Waiting for Beckett Documentary

Rare feature-length documentary on the Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett

This incredibly rare television documentary includes interviews with a number of Beckett's friends, colleagues and followers. Among those interviewed are: Raymond Federman, Hugh Kenner, Steve Martin, Edward Albee, Stanley Gontarski, John Calder, Barney Rosset and, in a round-a-bout way, Samuel Beckett himself. The film also includes footage of a number of Beckett productions, including Steve Martin and Robin Williams' 1987 performance as Didi and Gogo in the Mike Nichols production of Waiting for Godot, Billie Whitelaw as Winnie in Happy Days and clips from German/English television productions of What Where.

Waiting for Beckett: A Portrait of Samuel Beckett is a must for anyone interested in his work. It traces Beckett's early years in Ireland and Paris, before discussing the impact of his novels, plays and late work with the help of friends, scholars and publishers. Unfortunately, the audio and picture quality are not perfect, and subtitles obscure the names of many of the interviewees, but the film is still incredibly worthwhile.

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter in Krapp's Last Tape
• Beckett Speaks
• Film footage of Samuel Beckett, 1969
• Publisher Barney Rosset on Samuel Beckett

Judith Butler on Franz Kafka

Leading contemporary thinker discusses Kafka's literary estate

Who owns Kafka? As legal disputes continue over the status of Franz Kafka's literary estate, critical and cultural theorist Judith Butler unravels its complicated history in the London Review of Books (via The Casual Optimist):

An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv. As is well known, Kafka left his published and unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Indeed, Kafka had apparently already burned much of the work himself. Brod refused to honour the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him. He published the novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika between 1925 and 1927. In 1935, he published the collected works, but then put most of the rest away in suitcases, perhaps honouring Kafka’s wish not to have it published, but surely refusing the wish to have it destroyed. Brod’s compromise with himself turned out to be consequential, and in some ways we are now living out the consequences of the non-resolution of Kafka’s bequest.

Brod fled Europe for Palestine in 1939, and though many of the manuscripts in his custody ended up at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, he held on to a substantial number of them until his death in 1968. It was to his secretary Esther Hoffe, with whom he appears to have had an amorous relationship, that Brod bequeathed the manuscripts, and she kept most of them until her own death in 2007 at the age of 101. For the most part Esther did as Max did, holding on to the various boxes, stashing them in vaults, but in 1988 she sold the manuscript of The Trial for $2 million, at which point it became clear that one could turn quite a profit from Kafka. What no one could have predicted, however, is that a trial would eventually take place after Esther’s death in which her daughters, Eva and Ruth, would claim that no one needs to inventory the materials and that the value of the manuscripts should be determined by their weight – quite literally, by what they weigh. As one of the attorneys representing Hoffe’s estate explained: ‘If we get an agreement, the material will be offered for sale as a single entity, in one package. It will be sold by weight … They’ll say: “There’s a kilogram of papers here, the highest bidder will be able to approach and see what’s there.” The National Library [of Israel] can get in line and make an offer, too.’ [Read more]

Judith Butler, 'Who owns Kafka?'

London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 5

3 March 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• McCrum on Kafka's Manuscripts
• Kafka Legal Battle Continues
• Kafka's Manuscripts on Trial
• Kafka's Unseen Papers

Samuel Beckett and the 'State' of Ireland Conference (2011)

Call for Papers for a conference to be held at University College Dublin

Samuel Beckett in Paris. Photograph: John Minihan.

Samuel Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland Conference
University College Dublin, July 8-9, 2011
Hosted by The Humanities Institute of Ireland

Famous throughout the civilised world and the Irish Free State

Murphy

I have also decided to remind myself of my present state before embarking on my stories. I think this is a mistake.

Malone Dies

About the Conference

Samuel Beckett’s relationship to his home country of Ireland has always been a curious interaction. Years of criticism interpreted his Parisian exile and switch to French as Beckett ‘turning his back on Ireland’. However, recent scholarship has opened up a much wider excavation of Beckett’s connections with Ireland. This is evident in a number of recent publications which interrogate Beckett’s relationship to his native country, in particular Emilie Morin’s Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (2009) and Beckett and Ireland (2010), edited by Sean Kennedy. In addition, the publication in 2009 of the first volume of Beckett’s letters, covering the period from 1929 to 1940, has re-iterated for scholars the lasting influences and shaping experiences that Ireland represented for Beckett. The staging for the first time of a conference solely devoted to Beckett’s relationship to Ireland aims to encourage an exchange of ideas which will inform ongoing critical efforts to construct an Irish Beckett.

