Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

A survey of distinguished authors and thinkers

I have always been fascinated by the daily rituals and routines that govern people's everyday lives. Daily Routines has compiled a wide and varied selection of such rituals, taken from interviews and biographies of some of the world's most distinguished writers and thinkers. It makes for fascinating reading - even if browsing the daily routines of others leaves little time for our own:

Paul Auster:

The usual. I got up in the morning. I read the paper. I drank a pot of tea. And then I went over to the little apartment I have in the neighborhood and worked for about six hours. After that, I had to do some business. My mother died two years ago, and there was one last thing to take care of concerning her estate—a kind of insurance bond I had to sign off on. So, I went to a notary public to have the papers stamped, then mailed them to the lawyer. I came back home. I read my daughter’s final report card. And then I went upstairs and paid a lot of bills. A typical day, I suppose. A mix of working on the book and dealing with a lot of boring, practical stuff. [Read More]

Will Self:

Rituals. Smoking--pipes, cigars, special brands, accessories, the whole bollocks. Coffee, tea, strange infusions--I have a stove on my desk. Fetishising typewriters, pens, etc. Overall, though, I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer. [Read More]

Gustave Flaubert:

Days were as unvaried as the notes of the cuckoo. Flaubert, a man of nocturnal habits, usually awoke at 10 a.m. and announced the event with his bell cord. Only then did people dare speak above a whisper. His valet, Narcisse, straightaway brought him water, filled his pipe, drew the curtains, and delivered the morning mail. Conversation with Mother, which took place in clouds of tobacco smoke particularly noxious to the migraine sufferer, preceded a very hot bath and a long, careful toilette involving the regular application of a tonic reputed to arrest hair loss. At 11 a.m. he entered the dining room, where Mme Flaubert; Liline; her English governess, Isabel Hutton; and very often Uncle Parain would have gathered. Unable to work well on a full stomach, he ate lightly, or what passed for such in the Flaubert household, meaning that his first meal consisted of eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate. The family then lounged on the terrace, unless foul weather kept them indoors, or climbed a steep path through woods behind their espaliered kitchen garden to a glade dubbed La Mercure after the statue of Mercury that once stood there. Shaded by chestnut trees, near their hillside orchard, they would argue, joke, gossip, and watch vessels sail up and down the river. Another site of open-air refreshment was the eighteenth-century pavilion. After dinner, which generally lasted from seven to nine, dusk often found them there, looking out at moonlight flecking the water and fisherman casting their hoop nets for eel. [Read More]

Franz Kafka:

Begley is particularly astute on the bizarre organization of Kafka's writing day. At the Assicurazioni Generali, Kafka despaired of his twelve-hour shifts that left no time for writing; two years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, he was now on the one-shift system, 8:30 AM until 2:30 PM. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then sleep until 7:30, then exercises, then a family dinner. After which he started work around 11 PM (as Begley points out, the letter- and diary-writing took up at least an hour a day, and more usually two), and then "depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or three o'clock, once even till six in the morning." Then "every imaginable effort to go to sleep," as he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse. [Read More]

J. M. Coetzee:

"Coetzee," says the writer Rian Malan, "is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. [Read More]

Immanuel Kant:

[...] After getting up, Kant would drink one or two cups of tea -- weak tea. With that, he smoked a pipe of tobacco. The time he needed for smoking it "was devoted to meditation." Apparently, Kant had formulated the maxim for himself that he would smoke only one pipe, but it is reported that the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on. He then prepared his lectures and worked on his books until 7:00. His lectures began at 7:00, and they would last until 11:00. With the lectures finished, he worked again on his writings until lunch. Go out to lunch, take a walk, and spend the rest of the afternoon with his friend Green. After going home, he would do some more light work and read. [Read More]

Karl Marx:

His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British Museum reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne [Read More]

Philip Roth:

When I came to visit, it was a late-winter morning, and the snow was piled high around the studio. Roth was wearing a blue Shetland sweater, green corduroy pants. Often there is tweed. He dresses like a graduate student of the late fifties. He led me to the back room. There was a team photograph of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. There were free weights, a lifting bench, and an exercise mat. He had quintuple-bypass surgery eleven years ago and is determined to keep in shape. He stays out here all day and into the evening: no telephone, no fax. Nothing gets in. In the late afternoons, he takes long walks, often trying to figure out connections and solve problems in the novel that's possessing him.

"I live alone, there's no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with," Roth said. "My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don't have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don't have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning--this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens--and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. [Read More]

Joyce Carol Oates:

I try to write in the morning very intensely, from 8:30 to 1 p.m. When I'm traveling, I can work from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Alone, I don't sleep that well. I get a lot of work done in hotel rooms. The one solace for loneliness is work. I hand write and then I type. I don't have a word processor. I write slowly. [Read More]

More examples:

• Daily Routines: How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days

Disjecta: This week's links

(Image: Francis Bacon, 'Triptych', May-June, 1973)

Literature:

J. G. Ballard: NPR publishes an excerpt from the Complete Stories
Don DeLillo: A short story in the New Yorker, 'Midnight in Dostoyevsky'
Paul Auster: FlavorWire on Paul Auster's Invisible
Patricia Highsmith: Slavoj Žižek on Patricia Highsmith and the Ripley novels

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Slavoj Žižek: Žižek appears on the BBC series HardTalk
Simon Critchley: 'To philosophize is to learn how to die'

Music:

Jazz: Jazz album art in the digital age

Art & Design:

Francis Bacon: John Richardson writes on Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon: The other side of Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon: Francis Bacon's legacy revisited

Keith Ridgway on Beckett's Mercier and Camier

A reflection on Beckett's short novel

Irish novelist Keith Ridgway writes about Samuel Beckett's novel, Mercier and Camier, and the influence it has held on his work:

Beckett's concentration of the human voice led him, perhaps inevitably, to the stage. By 1953 his boiling down of confusion and memory had revealed the sharp gleaming bone of Waiting For Godot. But before doing any of that, before altering forever the way we think about the novel and the play, he did something that has annoyed Beckett scholars and biographers ever since - he wrote Mercier and Camier.

They'll try to tell you that it's not a good book. That it doesn't fit into the great Beckett canon. That its omnipotent narrator and the jokesy tone are throwbacks to the earlier, less interesting author of Murphy and Watt. They may be right. It's certainly true that Beckett had begun the book before his trip back to Ireland - before his "revelation". Perhaps he just wanted to clear his desk, get it out of the way before embarking on his new idea.

