Trailer for a 2007 documentary on the founder of Grove Press
Source
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
28.6.12
27.6.12
Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road
A new collection of essays from Continuum
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| Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Man and Boy in John Hillcoat's 2009 adaptation of The Road |
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Face to Face with Allen Ginsberg
That Other Word: Episode 4
A free online podcast discussing literature and translation
An announcement from That Other Word:
That Other Word is a podcast run jointly by Daniel Medin (Center for Writers and Translators, Paris) and Scott Esposito (Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco).
Each episode features a discussion between Daniel and Scott on recent noteworthy literature in translation, and then an in-depth interview with writers, translators, editors, and publishers. The podcast hopes to celebrate and explore various and under-appreciated aspects of translation, not only into and out of English, but other languages as well.
This episode’s opening conversation celebrates literature from Eastern Europe: Daniel Medin, speaking from Book Expo America in New York City, is impressed with Mikhail Shishkin’s forthcoming novel Maidenhair, and Scott Esposito loves Marek Bieńczyk’s genre-bending Transparency. They hope that Julius Margolin’s memoir from the Gulag, Voyage au pays des Ze-Ka will make its way into English soon, and in the meantime they enjoy the biting humor of Éric Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times and Demolishing Nisard. Finally, Contemporary Georgian Fiction, the latest in Dalkey Archive Press’ series of regional anthologies, provides a welcome introduction to writing from an often-overlooked country.
Daniel Medin then speaks to Antoine Jaccottet, who founded the Paris-based press Le Bruit du Temps in 2008 and has since brought out an admirable collection of works in translation, collected works, memoirs, poetry, and philosophy. He has stated that the press’s mission is to publish, if possible, “constellations of books rather than books in isolation. A bit like a musical season: we establish projects around an author (Browning), a book (The Tempest), a theme.” He speaks about the publishing program of Le Bruit du Temps, the importance of translation, Robert Browning, Isaac Babel, Julius Margolin, Virginia Woolf, Zbigniew Herbert, and Osip Mandelstam. The conversation concludes with a bilingual reading: Medin recites Gabriel Levin’s poem “In Alexandria” in the original English, and Jaccottet reads the beautiful French translation by Emmanuel Moses.
Podcast
Listen to Episode 4 on That Other Word website.Links
The American University of Paris: Center for Writers and TranslatorsCenter for Writers and Translators: Facebook
Center for Writers and Translators: Twitter
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Simon Critchley discusses The Faith of the Faithless
Simon Critchley featured on PRI's Smiley/West
Verso have posted an audio recording of Simon Critchley's recent appearance on the Smiley & West radio show. Critchley discussed his new book, The Faith of the Faithless, and was joined in conversation by Cornel West and Tavis Smiley. [Listen] Also at A Piece of Monologue:26.6.12
Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye
Tate Modern: Exhibition · 28 June – 14 October 2012
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| Edvard Munch, New Snow in the Avenue, 1906. Photo: Photograph: Munch Museum/Munch-EllingsendGroup/DACS 2012 |
Beyond Historicism: Resituating Samuel Beckett
The University of New South Wales, Kensington, Sydney · 7-8 December, 2012
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| Trilogy images courtesy of Neven Udovičić |
About the Conference
When Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy first appeared in France, in May 1951, Georges Bataille called it an "extravagant, fantastic, sordid" tale that precipitated a "monstrous myth". The two novels that succeeded Molloy - Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953) - have, despite their author's resistance, collectively come to be known as the Trilogy. Yet if Bataille (and other French critics) initially saw these works as contributions to the European avant-garde, subsequent critical responses have been more wide-ranging, considering them as, for example, psychoanalytical case-studies, violations of generic forms (detective novel, memoir-cum-confession, domestic comedy, novel of ideas) and as fictional demonstrations of what will later be theorised as deconstruction. But perhaps the most telling indicator of the Trilogy's enduring influence is that, even as it affirmed the death of the novel as a viable narrative form, it also inspired at least two other fictional trilogies: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and John Banville's Frames Trilogy.Following Faber's recent re-publication of the three novels, this conference seeks to re-examine how these and other works can be read now, at this particular moment in Beckett studies. Responding to or even reacting against the theoretical turn of the mid-1980s, the so-called 'archival' turn of the past fifteen years has sought to place Beckett's works on a more empirical and evidential footing. Driven by two biographies, scholarly annotations of Beckett's notebooks, and, most recently, two volumes of the Letters, this orientation has developed a critical apparatus that often works to foreclose on or at least proscribe more speculative, exploratory engagements with the Beckett oeuvre.
