 |
| A good place to begin? Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer |
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.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
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]
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.' |
| Saul Bellow, Letters |
Je connais ces petites phrases qui n'ont l'air de rien
et qui, une fois admises, peuvent vous empester toute une langue.
Samuel Beckett, Malone meurt
Bouche comme cousue fil blanc invisible
Samuel Beckett, Bing
Cliché itself, the degenerative metaphor of everyday language, is, Beckett recognizes, expressive of fundamental desires, fears and truthsCliché points initially to the imprint of a mold, the impression, and the mechanical reproduction of the identical. Sounds marks, photographic prints, ready-made snatches of discourse or of representation: the varied forms of cliché in Beckett’s work evoke an entire formal and signifying network, like these stereotyped expressions, replayed or thwarted by a narrative voice of uncertain responsibility, or like the definition of bodies by their rigid posture, with the pieces for television and their static shots.
Elizabeth Barry, Beckett and Authority: The Use of Cliche
 |
| One Little Goat produces Thomas Bernhard's Ritter, Dene, Voss |
 |
| Thomas Mann and Thomas Bernhard |
 |
| Paul Auster, Sunset Park |
For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things. There are at least two jobs every day, sometimes as many as six or seven, and each time he and his cohorts enter another house, they are confronted by the things, the innumerable cast- off things left behind by the departed families. The absent people have all fled in haste, in shame, in confusion, and it is certain that wherever they are living now (if they have found a place to live and are not camped out in the streets) their new dwellings are smaller than the houses they have lost. Each house is a story of failure — of bankruptcy and default, of debt and foreclosure — and he has taken it upon himself to document the last, lingering traces of those scattered lives in order to prove that the vanished families were once here, that the ghosts of people he will never see and never know are still present in the discarded things strewn about their empty houses. [Read more]Source: US Macmillan: Paul Auster, Sunset Park
 |
| Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg outside City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco |
 |
| Jacques Derrida |
The tightrope Derrida is walking here is terrifyingly thin. On the one side, there is the gulf of full-blown literary essentialism, whereby certain texts are deemed Literary simply because they are Literature. (This is the conservative conception of Literature that goes along with the canon and a whole host of reactionary paraphernalia). On the other side, there is the abyss of pragmatism, whereby a certain text is only literary because a specific conjunction of material practices and institutions have deemed it to be so. (This is usually the radical conception of Literature, one to which Terry Eagleton subscribes more or less readily, and to which I have myself been warily partial up to now). If you fall into the essentialist gulf, you end up some sort of authoritarian typologist, guarding the boundaries of Literature against the riff-raff of pop culture and the surly brows of philosophy. But if you tumble into the abyss of pragmatism, you risk missing the subtleties of the subjective and objective constitutions of literature. [Read the article]Also at A Piece of Monologue:
 |
| Frank Kermode. Photograph: Fabio De Paola. |
Widely acclaimed as Britain's foremost literary critic, Sir Frank Kermode, died yesterday in Cambridge at the age of 90.Writers have, in the past, voiced their admiration for Kermode's distinctive brand of criticism:
The London Review of Books, for which the critic and scholar wrote more than 200 pieces, announced his death this morning. Kermode inspired the founding of the magazine in 1979, after writing an article in the Observer calling for a new literary magazine.
Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held "virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles", according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and professor of poetry at Harvard, along with honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was knighted in 1991.
A renowned Shakespearean, publishing Shakespeare's Language in 2001, Kermode's books range from works on Spenser and Donne and the memoir Not Entitled to last year's Concerning EM Forster.
He was also an acclaimed reviewer. John Updike said that Kermode's conclusions seem "inarguable – indeed just what we would have argued, had we troubled to know all that, or goaded ourselves to read this closely", while Philip Roth admitted that although he dislikes reading reviews, "if Frank Kermode reviewed my book I would read it".Read more:
The American writer will no doubt have been pleased by a 2008 review of his novel Indignation in the LRB, in which Kermode wrote that "he is a writer of quite extraordinary skill and courage; and he takes on bigger enemies in every book he writes".