The book's detractors certainly comfort themselves with the fact that Beckett refused permission for its publication until 1970, and did not bother translating it into English until 1974. Nevertheless, Mercier and Camier remains, even in the face of what came afterwards, perhaps because of what came afterwards, one of my favourite pieces of Beckett writing.

My mother gave me a gift of the trilogy on my 20th birthday. I had read the novellas by then I think, and I'd heard about this mad three-piece and I was ready to plunge into it. But I was hampered somewhat. I think that I was too young for it. I got some of the jokes, and there were passages that made my heart do strange things, but I felt that I was skating over it, that I was missing the point. I gave up about two-thirds of the way through Molloy. So when, in the university library, I stumbled upon a Beckett book which I'd never heard of, that looked fairly short and digestible, I thought I'd try it instead.

The journey of Mercier and Camier is one I can tell, if I will, for I was with them all the time.

The book is full of familiar Beckettisms. The eponymous pair are tramps, or tramping anyway, around a city and then out of it, and then back. They are aimless but there is something elusive that they feel they need to be doing. They arrange meetings that don't happen, or do happen but at the wrong time, afterwards, as if by accident. They spend their time in circular arguments about splitting up, being shot of each other. They are preoccupied by the weather, a raincoat, an umbrella, a bicycle. All of these are ingredients in later work as well, and they come accompanied here, fleetingly, by those things in Beckett that we know about but cannot really name, those things that occupy so much of the trilogy. Intangible things, traps in the mind, that voice we hear, the stop-start understanding, the ongoing bewilderment, the fear. [Read More]

Keith Ridgway, 'Knowing me, knowing you'

The Guardian, 19 July 2003

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Beckett Between: Paris Conference 2010
• Simon Critchley: Beckett, Literature, Philosophy
• Beckett Speaks
• How Beckett Can Save Your Life

Paul Auster in New York Magazine

An interview with the American writer

Paul Auster talks to Tim Murphy of New York Magazine about his new novel, Invisible:

Tim Murphy: How much of Walker, the protagonist of Invisible —a handsome aspiring poet, in 1967, who is juggling a sexually sinister older European professor and a tortured French girlfriend, not to mention having a summer of sex with his own sister—is you?

Paul Auster: He is simply not me. Every novelist uses things from his or her own life. Yes, I was in Paris in 1967. That hotel is a place I stayed. I wanted to go back and think about what it was like to be 20 again, and how ignorant we are at that age, how inexperienced, how susceptible we are. [Read More]

Tim Murphy, 'Q&A With ‘Invisible’ Author Paul Auster'

New York Magazine, 20 November 2009

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• James Wood on Paul Auster
• Paul Auster: Why Roth is wrong about the novel
• Paul Auster on meeting Samuel Beckett
• Paul Auster on his new novel, Invisible

James Wood on Paul Auster

Profile in New Yorker magazine

James Wood of the New Yorker casts a wry eye over Paul Auster's writing career, and questions his flirtation with postmodern fiction. Wood's article begins with a parody of the quintessential Auster narrative:

Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s Confessions. A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to within an inch of his life; Mary was set on fire, and survived just five days in the I.C.U. By day, Phaedo translated; at night, he worked on a novel about Charlie Dark, who was never convicted. Then Phaedo drank himself senseless with Scotch. He drank to drown his sorrows, to dull his senses, to forget himself. The phone rang, but he never answered it. Sometimes, Holly Steiner, an attractive woman across the hall, would silently enter his bedroom, and expertly rouse him from his stupor. At other times, he made use of the services of Aleesha, a local hooker. Aleesha’s eyes were too hard, too cynical, and they bore the look of someone who had already seen too much. Despite that, Aleesha had an uncanny resemblance to Holly, as if she were Holly’s double. And it was Aleesha who brought Roger Phaedo back from the darkness. One afternoon, wandering naked through Phaedo’s apartment, she came upon two enormous manuscripts, neatly stacked. One was the Rousseau translation, each page covered with almost identical words; the other, the novel about Charlie Dark. She started leafing through the novel. “Charlie Dark!” she exclaimed. “I knew Charlie Dark! He was one tough cookie. That bastard was in the Paul Auster gang. I’d love to read this book, baby, but I’m always too lazy to read long books. Why don’t you read it to me?” And that is how the ten-year silence was broken. Phaedo decided to please Aleesha. He sat down, and started reading the opening paragraph of his novel, the novel you have just read.

Yes, that précis is a parody of Paul Auster’s fiction, l’eau d’Auster in a sardonic sac. It is unfair, but diligently so, checking off most of his work’s familiar features. A protagonist, nearly always male, often a writer or an intellectual, lives monkishly, coddling a loss—a deceased or divorced wife, dead children, a missing brother. Violent accidents perforate the narratives, both as a means of insisting on the contingency of existence and as a means of keeping the reader reading—a woman drawn and quartered in a German concentration camp, a man beheaded in Iraq, a woman severely beaten by a man with whom she is about to have sex, a boy kept in a darkened room for nine years and periodically beaten, a woman accidentally shot in the eye, and so on. The narratives conduct themselves like realistic stories, except for a slight lack of conviction and a general B-movie atmosphere. People say things like “You’re one tough cookie, kid,” or “My pussy’s not for sale,” or “It’s an old story, pal. You let your dick do your thinking for you, and that’s what happens.” A visiting text—Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Hawthorne, Poe, Beckett—is elegantly slid into the host book. There are doubles, alter egos, doppelgängers, and appearances by a character named Paul Auster. At the end of the story, the hints that have been scattered like mouse droppings lead us to the postmodern hole in the book where the rodent got in: the revelation that some or all of what we have been reading has probably been imagined by the protagonist. Hey, Roger Phaedo invented Charlie Dark! It was all in his head. [Read More]

James Wood, 'Shallow Graves: The novels of Paul Auster'

New Yorker, 30 November 2009

Mortality in Will Self's Fiction

An academic study

Joe Barton, a final year undergraduate student at Newcastle University, speculates on mortality and the Corpse in the fiction of British writer Will Self:

Death, according to Jacque Lynn Foltyn, has replaced sex as the 21st century’s definitive taboo. While the valance has long since been ripped away from the collective Victorian piano leg, the corpse, meanwhile, has become primed with symbolic explosives, threatening the very foundations of society built upon the mythology of modernist progress. Be it the computer-generated cadavers of CSI Miami, or Gunther von Hagens’ reality TV autopsies, Foltyn argues that the human corpse has become an increasingly pervasive object of revulsion and attraction in our culture, a site of anxiety about medicine’s failure to conquer, but enthusiasm to hide, death. With all this in mind, it’s not surprising to find that the fiction of Will Self – an author who frequently weaves his narratives in, around, and beyond the boundaries of taboo – is one who showcases several literary autopsies, in which death and the human corpse are explored with a surgeon’s eye (and, more often than not, a coroner’s tongue). [Read More]

Joe Barton, 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Mortality, the Corpse and the Fiction of Will Self.'

