Philip Roth/Nathan Zuckerman on cell phones

An excerpt from Exit Ghost

Philip Roth's protagonist Nathan Zuckerman reflects on city life and cell phones in Exit Ghost:

What surprised me most my first few days walking around the city? The most obvious thing - the cell phones. We had no reception as yet up on my mountain, and down in Athena, where they do have it, I'd rarely see people striding the streets talking uninhibitedly into their phones. I remembered a New York when the only people walking up Broadway seemingly talking to themselves were crazy. What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say - so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and somebody behind me talking on a phone. Inside the car, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect. What will the consequence be? You know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can't, you get impatient - impatient and angry like a little stupid god.

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost

Airport Architecture

'Cathedrals of modern technology'

Designs for Heathrow's new Terminal 2 show Norman Foster 'at his mighty best' according to the Guardian's architecture critic, Jonathan Glancey. A 'sequence of crisp, elegant, uncluttered spaces set under a single swooping, aerofoil-like roof', Terminal 2 strikes the balance between practical function and beautiful design. In the age of cheap, mass air travel, we take a look at some of the most ambitious and innovative examples of airport architecture yet.

'Flights of fancy: The world's best airport architecture'

guardian.co.uk, 14 August 2009

Like a true Ballardian, I was awestruck by Heathrow's Terminal 5 departure lounge when I passed through it just two weeks ago. I was stunned by its scale, and the way it neatly balanced practical functionality with a kind of optimistic modernism. What was conceived of as a straightforward transitory space between destinations becomes an exciting destination in itself: a cathedral of modern technology.

Now, with talk of Norman Foster's Terminal 2 design show, The Guardian are hosting an online image gallery of the very best in airport architecture. You can view the online gallery by clicking here. I've also included a link below to J. G. Ballard's wonderful article 'Airports', first published in The Observer back in 1997.

More:

• J. G. Ballard, 'Airports' in The Observer, 14.09.1997
  
• Jonathan Glancey, 'Norman Foster sweeps Heathrow to the height of airport architecture' in The Guardian, 14.08.2009
  
• Foster & Partners: official website
  
• World Architecture News: 'BAA reveal Heathrow's new terminal'
  

Kafka's The Trial at the Edinburgh Festival

A re-imagining of Franz Kafka's novel for the stage

Lyn Gardner reviews a production of Franz Kafka's The Trial at this year's Edinburgh festival:

An apparently welcoming hand pulls me through the door. Before I can scream, I'm blindfolded and spun around. The darkness is complete. I can just make out pinpricks of light. Sinister whisperings echo in my ear; someone strokes my arm. I'm moved around, giddy and disorientated. This is the brilliant start to Belt Up Theatre's version of Kafka's novella about Josef K, a man whose world is turned upside-down when he is accused of a nameless crime and must prove his innocence. The audience's physical disorientation matches Josef K's rising panic as he finds himself in a world that is simultaneously familiar and entirely unrecognisable. [Read More]

Lyn Gardner, 'The Trial. C Soco, Edinburgh'

guardian.co.uk, 10 August 2009

Miles Davis' Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary Retrospectives

Seminal jazz album celebrates its fiftieth year

I'm not generally one to promote commercials at this site, but in this case I thought I'd make an exception. Legacy Recordings has made a short retrospective of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year. The short video, which includes the reflections of Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, and a host of prominent jazz musicians, promotes the Collector's Edition Boxset that was released earlier this year. You can watch it by clicking above, or by visiting Youtube.

Below, you can also find Scott Timburg's observations on the album's fiftieth anniversary, Ashley Kahn on the relationship between Davis and Evans, and Made in Heaven, a documentary on Kind of Blue's creation and legacy.

More:

• Scott Timburg, 'Kind of Blue at 50' in the Los Angeles Times (10.05.09)
  
• Made in Heaven: The Making of Kind of Blue  1 | 2 | 3
• Ashley Kahn, 'Miles Davis and Bill Evans: Miles and Bill in Black & White' in Jazz Times, September 2001

Rare edition of Beckett's Foirades / Fizzles

Limited edition, with illustrations by Jasper Johns

Samuel Beckett, Foirades/Fizzles. Illustrated by Jasper Johns.