 |
| Jacques Derrida |
 |
| Bruno Schleinstein, 1932-2010 |
 |
| Thomas de Quincey's The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, illustrated by Laurence W. Chaves |
 |
| Primo Levi |
You do not interest me. No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice," writes philosopher Simone Weil. To turn a deaf ear is an offence not only to the ignored person but also to thinking, justice and ethics. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is cursed because no one will listen to his story. The Italian chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi was preoccupied with this fable because of his fear that on returning from Auschwitz people like him would be either ignored or simply disbelieved. Regardless, listening gets a very mixed press amongst critics and intellectuals. There is a suspicion of "wistful optimism" or the quasi-religious appeal to "hold hands" and play priest at the confessional. These qualms miss the centrality of listening to a radical humanism which recognises that dialogue is not merely about consensus or agreement but engagement and criticism. This is something that Primo Levi understood.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Faussone, the hero of Levi's novel The Wrench, is a difficult man. An itinerant rigger, he spent his life travelling the cities of the world operating high-rise cranes. Despite the dramatic nature of his adventures Faussone is not a natural storyteller. The novel's narrator comments on how tempting it is to interrupt him, put words in his mouth and spoil his stories before they have even been told. He comes to realise: "Just as there is an art of storytelling, strictly codified through a thousand trails and errors, so there is also an art of listening, equally ancient and noble, but as far as I know, it has never been given any norm." The quiet patience required to invite the story's telling makes an important contribution to its content. For, as Levi writes, "a distracted or hostile audience can unnerve any teacher or lecturer; a friendly public sustains." The listener's art for Primo Levi is practised through abstaining from speech and allowing the speaker to be heard. Listening is active, a form of attention to be trained rather than presumed.
In his famous essay on the storyteller, Walter Benjamin lamented the loss of attention to stories and tales which could be "woven into the fabric of real life" as wisdom. The profusion of talk and information inhibits social transactions of understanding. Our ears become soundproofed, double-glazed like our homes to keep out the noise of the city.
Levi was arguably the most astute witness to the Nazi holocaust, and his commitment to listening derives from his experience of being a witness and survivor, but it is also an essential part of his skill as a writer. [Read more]
 |
| Simon Morgan Wortham, The Derrida Dictionary |
.jpg) |
| Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce's Ulysses |
[...] Bernard Comment, who is editing Fragments, which will be published jointly by the Editions du Seuil in France and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States in October, revealed last week that Whitman, one of the most influential American poets, had "fascinated" Monroe. "In these very personal texts we come across James Joyce, who she discovered aged 26, performing extracts from Molly's famous soliloquy. She also admired Samuel Beckett, who was in his first flush of success when she was a regular at the Actors Studio after her arrival in New York. More surprising still is her fascination with Walt Whitman, the founder of modern American poetry," he said.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
[...]
She had a vast library, which included works by George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, D H Lawrence, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck, as well as Joyce, which she took with her whenever she moved house, something she did many times over her short lifetime. Her copy of Ulysses fetched $9,200 (£5,800) at an auction of her possessions by Christie's in 1999. While in Hollywood, she briefly took evening courses in art appreciation and literature at UCLA before withdrawing after her presence proved too distracting for the other students.
The book will also include notes from her readings about Renaissance art, letters and about 30 photos. [...] There are also diary-style entries on Monroe's relationship with [playwright] Arthur Miller, her third husband. [Read the article]
 |
| Don DeLillo. Leemage/Writer Pictures |
DeLillo now lives in Westchester County in New York State with his wife, Barbara, a landscape designer, but he has not completely left his childhood neighbourhood, a place he insists still "looks the same, though the people are different": an influx of new immigrants, Serbs, Croats and African-Caribbeans. Every year, he goes back to meet old school friends from the streets of his childhood. "We meet on a major street and have a meal together and a laugh," he says. Inevitably, the conversation will turn to baseball, DeLillo's first love – what he calls his "second language". Baseball, he says, "was just so natural, because we all grew up with it. We played it; we listened to it on the radio, and then we went to Yankee stadium. It was a taken-for-granted pleasure".Also at A Piece of Monologue:
DeLillo still had to make his journey "into America" and that was hard. "It took a long time," he says. "I was very slow to begin. I lacked the discipline for the enormous commitment one has to make. Even when I had all day to write, and sometimes all week, I took forever finally to enter my first novel." That was Americana, published in 1971 when he was 35.
"It was only after two years' work," he confesses, "that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is – an intense form of thought."
DeLillo likes to keep this intensity to himself, which has given him the label "reclusive". But he resists this. "I'm not reclusive at all. Just private." As a celebrated writer, and a shy man, he wants to keep it this way, with his fans held at arm's length. "This is the age of consumer fiction. People want fiction that's easily assimilable." That holds no interest for DeLillo. "Point Omega challenged me in the writing and I assume it will challenge some readers as well."
