Samuel Beckett on the Quantified Self

When am I ever, ever going to have a better excuse to post this.

F. Spufford @2
that being a take-off on the whole genre of TV detective shows, or a specific one?

LFC, I think of the particular breed of mid-70s cop shows that always had quirkily cool protagonists with highly stylised sidekicks, from Kojak to The Rockford Files by way of Colombo.

Memory just clicked in: James Garner. Or James something at any rate.

After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes.

It is unbelievably excessive, and I cannot imagine why self-proclaimed leftists should hang on this serial obfuscator’s every emission.

File under: Things not to read while eating lunch.

My favorite piece of trivia ever: For a couple of years while he was living in France, Beckett gave a neighbor kid a ride to school every morning. Why? Because the kid had been banned from the school bus. Why? Because he couldn’t fit comfortably into the seats. Why? Because he was Andre the Giant.

But the soundtrack in the video is not from “Starsky and Hutch” in which the grandiosely racist caricature Huggy Bear made special appearances but the from “The Streets of San Francisco” which featured a young Michael Douglas who would later become famous for his sensitive portrayal of Liberace.

At any rate, let’s think like Silicon Valley, Morzov would instruct us. The task is to find surface body space on which to put a new sensor. That is why the fart sensor is such a good idea: who thought of putting a sensor there, yet so much valuable information is revealed by the fart count per hour. And without a penile sensor for involuntary erections how do we know if someone really needs ED medicine.

Reading Beckett made me the go-getter that I am today!

Francis Spufford @6

I didn’t watch Kojak or The Rockford Files; ‘quirkily cool’ is a fair description of Columbo as I remember him, but I don’t recall his having a regular sidekick, highly stylised or not.

And to the OP–at least Beckett evened-out the coarse triviality of his emissions at one end by those of the other. Unlike Trump and Cruz.

Henry @19 : pt taken

Dr Ngo @23:
‘Cannon’ starred William Conrad, radio’s Matt Dillon (‘Gunsmoke’). I prefer to think of him that way, rather than as Cannon. (I’m not quite old enough to have listened to ‘Gunsmoke’ when originally broadcast, but one can still hear it on ‘oldies’ radio today.)

RNB @17
It could be from reading Beckett that you get the next great idea to take to the VC’s.

Took me a couple of seconds to figure out that VCs = venture capitalists. You must stop writing in Silicon Valley shorthand. You’ve clearly been teaching in the Bay Area too long. ;)

Francis Spufford,

“When am I ever, ever going to have a better excuse to post this.”

That is so awesome, it brings back the mid 90s rather than the 70s for me

https://youtu.be/z5rRZdiu1UE

That Quinn Martin Beckett looks good, but the title sequence is missing the voiceover.

Police Squad! parodies those titles back in the 80s:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWOrtgiG7EI&w=420&h=315%5D

Does Judge Brown oppose all forms of serfdom? Surprisingly, she did mention that there might be other roads to serfdom, but certainly did not elaborate on that.
I can’t help but think that definition of freedom is just some obfuscation of
freedom to look at the world the same way she does.

I was going to say the same thing about Columbo’s dog. I always wanted an episode based on Lt. Columbo’s last day on the job, where he grumbles about how, for all his success clearing cases, he never made Captain, and tells us why. I also wanted a Columbo-Murder She Wrote crossover where Jessica Fletcher goes to L.A., someone dies (imagine that) and the two of them solve the case combining their trademark approaches. The last scene is Jessica on the phone to her agent telling him she has a great idea for a new series character.
Speaking of Jessica Fletcher, I saw Angela Lansbury in a production of Blithe Spirit. In one scene, the wife of the leading man, a successful mystery writer, is talking to Lansbury, playing a slightly demented medium. The wife mentions that her husband is working on a new mystery in which a mystery writer gets involved in solving a crime. The audience waited with bated breath to see what Lansbury/Fletcher would do with this. She did what the old pros always do — nothing. After a perfectly timed pause, the audience cracked up and then the play went on.

Suzanne (if I may) @ 33–

Thanks so much for that. I DO strongly agree that the 80s restart was pretty lame–and in part because it didn’t reproduce the deductive-style methods. (So, I’m also respectfully disagreeing with you as well!) I think of the Ross Martin episode where he was an art expert, and Columbo, suspecting him, reaches in a folio to touch what’s in there, only for Martin’s character to jerk it away. Later Columbo orders that the (supposedly recovered) art be dusted for fingerprints–and Martin’s character protests that his prints would be all over the work and ridicules Columbo for that–but then the Lieutenant says something like–“Not your fingerprints–*my* fingerprints”–because he could never have touched them except for the folio incident. Other episodes: Columbo “forcing” a murderer to dispose of a body in a concrete footing of a building by convincing authorities to dig up that footing (knowing that there was no body there) and thus allowing the killer to infer that that location was the safest place to dispose of the corpse, and surprising the killer at the site when doing so (one instance where Columbo uses the killer’s logical powers of deduction to trap him!). Placing another killer (Robert Culp?–a multi–guest-star killer–I refuse to Google every questioned part of my memory) in the situation of identifying a camera that only the killer could have known about, etc. etc. I think Columbo was in fact (originally) based on the idea that appearances are deceptive, and in ways that professional philosophers should heartily endorse as all too familiar: someone who appears odd, eccentric, and even slow at first glance, but who is extremely sharp and devises (largely) deductive strategies to entrap opponents.

But again I’m with you–starting in ’66 and though much of the 70s–Columbo is the best media detective ever.

“Sorry, pardon me, just one more question, something’s bothering me . . .”

I like this essay on “Fail Again”, which has no time for cities on hills: Fail Worse.

I suspect there’s some joke to be made about Krapp’s bananas and Molloy’s farts, but it’s going to take someone wittier than me to make it.

@37: Yes, it was Van Dyke. My recollection is fairly sharp because my father likes

Points taken. I’m thinking of episodes like the one where Columbo made a very big production about Robert Conrad knowing or not knowing when his victim had changed his gym clothes, and another one where The Missing Boutonniere causes John Cassavetes’ superstar conductor to collapse before Columbo’s powers of deduction. These guys are not only clever, ruthless killers, they’re also men of means (Columbo episodes always taking place in posh surroundings), and I still have no idea why they just don’t say, “An interesting theory, Lieutenant. Good luck proving it in court and I’m not talking till my costly legal team gets here.”

I do remember that show about the architect. It’s a nice moment when those floodlights go on.

I’d say Peak Columbo was the first five years of the series’ seventies run. Toward the end of the first run the plots really did get a bit out of hand – thinking specifically of the one where Nicol Williamson trains his dogs to rip apart anyone who says “Rosebud.” But even that was a fun episode, because the byplay between Williamson and Falk was sharp.

“Counting Farts in Japanese and Irish Literatures: The Cases of Sōseki and Beckett”
Whereas for Beckett, the counting of farts is a way to gain self-knowledge and clarity, perhaps even freedom from vexing concerns, the imagined detective in Sōseki’s Grass Pillow is an agent of societal control, whose determination to count the protagonist’s farts serves to undermine his ability to freely follow his calling. Yet despite this surface dissimilarity, the two cases have a deep kinship, for Molloy’s self-observation is nothing more than the internalization of the detective and his operation of control, put, perhaps, to a novel use.

(must be something in the air)