One of the aims of this conference is to resituate the Trilogy at the heart of Beckett's prose corpus. To that effect, there will be at least two panels based on re-examinations of the three novels. However, we also invite papers that address any other part of Beckett's writing - fictional, dramatic, cinematic or critical - and consider how it might be read and understood in the wake of the historicist-empirical emphasis of the last fifteen years. How does Beckett's work appear to us now, when put into dialogue with more recent critical and philosophical approaches to literature, such as (but not limited to) cognitive literary studies, neuoroaesthetics, thing theory, the 'new' narratology, eco-poetics, theories of affect, cybercriticism, technics, trauma theory, swarm theory, biopolitics, network ecologies, the new aestheticism, literary-legal studies, and so on? And how does Beckett's work seem when confronted with the doyens of 'post-theory', both evident already in Beckett studies (Badiou, Agamben) and less visible (Rancière, Žižek, Stiegler, Nancy, Latour)? Or when set alongside other, more idiosyncratic thinkers - Kittler, Sloterdijk, Meillassoux?
Confirmed keynote speakers
Professor Derek Attridge (University of York, UK)Assoc. Professor Anthony Uhlmann (University of Western Sydney)
Conference venue
The University of New South Wales, Kensington, SydneyAll enquiries
resituating.beckett@gmail.comCall for papers
Potential papers should address the Trilogy, or any other part of Beckett's work, in its textual, historical, theoretical and / or formal dimensions, and consider how any of these might be recast or rethought in light of the debates outlined above.Abstracts should be no more than 250 words, and submitted via email, to: resituating.beckett@gmail.com Please include the paper title, and a brief biography and contact details of the presenting author.
Submission deadline: 31 October 2012, at 5pm.
Please note: authors of successful submissions will have 20 minutes to present their paper.
Registration
Academic / salaried $250Academic / non-salaried $130
Payment options available soon.
Website
Beyond Historicism: Resituating Samuel Beckett - Macquarie UniversityAlso at A Piece of Monologue:
Translating Paul Celan's The Meridian
John Gray on Slavoj Žižek
Gray reviews Less Than Nothing and Living in the End Times
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| Žižek at his apartment in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2010. Photo: Reiner Riedler/Anzenberger/Redux |
In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism. Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic—amounts in the end to less than nothing. [Read More][Update: 12.08.12] You can read Žižek's response at lacan.com.
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Leo Tolstoy on Film
25.6.12
Kyle MacLachlan on David Lynch
Interview with The Observer
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| Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey Beaumont in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) |
David Lynch plucked me from obscurity. He cast me as the lead in Dune and Blue Velvet, and people have seen me as this boy-next-door-cooking-up-something-weird-in-the-basement ever since. I was 23 when I first met him, in his bungalow on the Universal lot, and could never have predicted we would have such an enduring relationship.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
[...]
David Lynch creates a dark world, but there is also a vein of humour that running through it. It's a collission of the light and the dark, the funny and odd. It appeals to me, as I have a slightly unusual sense of humour. [Read More]
24.6.12
Echo Chamber: Listening to La Jetée
A visual essay exploring the soundscape of Chris Marker's landmark 1962 film
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers
1991 profile of the American Beat writer
From Open Culture: 'When German filmmaker Klaus Maeck, for example, needed a star for the dream sequences in Decoder, a low-budget dystopian tale of the government weaponizing emotion-killing muzak, he recruited Burroughs. The two men’s acquaintance proved even more fruitful than that: in 1991, Maeck directed the hour-long documentary William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers. In it, he takes an in-depth interview with Burroughs, a series of his readings, a collection of his appearances in other movies, and even images of his paintings, then cuts them up (as is the Burroughs sensibility) and reassembles them using all the finest — or at least the strangest — visual effects and video filters the early nineties had to offer. Should documentarians work this way? Burroughs himself, in one of the film’s interview segments, has an answer: “There is no such concept as ‘should’ in art. Or anything.”' [Read More] Also at A Piece of Monologue:
James Joyce's Death Mask on Display
Museum in Limerick places Joyce's death mask on public exhibition
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| Naomi O'Nolan of the Hunt Museum, Limerick, with the museum's James Joyce death mask. Photograph: Don Moloney/Press 22 |
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Philip Roth awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize
American writer receives prestigious Spanish literary award
From The Olive Press: 'US author Philip Roth has won one of Spain’s top literary awards after being praised for his "fluid, incisive writing".' [Read More]Also at A Piece of Monologue:
21.6.12
David Lynch Loves to Paint
Lynch interviewed at his home in the Hollywood Hills
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
20.6.12
Colm Tóibín on Joyce's Dublin
Tóibín reflects on the 'city of dreamers and chancers'
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| Photograph: Bert Hardy |
