President Barak Obama's inaugural address lasted 18 minutes, the duration between Billie Whitelaw's stage presentation in early 1973 of Samuel Beckett's Not I in New York City which lasted 19 minutes and the London presentation which lasted 17 minutes. When SB learned that it lasted 19 minurtes in New York he ordered Whitelaw to cut it down to 17 in London where I saw it at the Royal Court Theatre in the evening of 16th January 1973




There are money-minded people, there are sex-minded people, there are religion-minded people, there are politically-minded people, I am a Beckett-minded person, as once I knew that Obama's inaugural address lasted 18 minuets, it flashed in my mind that this address lasted between New York's and London's Not I. I think I have a Beckett idee fix, ie, Beckett fixation, like the mother fixation Norman Bates, the hero of Hitchcock's Psycho, played by Anthony Perkins had, and as fixation, whether a mother fixation as in Norman Bates' case or a Beckett fixation as in my case, is a mental disorder, I therefore am in need of psycho-therapy. I wonder if this happens to every Beckettian, or, to use Ruby Cohn's term, Becketteer!

Like many an Iraqi scholar and student, SB's plays have always been dear to me and ever present in my mind, hence here's my ad-libbed Hamm-Clov dialogue






[Scene: Saddam and Deputy Tariq Aziz in a hide-out during the American-Iraqi liberation war leading to Saddam's long-awaited downfall on April 9th 2003, co-inciding on 138th anniversary of end of American civil war on Palm Sunday April 9th 1865]



Saddam: The Americans have forgotten us

Aziz: Forgotten us! You exaggerate

Saddam: I mean here in the vicinity of our hide-out

Aziz: But they bombard us from time to time

Saddam: Then the Americans haven't forgotten us

No one has experienced WAITING as did the Iraqis, hence we LIVED WAITING FOR GODOT not simply READ about it. For over three decades, I for one--among the Iraqis--was waiting impatiently for Saddam's downfall, and this downfall like a long-awaited Godot did arrive, but in seems that the chthonic powers wouldn't let us rejoice the arrival of the Iraqi GODOT

> Here's an answer to you query about SB's popularity among Iraqi students which you raised in your first e-mail message two weeks ago. Ever since we. Iraqi students in the University of Baghdad were introduced in late spring, 1967 to SB's WAITING FOR GODOT--and I pride myself in getting to know SB before James Knowlson who discovered him in 1969--our love of him has been growing over the years and from one generation to the other, as if he was a guru whose followers grow in number in the course of time. Amidst the atrocitiers on-going currently in Iraq, we Iraqis--scholars as well as laymen--pride ourselves in LIVING the Absurd whereas the rest of the world READS in books and SEES on stage the Absurd, ie other people's fiction is our reality, their intellectual luxury is our mental agony, their book reading, university lecturing and play staging are our street fights, suicide cars exploding and kidnapping and killing. Hence SB's credibility, reality and the truth among us, not READ on the page or SEEN on the stage, but LIVED on ground

1--In a recent NOT I staging I read about in THE BECKETT CIRCLE which you once edited, the Auditor is made a Twareq look-alike. Twareqs are bedouin Arabs living in the Algerian Sahara (Desert). The recent V[olkes] W[agen] model is subtitled Twareg, ie desert rover, as the Arabic word, tawreq means rovers or roamers. The name Twareq (twareq is plural of tareq) is from Tareq ben Ziad, the Arab captain who crossed the sea from Tangier to Spain en route what later came to be named after him, Gibraltar which is a spoiled English version of the original Arabic: Jabal Tareq which translates as: Mount of Tareq. Present-day Saddam's Deputy Tareq Aziz, imprisoned in Baghdad since Saddam's fall on 9th April, 2003, is named after that Arab Captain Tareq ben Ziad, and Deputy Aziz named his first-born son, Ziad so that the son's name is Ziad Tareq who is currently in Jordan, pleading--through Pope Benedict XVI, among many another world VIP--for his father's release




2--In the television staging of QUAD which I saw in England as part of the 1981 BBC-2 TV Beckett Plays Festival, the four hooded figures were Moroccan look-alikes. They were reminiscent of the hooded man who gets stabbed in the market-place in Alfred Hitchcock's THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, the 1956 Hollywood film whose action at the beginning is set in Morocco where James Stewart and Doris Day are touring

Circa 1976 in a bookshop in the city of Mosul, modern Iraq, where Jonah in the ancient city of Nineveh, Mesopotamia, just across the River Tigris, once dwelt, I bought a book written in Arabic on Samuel Beckett containing, among other things, a photo-copy of a post card from Samuel Beckett to Suhail Bedee Bishruie, then American University in Beirut, Lebanon Professor of English Literature, and currently a Maryland University Professor next door to you. Bishruie and his colleagues planned a birthday party for SB and wrote him a request to do so. In a reply characteristic of him, Beckett wrote to Beshruie to the effect of "I kneel to you to excuse me from this." Lois, get hold of Bishruie in Maryland to get from him that SB post card to include it in your collection of the correspondence of SB. Rush to Bishruie as, according to word I have heard, he was seen walking on two crutches on the Maryland beach due to old age. My MA supervisor in my thesis on SB's plays, Leeds University, UK in 1971, Robert Welch currently Dean of Faculty of Arts, University of Ulster-Coleraine, N Ireland, editor of Oxford Companion to Irish Literature and father-in-law of the actor who played Lucky in Sir Peter Hall's August 2005 production of Waiting for Godot, told me during my visit to him in July 2005 that Bishruie had visited him a couple of weeks ago, and that they agreed to co-author a book on Irish literature

In an interview where Eli Wallach accounts for his relation with Marilyn Monroe, he says that in an off-the-set conversation with MM while making The Misfits, he said to her, "Let me show you who I really am; let's go the beach"


During my NYC visit in July 2004, and while on my way to visit the Actors' Studio at W 44, I thought I was going to an area that was sealed by NYPD, and only pre-arranged visits could be made. I arrived there, and where did I find myself? In a desolute avenue where it took me five minutes to find a passer-by to hold my camera and snap it for a photo of myself standing at the entrance of the Actors' Mecca. Thank God, a van belonging to the neighbours opposite the Studio stopped and two men came out to unload their shopping. One of them, who couldn't make head or tail of my hyper-excitement took my photo. I could get inside the Studio when a trainee arrived . He allowed me only 2 minutes, during which I looked around. The trainee pointed at a chair and a desk were a lecturer or instructor would sit facing his audience. He told me that a few months ago before he died, Marlon Brando was sitting there one morning when Eli wallach came in and started talking what sounded to Brando stuff and nonsense that Brando with his bulky belly stood up and rushed towards Wallach and hurled him away, calling him names. After getting Wallach's phone number in NYC, I dialed and the other side which was the answering machine said to me, "Mr Wallach regrets that he cannot respond to calls on this number."