This two day conference aims to host a wide selection of both graduate and professional papers with the aim of highlighting new and dynamic work being done on Samuel Beckett. Proposals are sought from researchers working in the field in general and are particularly welcome from those working in disciplines outside of the traditional confines of Beckett studies, especially from those working on Beckett in the Irish language. Keynote speakers will be established scholars within the field.

Topics will include but are not limited to:

Representations of Ireland in Beckett
Beckett and Irish Studies
Beckett and Irish Drama
Beckett as an Irish Protestant
Beckett and the Free State
Beckett and the Irish Language
Representations of Landscape
Exile and Home

Abstracts not exceeding 300 words for 20 minute papers should be emailed to: Beckettconference2011@gmail.com.

The deadline for proposals is Friday May 6, 2011.

Conference Programme

“Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland”
UCD Conference 2011
Friday 8th
9:45 Opening Remarks.

10:00-11:15 Protestantism in Beckett’s Ireland
Aaron Smith, QUB: ‘The Siege Mentality’ Beckett’s Irish Protestantism in the Poetry and Krapp’s Last Tape.”
Stephen Kelly, UCD: “Flight from Perception: ‘Preceivedness’, Ireland and the Protestant God in Beckett’s Film.”
Chair: Scott Hamilton

11:15-11:45 Break/Coffee

11:45-1:00 Language and landscape: Representations of Ireland
Dr. Arthur Broomfield: “Representations of Ireland in Beckett.”
Feargal Whelan, UCD: “‘Gazing straight before him through the anti-dazzle windscreen’: The Young Anglo-Irishman’s difficulty with Irish landscapes.”
Chair: Dr. Graham Price

1:00-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:15 The Functional Body?
Adam Winstanley, University of York, England: ‘ “Des selles de ses citoyens”: Beckett, Swift and the Coprophilic Economy of Ballyba’.
Dr. Paul Stewart, University of Nicosia, Cyprus: ‘ “Like fucking a quag”. Ireland, Sex and Exile’.
Chair: Dr. Graham Price

3:30-4:20 Plenary Session
Professor Anthony Roche, UCD:
“The ‘Irish’ Translation of En attendant Godot.”
Chair: Dr. Nick Johnson

4:20-4:45 Break Tea/Coffee

4:45 -5:45 Plenary Session
Professor Eoin O’Brien, UCD:
“The Annihilation of Reality – The Beckett Country.”
Chair: Professor Anthony Roche

6:00 Reception

Saturday 9th

10:00-11:15 Beckett’s Irish Novel
Scott Hamilton, UCD : “Mercier and Camier: Beckett, Exile, Myth and 1940s Ireland.”
Alexey Boronenko, Ural State University, Russia: “Irish Humour in Samuel Beckett’s early Novels.”
Chair: Dr. Alan Graham

11:15-11:45 Break/Coffee

11:45-1:00 Beckett and Irish Poets
Damien Lennon, UCD: “Self-Determination in Beckett’s Mirlitonnades.”
Dr. Alan Graham, UCD: “Irish Bookman: “Recent Irish Poetry” and “Censorship in the Saorstát.”
Chair: Feargal Whelan

1:00-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:15 Beckett, Drama and the Performance of Irishness
David Clare, UCD: “Anglo-Irish ‘Distortion’: Double Exposure in Francis Bacon’s Portraits and the Liminal Setting in Samuel Beckett’s The Old Tune.”
Dr. Nicholas Johnson, TCD: “Krapp History: A Late Evening in the Future.”
Chair: Dr. Mark Nixon

3:30-4:45 Keynote
Professor Seán Kennedy, St. Mary’s University, Halifax:
“Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland: Edmund Spenser, Famine Memory and the Discontents of Humanism in Endgame”.
Chair: Dr. Sam Slote

4:45-5:15 Break Tea/Coffee

5:15-6:15 Keynote
Dr. Mark Nixon, University of Reading, England:
“Beckett Reading Irish Literature”
Chair: Dr. P.J. Mathews

8:00 Conference Dinner.
The Farm: Dawson Street

Times are subject to change.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011 (CFP)
• Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011
• Conor Lovett to perform at York Beckett Festival
• Samuel Beckett's German Diaries to be published

