drank and socialised, and with whose propritetor Roy Paultier I developed a relationship that sometimes authorised me to go behind bar and serve customers, I one day met a Tom who had been an M-G-M agent in London. When Tom gathered I was a film buff and particularly a Stewart Granger fan, he told me that Jim (Stewart Granger) kept a villa in Spain where he welcomed friends and guests to eat, drink and even stay, and many were the times when Tom enjoyed Jim's hospitality
Come and read the Liz Tayalor interview whose fun reconciles you to life. She is crippled and confined to a wheel chair, sipping alcohol-free beer, also known by the name Islamic beer. She protests to some remour that her daddy was gay. On the other hand, she says that the three great gays in Hollywood, Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift and James Dean were her most intimate personal friends, and when Rock told her he was diagnosed with AIDS, she was shocked as if the thing had happened to a member of her nuclear family. She talks about the many times she invited Monty to bed for sex but he refused. Asked about her views of sex now she is at the age of seventy, she burst saying, "Wow, I still enjoy it as I did when I was in my twenties."

Viewing the rushes of her film BUTTERFIELD 8, Liz Taylor took off her show and threw it at herself on the screen. Few weeks later, she got her first Oscar for her acting in this film

from Ibrahim Mumayiz

Dear Sid,




What an interesting, amorous adventure! I didnt know you were such a womanizung libertine. Keep such stories coming!



Ib

Thesiger, Prince of Empty Quarter

It was Thesiger who explored and loved the Empty Quarter. A friend of mine over here in Doha, originally from Mosul, told me that he had been to the Empty Quarter and camped there with friends for a couple of days. He said it was the best time of his life to live those 50 hours in the Empty Quarter. The man has seen cities and places from Tokyo to San Francisco these thirty years of residence in Doha.Thesiger was the last of the Empty Quarter explorers. He was sent there by the FAO to identify locust breeding grounds. His book "Arabian Sands", a title taken from a poem by Wordsworth, as I recall, was one of the first books that I bought from "Mackenzie", Baghdad's famous bookshop. I especially liked his warm feelings for his two Arab guides, Bin Kabina and Bin Ghabaisha. He crossed the Empty Quarter in the early 1950's

One may or may not recall whether Thesiger's "Arabian Sands" is from Wordsworth, but I do recall a book titled, "Forbidden Sands" by Richard Trench. In the evening of 5th November (Guy Fawkes Day) l979, I was down in London to see Bernard Shaw's "You Never Can Tell" at the Lyric-Hammersmith. I had bought the ticket and was entering to take my seat when the usherrette came to me trying to help me find my seat. "There is still half an hour for the show to start," she said, "you can have a drink in the theatre bar in the meantime." "Alright," I retorted only if you would share a drink with me." "O, no, I'm on duty," she explained. "After the show then," I said. And we agreed. I stayed with her and she was every now and then answering queries of audience members about their seats. We talked a lot and my conversation was highly allusive and literary especially after she told me that in the daytime hours she worked in the BBC-TV. The bell rang indicating beginning of the show, and she took me to my seat saying to me, "I'll see you after the show." The show was over after 11:00 and we went together for a drink but the bar was closed. She suggested we go to her flat for she kept whiskythere. We went. That was the seed of a friendship which culminated in my proposing to her. Putting her head on my shoulder she said, "O, no, I'll tire you with what with my drinking and smoking." She would consume half a bottle of whisky every day during office hours at the BBC. One day when she was feeling out of her element she told me she needed hasheesh to smoke. "What do you say?" she asked me and I replied, "I'll go with you to get it, I'll pay it for and I'll sit with you when you smoke it but I will not smoke it." She picked a book from the table and gave it to me. The book's front cover read, "Forbidden Sands" by Richard Trench. She then dialed a number and while waiting to start talking, she told me she was calling Richard Trench the author of that book to provide her with hasheesh. The book was about the author's travels in sahara in North Africa

Two of Beckett's teachers

Thomas Rudmose-Brown was professor of French at TCD whose method of teaching Racine's PHEDRE influenced Becektt both in form and in content. Rudmose-Brown had a fiery spirit, and he was alluded to by his students, including Beckett, as 'character' which locally meant 'eccentric'. Rudmose-Brown threw hilarious parties in his home and he was the only person who could elicit any conversation from Beckett whose habit in parties was to stand alone leaning against the wall in a corner, lowering his head and talking to no one. In Rudmose-Brown's parties, Beckett would sit on the arm of the sofa where Rudmose-Brown was sitting and lower his head to listen and talk to him. Rudmose-Brown's character was wild and his talking was laced with curses which habitually would turn into an altogether obscene language as he drank more and the night's hours passed more. Rudmose-Brown, was, when all is said, a dear who, despite all efforts to do otherwise, aroused everybody's admiration and applause. He hated all ideologies, religions, political parties and any kind of leadership. Furry, Mrs Rudmose-Brown, was no less wild than her husband
Thomas Rudmose-Brown was professor of French at TCD whose method of teaching Racine's PHEDRE influenced Becektt both in form and in content. Rudmose-Brown had a fiery spirit, and he was alluded to by his students, including Beckett, as 'character' which locally meant 'eccentric'. Rudmose-Brown threw hilarious parties in his home and he was the only person who could elicit any conversation from Beckett whose habit in parties was to stand alone leaning against the wall in a corner, lowering his head and talking to no one. In Rudmose-Brown's parties, Beckett would sit on the arm of the sofa where Rudmose-Brown was sitting and lower his head to listen and talk to him. Rudmose-Brown's character was wild and his talking was laced with curses which habitually would turn into an altogether obscene language as he drank more and the night's hours passed more. Rudmose-Brown, was, when all is said, a dear who, despite all efforts to do otherwise, aroused everybody's admiration and applause. He hated all ideologies, religions, political parties and any kind of leadership. Furry, Mrs Rudmose-Brown, was no less wild than her husband

Arthur Aston Luce, DD, Beckett's tutor atTCD, was a philosopher and an authority on the writings of Descartes, Bergson and Berkeley the Irish philosopher who gave his name to Berkeley city in California. Luce was not Beckett's teacher but acted more as an overseer equivalent to counsellor (murshid) in Iraqi universities. Luce says that Beckett was a simple untalkative schoolboy who did not engage in small talk, did not spread himself thin with friends, had very little contact with women and whose greatest delight was cricket. Indeed, till the last hour of his life, Beckett relished two things: whisky and watching cricket matches on television. While at TCD, Luce wanted Beckett to become a teacher, mom May wanted him to be a lawyer and dad Bill wanted him an accountant at the Guinness brewery

Behan at Beckett's

Heavy-boozer Brendan Behan once came to Paris to see two of his plays running simultaneously in two Paris theatres. As always, Behan sought Beckett, and during the process of seeking Beckett, Behan stopped at every cafe to get roaring drunk. To Beckett's relief, the two men didn't meet during that visit. Becckett was not always lucky in getting away from Behan. Behan was in the habit of seeking Beckett every time he visited Paris, and he would show up in the early hours of the morning coming from a cafe where he had been drinking. He used to come to Beckett's residence and pound the door until Beckett and his wife Suzanne would admit him. He was always drunk and would talk for hours on end. One morning at 6 o'clock, Behan talked to Beckett for three hours, and had it not been that Beckett excused himself to go to the theatre to attend rehearsals of WAITING FOR GODOT, Behan would have went on talking

coprophilia

In one of his chats on his favourite topic, sex, our dear vulgar sex-maniac Monthir Habeeb remarked to me that sex begins with a noble emotion, develops into physical contact culminating in copulating. Monthir elaborated by saying that this is sex for conventional people, but those in the know indulge in exercises that lead to the final act of copulating and these exercises include heightening the sexual desire to its peak and the peak is to enjoy sniffing and ultimately licking shit of the sexual partner. My topic in this message, dear Ib, is neither to offend you with this filthy subject nor to arouse nostalgic reminiscencs of Monthir, but to tell you how flabbergasted I was yesterday to know that the great James Joyce and his protagonist in ULYSSES Leopold Bloom enjoyed this filthy indulgence, coprophilia


