Fifteen Eighty Four

In today’s LA Times review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Tim Rutten hits on Beckett’s biting humor:

“One of his last acts before abandoning what promised to be a dazzling academic career at Trinity was to deliver a lecture to Dublin’s Modern Language Society on an avant-garde French poet and his school, both of which Beckett had invented. He particularly enjoyed the subsequent discussion in which members referred to their own familiarity with the imaginary poet and his circle.”

Ouch. I mean, it really comes off as a caricature of academia, doesn’t it?