Teatro Plástico: Samuel Beckett

A glimpse at the Portugese theatre company's visually striking productions

Teatro Plástico's production of Samuel Beckett's Rough for Theatre II

Teatro Plástico's production of Samuel Beckett's What Where

Teatro Plástico's production of Samuel Beckett's What Where

Recent Samuel Beckett productions by a Portugese theatre company, Teatro Plástico (Plastic Theatre), have caught my eye this week, for their bold and minimalist productions of What Where and Rough for Theatre II. The following is an imperfect translation from their website, which includes photographs and publicity posters of the productions:

With 'Beckett: What - Where' Plastic Theater continues the cycle of work devoted to this undeniable master of contemporary theatre, which began with "Not I" and "Catastrophe."

This show aims to address the many dimensions of the Beckettian universe. Theatrical, poetic and visual and physical and mental health as viewed as territories that have indelibly marked all areas of contemporary culture and remain fundamental to our definitions of reality and humanity.

Inhabited by oppressors and oppressed, and miserable tramps, blind and paralyzed, demented and insane, and the desolate world of Beckett, houses an impressive gallery of reduced and incomplete beings, creatures who, in their desperate tragicomic limit, reflect the fragility and absurd meaninglessness of human existence but also our mysterious strength and persistence to continue.

Condemned to repeat, wait, and progressively reduced in their abilities, these speaking beings, thrown into the void of existence as humans on a remote planet on the outskirts of the immensity of the universe, return to us the essence of the human project and the eternal struggle of mankind to make sense and survive in a hostile environment and absurd.

But this is a dark, menacing, paradoxically, inhabited by the most extraordinary and wild laughter of contemporary theatre, and, in the illustrious tradition of great Irish comedians, the comic genius of Beckett's talent allows us one of the few pleasures left to mankind to fill the pain of existence and emptiness of waiting, laughing.

Author: Samuel Beckett | Art Director: Francisco Alves

Performers: Mario Santos, André Amalie, Viriato Mitchell, Eurico Santos - Voice off: Anthony Durães

Light: Mario Bessa | Sound: Joseph Silver | Video: Tiago Afonso | Photo: Inês d'Orey | Design: James Morgan | Assistance director: Julie Alexandria | Executive Producer: Carolina Losa

Production: Plastic Theatre

[Structure financed by the Ministry of Culture / DGArtes] [Read more]

Source: Teatro Plástico website (translated from Portugese to English)

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011 (CFP)
• Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011
• Conor Lovett to perform at York Beckett Festival
• Samuel Beckett's German Diaries to be published

Waiting for Godot Video Game

Play an arcade game version of Beckett's absurdist play

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, re-imagined for a 1980s videogame format.

Download and Play the full game at Vectorbelly.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Waiting for Elmo

Samuel Beckett and Silence

Stephen Mitchelmore on Samuel Beckett's post-war writing

Samuel Beckett at his country retreat in Ussy-sur-Marne

In a recent posting over at This Space, Stephen Mitchelmore reflects on the silence that seems to permeate Samuel Beckett's late work. With reference to interviews and reflections from the writer, Mitchelmore asks how we might think about silence and its relation to literature:

In another meeting, Beckett tells Juliet that he often sat through whole days in silence in his cottage in Ussy-sur-Marne. With no paper before him, no intent to write, he took pleasure in following the course of the sun across the sky: "There is always something to listen to" he says. So Beckett didn't experience silence as silence: it was attention. [Read more]

Stephen Mitchelmore, 'Beckett's Silence'

This Space, 16 February 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011 (CFP)
• Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011
• Conor Lovett to perform at York Beckett Festival
• Samuel Beckett's German Diaries to be published

Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011

Peter Fifield announces the speakers appearing at this year's seminars

Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Minihan.

Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011
University of Oxford

5pm on Tuesdays in Trinity Term 2011.
New Seminar Room, St John’s College, Oxford.

3 May - Professor Andrew Kötting
(Professor and Filmmaker, University for the Creative Arts)
“Kötting’s First Tape.”

10 May - Dr Iain Bailey
(Postdoctoral Fellow in English, University of Manchester)
“'My name in full': Emendation, Intertextuality and Minutiae in Beckett's Drafts.”