Following on coprophilia, and it seems that there is a lot more than we thought in our innocence and puristic way of thinking to this and related topics, and right now there is in your alma mater the University of Manchester a Department of Sexuality, Gay and Lesbian Studies, I say that in the 1994/5 MA program at Mustansiriyah University, when you taught Reniassance Literatre and I Drama, and our dear the late Kowther Al-Jazaeri was to teach Literary Criticism, but due to her hospitalisation for a surgery in the digestive system, I took up the Literary Criticism course and covered the first third of it until Kowther took over after her recovery. The textbook prescribed was David Lodge's 20th CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM which contained a chapter which I didn't, nor did Kowther I think, teach, titled "The Excremental Vision" by Norman O Brown, taken from his book LIFE AGAINST DEATH: THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL MEANING OF HISTORY (1959). Here's how the chapter opens

Any reader of Jonathan Swift knows that in his analysis of human nature there is an emphasis on, and attitude towards, the anal function that is unique in Western literature. In mere quantity of scatological imagery he may be equalled by Rabelais and Aristophanes; but while for Rabelais and Aristophanes the anal function is part of the total human being which they make us love because it is part of life, for Swift it becomes the decisive weapon in his assault on the pretensions, the pride, even the self-respect of mankind. The history of Swiftian criticism, like the history of psychoanalysis, shows that repression weighs more heavily on anality than on genitality

 Shit, therefore, is an academic topic and an essential section in English literature, isn't it so in human existence? Pirandello remarked that there is a nerve cord that joins the brain to the anus and that is why as much as we find in the brain food for thought, we feel the pleasure of shitting. Walt Whitman in LEAVES OF GRASS says that the best smell he can enjoy better than the perfume of roses is the smell of his own shit, especially when shitting outdoors. In THE QURAN, the word shit is mentioned only once in the verse that says: None of you is created out of shit

After ENDGAME, Beckett became scant in writing that he wrote plays [Ruby Cohn described them to me as "not active plays"] which were growing tinier in length in a way some cynics thought that Beckett would one day publish a volume entitled PLAYS BY SAMUEL BECKETT containing absolutely blank pages. But Beckett, having another side, explained to a fellow-Irishman that he was finding it difficult to write because he was finding it difficult to write with honesty. The reason why I ceased  is because, like Beckett, I have been finding it difficult to write honest things


 Keep the cookies until the cake arrives

on me by me

Verily, verily, I am a peaceful, God-fearing, law-abiding, small-time scholar, and I am no novelist, poet, playwright and what-not, but, as Keats said, "I think I shall be remembered among the great poets", and Shaw said, "I shall be remembered as long as Aeschylus and Aristophanes", I, dear Ib, think I shall be remembered for my epistolary literature

from Ibrahim Mumayiz

Your epistolarian output has a charming candour that is heartfelt. Your letters have a Victorian glow to them; Victorian in the best meaning of the term, not in the dated sense. They have that period touch of erudition that today is erroneously brushed away as quaintly obsolete, but to me is not so,but is evocative of better years of yore and times long gone before when an Englishman was an Englishman and a pound was a pound. Your letters ,in short capture that something that is now, alas and alack lost. I could say sometimes they are overwhelming, marmalade on beefsteak, but that is rare ,and a possible defect if we must have one.

Dearest Sid,


Yes indeed. You shall be remembered for your epistolatory literature. Honestly, and without flattery, you're the best letter writer I know after GBS.

Ib

Drunk--some with wine, others with words

In Man and Superman, Bernard Shaw portrays John Tanner as a man drunk with words. In Iraq we describe a drunken man as dringa. I am drunk with biography. There are now biographies, not only of people but of things: there is a book titled LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY and another titled THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Lately I read biographies of Stalin, Mussolini and Rasputin. Yea, I adore naughty people's biographies. Right now I'm reading biography of Billie Holiday, singer, nigger, junkie, small-time prostitute, gaol inmate and what-not, but personally humane, nice, sincere, intimate and what-not. This is not only Billie's biography but the biography of an entitre era, the 1920s-1950s, the jazz and blues golden era in Harlem where friends gathered in house-parties to drink punch amidst heart-to-heart conversation of an excited crowd talking, laughing, telling jokes and anecdotes and every now and then there is someone, often Billie, to sing to the accompaniment of trumpet, drum and piano, and late at night to sit down in a merry spirit and eager stomach to eat ox knuckles, lamb feet and pig heads, counterpart of our Iraqi pacha

Been on holiday

We went to Istanbul, and staying in a 5-star hotel cut me from the miserable world, and so I felt a perfect Wordsworthian seclusion, Sidneyan arcadia, Coleridgian spiritual xanadu and Keatsian beauty and truth. Shaw disliked to travel, but every now and then wife Charlotte would come home with a couple of tickets to travel and he didn't say no. That way Shaw travelled from Moscow where he met Stalin to Hollywood where he met Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Greta Garbo. Likewise, I dislike travel, but every now and then, wife, knowing how to make herself lovable among sheikhas, would bring tickets for a paid holiday and I wouldn't say no. Last month 's Istanbul trip was one of those paid holidays. Shylock complained that Antonio one day called him dog. If you considered me a lucky dog I wouldn't complain






Been on holiday. Have read the celebrated Hungarian stage-director and personal friend of, among many others, Brecht, Beckett and Elia Kazan, George Tabori who says that the function of art is not to be likeable. Basing on Tabori, I can say that watching a 1950s movie, say KING SOLOMON'S MINES, ON THE WATERFRONT, THE KING AND I, is likeable whereas reading Shakespeare is unlikeable. I agree with Tabori when he concludes with a rhetorical question: Who'd spend a weekend with Hamlet?