In the autumn of 1974, I moved into a damp room at the back of the basement of one of two gaunt Victorian houses which stood on Upper Hatch Street, 10 minutes' walk away from here. They were the only houses on the street and were demolished in the early 1980s. My room was called the "garden flat" by the genteel landlady who lived upstairs and who often entertained her friends for drinks. There was a sink in the corridor in the basement and a toilet outside, but there was no bathroom. At night as I walked home from a pub or from the National Library, the street that led from Stephen's Green to Hatch Street was empty and desolate. These were the years before the National Concert Hall was constructed inside the shell of the old university building and when the Conrad Hotel had yet to be built. The university itself had moved to the suburbs, and the Harcourt Street train line, which had once run at the back of the house in Hatch Street, was also closed. It was not difficult to imagine that the city James Joyce wrote about in Dubliners was still in place, perhaps even more paralysed than he had ever imagined. The spirit of scrupulous meanness that he used in his prose was a spirit which a lone walker on those nights could sense as palpable and present. [Read More]Also at A Piece of Monologue:
19.6.12
David Denby on Fyodor Dostoyevsky
'Can Dostoevsky still kick you in the gut?'
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| Source |
Many people would say that Dostoevsky’s short novel “Notes from Underground” marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. (Other candidates: Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew,” written in the seventeen-sixties but not widely read until the eighteen-twenties, and, of course, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” from 1856.) Certainly, Nietzsche’s writings, Freud’s theory of neurosis, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Bellow’s “Herzog,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” perhaps Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” and half of Woody Allen’s work wouldn’t have been the same without the existence of this ornery, unstable, unmanageable text—the fictional confession of a spiteful modern Hamlet, an inhabitant of St. Petersburg, “that most abstract and pre-meditated city,” and a man unable to act and also unable to stop humiliating himself and embarrassing others. A self-regarding, truculent, miserable, paralyzed man. As I began reading “Notes” again recently (in Andrew R. MacAndrew’s translation for Signet Classics), I wondered if it had been overwhelmed by the books and movies that it has influenced. I wondered if “Notes” would seem like a dim echo, whether it still had the shock value that I remember from long ago. [Read More]Also at A Piece of Monologue:
11.6.12
Will Self: Kafka's Wound
Self to write on Franz Kafka for new blog, The Space
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| Will Self. Photograph: Philip Grey |
Will Self is blogging here about a digital essay he’s writing, Kafka’s Wound, commissioned by the London Review of Books, which will be launched on The Space website.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
His essay will examine his personal relationship to Kafka’s work through the lens of the short story “A Country Doctor” (1919), and in particular through the aperture of the wound described in that story.
The essay is being “through composed” with Will’s own thoughts, as he works, being responded to by digital-content providers – many of whom are colleagues of his at Brunel University. The entire digital essay will go live in July. [Read More]
10.6.12
Woody Allen Interview, 1979
Woody Allen interviewed by a French journalist in his New York apartment
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Gary Indiana on David Cronenberg's Videodrome
Videodrome: The Slithery Sense of Unreality
Gary Indiana writes on David Cronenberg's Videodrome for the Criterion website: 'Videodrome, prophetically for 1983 (and looking increasingly less like fiction), shows us a world of technological hyperdevelopment in which people merge with their electronic media. Like an autoimmune catastrophe, the boundary between our bodies and what’s outside them becomes indistinguishable. Like the unwary users of the hallucinogen Chew-Z, who can never come down from their trip, in Philip K. Dick’s psychedelic-era novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, anyone exposed to the Videodrome signal gets sucked into a never-ending hallucination controlled by someone else’s will. Whoever it goes into goes into it: it can bend the subject’s perceptions so drastically that the body itself alters form; its flesh melts into globs, sprouts machine parts, splits apart for use as a storage area. You can even patch a video into the person’s brain by inserting a cassette in his stomach. He can be programmed to kill, and he does.' [Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Beckett and Brain Science: Free London Symposium
Birkbeck, University of London, 22 June 2012
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| Design: Rhys Tranter |
One day Symposium
Birkbeck, University of London
Friday 22 June 2012
This AHRC-funded project brings together literary scholars, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, cognitive neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, and philosophers to investigate the ways in which historical and contemporary models of the brain and mind can contribute to our understanding of Beckett’s work. The project also uses Beckett’s texts as case studies to investigate the ways in which aesthetic representations can offer insights into the experience of neurological and psychological disorder, while asking rigorous, philosophically robust, questions about the relationship between mind and body. By encouraging dialogue between scientific researchers, literary scholars, theatre practitioners, and trainee medics, the project hopes to extend our understanding of the relationship between medical science and literature, while also having a positive impact on patient care.