17 May - Dr Garin Dowd
(Reader in Film and Media Studies, Thames Valley University)
“Beckett’s cinema legacies: strategies of citation in four films from the last decade.”

24 May - Dr Graley Herren
(Professor in English, Xavier University, Ohio)
“Mourning Becomes Electric: Hamlet, Eh Joe, and the Mediation of Loss.”

31 May – Dr Mark Nixon
(Lecturer in English, Director of Beckett International Foundation, co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, University of Reading)
“herrdoktoring: The Use of Manuscripts in Beckett Studies.”

7 June – Professor Shane Weller
(Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Kent)
“Towards a Literature of the Unword: Beckett, Kafka, Sebald.”

14 June – Professor John Pilling
(Professor Emeritus of English and European Literature, University of Reading)
“Beckett/Sade: texts for nothing.”

21 June – Dr Sean Lawlor
(University of Reading)
“'A good thing about hope': Doggerelizing Chamfort and the mirlitonnades.”

Website: Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2011 (CFP)
• Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2010
• Conor Lovett to perform at York Beckett Festival
• Samuel Beckett's German Diaries to be published

James Joyce on Hamlet

From Conversations with Frank Budgen

The indispensable Biblioklept finds James Joyce discussing Shakespeare's Hamlet with Frank Budgen:

Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a jusqu’auboutist. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should fall. [Read more]

Frank Budgen, Conversations with Joyce

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Shakespeare's Hamlet: Polonious on Conduct
• Hamlet: Play or Novel?
• James Joyce: Political Controversialist
• Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
• Joycean Literature: Literature & Poetry 1910-2010
• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Conor Lovett to perform at York Beckett festival

The Gare St Lazare Players will appear at the Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive conference and festival this June

Conor Lovett in First Love. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Gare St Lazare Players present First Love and The End 
Venue: Dixon Studio Theatre, Wentworth College
Times: Wed June 22 to Fri June 24 at 8pm; Sat June 25 at 5pm
First Love and The End

Gare St Lazare Players’ arresting stage adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s First Love and The End, two short stories originally written in French in 1946, provide a perfect introduction to the writer’s work.

In First Love a man recounts an episode from his youth when, having been ejected from the family home upon his father's death, he meets a young woman on a canal-side bench. Described by Christopher Ricks as “a masterpiece of Beckettian perversity”, First Love is awash with Beckett's signature balancing of comedy and tragedy. This is paired with a similarly heartbreaking and hilarious production, The End, which features a man near the end of his life, expelled from an institution of care and left to fend for himself.

Conor Lovett, considered by many to be the definitive Beckett performer, brings these one man tours de force to life, while Judy Hegarty Lovett’s innovative direction is typical of a company renowned for their ability to expose the compassion, humour and integrity of Beckett’s work.

Recent reviews

Conor Lovett’s supremely funny performance in First Love, a solo stage adaptation of an early postwar Beckett novella, is such a pleasing triumph because its gallows humor emerges so organically, the result of a prepared actor with a deep understanding of the text.

The New York Times

His control is exquisite. Comedians would kill for such timing where every nuance is in focus and every word a gem.

The Sunday Times

A triumph of literary excavation… Judy Hegarty Lovett and her performer have traced every thought within a tangle of prose, ideas and corrosive wit.

The Irish Times

Beckett's pain is Lovett's audience's gain.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Conor Lovett is considered by many critics to be the greatest Beckett interpreter alive today and judging by the standing ovation he received on Thursday evening from an Arts Festival audience that had been sitting in the same position for nigh on three hours, this reputation has been solidified.

Australian Arts Hub

One could hardly come up with a better human instrument to intone the sonorous waves of Beckett’s blasphemous comic prose than Conor Lovett.

Los Angeles Times

Gare St Lazare Players Ireland

Conor Lovett in First Love. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh

Over the past fourteen years Gare St Lazare Players Ireland has established an international reputation for artistic excellence. GSLPI has built a repertoire of Beckett works including ten novels, numerous short stories and prose works, seven radio plays and one solo play. The collaborative output of joint artistic directors Judy Hegarty Lovett (director) and Conor Lovett (actor) has consistently received plaudits for entirely accessible and faithful renditions of Beckett’s prose that highlight equally the humanity and humour inherent in the work of the Nobel Prize-winning author.