Will-Self.com, 22 November 2009

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Self: 'My hero J. G. Ballard'
  
• Will Self on Bob Dylan
• Will Self on Burroughs and Junky
• My Other Life: Will Self
• Will Self on Werner Herzog

Disjecta: This week's links

(Herbert Bayer’s design for a cinema. 1924–25. Image via Design Observer)

Literature:

Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov
William S. Burroughs: Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer
Paul Auster: The Rumpus interview with Paul Auster
Will Self: Will Self's introduction to Zamyatin’s cult classic novel, We
James Joyce: Philip French on the 1967 film adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Martin Heidegger: Nomadics has déjà on the recent Heidegger and Nazism debate.
Assuming Gender: Call for papers for the Spring 2010 issue of new academic journal.
Slavoj Žižek: Žižek discusses his new book, First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (via PhilosophyBites)

Film:

Stanley Kubrick: Brian Eno on Barry Lyndon (via Ballardian)
Stanley Kubrick: Anthony Burgess and Malcolm McDowell on A Clockwork Orange (via Ballardian)
Stanley Kubrick: Steven Spielberg on Stanley Kubrick, speaking in 1999
Woody Allen: Roger Ebert reviews the new Woody Allen film, Whatever Works
Woody Allen: French auteur director Jean-Luc Godard speaks to Woody Allen
Michael Haneke: Sight and Sound reviews The White Ribbon.

Music:

David Bowie: Marc Spitz's new David Bowie biography
Kraftwerk: Amazon offer a comprehensive image of the new Kraftwerk Catalogue box-set.
Velvet Underground: Velvet Underground to reunite in New York.
Jazz: All About Jazz on the year 1959: The Year Classic Jazz Albums Were Born
Jazz: Sonny Rollins headlines this year's London Jazz Festival

Art & Design:

Architecture: Bauhaus at MoMA (via 3:AM Magazine)
Photography: Thomas Struth's Streets of New York
Brian Eno: Brian Eno and Steven Johnson on environments that foster innovation (via Jessa Crispin)
Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty (via 3:AM Magazine)
Leonardo da Vinci: The secret behind Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile (via boa_arts)

Beckett Between: Call for Papers

An International Conference

The École Normale Supérieure in Paris has issued a call for papers for a conference on Samuel Beckett, to be held in February 2010. The university, which happens to be Beckett's alma mater, has named the conference Beckett Between, and welcomes papers relating to translation, bilingualism and travel-writing. Deadline for all submissions is 14 December 2009:

Beckett Between Conference February 20-21st 2010, Paris
Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris

Contact email: dunlaith.bird@ens.fr

Beckett Between

Call for Papers for École Normale Supérieure Paris International Conference, 2010

Conference Date: 20-21 February 2010
Locations: École Normale Supérieure and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris

Beckett Between, the international bilingual conference to be held at the École Normale Supérieure Paris, from 20-21 February 2010, is now seeking abstracts for conference papers. This conference, supported by the Centre Culturel Irlandais and the Irish Embassy, will consider Samuel Beckett in motion, between two countries, two languages and two institutions, Trinity College Dublin and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. It will explore how this trajectory impacts on his work, with themes ranging from Beckett’s self-translation to rhetoric and use of the non-lieu and the entre-deux. This fundamental question of the writer ‘between’ will bring together international perspectives on Beckett, offering both graduate researchers and Beckett specialists the opportunity to examine Beckett’s work in a different light.

The first day of the conference will finish with an exclusive performance from renowned international Beckett actor, Conor Lovett, offering an alternative vantage point on Beckett’s work. On the following day, 21st February, the inaugural ‘Beckett Brunch’ will take place at the Centre Culturel Irlandais. This round table discussion involving pre-eminent Beckett scholars and new researchers will expand on the themes raised during the conference, providing a dynamic forum in which to consider current developments in Beckett studies.

The organisers are particularly interested in papers with themes including, though by no means limited to

• Beckett and bilingualism
• Self-translation
• Beckett in motion, travel and travel writing
• Interdisciplinary aspects of Beckett’s work

Submission of Abstracts: Abstracts of 300 words, one copy in English and one in French, to be submitted by 9th December 2009. (Papers can be given in the speaker’s language of choice.)

Notification of acceptance of papers by 14th December 2009

Length of conference papers: 20-25 minutes
Submission of full paper: 27th January 2010

All abstracts, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to:

Dr. Dúnlaith Bird, Maître de Langue,
École Normale Supérieure
45, rue d’Ulm
75005 Paris
dunlaith.bird@ens.fr

University of Pennsylvania, Call for Papers

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Beckett Between: List of Papers: February 2010
• Reading University: Samuel Beckett Conference 2009

Nietzsche: Loneliness and Solitude

Featured in the new issue of Harper's Magazine

Harper's Magazine on Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche and solitude:

Hannah Arendt ends The Origins of Totalitarianism with an extended essay on loneliness and solitude. Why? “Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.” The essence of the alienation associated with the “crisis of modernity” involves the outsider’s swing between being a lone wolf and dissolving into the masses generated by the totalitarian wannabes of all stripes. Arendt sees the philosophical roots of this dilemma in works of classical antiquity, from Cicero to Seneca, in the writings of Augustine, but most of all in a handful of poems by Friedrich Nietzsche. She cites his short work Sils Maria and the more complex poem Aus hohen Bergen which has quite striking references to Friedrich Hölderlin. But still more important for this point is the poem Der Einsame which puts loneliness or solitude on one hand and the feeling of “belonging” in a still more starkly political context. [Read More]

'Nietzsche - The Lonely One'

Harper's Magazine, 22 November 2009

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Human, All Too Human
• Nietzsche on 'historical philosophizing'
• 'Human, All Too Human': BBC's Nietzsche Documentary
• Joyce Carol Oates on reading Nietzsche
• Nietzsche Family Circus

Simon Critchley: Beckett, Literature, Philosophy

An interview with the British philosopher

In 2001, The Necronautical Society interviewed British philosopher Simon Critchley for his opinions on, amongst other things, death and literature. There is a discussion of some of the major themes running through his book, Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Literature and Philosophy, and Critchley is a candid and articulate respondent.