Also been reading interviews with Elia Kazan who says that the moral of his movie SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS is to accept the cost of disaster

Also been reading Maureen O'Hara's autobiography where she quotes letters from the director John Ford to her wherein he shows himself as a great lover and superb love-letters writer beating even Casanova and Don Juan and me

In books, I read

In a book I bought in London and read on the plane, Anthony Burgess who started his literary career using the name Burgess Wilson, and author of the novel A CLOCKWORK ORANGE made into an Oscar-nominted movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, starts his autobiography LITTLE WILSON AND BIG GOD in 1746, the year of the battle of Culloden when prince Charles Edward Stuart, James II's grand son is said to have fathered an illegitimate child in Manchester, Thomas de Quincey's city. From this boy, John Wilson, descended Anthony Burgess who was born in Carisbrook Street in Humphrey, a working-class district of north Manchester, at midday on Sunday 25th February 1917, just after the pubs had opened
In New York City, I read in a book I had bought in Boston about how Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole used to go on drinking bouts for days and nights on end, and moved or were removed from place to place all unawares that one time they started drinking in a Paris cafe but woke up in a Malaga hotel, and to their shock as they were bound to a shooting schedule for the film BECKET, O'Toole asked the bell boy what hour it was, but Burton retorted, "Don't ask him about the hour, ask him what day it is." That's drinking for you
While in Coleraine, I commuted to Belfast where there is a mall where there is a huge bookshop where I bought books where I read in them:


(1)--"My mother relished fellatio more than intercourse ... " Marlene Dietrich's biography by her daughter

(2)--"The curate discovered that my sister Rose was stealing candle sticks from the parish to use them for her masturbating ... " Tennessee Williams' NOTEBOOK

(3)--"Robert Taylor married Barbara Stanwyck to cover up their homosexuality, he his gayness and she her lesbianism ... " Harvey, LOVE MOVIES OF THE 1950s

10 c's Notebooks

I prefer biographies to literature, and I would choose to spend a weekend with Shakespeare rather than with Hamlet, therefore I enjoyed reading 10 c Williams' NOTEBOOKS published recently more than his plays. In NOTEBOOKS 10 c describes how he used to shiver with delight as he remembered "the sweet thrill of caressing my little one." No, this is not a lover, a man or woman, as 10 c was a self-confessed gay, neither is it a puppy. It is his cock, his dick, his penis


In another section of his NOTEBOOKS, 10 c declares :"A play is a phoenix, it dies a thousand deaths." Then he hurries up to say: "Actors in tragedy, like the deflating penis, fall and rise again at the next performance", ie, stage performance in the case of actors, and bed performance in the case of penises




PS One day, rather night, my London girl-friend Caroline Murphy criticised my bed manners, but she lauded my bed performance

Elizabethan and other topics

Elizabeth was an open-minded person who promoted the arts especially the theatre. She was the extreme opposite of her Catholic half-sister Mary who was a fundamentalist, and like any fundamantalist she was a rigid person to whom apply Dryden's words describing Zimri in ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL, "stiff in opinion, always in the wrong". Shakespeare was aware of what was going on in the Queen's heart, that is why in TWELFTH NIGHT he depicts the religious fanatic What-'s-his-name as a perfect hypocrite. You know, it is nice after all to recall Zimri, Absalom and Achitophel whom I studied in the University of Baghdad in 1967, forty years ago. Out poetry teacher was American Robert Beamis who taught us that year the first two books of PARADISE LOST and the entire ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL and the entire RAPE OF THE LOCK. Beamis made us read the BIBLE to enhance our understanding and appreciation of PL. One of my class-mates was Mona Rashid Al-Zayyani from Bahrain where she is currenly in her capacity as owner and president of Arab Gulf Private University. One day forty years ago, Mona celebrated her birthday by throwing a party in the students' cafeteria, and among invitees beside myself and other class-mates were teachers who included Abdul-Wahhab Al-Wakil, Dhia Al-Jubouri, Beamis and another teacher a Cantabridgian John Wilson to whom thanks and tribute are due for his teaching us English prose in its golden period, the Augustan Age which included Dryden, father of modern English prose which, according to Dr Johnson, Dryden found brick and left marble, oh, yea, you go ahead now, dear Ib, and recite audibly please the actual original Latin about Augustine finding then leaving Rome, Defoe whose JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR strikes me as present-day newspaper reportage, Swift whose GULLIVER'S TRAVELS arouses in me a fearful hunch of some imminent menace in a way as if I am sitting at the edge of the universe and feeling that the floor of the universe is about to give way under my feet, Steele in his THE TATLER essays, Addison in his depiction of Sir Roger de Coverley, Richardson in his epistolary novels which read as intimate as diaries, Fielding's superbly constructed picaresque novels what with their juxtapositions, digressions and what-not, Smollett's novels of excursions in the beautiful England of the late eighteenth century, Dr Johnson in his LETTER TO CHESTERFIELD which Samuel Beckett kept reciting until later age, Goldsmith in his essays on Beau What's-his name, Gray's Netley Abbey whose ruins in the bosom of the woods were hidden from profane eyes, Sterne's sweetly intimate conversational style heralding the twentieth-century stream-of-consciousness novel, Lord Chesterfield in his LETTERS to his son, and de Quincey in his from-heart-to-heart prose style in THE CONFESSIONS




In evening of 7th February 1601, somebody paid the Chamberlain's Men Troupe two sterling pounds to perform Shakespeare's not-often performed RICHARD II. Next morning 8th February (=Iraqi 14th Ramadhan Revolution which occurred also on 8th February [1963] and which deposed Kareem Qassim) there was the Essex plot to depose Queen Elizabeth. After police investigations it turned out that Essex and his fellow-conspirators made the Chamberlain's Men Troupe perform RICHARD II that evening to prepare people to the idea of deposing the monarch, and also expecting that the London street would back the conspirators. Such things didn't happen. Exposed, Essex and conspirators had no choice but run away , but caught and later beheaded. Six months later, Elizabeth in her firm voice said to Parliament, referring to the RICHARD II performacne associated with the Essex conspiracy, "I am Richard II, don't ye know that?"

from Tareq Zuhair

Mr. Tawfeek, you are the intimate friend of writers and poets, Beckett, Shaw amd Pound, and of books, Oedipus, Hamlet, etc ....

from Adnan Khalid

You are a born teacher


Ad

from Tareq Zuhair

Still, I remember so may things you said
One of the best moments was at the discussion of my graduation project when Dr. M. Ali Mosa asked you: “ Are you a god?” and you replied intelligently and diplomatically, “ A fallen one.”

Professor Mohammed Shaheen

Circa 1999, Professor Mohammed Adnan Al-Bakheet, Al-al-Bayt University President

gave me a book he had received form its author and told me to summerise and review it for him. The book was George Meredith's letters, edited by Mohammed Shaheen whom I learned to be Professor of English Literature in Mota University. I had already been familiar with Shahenn's name as member of the editorial board of PAIDEUMA, a journal devoted to Ezra Pound. Later I wrote Professor Shaheen a letter inquiring about the Pound scholar Hugh Kenner to whom I had written a letter inquiring about Caid Ali mentioned in one of Pound's poems, but I didnt receive a reply from Kenner. Shaheen telephoned me from Mota and informed me that Kenner was in a coma, hence no reply from him. A few months later, the Samuel Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn of University of California-Davis told me that Kenner had died. Another communication with Professor Shaheen was when I sent him a copy of the JAMES JOYCE JOURNAL which was a special issue on Joyce and Moslem culture. Last year, Professor Husam Al-Khateeb and I talked about Shaheen and Al-Khateeb complained that Shaheen was not responding to his communications. Al-Khateeb was a class-mate of Omar son of Ezra Pound in Cambridge in mid-1950s.

