Watt: Edinburgh International Festival 2012

Barry McGovern adapts Beckett's novel for the stage  · 11 - 14 August 2012

Barry McGovern performing an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Watt

From the Edinburgh International Festival website: 'Watt is the extraordinary story of an itinerant character who walks one day from a train station to the home of a Mr Knott whom he will serve. The bizarre adventures of Watt and his struggle to make sense of the world around him are told with verbal elegance, immense pathos and fierce humour.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Krapp's Last Tape: Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2012

Edinburgh Fringe · 3 - 26 August 2012

Tom Owen as Krapp in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape

Tom Owen, star of Last Of The Summer Wine, returns to his theatrical roots in this powerful one-man play by Samuel Beckett.

The play tells the story of Krapp, a would-be writer, who each year since the age of 24 has recorded his impressions of the previous year on his birthday. Krapp’s Last Tape joins Krapp on his 69th birthday, as he listens to a tape recorded 30 years earlier.

Considered one of Beckett’s major theatrical achievements, the sonorous monologue is a searing portrait of failed ambition and impotent desire, delivered by one of Britain’s best loved thespians.

Krapp’s Last Tape
Assembly Rooms Studio 2
3 - 26 August (but not 13 August)
2.45pm (1 hour)
£10/£9 [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter in Krapp's Last Tape
• Krapp's Last Tape Anniversary
• Beckett and Krapp as Artists
• Mouth on Fire: Four Beckett Plays
• John Hurt on Samuel Beckett and Krapp's Last Tape

Mouth on Fire: Four Beckett Plays

University of Southampton · 8 September 2012

Samuel Beckett's A Piece of Monologue, performed by Mouth on Fire

The Dublin-based theatre company Mouth on Fire will be performing four plays by Samuel Beckett in Southampton this September. The programme includes Krapp’s Last Tape, A Piece of Monologue and Rockaby. The latter will be performed in English, followed by its World Premiere in Irish. This will be a very special, not-to-be-missed event for anyone who is interested in Beckett’s work and in avant-garde theatre. The performances will be followed by a Q+A session.

To book online, email Dr. Julie Campbell at J.Campbell@soton.ac.uk.

Location: Lecture Theatre A, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton

Time: 8pm

Tickets Booked: £8 (waged) £4 (unwaged)
Tickets at the Door: £10 (waged) £5 (unwaged)

Contact & Links: Website · Facebook · Twitter

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

ICA: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London · 30 August - 31 August 2012

From ICA: Andy Holden and David Raymond Conroy present Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. Conroy and Holden have adapted for the stage Wallace’s collection of short stories; a book that through a series of unspoken questions examines the possibility of complete sincerity and truth within a modern relationship.

“BIWHM, is a book which, on first reading, we found to be simultaneously inspirational and crushing. In his book, perhaps a collection of short stories or possibly a kind of high postmodern novel, Wallace had produced, at least for us, an almost perfect work. It is not flawless, but maybe that helps. It speaks about judgment and value, about seduction and disappointment, about comedy, and obsession and pathos. It seems to be able to propose incredibly difficult, unsolvable questions in the most straightforward way and it does this by being written in this amazingly rigorous reflexive prose. It breaks your heart whilst telling you it is doing it; whilst telling you how it is done. But what do you do when you love something? You share it, you hold it up, you take it apart to see why it makes you love it so. You give yourself to it because it gave itself to you.” [Read More]

£8, £7 concession, £5 Members 7.30pm,

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Foster Wallace Symposium
• David Foster Wallace, Oblivion
• Postcard: David Foster Wallace to Don DeLillo
• David Foster Wallace's Annotated Books
• Can Literature be Philosophical?
• David Foster Wallace: Fate, Time, and Language

Contra Mundum Press awarded grant

Petőfi Literary Museum awards independent publishing house

From Contra Mundum Press:

Contra Mundum Press is honored to announce that within our very first year as a publishing house we have received a grant. Just last week the Petőfi Literary Museum awarded us a grant for our forthcoming translation (September 2012) of Miklós Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova, the first book of Szentkuthy’s epic multi-volume work St. Orpheus Breviary. Read the news on Hungarian Literature Online [Read more]

Originally published in 1939, as Csaba Sík noted, the seven volumes of the St. Orpheus Breviary “represent the greatest enterprise in scope, in worth? – undertaken in the Hungarian novel.” Justifiably, Szentkuthy has been compared to Proust, Musil, and Joyce, and has already been translated into French, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, and Spanish. Our translation was done by Tim Wilkinson (known for his translations of Imre Kertész and others) and will feature an original cover designed by Hungarian artist István Orosz.

As the first ever translation of Szentkuthy into English, this should prove to be a momentous if not even historic publication for the Anglophone world. Over the next decade, CMP hopes to publish a tr. of the entirety of Szentkuthy’s Breviary and many other works, including his monumental Prae. News will follow about possible book events this coming fall in NYC, if not elsewhere...

Forthcoming next from CMP is a new edition of W.J. Bate’s long out of print canonical study on Keats, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats, featuring an introduction by the distinguished Italian poet, playwright, and critic Maura Del Serra.

Other forthcoming publications include Richard Foreman’s Plays with Films, Elio Petri’s Writings on Cinema and Life (the first ever translation into English), and Nietzsche’s Greek Music Drama (another first ever translation into English).