There are some wonderfully insightful summaries included in the talk, on literary and philosophical nihilism, the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Blanchot and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

The work of Samuel Beckett is also mentioned in a reflection on German critical theorist Theodor Adorno and holocaust representation:

Simon Critchley: Also, yes. If I could go back to what I was saying about Nietzsche: what people get excited about in his work is this notion of affirmation: an affirmation in relation to death. I can affirm the meaninglessness of the universe and the ultimate meaninglessness of my own life, and heroically assume that. There's something almost disgusting about that thought after the holocaust, it seems to me. Adorno puts his finger on this quite well in the final part of Negative Dialectic. He's concerned with after Auschwitz. He says that a new categorical imperative has imposed itself on humankind: not to let Auschwitz repeat itself, and not to hand Hitler posthumous victories. He goes on to say that the situation of the death camps is best described not by descriptions of them, but by, for example, the work of Beckett. Why? Because it doesn't say anything about them; it doesn't attempt to represent what took place.

So then there's this question of death and representation: What would be the least disgusting aesthetic response to this situation? At one end of the scale we've got Spielberg and Schindler's List, which for all its sincerity is a disgusting film. At the other end we've got, say, Remains of the Day, which is all about processes that are bound up with what becomes the holocaust, but it's much more oblique. Or, in the French context, [Lanzmann]'s Shoah -

Tom McCarthy: That's the eight-hour epic…

Simon Critchley: Right. [Lanzmann]'s aesthetic, which is organised by lots of these concerns I've been talking about, is that he's not going to represent what happened and he's not going to judge what happened. He has interviews with, for example, an SS officer who was at one of the camps, and he's got a semi-hidden camera; and the SS officer wants to either say he's sorry or exculpate himself from guilt - and [Lanzmann]'s saying: 'No, I've got no interest in that; I don't care about what you feel. Just tell me what happened. What happened when the trains arrived? Who opened the doors? How did people get from there to there? How did they get into the rooms? Who put the Zyclon B in? What happened to the bodies? Who dug the ditches? How deep were they? How many?' - these things. So there's a sense in which that attention to factual description without representing the event would be adequate to that event. So to go back to the question: the way in which we'd be able to approach death is by not representing it, having an oblique relationship to it. So some cherished philosophical ideas of death, heroic ideas, would be gone. Beckett is interesting because he's the anti-heroic figure.

Tom McCarthy: We were talking about Beckett at lunch. Paul Perry's formulation of it was that Beckett puts all the markers in and then takes them away at the last minute. In the first draft of Happy Days, for example, the play started with a nuclear blast and a radio voice saying 'Nuclear War has been declared; London's gone, New York's gone etc' - and then Beckett just cut that but left the post-apocalyptic landscape intact. You get that throughout Beckett's oeuvre. There are points where he almost spells it out, like where Vladimir says to Estragon towards the end of Waiting for Godot: 'Can't you see the bodies piled up in mounds? Can't you smell the decomposition?' He could almost be talking about Auschwitz. Come to think of it, it's almost like Nietzsche's madman in the market place.

Simon Critchley: Or the farmers in Cumbria!

Tom McCarthy: Ah, well, this all opens up to another term I want to bring in, not least because I know you're writing a book about it at the moment -

Simon Critchley: Yes, it brings us neatly to humour.

Tom McCarthy: Yes. Beckett is also incredibly funny. It's not a separate thing: his deep ethical engagement with this whole problematic and his humour are completely bound together. I mean, how do you see comedy and death as fitting together?

Simon Critchley: They're in an intimate relationship. Comedy is much more tragic than tragedy, I always think, and much more about death. Tragedy is about making death meaningful - with some exceptions: you could say that in Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus there's a different relationship to death. But conventionally the tragic hero takes death into him- or herself and it becomes meaningful; we experience catharsis in relation to that and we all go away happily. Comedy is about the inability to achieve that catharsis. So either you can't die in comedy, which is why Waiting for Godot's a tragi-comedy: nobody can hang themselves and it's funny. Or if they do die they pop back up to life, like in Tom and Jerry cartoons. Now what's the more tragic thought: life coming to an end or life going on forever? The latter's much more tragic. Swift explores this in Book Three of Gulliver's Travels: there are the Immortals, the Struldbrugs, who are marked with a red circle in the middle of their foreheads, and lie around in corners having lost all interest in life and not even speaking the language they grew up with. They're tragic figures. The worst thing would be not death but life carrying on forever, and comedy's about that. It's also linked to depression and all sorts of things like that.

Anthony Auerbach: But is the repetition in Beckett the joke? Or is that the real tragedy? This theatre of the absurd that just starts again exactly the same once it's finished. Does that have something to do with Nietzsche's doctrine of recurrence?

Simon Critchley: What's great about Beckett is that you're given the high drama of European culture through a strangely comical Anglo-Irish lens which is much more pragmatic and down to earth. Beckett's ridiculing to some extent. He would be interested by the idea of eternal return but Nietzsche's laughter is a laughter of affirmation and ecstasy, whereas Beckett's laughter is a laughter of derision, a sardonic laughter, which is actually much more tragic. Jokes leave you in that position. The philosophically most nuanced discussion of Beckett is Adorno's by several kilometres. But what Adorno will not see in Beckett is the laughter. Adorno will say things like 'Laughter is the fraud practised on happiness', 'Laughter is complicity with domination'. I think that's a mistake. Blanchot also misses the humour in Beckett. The humour in Beckett is at the level of idiom, in the fine grain of detail. There's all sorts of stuff that we might want to call 'Irish' - although that would be too easy, but something like that - and it's that that philosophy misses.

Tom McCarthy: I see the humour in Beckett as being slapstick, too. That's the element he's getting from Buster Keaton. It's sort of like Bataille's reading of Hegel. Hegel is all about an elimination of matter, turning it into golden shit as you say; but with Bataille matter becomes 'that non-logical difference which represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law'. It's something that gets in the way of the perfect Aufhebung, or synthesis, resolution. And I think that lots of the slapstick in Beckett is about that failure: the failure of tragedy, the failure of matter to get aufgehobt, to go up there and be sublime. We want to go to the heavens as heroes but we trip over our own shoelaces and piss ourselves.

Simon Critchley: Exactly: we're human. [Read more]

Interview with Simon Critchley

The Necronautic Society, 29 March 2001

Thank you to 3:AM Magazine for the link.