The mind has its own tools to ward off boredom of humdrum life. Zarathustra lived alone for ten years in a cave in complete seclusion. Mohammed would leave his wife's warm bosom and walk all the way to a mount top in wind and rain, in sand storm and blazing sun. Oedipus lived his last years alone in a cave, blind and isolated. Timon of Athens left palace and luxury and went to live in the wilderness. The Marquis de Sade lived 28 years in prison and asylum. Charles Manson has been in prison since 1969 to date. The secret behind these and other people's endurance of such conditions is that there is deep down in the human psyche a soothing feeling of a visceral attachment to one's surroundings and things. Some say that thanks to this visceral attachment, people will not only endure, but love hell
This feeling of visceral attachment to things is part of fetish which is an essential element of the human psyche. I for one, love to keep envelopes of letters and parcels I receive by post. Back home in Mosul I have envelopes I received in 1959. I also love the smell of fresh newspapers because the smell arouses in me boyhood feelings and memories when in mid-1950s I once by chance smelt a newspaper my dad used to get by post every day. It was AL-ZAMAN newspaper. In LEAVES OF GRASS, Walt Whitman in the "On Myself" section, says that he enjoyed smell of his shit when one day he was shitting outdoors in Monument Valley, Arizona. In Steinbeck's GRAPES OF WRATH, the old man refuses to leave home to go to California. He picks up a handful of dirty dust and says, "This is dirt, but it is mine and I love it."

with a cudgel

From the gentle tone of dear good old Spenssie's "Sweet Thames, etc.." to that of King Lear when he howls, "Come fire and consume this earth, etc ...", then shifting to Brutus advising Senators to slay Caesar not cruelly but kindly, and then in the famous speech where Antony says, "Pardon me O piece of earth that I am meek and gentle with these butchers, etc..." to the image given by the Sergeant how Macbeth cut into two the enemy's commander, I hit with a cudgel those idols, and feel like Ben when he tells Willy triumphantly in Miller's "Death of a Salesman", "William, I went into the jungle and when I came back, I was rich."

Frank Harris

Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw biographer, fled home in Scotland at the age of 14 and ended up in America. He came back to England later, but he was unwelcome among literary circles. Moreover, he was despised and mistrusted for he was considered as a crook ("clowchi" in Baghdadi dialect). Shaw was merciless in exposing and scandalising him. After all, there is something that attracts me to these "clowchis", there is something I admire about them. I also like cynics and foul-mouthed wicked persons: Marquis de Sade, Swift, AbuFaraj AlAsfahani, Jareer, Orwell. Among literary characters, my heroes are not Hamlet, Othello and Co, but Thersytes in Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" whose curses and swearing amuse me immeasurably more than Hamlet's to-be-or-not-to-be and other jargons, Shylock who speaks the most eloquent, rhetorical and wonderful speeches in the play, and Jacques in "As You Like It".There is more to be said about this topic.... Here's Shylock:


To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,

it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and

hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,

mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my

bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine

enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath

not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,

dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with

the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject

to the same diseases, healed by the same means,

warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as

a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison

us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not

revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will

resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,

what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian

wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by

Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you

teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I

will better the instruction



Reminding G Wilson Knight of this Shylock speech, Knight, who had told me he was one-eighth Jewish, said to me: "Let Israel make a sign on its borders with this speech written on it so that no enemy could harm her"

An Egyptian friend of mine was recuperating from a minor surgry. I went to visit him with a bulky tray of take away charcoal grilled chickens and a liberal salad collection from the most renowned Turkish restaurant in the city. Another Egyptian, a former radio broadcaster and programmer and a colleague of the infamous Ahmed Saeed but a great hater of him and His Master's Voice Nasser, brought up the subject of Hamlet while munching chicken and dipping in homos-bit-heena, and he made a rather intriguing remark about Hamlet's father's ghost appearing in military dress. He explained that by saying that Shakespeare believed that the sword is mightier than words (cf: Hamlet's remark to Polonius "words, words, words"), and that man is at his best when he is a fighter and not a writer, a warrior and not a philosopher, and that the West today is ruling the world due to military might. Questions to be asked, to be considered and to be answered, as Falstaff says in HENRY IV, Part 1.

The Egyptian went further to say that Shakespeare by dressing the ghost in military attire meant that Shake believed that military might is the only way to "set things right", to use Hamlet's words. Hence, Hamlet's failure contrasted with Fortinbras' success, because Hamlet uses philosophy whereas Fortinbras uses the army. The Egyptian elaborated by saying that in the 15th century, the Pope called commanders and with his sword pointed at the map of the world and he said that the eastern hemisphere is the responsibility of the the Portugese and the western hemisphere is the responsibility of the Spanish ...


The Egyptian claims that the imaginary dagger-- a dagger is usually in the shape of a phallus-- coined by Macbeth's disturbed brain is intended by Shake to serve as a semiological reference to Macbeth's impotence--and Macbeth who seems to have suffered a great deal of sexual frustration, we have seen him in the light of impotence when Lady Macbeth says to him enticising him to kill the king, "If thou darest do it, then you were a MAN." MAN not in the human sense: very far from it, but in the VIRILE. The Liverpudlian Shakespearean critic LC Knights was aware of this point, hence his great essay, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?"The Egyption claims that the imaginary dagger-- a dagger is usually in the shape of a phallus-- coined by Macbeth's disturbed brain is intended by Shake to serve as a semiological reference to Macbeth's impotence--and Macbeth who seems to have suffered a great deal of sexual frustration, we have seen him in the light of impotence when Lady Macbeth says to him enticising him to kill the king, "If thou darest do it, then you were a MAN." MAN not in the human sense: very far from it, but in the VIRILE. The Liverpudlian Shakespearean critic LC Knights was aware of this point, hence his great essay, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?"

from Ibrahim Mumayiz

Most interesting recollections. You should seriously consider writing your memoires.

The Orient in Occidental Literary Heritage

It was John Lydgate (1370-1451), monk, scholar and poet, admirer of Chaucer and friend of his son Thomas, who popularised the story that Mohammed would put some seeds in his ears so that a dove would come to eat the seeds, and thus he made people believe that the dove was bringing word from God. In HENRY VI part ii, Shakespeare makes a character question Joan of Arc, "Did the dove that went to Mohammed turn into a falcon to bring you word from God!"
We've got to remind ourselves time and again that the two of the greatest literary works in the world are Iraqis: THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH and THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. GILGAMESH has the merits and features of a classic Greek tragedy by having the sense of irretrievable and uncompensated loss. It is also modern in that it contains concepts of the absudity of human life and it arouses fears and worries about human destiny and that we are living in a world without tomorrow or with a dubious tomorrow. For perhaps opposite characteristics, THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS is also modern in its being a hilarious and hectic work celebrating life and the joys of living in a manner similar to modern existentialism. It is also bawdy like any golden Shakespearean comedy. THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHT gives an image of the ancient city of Baghdad as vivid as Athens in 5th century BC, Venice in the 16th century and present-day Paris and London and New York combined together
G Wilson Knight the eminent Shakespearan critic whom I used to visit in his home, told me once that he was a great admirer and avid reader of the novel HAJJI BABA OF ISFAHAN and the play HASSAN. Indeed, such literary works--a cynical critic called them "sub-literature"--are highly enjoyable and extremely entertaining, and their literary merits are not inferior at all. I remember the beautifual English the author uses in HAJJI BABA OF ISFAHAN , and the beautiful lyrics in HASSAN, especially that song which says something to the effect of " .. and take the road to Samarkand ..." Furthermore, I love the history and geography of the area extending from Samarkand thru Bukhara to the mountains and valleys of Afghnistan, the area where Genghis Khan--one of my heroes--dwelt. And as you know Genghis Khan was grandda of Kublai Khan immortalised by Coleridge, and this links me more tightly to Genghis Khan. Many a Renaissance dramatist wrote plays with historical and geographical background of that part of the world.
Doughty,s mighty book "Travels in Arabia Deserta". One day circa Spring 1973 I travelled to Royal Holloway College in Eggham north of London with a proposal to do a graduare research on modern English literature, I saw me ending up in a professor's office who told me he was willing to do with me a research on Doughty's book. He stood up and walked towards the wall and turned back to me reciting with dramatic bravura lines from that book about walking in the streets of old Damascus, etc..
The original Macbeth went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, hence should be called Hajji Macbeth, after the
fictional Hajji Baba and the factual Hajji Murad. Another factual figure who went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem was the notorious Russian eroticist Rasputin, hence Hajji Rasputin.
The best known dirge is the one in Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" which goes, "Fear no more the heat of the sun, etc..." I have heard it recited by the American actor Vincent Price and the English actress Diana Rigg and I found the performance superior to the text. I will keep an eye on anything that comes in my way related to dirges your cup of tea these days. My cup of tea nowadays is--the old one but now heated--1950s Hollywood movies and stars. I like the history and the biographies. I have found in the internet an oasis to hear my desert song of Hollywood. My dvds collection is looming fairly well. Now I can speak of a collection of over 600--not too bad for one living in the desert. The Empty Quarter, by the way, is only 100 miles from me. Who that British traveller was who crossed the EQ, I fondly ask! He said he had the best time of his life there. He said that the desert has nothing to offer you, but it offers you the best thing in the world which you can find neither in London, nor Paris nor New York, nor anywhere else, and that thing is freedom