Samuel Beckett, Foirades/Fizzles. Illustrated by Jasper Johns.

Samuel Beckett, Foirades/Fizzles. Illustrated by Jasper Johns.

Samuel Beckett, Foirades/Fizzles. Illustrated by Jasper Johns.

If there are any Samuel Beckett fans with a pretty penny in their pocket, the Manhattan Rare Book Company has attained a first edition of Foirades/Fizzles signed by both Beckett and the artist Jasper Johns. Not bad for $30,000. (Click above images to enlarge.)

SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION, ONE OF ONLY 250 COPIES SIGNED BY JASPER JOHNS AND SAMUEL BECKETT (from a total edition of 300).

Magnificently illustrated with original prints by Johns including: 26 lift ground aquatints and 5 etchings with mixed media, 1 soft-ground etching, and one aquatint; plus 2 color lithographs as endpapers. Printed on handmade wove Auvergne Richard de Bas paper watermarked with Beckett’s initials and Johns’s signature. Text in both French and English by Beckett.

London, Paris, and New York: Éditions de Minuit & Petersburg Press, 1976. Oblong folio (13 x 9 3/4 in.; 330 x 247 mm), publisher’s ivory wove paper binding with aquatint endpapers, bound in accordion fold around support leaves; publisher’s beige linen solander box with purple tassel lined with colored lithograph. Printed at Atelier Crommelynck. FINE CONDITION. $30,000.

Manhattan Rare Book Company

Two of the most enigmatic artists of our time, Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns, collaborated on this complex yet elegant artist’s book. Originally written in French..., the brooding essays were rewritten in English by Beckett for this project. Nevertheless, Johns decided to include both texts that expanded his own involvement to thirty-three etchings and aquatints plus color lithograph endpapers. Johns’s imagery is based on a major four-panel painting, Untitled (1972), along with his classic imagery related to numbers and body parts. This cerebral volume that provokes more questions than it answers is considered one of the greatest artists’ books of the second half of the twentieth century.

Johnson and Stein, Artists’ Books in the Modern Era 1870-2000. Included in the landmark 1995 Museum of Modern Art exhibit: A Century of Artists’ Books.

Beckett Speaks

Samuel Beckett discusses What Where in Paris hotel room

A rare and wonderful glimpse of writer and dramatist Samuel Beckett speaking in Paris, 1987. The video includes a discussion of the play What Where, and an appearance from Beckett scholar Stanley Gontarski, who discusses its historical significance. (Thanks to Stephen Mitchelmore's This Space.)

Anthony Cronin describes the circumstances of the clip in his biography, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist:

When Barney [Rosset] arrived in Paris towards the end of 1987 he was accompanied by the American film-maker John Reilly, who wanted to make a film of Beckett's life. They had brought with them several videos of American productions of the plays, some of which, such as Ohio Impromptu, Beckett had never seen produced in any form. They took a room in the PLM to show him the videos and on the way up in the lift Barney mentioned casually that Reilly would like to make a biographical film, to which Beckett assented without demur. Whenever he was supposed to join them in the hotel they would watch for him from the window and, to Reilly's amazement, he would walk slowly across the street through the racing traffic, apparently oblivious of danger. Reilly observed that he had difficulty in walking and this was beginning to be the case, for his legs were now affected by his circulatory problems.

Beckett took an intense interest in the productions he saw on video, some of which had been directed and the videos made by S. E. Gontarski, who was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies, a publication in which academic views of aspects of Beckett's work were now regularly aired. In the film Riley made there is a shot of Beckett leaning forward to watch Gontarski's production of What Where on the monitor in the hotel bedroom. He is watching it so intensely that he is reading some of the words with his lips and seems to be conducting the tempo of the speeches with his hands.

Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• : Film footage of Samuel Beckett, 1969
• Waiting for Beckett Documentary

August in Los Angeles

Vacation

A Piece of Monologue isn't going to be updated very often this month.

I am in Los Angeles with Jennifer's family, seeing the sights and ticking items off a colossal to-do list. There's every chance that I'll write something when I can, or when the mood strikes me. But, in the meantime, I'm updating my Twitter feed with all the latest goings-on, and the occasional news item.

Regular posting shall resume in early September.