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Travels in Nihilon: Critchley on Beckett and Adorno
• Simon Critchley on Krapp's Last Tape
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Simon Critchley on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time
• Samuel Beckett Speaks
• Claude Lanzmann's liberated memories
• Simon Critchley Interviewed on Swedish television
• Simon Critchley on Samuel Beckett
• Simon Critchley reflects on Punk and Nihilism
• Michel Foucault on Beckett's Waiting for Godot
• Continental Philosophy

Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'

An excerpt from the novel, Nausea

An excerpt from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea (La Nausée); a prose work that attempted to portray and dramatize some of the key concerns of existential philosophy:

I haven't had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures. It isn't a matter of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something I longed for more than all the rest - without realizing it properly. It wasn't love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was... anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little order. There is nothing very splendid about my life at present: but now and then, for example when they played music at cafés, I would look back and say to myself: in the old days, in London, Meknès, Tokyo, I have known wonderful moments, I have had adventures. It is that which has been taken away from me now. I have just learnt, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. Adventures are in books. And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It was to this way of happening that I attached so much importance.

First of all the beginnings would have had to be real beginnings. Alas! Now I can see so clearly what I wanted. Real beginnings, appearing like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, abruptly, cutting boredom short, strengthening duration; evenings among those evenings of which you later say: 'I was out walking, it was an evening in May.' You are walking along, the moon has just risen, you feel idle, vacant, a little empty. And then all of a sudden you think: 'Something has happened.' It might be anything: a slight crackling sound in the shadows, a fleeting silhouette crossing the street, But this slight event isn't like the others: straight away you see that it is the predecessor of a great form whose outlines are lost in the mist and you tell yourself too: 'Something is beginning.'

Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through its death. Towards this death, which may also be my own, I am drawn irrevocably. Each moment appears only to bring on the moments after. To each moment I cling with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable - and yet I would not lift a finger to prevent it from being annihilated. The last minute I am spending - in Berlin, in London - in the arms of this woman whom I met two days ago - a minute I love passionately, a woman I am close to loving - it is going to come to an end, I know that. In a little while I shall leave for another country. I shall never find this woman again or this night. I study each second, I try to suck it dry; nothing passes which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever within me, nothing, neither the ephemeral tenderness of these lovely eyes, nor the noises in the street, nor the false light of dawn: and yet the minute goes by and I do not hold it back, I am glad to see it pass.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Translated by Robert Baldick

Marcel Proust's obituary

From the archives...

As part of their 'From the archive' series, The Guardian newspaper has re-published their report of the death of French writer Marcel Proust. A fascinating glimpse into the reputation Proust had created in 1920s Europe:

Originally published on 20 November 1922

(From our Correspondent.)

PARIS, SUNDAY.

Marcel Proust, foremost of "young novelists" of France, died yesterday. He was fifty years old and had been in poor health from childhood. It is probable that he was as well known abroad, especially in Holland and England, where Marcel Proust Societies have recently been formed, as in Paris, where his work was enjoyed by a select minority. His style was difficult and obscure, and his intricate, exquisitely delicate meditations and analysis of emotions could never have appealed to the mass of readers. Outwardly and in his habits he was a strange being. Very pale, with burning black eyes, frail and short in stature, he lived like a hermit in his home, which was open to a few privileged friends, amongst precious furniture. Yet by fits and starts he loved to re-enter the fashionable "night-life" of Paris. His apartment was lined throughout with cork in an ineffectual attempt to keep out the uproar of the noisiest city in the world. Most of his best-known work was done after he reached the age of forty-five years. Of all idols and masters of present-day literature in France he is most likely to have won a place which time will not take away. [Read More]

'From the archive'

The Guardian, 20 November 2009

Hendrik Wittkopf and Lee Rourke on Beckett

A discussion on art and literature

In an interview with 3:AM Magazine, artist Hendrik Wittkopf and writer Lee Rourke discuss the influence of Samuel Beckett on their new exhibition, Non-working doing its work:

3:AM Magazine: What inspiration did you draw from Beckett’s essay, “Les Peintres de l’empêchement”?

Hendrik Wittkopf: Beckett’s way of writing is very close to what I think, and reading him it feels as if he was painting himself. Most of my inspiration from Beckett dates back some time ago. When I was young, I read his texts as if they were the very translation of what I did with my painting, only stretched out over pages, whilst I stuck all of it on different layers, vertically, a frame, a still. I am not interested in creating something meaningful, but in confronting the perpetuity of creating ’something’ within a framework of constant change. Trying to do this within a two-dimensional playground of colours gives me immeasurable pleasure and immeasurable pain.

Lee Rourke: Beckett points us towards rapprochement, or the struggle of bringing the objects of our consciousness together. Contained in this struggle is the concern of ‘empêchement,’ where the object becomes invisible and unrepresentable because objects are what they are. Beckett’s essay merely illustrates to us the thin veil of transparency that separates our practice: a shared struggle to represent the objects of our consciousness. Although, I don’t wish to wrap our art in theory to such an extent that it removes the viewer from the thing itself. The philosopher Simon Critchley (who has written some of the best stuff on Beckett today) calls this thingness art’s ‘truth.’ I guess – and I feel Hendrik feels the same way – we want to avoid what Critchley calls a ‘Philosofugal’ situation, where theory ’spins out’ from within to cover art, or smother art’s truth. I think we are attempting an outwards, ‘artopetal’ state where any ‘theory is drawn into the orbit of the thing’ because our show is what it is and nothing besides. All this is contradictory, of course, but it is what interests us right now. I think we are just trying to show the unrepresentableness of things. [Read More]

Non-working doing its work: An interview with Hendrik Wittkopf & Lee Rourke

3:AM Magazine, 19 November 2009

Franz Kafka and Philosophy Workshop: 2010

A Call for Papers

A call for papers has been announced for an upcoming academic workshop on philosophy in the work of Franz Kafka, to be held in August 2010. The workshop is part of a larger conference on 'Thought in Science and Fiction' organized by Cankaya University in Turkey, and aims to consider 'various conceptions of the relationship of literature and philosophy'.

The workshop on Franz Kafka aims to prompt a discussion and debate of the latest theoretical and philosophical approaches in contemporary critical theory. The call for papers has been split into seven sections, each dealing with a possible interpretive approach to Kafka's work, and ranges from existing studies, to biography, to philosophical 'affinities' and themes.

The deadline for submissions is set for 15 December 2009.

CFP Philosophy and Kafka August 2-6, 2010
International Society for the Study of European Ideas

Contact email:
bmoran@ucalgary.ca

CALL FOR PAPERS
for a Workshop on “Philosophy and Kafka” to be held at the 12th international conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas) at Cankaya University, Ankara, Turkey on August 2-6, 2010. The theme of the conference is “Thought in Science and Fiction.”

