delta

The Delta Quadrant is situated between 180 degrees and 270 degrees.

Sarah Kane

A Synopsis

The play is set in an expensive hotel room in Leeds. Ian, a foul-mouthed middle-aged tabloid journalist has brought a young woman, Cate, to the room for the night. Cate is much younger than Ian, and emotionally fragile. Throughout Scene 1, Ian tries to seduce Cate into sleeping with him, but she resists. All the while, Ian proudly parades his misogyny, racism and homophobia. The scene ends with the sound of spring rain.

Scene 2 begins the next morning. Ian has raped Cate during the night. She attacks him and then escapes out of the bathroom window. Then, unexpectedly, a soldier enters the room in full battle dress. Then hotel room is then struck by a mortar bomb, and the scene ends with the sound of summer rain.

In Scene 3, the hotel room is in ruins; the bomb has blasted a whole in the wall. The soldier and Ian begin to talk, and it is gradually revealed that England is in the midst of war. The soldier tells Ian about appalling atrocities that he has witnessed and taken part in, involving rape, torture and genocide, and says he has done everything as an act of revenge for the murder of his girlfriend. He then rapes Ian, and sucks out his eyes. The scene ends with the sound of autumn rain.

In Scene 4, Ian lies blinded next to the soldier, who has committed suicide. Cate returns, describing the city being overrun by soldiers, and bringing with her a baby that she has rescued. The baby is dead, however, so she buries it in a hole in the floorboards and leaves.

Scene 5 consists of a series of brief images, showing Ian crying, masturbating and even hugging the dead soldier for comfort as he starves in the ruined room. Eventually, he crawls into the hole with the dead baby and eats it. The stage direction then reads that Ian dies. It starts raining, and Ian says "Shit". Cate returns, bringing a sausage that she has paid for by having sex with a soldier.





Her last play, 4.48 Psychosis, was completed shortly before she died and was performed in 2000, at the Royal Court, directed by James Macdonald. This, Kane's shortest and most fragmented theatrical work, dispenses with plot and character, and no indication is given as to how many actors were intended to voice the play (in Macdonald's production, two women and one man performed the work). Written at a time when Kane was suffering from severe depression, it has been described by her fellow-playwright and friend David Greig as having as its subject the "psychotic mind."

The play is written from the point of view of someone with severe clinical depression. A repeated motif in the play is "serial sevens": counting down from one hundred by sevens, a bedside test often used by psychiatrists to test for loss of concentration or memory. According to her friend and fellow-playwright David Greig, the title of the play derives from the time -- 4.48 am -- when Kane, in her depressed state often woke. Greig considered the play to be 'perhaps uniquely painful in that it appears to have been written in the almost certain knowledge that it would be performed posthumously.' Some critics have had difficulty in distinguishing the play from the reality of Kane's life. Michael Billington of The Guardian newspaper asked, "How do you review a 75-minute suicide note?"

Des Esseintes on Genre

"Of all forms of literature that of the prose poem was Des Esseintes' chosen favorite. Handled by an alchemist of genius, it should, according to him, store up in its small compass, like an extract of meat, so to say, the essence of the novel, while suppressing its long, tedious analytical passages and superfluous descriptions. Again and again Des Esseintes had pondered the distracting problem, how to write a novel concentrated in a few sentences, but which should yet contain the cohobated juice of the hundreds of pages always taken up in describing the setting, sketching the characters, gathering together the necessary incidental observations and minor details. In that case, so inevitable and unalterable would be the words selected that they must take the place of all others; in so ingenious and masterly a fashion would each adjective be chosen that it could not with any justice be robbed of its right to be there, and would open up such wide perspectives as would set the reader dreaming for weeks together of its meaning, at once precise and manifold, and enable him to know the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the spiritual history of the characters, all revealed by the flash-light of this single epithet."

Cohobate \Co`ho*bate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Cohobated; p. pr. &
vb. n. Cohobating.] [LL. cohobare; prob. of Arabic origin:
cf. F. cohober.] (Anc. Chem.)
To repeat the distillation of, pouring the liquor back upon
the matter remaining in the vessel. --Arbuthnot.
[1913 Webster]

For your enjoyment

Please enjoy this.

Des Esseintes on Baudelaire

"But Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had pushed his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, had penetrated those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish.

There, near the confines where aberrations of the intellect and diseases of the will sojourn, - the mystic tetanus, the burning fever of wantonness, the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime, he had found, hatching in the gloomy forcing-house of ennui, the appalling reaction of age on the feelings and ideas.

He had revealed the morbid psychology of the mind that has reached the October of its sensations, detailed the symptoms of souls challenged by grief, set apart by spleen; had demonstrated the ever encroaching caries of the impressions at a time when the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth are faded; when there remains only the barren memory of miseries endured, of tyrannies suffered, of vexations undergone, in intelligences crushed by an incongruous fortune.

Happy Mother's Day

A brief glimpse of lean in the early seconds of this conversation on Meet The Press:



Did Dodd's comment signal a departure so drastic that Russert was unable to avoid becoming momentarily bent, askew, jarred, to the point of silence, eyes adjusting to the parallax? Was the effect intentional? subliminal? Where, indeed, can we locate the meaning of motherhood within this exchange? What is at stake when Russert simply chooses to turn his eyes downward, towards the material comfort of his papers?

The other 6 minutes 45 seconds with Dodd (on Obama) are also interesting, while the rest of the show (scroll down at video.msnbc.com) features a severely
leaned Terry Mcauliffe struggling to compensate for the Clinton campaign's most recent (and ongoing) disasters, during which Russert seems to shed stunned moments of silence for hardball political journalism.

I deserve credit

"Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who fathered seven children with his daughter while keeping her imprisoned in his cellar, has complained of receiving a bad press and not being given credit for keeping his dungeon family alive for more than two decades."




"Fritzl, 73, claimed that media coverage was “unfair” and “entirely one-dimensional”, given the fact that he did not kill his daughter and the children he produced with her during 24 years of sexual abuse in a subterranean bunker in Amstetten."