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| Stephen Surlin, 'Beckett's Car With A Broken Window' (Paper model 2010) |
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| Franz Kafka, drawn by Robert Crumb. |
It's been said that stories such as A Country Doctor are expanded metaphors but, according to the psychiatrist Aaron Mishara, Kafka's staying awake while others slept had a direct influence on his fiction and that Costello was literally correct; no metaphor is involved. Mishara's remarkable paper Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain claims that Kafka suffered from dream-like hallucinations during a sleep-deprived state while writing and that his work "provides data about the structure of the human self. That is, it documents processes "that are not limited to the individual's experience of self in its historical context, nor the individual's 'autobiographical' memory, but reflect the very structure of human self as a transformative process of self-transcendence".Also at A Piece of Monologue:
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| Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova trans. David Slavitt (2011) |
Dante met his Muse in Florence in 1274 when he was nine and the lady in question, his famous Beatrice (Bice Portinari), was eight. A decade later finds Dante writing and circulating his earliest known sonnets, all steeped in the exceedingly mannered medieval culture of courtly love, with its byzantine rationales and its fantastic avoidance of directness. In 1283 our young poet met Beatrice again, and in the same year he met and was befriended by an older and more seasoned poet named Guido Cavalcanti, and some essential element in Dante’s genius was ignited. That same year saw the production of the verses that would eventually become the foundation of Dante’s strangest, most personal, and most sublime work, La Vita Nuova, a sequence of shorter poems and longer canzoniere that nominally concentrates on the poet’s abiding fascinating with Beatrice, his grief at her death in 1290, and his tremulous attempts to take some kind of comfort from life in the aftermath of her passing. Dante formally composed the 31 poems of the Vita Nuova in the early 1290s as part of a vibrant conversation between himself and a group of like-minded poets, foremost of whom was Cavalcanti and all of whom were interested in the inner waves and tides, what a later age would call the psychology, of love itself.Also at A Piece of Monologue
It was a private conversation. The Vita Nuova was never intended for a general audience. Rather, it was polished, circulated, and discussed mainly among that group of like-minded poets and select readers among the nobility. It was a deeply traditional work in is precepts and preoccupations, in its manner, but it’s also a trailblazing thing, written in Italian rather than Latin and turning regularly to gaze upon itself in a way scarcely any love poetry had since Catullus. Dante presents the reader first with the narrative setting of each poem, then with the poem itself, and then, remarkably, with his own section-by-section breakdown of the poem the reader just read. In Dante’s own time and circle, those breakdowns were part of a new, fresh kind of poetry discussion, absolutely thrilling to those participating in it. To later centuries, secure in the fuller expressions of the poetic tradition Dante helped to create, those breakdowns seem baffling. The poetry of the Vita Nuova is so strange, mystical, and heartfelt that the work has devoted adherents who assert its superiority even over Dante’s later masterpiece, the Commedia, but the other things going on alongside the poetry have driven more than one of those devotees to despair. [Read more]
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| Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011) |
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| Samuel Beckett |
What kind of art is Beckett's? It completely ignores the traditional conventions of the stage, among them clarity. Beckett's most famous play is Waiting for Godot. Asked who Godot was, Beckett replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." As for form, he once wrote to his younger disciple Harold Pinter, "If you insist on finding form [for my plays] I'll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That's the only kind of form my work has."Also at A Piece of Monologue:
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| Lars Iyer, Spurious |
In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Show comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences where they serve better gin.Publisher Page: Lars Iyer, Spurious, Melville House Publishing
Another reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no on seems to know what to do about. Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled to solve some major philosophical questions (such as "Why?") and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus... before it's too late. Or, he has to move.
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| Samuel Beckett is now on Twitter: Follow him @samuelbbeckett |
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| The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad |
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| U.S. President Barack Obama |
Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates are among the 2010 winners of the National Humanities Medal, and Harper Lee, Meryl Streep, James Taylor and Quincy Jones are among the winners of the National Medal of Arts, the White House announced on Tuesday. [Read more]Source: Kate Taylor, 'Roth and Oates to Receive National Humanities Medals', newyorktimes.com, 1 March 2011
Joyce Carol Oates for her contributions to American letters. The author of more than 50 novels, as well as short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, Ms. Oates has been honored with the National Book Award and the PEN/ Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story.Source: 'President Obama to Award 2010 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal', whitehouse.gov, 01 March 2011
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Philip Roth for his contributions to American letters. Mr. Roth is the author of 24 novels, including Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral, which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, and his criticism has appeared in our leading literary journals.
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| Karen Barbour. |
Joyce Carol Oates: Writing always seems so private — I can never quite believe that anything I write, especially in longhand, on scraps of paper, which is my usual way of writing, will ever be read by anyone else!Also at A Piece of Monologue
I never set out to “write” a memoir — the book called “A Widow’s Story” is comprised of journal entries from Feb. 11, 2008, through Aug. 29, 2008. When Ray was first hospitalized, I was very anxious and excited and could not sleep well, so I wrote in the journal late at night, as I’ve been doing, though not so intensely, since the early 1970s. After Ray’s death, this was the only kind of writing that I could do, in fragments of a page or less. The act of writing — of even trying to write — of imagining to write — seemed meaningless, vain and silly.
In the summer of 2009, when I could not write fiction very readily, and was haunted by memories of a very visual nature, I gave in, in a sense, and turned to the journal entries — which I had not wanted to reread, as I certainly did not want to write a memoir — to shape into a coherent structure: what is called, so very abstractly, a “book.” In a traditional memoir, chapters are written; in this sort of composed memoir, chapters are assembled out of small journal entries, developed or expanded a bit, or edited.
The diarist doesn’t know how a scene will end, when it begins; she doesn’t know what the next hour will bring, let alone the next day or the next week; she is wholly unprepared for the most profound experience of her life — that her husband will die.
[...] the act of writing is an act of attempted comprehension, and, in a childlike way, control; we are so baffled and exhausted by what has happened, we want to imagine that giving words to the unspeakable will make it somehow our own. [Read more]
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| J. M. Coetzee |
In an early essay reproduced in Doubling the Point (1992), J. M. Coetzee chose to “put it baldly” when he wrote that “in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body”. When we think of those novels imaginatively connected with the state of the South African nation – Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), say, or Age of Iron (1990) – it is hard to ignore their vivid testimony about bodily reality, the suffering of the afflicted. We recall the frail form of Elizabeth Curren and the “cold, obscene swellings” of her cancer (that “parody” of pregnancy), or the Magistrate creepily fingering the “firm-fleshed calves, manipulating the bones and tendons” of the tortured barbarian girl. But to put the case for Coetzee even more baldly (or boldly): in all of his fiction, he is our best authority on suffering, our most credible literary authority on the body. [Read more]Also at A Piece of Monologue