Two Wrote Together

John Ford--that poet of the Western movies--made a movie titled, TWO RODE TOGETHER, starring James Stewart and Richard Widmark. I here borrow, twist and adapt that movie's tiltle and write you this e-mail message titled: TWO WROTE TOGETHER, meaning William Wordsworth and ST Coleridge. So entwined were the two men that to talk about one, one cannot but mention the other. However, they were in certain essential aspects as different from each other as THE INTIMATION ODE is different from KUBLA KHAN. Bill was chilly, whereas Sam was warm. Bill was sensible and hard working, while Sam was feckless and lazy.
I still--since late 1960s-- recall a couple of bulky volumes on a stack in the Mosul University Library. They are the fully annotated, well edited and nicely introduced two-volume book titled, "Cloeridge's Notebooks" from whose introduction the editor says that Coleridge sought solace in two things: opium and his notebooks.
For the past 10 years, I have--still going on-- written over 4,000 pages of notes in notebooks; commonplace books, as they were practised and named by Elizabethan authors. They are half in half in Arabic and in English. I use 200-page school notebooks, from right cover to middle of the notebook , I write in Arabic and in the other half I write in English. My topics include everything under the sun. My notes are original, adaptations from materials I read and sometimes word for word copying from here and there. But the different elements are so adroitly mixed-- adapting other authors' writings is no picnic, and sometimes it is much more difficult to make adaptations than to do original writing-- that my editor and/or biographer will find it extremely difficult or even impossible to tell me from other authors. I myself find it impossible in 90% of the cases to tell me from the authors I used. I have come to call this kind of notes, readerly writings. Already back in early 1980s, my PhD supervisor in Exeter Dr Peter F Corbin, confused me with Shaw on whom I was doing my thesis. What with my notes and my letters, I am a prolific author. I have little to pride myself on, but I think I am a notable epistolarian
Apart from his literary oeuvre which amounts up to twenty times the size of Shakespeare's, Shaw's output of letters, post cards and messages amounts to one quarter of a million. Voltaire wrote at the average of 10 letters a day

Elia Kazan's name

In his extended family, Elia Kazan had relatives with Turko-Arabic names, among whom there was a Murad and a Sultana. His mother's family was Karajoglou: kara means black, jo is derived from Josef/Yusuf and oglou means son of. I recall from school days, we studied about the two governments, one Turkish and the other Persian, which ruled Iraq consecutively in the period after the fall of Baghdad in 1258--Baghdad, by the way had a second fall in 1958. One of these two governments was Kara Koyilo, the Black Sheep as Kara means black and Koyilo sheep and the other government was Aaq Koyilo, the White Sheep, as Aaq means white and Koyilo sheep. Likewise, in Dostoyvsky's THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, the name Karamazov means the Black Mazov. In 1952-3, I lived in the town Tellaafer, 70 kilometres west of Mosul (sometimes nowadays on the news about terrorist acts). Tellaaferi folks were Shiites speaking Turkish. I picked up some words from them one of which was oghli meaning son of usually used in swearing and cursing as in the phrase: kuppuk oghli kuppuk and shuk oghli shuk which respetively mean: dog son of a dog and jackass son of a jackass

from Ruby Cohn

Two lovely allusion-laden letters from you have gone unanswered ...
Yours tardily
Ruby Cohn
14th April 2004

from Ruby Cohn

I am truly embarrassed that I have taken so long in answering your lovely and witty letter of July 16th
Friendlily
Ruby Cohn
18th September 2003

from Charles Colchester

Thank you for your interesting letters. You are deeply well read and indeed have a comprehensive knowledge of the lives and oeuvres of many great writers and thinkers. I love all that ... comprehensive bibliophile

Charles Colchester
CARE
21 May 2004

from Robert Welch

I enjoyed reading your Synge essay--very lively.... It is full of your very delightful and engaging style

11 March 1998

from Ruby Cohn

Two letters from you last week. Thank you for such interesting letters. Friendlily (the word is a Beckett neologism), Ruby Cohn

from Ruby Cohn

How fortuitous you should have the same initials as Samuel Beckett
Cordially
Ruby Cohn

from Christopher Ricks

Your friendly flurry of letters leaves me a little beathless, so just think how it must leave you.... But Iam grateful, even though I shall not even try to match as a correspondent--and not only because I am about to leave in two hours' time for England ...

22d July 1998

English literary history

English literay history falls into two periods: (1) from BEOWULF in the year 700 to Dryden's death in 1700, and (2) from Defoe to date. In the first period, English literature was formal and compositional whereas in the second period it was informal and conversational. The second period begins in early eighteenth century when Addison and Steele began writing their periodical essays and when in April 1719 Defoe published ROBINSON CRUSOE, and a generation later, the Romantics wrote a literature that is very intimate and personal, a type of literature which continued with the same intimate personal vein up until today and will foreseeably thus go on. I like and practise conversational writing

biography

"Facts, facts! Teach these children nothing but facts." Thus MacChockcholmchild in Dickens' HARD TIMES. Likewise, I am not reading anything but biographies, autobiographies, memoirs. diaries, journals, letters, and nothing else but biographical writings replete with visceral intimate private and personal spitit and abundant in memorabilia and paraphernalia. My current reading--indeed re-reading--is Thomas de Quincey's CONFESSIONS which is a book that makes you love reading and encourages you to pick up pen and pad and do writing youself. The book is conversational not in the sense that it is humdrum but in the sense that it is intimate and establishes with you a relationship as if with a friend who keeps a good company and entertains with glib conversation