GSLPI came out of the original Gare St Lazare Players, an international company founded in Chicago by Bob Meyer in 1983 which moved to France in 1988. Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor Lovett founded the Irish company in 1996. The group rehearses either in Cork or in Mericourt (France) and premieres work in Ireland before touring internationally, having performed in seventy cities in over twenty countries. Recent years have seen international tours to Australia, Bulgaria, China, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Israel, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and the USA. They have presented Beckett on some of the world’s great stages, among them The National Theatres of Great Britain, Bulgaria, Romania and Israel, as well as Steppenwolf (Chicago), Stadschowburg (Rotterdam), The National Concert Hall (Dublin), Schiffbau (Zurich), The English Theatre (Berlin), Riverside Studios (London) and the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre.

Biographies

Judy Hegarty Lovett has a Fine Art degree in Performance Art/Mixed Media and a postgraduate diploma in Dramatherapy. She worked as a photographer and set designer with a number of Cork theatre companies before joining the original Gare St Lazare Players in 1991 as an assistant to Artistic Director Bob Meyer. In 1996 she directed Conor Lovett in Molloy by Samuel Beckett in London and shortly thereafter the pair set up Gare St Lazare Players Ireland.

Hegarty Lovett’s Beckett directing credits include Waiting for Godot, Rockaby and prose recitals of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Lessness, Enough, Texts For Nothing, Worstward Ho, First Love and The End. In April 2006 for the Beckett Centenary Festival in Dublin, she directed new versions of Beckett’s radio plays as well as readings of Beckett’s prose and poetry by Tony Award Winner Anna Manahan and renowned Irish actors David Kelly and John Kavanagh.

Hegarty Lovett’s notable credits also include a revival of Lessness at the National Theatre in 2001; a staged reading of The Great Hunger by Tom McIntyre at The Abbey Theatre in 2004; and a mask piece called Anseo at The Glucksman Gallery, Cork in 2005. Other non-Beckett directing credits include Bouncers by John Godber, The Possibilities by Howard Barker, The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter, Swallow by Michael Harding, Tanks A Lot (co-written by Hegarty Lovett and Raymond Keane), The Good Thief by Conor McPherson at the Rubicon Theatre and, most recently, GSLPI’s 2009 adaptation of Melville’s Moby Dick.

Conor Lovett trained at L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He has performed eighteen different Beckett roles in twenty-four productions worldwide, and his work with GSLPI has earned him a reputation as one of the world’s great Beckett actors. He played the role of Lucky in the 2003 revival of The Gate Theatre’s production of Waiting For Godot, directed by Walter Asmus, and performed in What Where and Acts Without Words 1 & 2 at The Barbican in London during The Gate’s London Beckett Festival in 1999. He has performed with Gare St Lazare Players since 1992 under the direction of both Bob Meyer and Judy Hegarty Lovett and in 2004 was again directed by Asmus in Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue in a Gare St Lazare/Rubicon co-production.

Non-Beckett theatre roles include Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi, Joey in The Homecoming, Army in Requiem for a Heavyweight, Les in Bouncers, The Torturer in The Possibilities, Gus in The Dumb Waiter, the title role in Orpheus, Ed in Entertaining Mr. Sloane and The Narrator in Fabulous Beast’s The Bull. In 2007 he played David in Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves, a Druid/Royal Court Theatre co-production, which was directed by Tony Award-winner Garry Hynes. In 2007 he also worked with Peter Brook on a workshop towards his recent creation 11 or 12, and in 2009 he starred in GSLPI’s production of Moby Dick.

For the screen Conor co-produced and starred in Shut Eye directed by Jon Tompkins. Other screen appearances include Intermission, Father Ted, L’Entente Cordiale, The Kings of Cork City, Small Engine Repair, Fallout and Moll Flanders.

Website: Performances at Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive, outofthearchive.com

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive
• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Assuming Gender: Issue 2

Second issue of the free academic journal is now available

The latest issue of Assuming Gender, an online academic journal that debates contemporary issues surrounding gender, is now freely available at: assuminggender.com.

The site includes an archive of previous articles and reviews, an events page and Twitter feed. The editorial team, of which I am a member, are currently scouting submissions for the fourth issue, so feel free to visit the website for more details. Enjoy!

Articles

Jake Buckley
Moving, Assembling, Breaking Down: Sexual Automobility in Fordist Time and Space

Samara Anne Cahill
Powers of the Soul: Wollstonecraft, Islam, and Historical Progress

Johann Gregory and Alice Leonard
Assuming Gender in Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida: ‘Are we to assume that there were women in the audience?’

Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Intimate Pedagogy: The Practice of Embodiment in University Classrooms

Cecilia Gordano
A Pangendered Cyborg of Our Times: An Interview with Jaime del Val

Reviews

Abject Love: Undoing the Boundaries of Physical Disability
(Review: Michelle Iwen)

Kicked Out
(Review: A. Nicole Pfannenstiel)

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Welcome to the new design for A Piece of Monologue. Hope you like it!

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies: Call for Papers, University of Oxford
Samuel Beckett: Suhrkamp announces plans to publish Beckett's German Diaries (to be edited by Mark Nixon)
William S. Burroughs: A selection of Burroughs recordings, available online at UBUweb
William S. Burroughs: 97 things you didn't know about William S. Burroughs
Essential Jewish Literature: Jason Diamond picks his top 50 works of the last 100 years
Famous Writers' Doodles: Includes Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Jorge Luis Borges and more
Will Self: Toby Lichtig reviews Self's new work, Walking to Hollywood
William Shakespeare: Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare's revisions in the Wall Street Journal

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Friedrich Nietzsche: Geoff Dyer on his love of the nineteenth century philosopher
Roland Barthes: Mairéad Hanrahan praises Katie Briggs' 'wonderful translation' of The Preparation of the Novel

Film:

Alfred Hitchcock: Slavoj Žižek on Hitchcock’s Angles
Alfred Hitchcock: Image of Alfred Hitchcock's death mask
Coen brothers: Will Self on the Coen brothers
Coen brothers: Why Will Self is wrong about the Coen brothers

Art, Design & Photography

Francis Bacon: Bacon triptych, 'Three Sketches for a Portrait of Lucian Freud', sells for 23 million at auction

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

Essential Jewish Literature

Jason Diamond lists the Top 50 Jewish works of the last 100 years

American-Jewish novelist Philip Roth

Jason Diamond, who writes for Jewcy, has compiled a list of the greatest Jewish literature of the last 100 years. Some wonderful choices are included, from Paul Auster's postmodern New York Trilogy to Joseph Heller's WWII satire, Catch 22, with Kafka, Proust and Salinger dominating the top spots. While the list does not claim to be definitive, it does offer a fascinating glimpse into a rich cultural history, and a formidable literary heritage. But Diamond's selection is perhaps most distinctive for its variety. The top ten are all distinctive testaments to modern Jewish identity, but they are also valuable as diverse and imaginative documents of twentieth century life (link via Tablet Magazine):

1. The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
2. In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust
3. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth
4. Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller
5. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
6. The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
7. Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
8. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971) by Cynthia Ozick
9. A Contract With God (1978) by Will Eisner
10. Call it Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth

Source: Jason Diamond, 'The 50 Most Essential Works Of Jewish Fiction Of The Last 100 Years', Jewcy, 9 February 2011

TLS on Barthes' The Preparation for the Novel

Mairéad Hanrahan praises Katie Briggs' 'wonderful translation'

Roland Barthes

Mairéad Hanrahan has reviewed the recent English translation of Roland Barthes' The Preparation of the Novel in the TLS. Andrew Gallix includes a short excerpt on his website:

The uncertainty begins with the title. Is The Preparation of the Novel merely a course/class/series of lecture notes about the preparation of the novel, or is it also part of that preparation? From the outset, both interpretations are carefully invited: although Barthes denies, contrary to rumours circulating at the time, that he is writing a novel (and states that, if he were, he would not propose a course on its preparation), at the same time he acknowledges the deeply personal nature of the course’s origin and stresses that the “fantasy” it mobilizes is his own “Fantasy-of-the-Novel”. The ambiguity this creates about the book’s genre never disappears, reinforced by the contradictory positions adopted at different moments. For example, at the beginning of Part II (the 1979–80 classes), Barthes invites us to think of the Course as a “film or book”, whereas elsewhere he distinguishes it explicitly from “real writing, that of the book”. One of the text’s most enjoyable features is that the reader can never determine whether or not Barthes himself is practising what he teaches. This uncertainty is echoed in the strong parallels suggested between Barthes’s own situation and that of the writers he considers. This is particularly the case with his discussion of the decisive moment when Proust’s masterpiece, À la Recherche du temps perdu, suddenly “took” or fell into place. Proust’s passing from essay to novel in 1909, a few years after the death of his mother, corresponds closely to the turning point in Barthes’s own life evoked at the opening of The Preparation of the Novel: he recalls an afternoon not long after his own mother’s death when he found himself gripped by the necessity of a dramatic change, a vita nova. But for “someone who writes”, this new life could only involve a new writing practice. The choice of “The Preparation of the Novel” as the topic of Barthes’s course thus reflects a shift analogous to the one which resulted in Proust’s novel. [Read more]