It is sometimes said that Franz Kafka’s novels and stories defy philosophic extrapolation. Conversely, it has also been suggested that precisely the tendency of Kafka’s writings to elude discursive solution is itself a philosophical tendency, one that is somehow contributing to a wiser relationship of human beings with language.

The workshop on “Philosophy and Kafka” will explore such questions about the relationship of Kafka’s stories and novels with philosophy. A principal supplementary purpose will be to consider various conceptions of the relationship of literature and philosophy.

Possible approaches include the following.

1. Focus on specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka, such as those by T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Günther Anders, or Hannah Arendt.

2. Consider the possible relevance or helpfulness of certain outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, outlooks such as those of Taoism, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Albert Camus, or existentialism.

3. Examine Kafka’s writings through certain views of the relationship of literature or poetry with philosophy. Relevant views would include those for which poetry might involve a thinking that philosophy might not be able to achieve (Heidegger). Also of possible relevance in this context would be Kafka-commentaries by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous, and others.

4. Kafka’s writings could be assessed from the perspective of a specific conception of the relationship of philosophy and art – outlooks such as those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, the early German Romantics, Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hans Blumenberg, Sarah Kofman, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, or Jacques Rancière.

5. Consider the relationship of Kafka’s stories and novels with those aspects of his Nachlass, diaries, and letters that might more readily lend themselves to philosophical extrapolation.

6. Focus on “philosophical” affinities or divergences between Kafka’s writings and writings by other authors (such as Heinrich von Kleist, Lewis Carroll, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the surrealists, Robert Walser, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Shmuel Agnon, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Julien Green, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Ingeborg Bachmann, Maurice Blanchot, Wole Soyinka, Elfriede Jelinek, Orhan Pamuk).

7. Consider Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme. Kafka’s writings could be discussed in relation to ethics, aesthetics, love, sex, the sexes, political philosophy, legal theory, pragmatism, wisdom, thinking, myth, prophecy, the death penalty, or punishment.

These are only some of the possible approaches and topics. A principal criterion for selection will be the clear relevance of the proposal to some aspect of the topic “Philosophy and Kafka.”

Proposals of approximately 500 words or entire papers of no more than 3000 words (including notes) may be sent to Brendan Moran at bmoran@ucalgary.ca until December 15, 2009. Decisions concerning the final composition of the four hour session (of eight to ten papers) will be made within a month to six weeks following the submission deadline.

For information concerning the conference, see http://issei2010.haifa.ac.il

University of Pennsylvania, Call for Papers website

'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature

An interview with Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear are renowned contemporary translators of Russian literature. To date, they have collaborated to bring 16 key new editions of Russian novels to the English language, from Tolstoy and Gogol, to Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. And they are currently working on a new translation of Nobel prize winner Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, they share their passion for Russian literature, and discuss some of the practical difficulties of translation. The interview closes with a question about the contemporary relevance of the Russian novel, to which Volokhonsky and Pevear give a wonderfully philosophical answer:

Wall Street Journal: Every culture thinks its literature will stand the test of time. What is it about the Russian novelists that makes us come back to their work again and again?

Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky: I think there's the phrase "the accursed questions" attributed to Dostoyevsky: What is the meaning of life, the existence of God, the mystery of death, the big metaphysical spiritual questions? Those questions were central to Russian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries in a way that they had all but ceased to be in Western European literature. The Russians were engaged in portraying a fully human destiny rather than one dictated by class, social position, personal ambition and so on -- which is a vision similar to what we find first of all in Homer, as well as Dante and Shakespeare. We thirst for that vision and are grateful to find it in the great Russians. The aliveness of Tolstoy's heroes may come ultimately from the same wholeness of vision, which is not generalized and abstract, but deep in detail. [Read More]

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, 'Translating Tolstoy'

The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2009

Their most recent translation, Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, is published by Random House.

Simon McBurney on performing Beckett's Endgame

Why Beckett's work holds a special significance

Simon McBurney discusses the terror of playing Clov in Complicite's production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame:

[...] Beckett is special, Endgame particularly so. It is unlike anything else I have played: fastidiously specific, utterly elusive. At any one moment in the performance, you will be aware of someone laughing hysterically, another weeping, while others sit silent, astounded or baffled. Endgame resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life – the audience. [Read More]

Simon McBurney, 'I'm going to die'

guardian.co.uk, 17 November 2009

The Complicite production of Endgame runs at the Duchess Theatre, London, until 5 December.

More on Complicite's Endgame:

• A Piece of Monologue: Critics review Complicite's Endgame
• A Piece of Monologue: Beckett's Endgame at the Duchess Theatre
• A Piece of Monologue: Simon McBurney on Beckett's Stage Directions
• Duchess Theatre website: Samuel Beckett's Endgame
• Daily Telegraph: Endgame to mark Richard Briers' final theatre performance
• The Stage: Mark Rylance to replace Richard Briers in Endgame

Slavoj Žižek Speaks!

Cultural critic tours the UK

Independent publisher Verso is promoting a series of talks to be held in London by critical theorist Slavoj Žižek. Promoting his new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (a reference to Karl Marx's famous statement on the repetition of history), Žižek will be putting in appearances at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Birkbeck College, RSA and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Some of the venues are offering free public admission, but you can find out all the relevant booking details at each institution by clicking the links below. The whistle-stop three-day tour of events runs from 23 to 25 November.

Slavoj Žižek on the Myth of Natural Balance
Date / Time: Monday, 23 November 2009 / 6.45pm

Location: ICA / Tickets sold out

In his new book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek examines the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’. Tonight he will discuss one of them – the threat of ecological catastrophe – and deliver a lecture criticising the ideology which has grown up around ecology. The notion that that we shouldn’t mess around with nature, he argues, has become the new opium of the masses and one of the most insidious and most conservative ideologies of our time. If we are do anything about environmental problems, says Žižek, we need to stop sentimentalising nature and criticise the assumptions of environmentalism. James Harkin chairs the talk.
£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

Institute of Contemporary Arts

• Click here for more information or call box office for returns on +44(0)20 7930 3647

Slavoj Žižek: Apocalyptic Times
Date / Time: Tuesday, 24 November 2009 / 2.30pm

Location: Birkbeck College / Free

• Click here for more information.

Slavoj Žižek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: the economic crisis and the end of global capitalism

Date / Time: Tuesday, 24 November 2009 / 6.00pm

Location / Entry: RSA / Free but booking required

Slavoj Žižek – radical philosopher, polymath, film star, and author of over 30 books – is one of the most controversial and leading contemporary public intellectuals, simultaneously acclaimed as the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’ and denounced as ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the West’.