At the opening of CONFESSIONS de Quincey gives an account of his encounter with Coleridge in London when he, ie de Quincey has just arrived from Manchester, after a long tedious, strenuous but enjoyable journey all the same. De Quincey met Coleridge before he met Ann the street walker whom he immortalises in the CONFESSIONS. Both being penniless, Thomas and Ann lived in old shabby deserted houses in London where while one is asleep, a drunkard, a thief , a muderer, an escaped prisoner and what-not could enter. On 19th December 1979, while on the Exeter-London train, I got to know an Ann-like woman who was going back to London after coming to Exeter only to post Christmas cards to her parents in London to cheat them by the post-mark on the envelope that she was living away from London. Patricia was a sweet nice soul, always smiling, always merry, despite the tragedy of her life which she related to me. The episode was like one of the characters in Henry Fielding JOSEPH ANDREW travelling in a coach telling fellow-passengers the story of that jilted woman, Lenora whose house the coach was passing by on the way to London. I here summerise to you, dear Ib, Patricia's tragedy: Patricia was married and had a baby, and one night in the local pub, her husband went too far in abusing and humiliating her in front of everyone and they went home and he was still bothering her until he finally resorted to batter her. At this moment Patricia rushed to the kitchen and brandished a knife with which she stabbed her man who fell dead on the spot. "I took the baby in my arms," Patricia said to me making a gesture of a mother very much loving her babe, "and rushed back to the pub informing people about the incident, and the police arrived." She was placed in Royal Holloway Prison, South of London where she spent four and a half years as the incident was judged as misadventure. Pat, always looking at the bright side of things, felt nostalgic to her prison years and how cigarettes were smuggled to her and her prison-mates. When I asked her about her current residence, she told me--and here is the similarity between her and de Quincey's Ann--that she was living in a deserted home in the London's Angels area

London memoirs

Sitting in the lounge of the Red Lion, a pub on the Shaftesbury Avenue corner. London, circa Spring 1983, sipping my lager pulled by a Dorian-Gray look-alike bar-tender who spoke with a tinge of Oxford dialect, a silhouette shadow fell on the tabloid I was reading, and without formally introducing himself, and without mincing his words, said to me: "You look like the nice good chap I have in mind to put on a blue job right over here in Soho." Before I managed to say a thing, he raised his index in a gesture indicating to me to hold on a minute and he went to a far end in the bar--you know, dear Ib, that typical traditional brick-built London bars are characterised by having considerably long counters--and came back with two girls, one English and the other Indian, telling me to start my career with them. He told me later that his name was Andrew--telling me to call him Andy--and that he had a heart condition and that his key worry was that he might find himself forced to make his 14-year old daughter a party in a blue job

favourites

Of the Anglo-Saxon poems I like, "Deor" I like in particular due to this poem's wolfish spirit in enduring life's hardships and circumstances and the changes of fortune. Indeed, it gives the impression of a wounded wolf crying in the wilderness long and mournfully. In particular I remember that immortal line in "Deor":


That sorrow pass'd, so will this one

The other day I read Kamal Junbulat's motto in life, and I particularly liked it because it renders into a pygmy Shakespeare's To be or not to be and put it in the shade. Let's read:

To die or not die, care I not, for life is but a figment of the imagination

اموت او لا اموت , لا أبالي أنما العمر من نسج الخيال

Chekhov Letters

During my Mustansiriyah years in early 1990s culminating triumphantly and terminating joyously--after all, all's well that ends well-- in my exodus in 1995, I picked up from a stack in the central library, a volume, and after I blew the dust from it, I sat down to read it, and its material transported me to spheres which made me transcend--at times more than one, meals at your Baghdad home made me do the same-- the feeling of hunger I was feeling on that--one among many others-- days, to pilfer a phrase from dear good old WW when he describes a tree by saying: a tree among many. That volume contained Maxim Gorky's letters to Chekhov. The other day, I was reading Chekhov's letters to his wife the actress Olga Knipper. The letters made me imagine dear good old Anton Chekhov smiling with a protective humour and a full awareness of life's absurdity, plus awareness of the brief intensity of our existence

That Beauty

It was a day circa the first week os September 1995 when that beauty came to my Mustansiriyah office, and apologising for my poor means of entertaining her as we had that one-eyed porter Abdul who served nothing but black over-boiled tea, she suggested to be my host in a free tour in the beautiful cafes of the city of Baghdad. Being a true Moslawi and a passionte lover of her, dreaming rosy--sometimes blue--dreams of her, I immediately, like Mrs Bloom in James Joyce's ULYSSES, said Yes. We sat and set out in a taxi and I cannot-- couldn't then-- remember the places we passed because with her I was outside the streets of Baghdad, outside the world and outside my substance. I only remember we ended up in one of those Beirut-style cafeterias which were in fashion in those days where clandestine lovers had rendevouzes and trysts. I am unable to recall the actual words of our conversation, but I can still feel the--to use TS Eliot's term--objective correlative of--to use a phrase from Elizabeth Barrett Browning in "Songs from the Portoguese"-- the ways I counted to her how I loved her