He relishes complexity and goes into a long account of Teilhard de Chardin's work and the idea of the "omega point", concluding, after an explanation of the "noosphere", with a note of triumph, that "these are not easy ideas to understand, but that's what we are dealing with". For DeLillo, the mystery of the process is a vital ingredient in fiction. "We are bound to wonder: where does this material come from?"
As a champion of "difficulty", albeit in an American mode, he is an heir of modernism and says that he sees himself as "part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce". Unlike his friend Paul Auster, there's no part of his creative make-up that owes much to the 19th-century American masters. "I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne." Instead, he listens to jazz: "Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, the same music I listened to when I was 20."
This comes as a reminder that DeLillo stands in the middle of a postwar generation of American writers, ranging from the senior (Philip Roth) to the junior (Paul Auster), all of them from the suburbs. "We are not native," DeLillo explains. "We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural." [Read the Interview]
 |
| Thomas Bernhard |
 |
| Promotional poster for AMC's Mad Men |
 |
| Faber's Poetry Hardback Collection |
 |
| Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Despair (Penguin) |
 |
| Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin and The Eye (Penguin) |
[...] One of the jewels of the archive is Ballard’s annotated typescript for Crash, the semi-sane fantasy of autogeddon and paraphilia that cemented his cult status on its publication in 1973. Its first page, scored with madcap scribbles and red pen revisions, now forms part of an exhibition of the library’s greatest treasures, which includes a specimen of Shakespeare’s handwriting, one of the earliest surviving Bibles, a Beethoven sonata in autograph and the Magna Carta. This might, one imagines, come as rather a shock to the publisher’s reader who famously advised after seeing the Crash manuscript that the author was “beyond psychiatric help”.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Crash is a difficult book to read, one of the few shock novels that retains its power to shock several decades later. “Putting it crudely,” Ballard once said in an interview, “I’m saying, ‘So you think violence is sexy? Well, this is where it leads.” And where it leads, in Crash, is to a seemingly endless blur of speed, death, passionless sex and colour televisions.
The effort of writing the book — which revolves, more or less, around two men who come to find secret erotic pleasure in the injuries from automobile accidents — comes through in Ballard’s frantic typescript, in which sentence after sentence is razored through in red pen as the author revises and revises in search of his trademark emotionless glide.
Annotations in handwriting provide a miniature digest of the novel’s obsessions. “Among the pillars of the overpass” reads one spiky addendum. “Aspiring whores whom we picked up in the twilight world of all-night launderettes and supermarkets on the northern fringes of the airport,” reads another. They might as well be little signs: we are now entering Ballardian Space.
So unblinkingly weird and aggressive is Crash’s published text that it’s amusing to see the writer sifting possibilities. One can imagine him chuckling at the mad, adjectival excess of the scene, later discarded, in which his narrator pictures Jackie Kennedy “struck within her limousine by aggressive youths driving stolen cars on suicide courses through breaking police cordons, car after car hitting her limousine at every angle and forming an immense pyre from which her unburnt vulva is snatched from the flames”.
And it’s strangely endearing to find, in the margin of some of his most extreme passages, the capitalised note-to-self “STRESS GOOD ASPECTS”. Interestingly, too, the narrator’s name is given as Charles N throughout this second draft, suggesting that only late in the day did the author provocatively decide to rechristen him James Ballard.
Another of the archive’s treasures is an original manuscript of Empire of the Sun, the semi-autobiographical novel about Shanghai after the Japanese invasion of China that was Ballard’s passport into the mainstream.
In contrast to Crash, this manuscript, written through in blue pen on single sides of paper and containing numerous alternate passages and revisions, is a more stately affair. Surrounding it in the archive is a wealth of material that Ballard acquired from the Lunghua Camp in Shanghai, where he and his parents were held after the Japanese invasion. Compiled by the head of the residents’ association, a friend of Ballard’s father, the documents comprise memos, blueprints and harrowing scraps of information, such as the meticulously plotted, inexorably declining graph that measures the prisoners’ food supply dwindling to starvation as the war dragged on.
Letters and notebooks also form part of the collection. The letters, exchanged with friends such as Michael Moorcock and Will Self, as well as with interested fans and researchers, are still under library lockdown until data protection issues have been addressed. The slim handful of spiral-bound reporter’s notebooks is likewise yet to be catalogued, but a quick flick through suggests that these will be some of the most revealing documents. [Read the article]
