Will Self, Walking to Hollywood

Will Self talks about his new part-memoir, Walking to Hollywood

Will Self, Walking to Hollywood

The Telegraph interviews Will Self on his new semi-fictional memoir, Walking to Hollywood, where he discusses his fascination with Los Angeles, David Lynch and walking along the Yorkshire coast:

Will Self is not being entirely serious, but is he ever? We are standing in Thurloe Square in London SW7, looking at the trompe l’oeil effect this Victorian terrace produces from a particular angle. The building has only a blink-and-you’ll-miss it role in Self’s new book, a three-part memoir-cum-fantasia called Walking to Hollywood, but it jibes in a glinting, uncanny way with his abiding obsessions.

“It’s like a backlot,” he points out. You see that immediately — just as those main street façades in old film studios did their duty for western after western, this presents an equally artificial-looking frontage for imaginary tales of well-to-do Londoners. Except that it’s not artificial at all: the thin end of the wedge widens quickly into the full width of a thoroughly inhabited red-brick block.

Self prefers to see it as the sort of spectacle you might find, as he puts it with characteristic highbrow exactitude, in “Nathanael West’s Sargasso of the imagination”. I just about grasp that as a quotation from The Day of the Locust, West’s lacerating novel of 1939 about the aspirations and rotted dreams of Hollywood’s downtrodden, all of them extras in a pageant of apocalyptic grotesqueries.

[...]

Self says he’s in love with LA, which gives him a “gee-whizzery” feeling that he’s never felt on the East Coast (he is half American; his mother came from New York). The culture he describes is a palimpsest at once bewildering and seductive, a planet unto itself, and one that clearly fascinates him as much as it did David Lynch in Mulholland Drive.

“Lynch is the contemporary film-maker I feel the most affinity with. I interviewed him last year, actually. Didn’t get a thing out of him, except ‘Gee! Wow! That’s cool!’ He’s very good at hiding from interpretation.” [Read more]

Tim Robey, 'A Page in the Life: Will Self'

Telegraph.co.uk, 02 September 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self

Heart of Darkness: Graphic Novel

Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz adapt Conrad's iconic text

Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz's Heart of Darkness.
Source: The Guardian

Sam Jones of The Guardian website reports that Catherine Anyango, artist, and David Zane Mairowitz, author of Introducing Kafka, have collaborated on a graphic adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

In the 108 years since it was published, Joseph Conrad's colonial fable Heart of Darkness has infected TS Eliot, been excoriated for racism by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and transplanted to Vietnam by Francis Ford Coppola.

Now the book has been reinterpreted as a graphic novel in whose monochrome pages Conrad's exploration of power, greed and madness plays out as disturbingly as ever.

Catherine Anyango, whose drawings are peppered with David Zane Mairowitz's adaptation of the text, had her doubts about tackling the Polish-born novelist's most famous work.

Those reservations had more to do with the original medium than the enduring controversy over Conrad's views or the familiarity of Heart of Darkness.

"I wasn't sure initially if it was a good subject for a graphic novel as the writing is so dense and the style of it is partly what attracts me to the book," she said.

"As I knew we couldn't keep most of the text in, I tried to make the drawings very rich in detail and texture so that immersive feeling you get, especially when he describes the river and the jungle, was carried across." [Read the article]

Sam Jones, 'Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness published as a graphic novel'

guardian.co.uk, 31 August 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Introducing... Franz Kafka

Keep Calm, I'll Go On

Wartime poster adapted for the work of Samuel Beckett

To spur me on in the final week of my MA dissertation, I've made a poster based on the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' design. A mantra to repeat to myself as deadlines loom.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Keep Calm and Carry On

Where to start with Philip Roth?

Wyatt Mason praises the first of the Nathan Zuckerman novels

A good place to begin? Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer

Wyatt Mason writes a retrospective review of Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, the novel that introduced the world to Nathan Zuckerman:

With all twenty-eight of Philip Roth’s books in print, a reader not yet initiated into the pleasures of reading his fiction is faced with the tricky task of determining where to begin. Despite a reputation for monomaniacal attention to fixed themes—sex; women; writers; writing; Jews; Israel—Roth has exhibited such formal variety from book to book that where you choose to jump in can create very different impressions of Roth’s novelistic nature: it would be difficult to gather three more different novels by a single author than Letting Go, The Breast, and The Counterlife.

Although one might resort to—and could do very much worse than—setting aside a month and reading through all of Roth’s books in chronological order, few readers would have the space in their schedules even if they had the disposition. In the interest of serving a time lean on time, I submit that the best first book of Roth’s to read (or reread) is his tenth, short, and perfect novel, The Ghost Writer. [Read More]

Wyatt Mason, 'In Retrospect: Wyatt Mason on Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer'

National Book Critics Circle, 18 August 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth

Samuel Beckett and Germany

Journal explores the influence of German culture on Samuel Beckett's work

Edinburgh University Press is set to publish a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies, exploring the influence of German culture on Samuel Beckett's life and work. Mark Nixon and Dirk van Hulle are editing the collection, which is due out this September. The journal includes a chronology of Beckett's travels in Germany as an aspiring art critic in 1936-7, at 'an extremely tumultuous and dangerous period in the country's political and cultural history', an investigation of 'Beckett's attitude towards German Romanticism, from both a literary and a philosophical perspective [...] and a translation of Adorno's notes on Fin de partie and L'Innommable, with accompanying analyses, focusing on Beckett's direction of Endspiel' The journal concludes with 'review essays on a selection from the vast amount of recent German publications on Beckett', aiming to '[promote] the cross-fertilisation between research communities working on Beckett in different languages.'

Source: Edinburgh University Press: Beckett and Germany, Journal of Beckett Studies Volume 19 Number 2

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Saul Bellow, Letters

Literature:

Will Self: This month's Featured Artist on A Piece of Monologue
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethe's Light
Paul Celan: Stephen Mitchelmore on the Bachmann/Celan correspondence
Saul Bellow: Letters, to be published 04 November 2010
J. M. Coetzee: Nobel Prize Lecture
10 Classic Stories of Suburban Ennui
Bret Easton Ellis: Interview with AskMen
Apocalypse in Literature and Film
Chick Lit: NPR discusses the genre
Thomas Bernhard: A guide to the complete English translations of Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard/Thomas Mann
Barney Rosset: Obscene, a documentary on Rosset and Grove Press
Paul Auster: An excerpt from Auster's forthcoming novel, Sunset Park

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Samuel Beckett: Online academic journal sends call for papers on Beckett and cliché
Sigmund Freud: One-day conference at the Anna Freud Centre: Psychoanalysis and Surrealism in the digital age
David Lynch: Video footage now available of the Mapping the Lost Highway Conference

Theatre

Thomas Bernhard: Canadian production of Ritter, Dene, Voss

Film & Television:

David Lynch: Video footage now available of the Mapping the Lost Highway Conference
Twin Peaks Weekender: 30 hour marathon of every episode at Battersea Arts Centre, London
Watch Chris Petit's Radio On free online
Barney Rosset: Obscene, a documentary on Rosset and Grove Press

Art, Design & Photography:

Stanley Donwood: San Francisco exhibition, 2010
Caspar David Friedrich: A short extract from Joseph Leo Koerner's The Subject of Landscape
40+ Stunning Minimalist Book Covers
Vincent van Gogh: Painting recovered after being stolen from Cairo museum
Visual Editions

Etc.

Will Self: Bigness and Littleness

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.