G Wilson Knight

 I first came across Dick (G[eorge Richard] Wilson Knight), whose intimate domestic name Dick is from his second Christian name Richard, in the mid-1960s when reading his THE WHEEL OF FIRE during my undergraduate years in University of Baghdad. In Spring 1972 when reading for my MA in University of Leeds where Dick was Professor Emeritus but living in Exeter in his brother Jackson's Caroline House (named after mama Caroline) whose threshold I was destined to cross in Summer 1980, I attended a lecture delivered by Dick (read it, dear Ib, in Dick's book published later titled NEGLECTED POWERS). Brother Jackson was Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Exeter and he was the translator of Vergil's ANEID in the Penguin Classics series. (Unfortunately, I didn't meet Jackson for he had been dead). Dick's lecture was on one of his icons, John Cowper Poyse, of the three Welsh Poyse brothers who were all men-of-letters and no wonder as their great-uncle was the celebrated nervously-unhinged eighteenth-century English poet William Cowper the man with the oft-quoted line (I first read it in Palgrave's TREASURY--whoever read beautiful poetry for the first time but read it not in Palgrave's TREASURY!) by Alexander Silkirk on whom DD modelled his Robinson Crusoe: "I am the monarch of all that I survey."
Dick (1897-1985), like his brother Jackson, a couple of years his senior, lived and died a celibate. Dick died on a highly Shakespearean day, the ides of March, the Soothsayer's warning to Caesar: "Beware the ides of March." By the way, in Spring 1995, our Mustansiriyah University colleague the heart-conditioned Najiyah, the one who did in a French university a PhD on that What's-his-name Renaissance dramatist who choked to death of over-eating, tried her hand--I assisted her as elocution coach--at directing our students in a stage version of JULIUS CAESAR. If you sought a Shakespearean authortiy to give you the best second opinion on your present paper RENAISSANCE ASPECTS IN SHAKESPEARE, it had to be Wilson Knight. One noon-time I stepped into his house and was in the mind of leaving with him some material I had written on Shaw so that I would call next day to collect it corrected by him. He told me to hold on, and I, standing by his chair watching him as if he was a falcon devouring its prey verociuosly, waited for about twenty minutes until he handed me my paper, fully corrected. Dick and I parted on an unfriendly tone. After a friendship with Dick was lasted over four years, one evening in the City of Exeter's Ship Inn where according to legend the celebtared British Renaissance seaman Drake drank ale, I was boozing with a curious bunch. One of the bunch was Bill, a former lion-tamer, WWII glider flier and a some-time stage actor and the son of a stage actors in a travelling troupe. Bill, having a stage background, used to recite lines from Shakespeare, and one day indeed night, after reciting Prospero's speech: "Our revels are now ended ... " turned to me as said: "Siddeek, if this not greatness, what's greatness then?". Other members of the bunch was Alec who after sipping a quick double gin and lime would excuse himself to disappear to return about half an hour later. We discovered that he would go for a prayer at the Exeter Cathedral next door to the Ship Inn, then he would come back to resume revels with us by his drinking Guiness. Christine whose husband was bed ridden cripple was another one of the bunch. Christine's husband whom we never met had been a successful hotelier and restauranteur in Torquy, a seaside town south of Exeter. Aspiring to expand his empire of hotel busniness, he bought two more hotels. Mismanagement turned him penniless. When he received court's orders to be put in debtors' prison, he fell crippled once and for all. Another one in the bunch was John Rice, a local unpublished young poet, originally Liverpudlian, who never wore socks and pants. It was John Rice who had originally provided me with Dick's telephone number and address. Now that particular evening, I told John Rice that Dick was a millionaire due to royalties of his books which were over 40 in number. Next morning, John Rice showed up at Caroline House begging money from Dick. Whan Dick asked John who told him that he was well off enough to give money to people in charity, John Rice told him it was me. Following evening, at the Ship Inn, John Rice told me he could procure 100 pounds from Dick. John Rice said to me :"Wilson Knight said angrily :'Let Siddeek Tawfeek not discuss my money in public.' "
The key to G Wilson Knight's approach to Shakespearean tragedy is that in tragedy there is triumph over life. After telling me this, he recited King Lear's passage to his daughter Cordelia after both are captured and he tells her that they would sit in a cage and watch people in their going and coming and to laugh at them. This stems from his optimistic view to human existence, a view that is Judaic-Christian and not Hellenic, and he prided himself on being one eighth Jewish. The man himself was a practising religionist, and when I invited him to celebrate my 36th birthday at girl-friend Frances's place in Exeter, he arrived in a car driven by a co-churchgoer. He also told me that one could triumph over tragedy by laughing at it, then he mentioned that we could laugh at Macbeth himself, but, he added, we couldn't laugh at Hitler who to him, on basis of holocaust, was the only unforgiven villain
Asking him about his favourite of the 40 plus books he had authored, he told me it was THE CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE, out of print then and nowadays. Among his favourite authors beside Shakespeare, were Byron, Poe, Wilde, Shaw and John Cowper Powys, his icon and mentor in literature and in life, and one of his most favourite books was the play HASSAN from which he frequently recited to me the song that ends with the phrase: "on the road to Isfahan."
At 1 pm on 1st September 1981 G Wilson Knight stepped into my residence the Glwdyr, 41 Danes Road, Exeter. He came on foot as his residence in Caroline House which was about a mile's walk from my place. I served him mixed grill of beef chunks, mutton kebbab, kidnneys and lamb liver on a bed of burghul with pickled paprika and cucumbers. Dessert was konafa I had bought from the Greek delacatessen in town. After that we entered the living room where I had hidden the microphone to record our conversation. Result was a 50- minute- unguarded- moment conversation where the old man talked about his literary taste, personal habits and his writings on Shakespeare, and how one day he went to meet TS Eliot in his office at Lloyds Bank where Eliot worked as a clerk in order to negotiate publishing his first book, THE WHEEL OF FIRE, as Eliot was influential in publishing circles. Result: book was published with an introduction by Eliot.
G Wilson Knight the eminent Shakespearan critic whom I used to visit in his home, told me once that he was a great admirer and avid reader of the novel HAJJI BABA OF ISFAHAN and the play HASSAN. Indeed, such literary works--a cynical critic called them "sub-literature"--are highly enjoyable and extremely entertaining, and their literary merits are not inferior at all. I remember the beautifual English the author uses in HAJJI BABA OF ISFAHAN , and the beautiful lyrics in HASSAN, especially that song which says something to the effect of " .. and take the road to Samarkand ..." Furthermore, I love the history and geography of the area extending from Samarkand thru Bukhara to the mountains and valleys of Afghnistan, the area where Genghis Khan--one of my heroes--dwelt. And as you know Genghis Khan was grandda of Kublai Khan immortalised by Coleridge, and this links me more tightly to Genghis Khan. Many a Renaissance dramatist wrote plays with historical and geographical background of that part of the world

from Ibrahim Mumayiz

Most interesting recollections. You should seriously consider writing your memoires.

G Wilson Knight

When I told Eric Bentley about my excursions to Knight's residence in Caroline House, Bentley said that he had been there with his communist friend Arnold Kettle. When I told Ruby Cohn about my affiliations with Knight, she described said him, "Oh, that madman".


Knight's biography THE TARZAN OF ATHENS tells us things untold and uknown to us before about the man and his family. The family which was to expand into having two children, Frank Jackson and George Richard, originally came from Gloustershire. Neighbours were very familiar with daily shouts and yells coming from the Knights' house. Father and mother were at continuous rows. Mother Caroline was clairvoyant and practised necromancy and geomancy. She was the stronger and more influential character than the father, and that is why son Frank gave her name to the house he bought in Exeter later. Dick himself used to refer to her with reverence, and out of love and yearning to her, he himself practised necromancy to contact her, and he could communicate with her spirit

He was so because Dick found in Timon the perfect image of the solitary man, and the solitary man was Dick's icon, because the solitary man is the free man. Dick, although sociable and welcoming, was, deep in his heart, a recluse, so Timon provided him with the ideal model of the recluse. Besides, Dick was a life-long masturbater, so he imagined that Timon, being away from society was free to masturbate, or indeed, masturbation freed Timon then Dick himself from need for society and thus could live the desired reclusive life. There seem to be no women in Timon's life. He only kept stag company. When Timon later encounters the three prostitutes he rejects them altogether. There is no hint to any homsexuality in Timon. So, Dick concluded that Timon aired his sexuality chiroplatonically. In his lecture which I attended in Leeds in spring 1972, later included under the title "Masturbation and Mysticism" in the book published under the title, NEGLECTED POWERS, Dick promotes masturbation and he considers it as the best way to purify the self from any tendecies to cruelty. In my home in Exeter, he told me that if Israelis and Arabs sat and masturbated together, they would reslove all their disputes and become friends. He also told me that there were monks and priests who masturbated by imagining the image of Christ and sometimes holding a statue of Christ during the process of masturbation. When I asked him if he was still practising masturbation, Dick said, "No energy left."

Knight's favourite Shakespearean character was Timon of Athens. Knight had a one-man show of Shakespeare's play TIMON OF ATHENS . On mantlepiece of his Caroline House, I saw placed there a bronze statuette of Knight as Timon, in a Tarzan costume. No wonder a biography of him appeared posthumously in late 1980s titled the THE TARZAN OF ATHENS with Knight's pictrure as Timon on the cover. I borrowed it from Mustansiriyah University Library, Baghdad, Iraq in 1993