He visits the RSA to ask the question that is on everyone’s lips: if we can pour billions of dollars into the global banking system in a frantic attempt at financial stabilization, why has it not been possible to bring the same forces to bear in addressing world poverty and environmental crisis?

RSA Events

• Click here for more information.

Slavoj Žižek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: The Double Death of Neoliberalism and the Idea of Communism

Date / Time: Wednesday, 25 November 2009 / 1pm

Location / Entry: LSE / Free

Slavoj Žižek argues that the neoliberalism died twice: first as a political doctrine in the tragedy of the attacks of 9/11; then its farcical collapse as an economic theory when the meltdown at the end of 2008 brought an end to the utopia of global market capitalism. Has this crisis now offered a vital opening for the left to seize the reins of politics and the state?

Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana. This lecture launches Mr Žižek's new book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.

London School of Economics and Political Science

• Click here for more information.

More on A Piece of Monologue:

• Slavoj Žižek on Ridley Scott's Alien
• Slavoj Žižek on life, happiness and Hegel
• Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett

Paul Auster: Why Roth is wrong about the novel

Auster speaks out on the decline of American literature

Paul Auster speaks out to The Big Think, and "strenuously" disagrees with Philip Roth's assertion that the novel is a dying art-form, fading from public relevance. He also speculates on the future of internet literature. Full interview with Auster available here. (via Norton Fiction.)

More on A Piece of Monologue:

• Philip Roth and the fate of the Great American novel
• Philip Roth's Reading Habits
• Philip Roth discusses The Humbling with The Daily Beast
• Paul Auster on meeting Samuel Beckett
• Paul Auster on his new novel, Invisible

Disjecta: This week's links

(Image from The Folio Society: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy)

This week introduces Disjecta, a new weekly feature of A Piece of Monologue. It aims to digest news across philosophy and the arts into manageable bitesize portions. And yes, this format is a blatant steal from 3:AM Magazine's superb Missing Links column.

Literature:

Philip Roth: Elaine Blair on Philip Roth's The Humbling
Philip Roth: Alex Clark on Philip Roth's The Humbling
Paul Auster: Joanna Briscoe on Paul Auster's Invisible
Paul Auster: Folio Society publish Paul Auster's New York Trilogy

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Slavoj Žižek: 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Martin Heidegger: New York Times on Emmanuel Faye's book on Heidegger and Nazism
Martin Heidegger: Brian Leiter on the Heidegger and Nazism Question
Walter Benjamin: Terry Eagleton on Walter Benjamin and Barack Obama
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein's eating habits (via Leiter Reports)

Film:

Woody Allen: Trailer for Woody Allen's Whatever Works
Alfred Hitchcock: Alfred Hitchcock Cameos
Alfred Hitchcock: Polish and Czech Hitchcock Posters (via roundmyskull)
Michael Haneke: Philip French on Haneke's The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke: Ryan Gilbey on Haneke's The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke: Time Out reviews Haneke's The White Ribbon

Music:

Jazz: Telegraph on the 100 Best Jazz Recordings
Bob Dylan: Will Self on Bob Dylan
Kraftwerk: The Quietus on Kraftwerk reissues

Etc.:

Will Self: On Starbucks coffee

Will Self, 'My hero J. G. Ballard'

British writer pays tribute

Will Self has written a short piece in today's Guardian newspaper, expressing his deep admiration for the British writer J. G. Ballard, who passed away earlier this year. The article anticipates what would have been Ballard's 79th birthday on 15 November, and declares him the 'last great English avatar of the avant garde'.

Self acknowledges the contribution Ballard has made to 'literature, to the visual arts, to architectural theory and even philosophy', before elaborating on the profound influence Ballard held on Self's own confidence and creative imagination:

Tomorrow, on what would have been his 79th birthday, family and friends of JG Ballard will gather in London to celebrate his extraordinary life and still more extraordinary literary achievement. I don't really do "heroes", and Jim Ballard's whole outlook was antithetical to the notion of the "great man" (though less so, I suspect, to that of the "great woman"), but if I were in search of an antiheroic hero it would have to be him. When I was stranded in the doldrums of my early 20s, desperate to write fiction but uncertain that there was any way to yoke my perverse vision to any recognised form, Ballard's luminous short stories and minatory novels showed me a way forward. [Read More]

Will Self, 'My hero JG Ballard'

The Guardian, 14 November 2009

More on A Piece of Monologue:

• J. G. Ballard on Blue Velvet
• J. G. Ballard's Top Ten Writers
• Artforum on J. G. Ballard
• J. G. Ballard, 'Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton'
• J. G. Ballard 1930-2009

David Bowie's Lodger: 30th Anniversary

Third album in the renowned 'Berlin Trilogy'

The Quietus celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of David Bowie's Lodger, the third album of the so-called Berlin trilogy (Low, "Heroes", Lodger). Ben Graham elaborates on the significance of Lodger to Bowie's career, and recaps some of the key details of the musician's creative relationship with Brian Eno.

There's also an interesting exploration of Bowie's influences at the time the album was recorded, from the high-strung intellectualism of Talking Heads and the motorik beat of Neu!, to the European paranoia of Polanski's The Tenant.

But in essence, Graham aims to establish once and for all the role that Lodger plays within Bowie's Berlin trilogy. On the one hand, he argues, there are characteristics that hold it in place alongside Low and "Heroes", but the release of Lodger inevitably marks a kind of irreconcilable departure (thank you to 'Z' for drawing my attention to this article):

[...] And responsibility, in the end, is the real theme of Lodger: taking us back to the opening track’s worries over the fate of the entire planet resting in the hands of one flawed, capricious human being, through to ‘Repetition’s’ description of how we pass on our pain to those closest to us, full of self-pitying victimhood yet unaware we’ve become the aggressor. From the crippling banality of ‘DJ’- a man with the ears of millions of believers, yet nothing to say- to the cocooned self-absorption of ‘Boys Keep Swinging,’ and the damp squib of a judgement day portrayed in ‘Look Back in Anger.’ The last words on the album are “Such responsibility- it’s up to you and me.”