Mairéad Hanrahan, 'The Amazing About-Face of Roland Barthes', Times Literary Supplement, 19 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel
• Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
• Neil Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies
• Michael Wood on Roland Barthes
• Reading on Roland Barthes on Reading
• Roland Barthes on Cafés
• In Theory: Barthes' Death of the Author
• An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments

Samuel Beckett's German Diaries to be published

Suhrkamp to publish Nobel prize winner's travel journals

Samuel Beckett at the end of the 1920s.

Some very exciting news. German publishing house Suhrkamp have made the following informal announcement regarding the forthcoming publication of Samuel Beckett's travel journals, to be edited by Mark Nixon:

Samuel Beckett is known to have kept only one diary in his life, the ‘German Diaries’, written during his journey through Germany from September 1936 to April 1937. Discovered in a trunk after the author’s death in 1989, they were first explored and discussed by James Knowlson in his biography Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996). Since then, extracts from the diaries have been published, as well as scholarly discussions. The ‘German Diaries’ give a unique insight into Beckett’s relationship with German culture, and reveal his interest in the visual arts, literature, language and philosophy.

Edward Beckett, the author’s nephew and literary executor, has now entrusted the Suhrkamp Verlag with the first complete publication of the ‘German Diaries’. They will be edited by Mark Nixon, Director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading (which holds the world’s largest collection of manuscripts and archival resources relating to Samuel Beckett). The German translation will be completed by the Beckett expert Gaby Hartel.

Beckett’s German publisher is aiming to publish the bilingual, critical edition of the ‘German Diaries’ in 2015, and will work with Faber & Faber on a subsequent English edition.

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• 'As The Wind Takes Me': Beckett in Hamburg, 1936

Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies (CFP)

2011 seminar series at the University of Oxford

The following is a Call for Papers (CFP) from the Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies seminar series at the University of Oxford:

We have a small number of slots available for postgraduate students who would like to present a fifteen minute paper and answer some questions alongside our main speakers in May and June this year.

Your paper should speak to the rubric of the series:

Samuel Beckett stands at the meeting point of innovative historical study and contemporary artistic endeavour. The biographies, notebooks, diaries, drafts and letters of his archive are driving forward empirical research in modern literary criticism, while his works are cited as sources for authors, artists, philosophers, composers, filmmakers and choreographers. This seminar explores Beckett's cultural position in both of these directions: by examining some of the recently uncovered influences that shaped his writing, and by refracting his image and his work through those who follow his example. Going into our seventh year, we seek to combine the latest scholarship with a consideration of Beckett’s ongoing cultural life, and remain open to all.

The seminars will take place on Tuesdays at 5pm in St John's College, Oxford, and dates will be arranged following our decisions.

200-word proposals in English, including a provisional title and a short biographical notice, should be sent by 4 March 2011 to beckett.debtsandlegacies@gmail.com

Website: sambeckettdebtsandlegacies.com

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Geoff Dyer on Friedrich Nietzsche

British writer shares his love of the troubled philosopher

Friedrich Nietzsche. Photograph: Getty Images.

Featured in this week's Guardian newspaper, British writer Geoff Dyer reflects on his love for the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Acknowledging an often troubled personal life, not to mention the problem of misinterpretation, Dyer focusses on the influence of the philosopher's aphorisms, and Nietzsche's compelling critical insights: 'I keep waiting for my love of his writing to wear off, but it never does.' [Read more]

Source: 'My hero: Friedrich Nietzsche by Geoff Dyer', The Guardian, 5 February 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Nietzsche: Loneliness and Solitude
• Youthful reading: Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky
• Nietzsche, Kant, Sinatra
• Human, All Too Human
• Nietzsche and the Secret History of Philosophers
• Nietzsche on 'historical philosophizing'
• Human, All Too Human: BBC's Nietzsche Documentary
• Joyce Carol Oates on reading Nietzsche