Abu Shamkhi

In the 1950s there was a clothes-ironer named Abu Shamkhi. He had a shop adjunct to Al-Assaf Mosque where, as in the Oedipus story, three roads met, one to Adhamiya, the other to Raghba Khattoon and the other to the street where lived Abdul-Kareem Al-Jidda, Abdul- Rahman Al-Bazzaz and my uncle Akram. Abu Shamkhi was a renowned sodomite. Rumour spread about him that, while with boys, Abu Shamkhi was as piercing as the blade of the Arab who courts Portia in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, but with females, he was as placid as a blade of grass. One day, the folks around him relished a practical joke on him. They arranged with a woman prostitute to turn up at a certain address. On the other hand, they told Abu Shamlki that they had procured for him a boy more beautiful than the Queen Sheba. Abu Shamkhi, pressing his iron so firmly on the trousers he was pressing that the iron-board squeaked, nodded a big Yes, bigger than Mrs Bloom's Yes in Joyce's ULYSSES. The folks waiting at the fixed address and the woman prostiute hiding in the bedroom, Abu Shamkhi arrived with a smile as braod as the sky. To tease him, the folks delayed introducing him to the intended boy. Finally, they left the place. Like Marlow in many a Joseph Conrad novel taking up the narration, the prostitute took up the narration and she later
told the folks what happened after they had left her with Abu Shamkhi. Abu Shamkhi entered the bedroom with a Nietzschesque will to power , but when he found that it was not a boy but a woman, he felt so disappointed that he left without doing a thing, without saying good bye, but
with a broken heart, mumbling repeatedly, "I have been fooled, I have been fooled."
Postscript:
Post-Modernism means leaving no stone unturned, everything is acceptable and nothing is impossible. In early 1970s answering with yes a question put to him in a television talk show whether or not he was homosexual, 10 c Williams made the American nation from coast to coast give him a standing ovation for his veracity and courage. Homosexuality has become an acadmic subject for which students get the PhD from Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Yale and what-not. Before me right now, a page of Exeter University staff research interests, and I read: Dr Margaretta Jolly, Lesbian and Gay Writing. The other day, I translated a report on human rights of minorities in the USA, and one clause of the report cautions both the state and the public against discriminations against Jews, Moslems, disabled persons and gays

from Ibrahim Mumayiz

 My Dear and very dear Sid,

This form address was first used by (I think) Hazlitt when he first came across Fitzgerald,s translation of Omar Khayyam. So impressed was he that he sat down to write a letter to Fitzgerald which began "I have'nt the least idea of who you are,but...." This first sentence quite obviously, and most,most certainly does not apply to us, but I think the addressing phrase certainly does. I was quite overwhelmed by your most detailed  range of learning, and your gracious offer to introduce me to your friends in the UK. I would certainily be pleased to make their acquaintance.

Keep me informed about the publication of your letters to me. Its a great pity if they're not published. There are scores and scores of them. I have a huge pile of them.

It would be great to sit down to a glorious meal and have a glorious chat.

I academically fell in love with you because I was deeply impressed by the way you put things about authors and poets so beautifully and efficiently and nonchalantly earthily as if you had lived with them, eaten with them, drank with them and chatted with them. When we first met in Mosul about 1986, I expecting to find a humdrum ping-pong-question-and-answer chat with you. But a couple of minutes after our embarking upon discussion of literature, I realised that what you were offering was not the usual staple but a meal fit only for Zeus and Hera and the others on top of Mount Olympus, indeed it was godly food for thought, and methought I imagined Zeus pointing his finger at you saying to the others, "He is one of us." Yours, Ib

Something missing in Eliot's WASTELAND

The central theme of TS Eliot's THE WASTELAND being death wish, Eliot missed mentioning or quoting King Lear's best statement about death wish when he says to Cordelia who rouses him from his deep sleep, "You do me wrong to take me out of the grave", thinking he had been dead and buried. There is no mention or reference to Lear in THE WASTELAND, although quotations and allusions are sprinkled all over the poem which is indeed a hodgebodge of quotations

from Ibrahim Sallo

Great Dr Sadeeq. Really I like it.

from Ibrahim Mumayiz

Dear Sid,




Most welcome to WATA!!! You should have been an active, and honoured member at least a year ago. I'm so pleased you're with us. Lets do something in WATA together. What say thou? How about "SHAKESPEARE! THE IDEAL RENAISSANCE MAN" we could hold forth, alternately, you and I on how the Renaissance was Shakespeare, and Shakespeare was the Renaissance! A Real lively duette!!



Ib

Exchange with JoAnne Akalaitis

On Dec 31, 2007, at 11:06 PM, siddeek tawfeek wrote:

Dear JoAnne
Wishing you a
VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR
I remain
Sincerely
Siddeek


From joanne akalaitis to siddeek tawfeek

thank you and same to you. having fun with beckett now.

Sad champion Beckett

To you, dear Sam, sad champion of the drab




Today, April 13th, Samuel Beckett's 102nd birthday, and who knows, maybe like TS Eliot's Becket, Beckett is now looking down at us, we, to use Hamlet's phrase, "fools of nature

tsadeek

In her friendly, intimate, private and homely personal domestic book on SB, titled How It Was, Ann Atik doesn't find in the English language an adjective adequate enough to describe SB's nicety, so she resorts to borrow from the Hebrew language the word "tsadeek" which she explains means the rightueous, the veracious. "Verily, verily I tell ye" says The New Testament, which quotation Dostoyvsky used as epigraph for his The Brothers Karamazov. Indeed, my name Siddeek means the same in Arabic as tsadeek in Hebrew. On the other hand, after reading Ann Atik's "tsadeek" at the Beckett International Foundation in the University of Reading Library, I rushed to the secretary Verity Andrews and told her that her name, Verity and mine, Siddeek have the same meaning

With Ruby Cohn

Following year, July 2005, I visited Ruby Cohn at her London studio. We left the studio as the maid was tidying up the place, and we went to a restaurant where we had lunch. While walking, I told her we looked like "Violet and Sebastian, Sebastian and Violet", as Violet Venable, in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, describes how stylish and elegant she and her son Sebastian appeared in posh restaurants


Ruby was suffering from hard hearing, and as if she had a hunch that she was saying good-bye to intellectual life, she told me, after returning to her studio from the Italian restaurant, to help myself to any of the books available there. I choose one volume only and that was Deirdre Bair's SB Biography. At that time, there was a staging of Miller's Deat of a Salesman at the Lyric Theatre-Shaftesbury, London and I thought of going together, but she told me she had seen it, didn't like it and advised me against going to see it. She advised me to go and see a Beckett double bill in a fringe theatre which I couldn't locate, so I went to see Salesman which proved Ruby was right. Ruby told me a lot of things about her Beckettian life, and I asked her about the first French Godot in Paris directed by Roger Blin in 1953, she told me that the first Godot she saw was the 1956 one in London, and she went to see it with her then-husband. She also told me that Suzanne, Mrs Beckett, had two entrances to the Beckett residence, one for his visitors who included all the English-language speaking ones, and another entrance for her visitors who were all French-language speaking ones. Therefore, Ruby concluded, she never met Suzanne

At the Knowlsons'

After meeting Ruby Cohn in London, I went to meet James Knowlson in Reading. He was expecting me at the Beckett International Foundation. And at the BIF I was, reading a book on Beckett, and it was lunch time when everybody except me was out for lunch. I heard a knock on the door, and opening it, I saw a man and a woman standing there. Telling by my Arabian features that I was the Arab of Beckettia, they both said, "You must be Mr Tawfeek", saying "Yes", I added, "You must be Professor and Mrs Knowlson", and they said "Yes". We went to the Senior Common Room for lunch. Ruby had told me that Jim was a non-stop talker and how one day Beckett, being the shy man he was, signaled to her to make Knowlson cease. Indeed, Jim seemed not to have learned the lesson, and so he was doing all the talking--of course, all valuable stuff about Beckett--while Liz and I were all ears and chewing our chicken casserole. Jim concluded that I go visit them at home for a tea afternoon which I did. In the garden, over high tea, we exchanged remarks about Beckett and Liz said how one day Sam kissed her, and turning to Jim, she said, "Sam kissed me, Jim, you do remember", and Jim, in mixed jealousy and pride nodded "Yes". I spent a wonderful time with the Knowlsons, and when alighting from his car he said to me, "Call me Jim"