It’s this sense of responsibility - both individual and collective - that finally separates Lodger from the so-called Berlin albums. Low was, in Bowie’s own words, “Isn’t it great to be on your own, let’s just pull down the blinds and fuck em all”, a celebration of self-pity. “Heroes” saw the individual begin to fight back, but still from a passive-aggressive, me-against-the-world standpoint. It’s only with Lodger that Bowie realises that to survive in any meaningful sense, he has to engage with society, and with the rest of the human race. [Read More]

Ben Graham, '30-Years On: David Bowie's Lodger Comes In From The Cold'

The Quietus, 4 November 2009

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Bowie: 40 years
• David Bowie in Berlin, 1978
• Station to Station: Geoff MacCormack's Photographs of David Bowie
• David Bowie and the Berlin Period

BFI Michael Haneke Season

A selection of films spanning the director's entire career

Austrian director Michael Haneke, who recently won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival, is being celebrated by the BFI with a season of films. It's a representative collection, ranging from his shocking early work, Benny's Video, to the globally successful Hidden (Caché) and his latest feature, The White Ribbon. The BFI Michael Haneke season kicks off tomorrow, and runs until 17 December.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the screenings include both versions of Funny Games directed by Haneke: the original German theatrical release, and its shot-for-shot American remake. While Haneke's The Castle is also scheduled to be shown on two dates in mid-November, 'remarkable and rewarding for its extreme fidelity to Kafka's novel'. The jewel in the season's crown is an interview with Haneke himself on 22 November, which is open to the public (although, perhaps not surprisingly, this event is already fully-booked).

Geoff Andrew summarizes Haneke's relevance in his introduction on the BFI website:

[...] Haneke is now widely regarded as one of the world's most important auteurs. He's not only won a host of major awards - his many Cannes prizes culminating this year in the Palme d'or for The White Ribbon - but he's seen several films (most notably The Piano Teacher and Hidden) attain 'crossover' box-office success. These achievements have not been the result of any compromise, artistic or philosophical; indeed, Haneke's artistry has with the passing of time become even more rigorous in its precision, subtle in its complexity, and significant in its relevance to today's world. [Read More]

Geoff Andrew on Michael Haneke

The following setlist has been taken from the BFI website:

British Film Institute
November-December: Michael Haneke

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
Fri 20 Nov 18:20
Mon 23 Nov 20:30
Haneke paints a mordant and painfully plausible fresco of contemporary urban life.

Benny's Video
Fri 13 Nov 20:45
Haneke explores simplistic ideas about the relationship between images and violence.

The Castle
Fri 20 Nov 20:30
Tue 24 Nov 18:00
Remarkable and rewarding for its extreme fidelity to Kafka's novel about a land surveyor.

Code Unknown
Sun 15 Nov 15:40
Haneke's masterly film raises profound questions about contemporary urban existence.

Funny Games
Mon 16 Nov 20:45
Sat 21 Nov 18:10
A masterly and unsettling variation on the murder thriller.

Funny Games US
Sun 29 Nov 20:30
Mon 30 Nov 18:30
A shot-for-shot English-language remake of the dark masterpiece Haneke made a decade earlier.

Hidden
Sun 22 Nov 20:30
Sun 29 Nov 18:20
A taut, tense thriller exploring social and individual guilt and paranoia.

Michael Haneke in Conversation
Sun 22 Nov 18:30
The director will be discussing his Palme d'Or winning film The White Ribbon and his career to date.

The Piano Teacher
Sat 14 Nov 20:30
Sun 22 Nov 17:50
Haneke's brilliant, almost Bergman-esque adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel.

The Seventh Continent
Sat 21 Nov 15:50
Thu 26 Nov 18:00
The first part of Haneke's trilogy about the 'emotional glaciation' of Austria charts.

Time of the Wolf
Sun 15 Nov 18:00
Sat 28 Nov 20:30
An uncommonly realistic variation on the apocalyptic movie, set somewhere in Europe.

The White Ribbon
13 - 30 November
1 - 17 December
Haneke's Cannes Palme d'or-winner explores how a community is shaken by a series of events.

For booking or further information: BFI website: Michael Haneke Season

More on A Piece of Monologue:

• Kafka's influence on Michael Haneke

Will Self on Bob Dylan

A tribute to the American songwriter

In a New Statesmen article from 2003, Will Self reviewed Neil Corcoran's collection of essays, Do You, Mr Jones?: Bob Dylan with the poets and professors. Skeptical of the book's aims, he attempted to wrestle Dylan's lyrics away from the rabid interpretations of the academic establishment. Self picks this moment to elaborate on his own private fondness for Dylan's music, and the personal significance it holds for him:

[...] My Dylan needs must remain mine alone. From the proleptic punk who snarled Highway 61 Revisited (the first of his albums that yanked me into consciousness, aged 16 in 1977) to the keel-on-shingle, warbling eschatology of Time Out of Mind (the last one of his albums I bought and played to death), I have neither felt the need to justify my Dylanism, nor to qualify it even to myself.

Yet it has been profound. At times - usually bad ones - his has been the only contemporary music I will listen to at all. If I think of my relationships, my children and even my own books, each can be associated with a Dylan album. If I were to reread my own work I'm certain I'd find many tropes I have stolen from Dylan lyrics, and not only the ones I filched with intent. And given that I was able to encounter Dylan - apart from a few sonic outcrops - in the full flower of my musical youth, and given that not belonging exactly to his generation has meant that I've felt no need to keep in step with his output, I've been liberated from any Nick Hornbyesque nerdiness. I can pick 'n' mix my Dylan, and still own probably less than two-thirds of his total output. I've seen D A Pennebaker's luminous Don't Look Back umpteen times, but skilfully dodged Renaldo and Clara. Before this book, I had never read more than liner notes on his work (the best are Greil Marcus's for The Basement Tapes), and I don't think I'll be reading anything more for a long time to come. Christopher Ricks, I do not know you.

Because not only is there a desire to protect my own private Dylan, there is also an acute consciousness that to deconstruct his words would be to open up a Pandora's box of lyrical ills. Dylan's greatness as a writer teeters constantly on the edge of righteous nonsense and awesome self-parody: "On the back of the fish truck that loads/while my conscience explodes" indeed. And yes, I have always understood - something that many of the contributors to this book felt they had to remind me of - that Dylan is a white-faced minstrel, a Jewish, middle-class Middle American who has invented multiple musical personae with which to plunder the rich storehouse of folk music. Yes, even at 17, I grasped intuitively that "Highway 61 Revisited" was a modern jeremiad against the hypocrisies of imperialist Uncle Sam; and yes, I've never felt the least requirement to place his misogyny within the context of his misanthropy. All of which is by way of remarking that Dylan, like the greatest and most universal of writers (whether poets proper, novelists, essayists or songwriters), so powerfully transmutes his idiolect into the contemporary discourse that his songs have no need of any interpretation save for themselves. [Read More]

Will Self, 'How poetry became just an appendix. When do you hear anybody quote a line from a contemporary poet? Yet you hear Bob Dylan, and other songwriters, quoted all the time.'

New Statesman, 06 January 2003