Keynote addresses:
- Prof Catherine Malabou (philosopher, Kingston University)
- Prof Lois Oppenheim (literary scholar, Montclair University, and Scholar Associate Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute)
- Prof Sophie Scott (cognitive neuroscientist, University College London)
Other contributions from:
- Dr Elizabeth Barry (literary scholar, Warwick University)
- Dr Matthew Broome (psychiatrist, Warwick University)
- Dr Peter Fifield, (literary scholar, Oxford University)
- Jonathan Heron (theatre director, Warwick University)
- Dr Ulrika Maude (literary scholar, Reading University)
- Prof Adam Piette (literary scholar, Sheffield University)
- Dr Laura Salisbury (literary scholar, Birkbeck).
Booking
This event is free but spaces are limited and booking is essential. To reserve a place please contact Laura Salisbury: l.salisbury@bbk.ac.ukAlso at A Piece of Monologue:
- Writers: Samuel Beckett
- Beckett and Brain Science: Free Symposium
- Beckett and the Brain: Birkbeck Seminar
- Samuel Beckett Research Day Seminar 2012
- Samuel Beckett Research Day Seminar 2010
- Samuel Beckett Research Day Seminar 2011
- Beckett and the 'State' of Ireland Conference (2012)
- Samuel Beckett Summer School 2012
8.6.12
Bale to star in J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island
Brad Anderson and Christian Bale reunite for adaptation of Ballard's best-selling novel
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| First official poster for Concrete Island, directed by Brad Anderson. |
Los Angeles, 2020. Robert Maitland is a highly successful architect. One day, he speeds down the freeway losing control of his car and crashing into the middle of a manmade 'island' underneath a freeway intersection. After days of suffering agonising physical pain and the mental turmoil, he begins to suspect that he may not be the only person on the 'island'. When his fellow inhabitants finally reveal themselves, it soon becomes clear to Maitland that on this 'concrete island', only the strong survive. [Read More]Also at A Piece of Monologue:
6.6.12
Mysteries of Love: Documentary on Lynch and Blue Velvet
Watch Jeffrey Schwarz's 2002 documentary online
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
5.6.12
Penguin Classics: Joseph Conrad
A selection of Phil Hale's stunning covers for Penguin's modern repackaging of Joseph Conrad
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| Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary Illustration: Phil Hale |
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| Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim Illustration: Phil Hale |
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| Joseph Conrad, Nostromo Illustration: Phil Hale |
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| Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent Illustration: Phil Hale |
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| Joseph Conrad, Typhoon and Other Stories Illustration: Phil Hale |
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
1.6.12
AHRC Research Post: Samuel Beckett (Chester)
Applicants sought for an exciting new research project
A new fully-funded research opportunity relating to Samuel Beckett is being launched at the University of Chester (thanks to Johann Gregory for drawing my attention to the news):Researcher (Fixed term contract until July 2015)
The University of Chester in partnership with the University of Reading, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, has been awarded a three year AHRC funded project on the impact of productions of Samuel Beckett’s drama on theatre practice and cultures in the UK and Ireland (1955-2010). We are delighted to invite applications for an AHRC Researcher to undertake archival research on productions of Samuel Beckett’s drama in Mainland Britain (excluding London).This major research project will map the history of Beckett productions in Britain and Ireland from 1955; it will also assess the impact that Beckett’s productions have had on the theatre culture in Britain and Ireland over the same time period. The project will involve extensive archival research, in certain key sites (Reading, the V&A), and in relevant theatre archives across Britain.
The successful candidate will be based at the University of Chester, and will work with Professor David Pattie. Archival research will be undertaken at the University of Reading’s Beckett Collection, at the V&A's Blythe House, London, and any other relevant archival sources. As well undertaking research, the successful candidate will assist in developing a series of public events at Chester including public lectures, talks, and a series of international conferences across the period of the award. [Read More]
Closing date: 8 June 2012
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