Our most recent publication was Rainer J. Hanshe’s controversial novel, The Abdication, which Stuart Kendall called “a book both experimental and assured, a comedy of high seriousness and gospel of the flesh that our winded civilization has needed for 2,000 years.”

Website: Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press
• Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes
• Ghérasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey

David Lynch on BBC's The Culture Show

Miranda Sawyer interviews the American director, artist and musician

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Lynch on Ideas, Cinema and Billy Wilder
• Mysteries of Love: Documentary on Lynch and Blue Velvet
• Inside David Lynch's Club Silencio, Paris
• Is David Lynch Retiring from Film?

Cygnus Ensemble: Sounding Beckett

New York · 14 - 23 September 2012

Image from the Cygnus Ensemble's Sounding Beckett production of Ohio Impromptu

This September, the Cygnus Ensemble will be performing three musical pieces based on the works of Samuel Beckett. Adam W. Kepler (New York Times) writes: 'The plays, “Footfalls,” “Ohio Impromptu” and “Catastrophe,” are to be directed by Joy Zinoman with a cast including Ted Van Griethuysen, Philip Goodwin and Holly Twyford. Each play will be followed by new musical pieces inspired by the plays and written by the composers Chester Biscardi, Laura Schwendinger, David Glaser, Laura Kaminsky, John Halle and Scott Johnson.' The production is titled Sounding Beckett, and will be running at the Classic Stage Company theatre in New York [Read More]

Visit the official Sounding Beckett website for a complete schedule.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Kenzaburō Ōe on Barney Rosset

Japanese writer pays tribute to the groundbreaking American publisher

Barney Rosset and Kenzaburō Ōe

From Evergreen Review: 'Barney Rosset to me represents the literary world of the latter half of the 20th century. Two hefty books—the oldest of autographed books in my library—attest to this fact. The books are The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings and The Olympia Reader: Selections from the Traveler’s Companion Series, both published by Grove Press, Inc. The autographs are Barney Rosset’s dated 1965.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press
• Barney Rosset 1922-2012
• Samuel Beckett and the Grove Press

David Lynch on Ideas, Cinema and Billy Wilder

amNY.com talks to David Lynch about his work, artistic views and techniques

Mina Hochberg asks David Lynch questions about art, words, cinema, ideas, place, and interpretation.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Lynch Loves to Paint
• Mysteries of Love: Documentary on Lynch and Blue Velvet
• Inside David Lynch's Club Silencio, Paris
• Is David Lynch Retiring from Film?
• Will Self Interviews David Lynch

Review: Marguerite Duras, Yann Andrea Steiner

Extract from a 2006 review

Marguerite Duras

Matthew Tiffany (Pop Matters) reviews Marguerite Duras' Yann Andrea Steiner: 'Marguerite Duras’ prolific writing career includes over 40 novels, screenplays, and stories, including L’Amant, which was made famous in part due to Jean-Jacques Annaud’s explicit film version, The Lover. Yann Andrea Steiner, written towards the end of this career, feels like a coda, of sorts, a look back at a relationship that may have occurred between the author and a younger man. The feel of the book is one of paying up debts, of squaring the books between Duras and this younger man Steiner. Whether these books that need squaring are real or imaginary—or something in between—is not quite clear.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Marguerite Duras and Yann Andréa Steiner

Plunkett Lake Press: Stefan Zweig

A range of Zweig's non-fiction works published as e-books

Stefan Zweig

Plunkett Lake Press have made available a number of rare non-fiction titles by Stefan Zweig, the Austrian novelist, journalist and playwright. You can find out more about their selection, which is published in e-book form, by visiting their website. [Read More]

Samuel Beckett and the San Quentin Drama Workshop (SQDW)

A 2008 interview with Rick Cluchey

The San Quentin Drama Workshop presents a short interview video with co-founder Rick Cluchey circa 2008, Los Angeles. [Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Rick Cluchey on Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett, Nacht und Träume (1982)

George Hunka on one of Beckett's 1980s television plays

Samuel Beckett, Nacht und Träume (1982)

George Hunka has posted a link to Samuel Beckett's Nacht und Träume, a television play made in Germany in 1982: 'Among the plays from Beckett’s final decade was the 1982 Nacht und Träume, an intimate and quiet piece that nonetheless is Webernian in its emotional effect. It, like Beckett’s other television plays, is extremely difficult to find; one wishes that some enterprising distributor would collect these on a DVD, as the British Library collected the radio plays a few years back. Below, however, is the play as I found it on YouTube. While the logo in the top left of the screen is disconcerting when watching the play, I offer the production here due to its rarity outside academic collections. The play is best viewed in full-screen mode (click on the box in the extreme lower-right corner of the player, which is available once you begin playing the video).' [Watch]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Why You Should Know Clarice Lispector

From an article in More Intelligent Life

Clarice Lispector

Benjamin Moser on the life and work of Clarice Lispector: 'She grew up in the Jewish neighbourhood of Recife, where she lost her beloved mother when she was nine. As a teenager Lispector migrated with her father and sisters to Rio de Janeiro. By the time she reached university she was already renowned as one of the most beautiful women in Brazil, and when she published her first book, "Near to the Wild Heart", at age 23, it was acclaimed as the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language. The judgment would still hold if Clarice Lispector had not continually surpassed her first book with her own subsequent works.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
• Clarice Lispector: New Translations
• Clarice Lispector: Cult Hero
• That Other Word: Episode 3

The Master: Official Trailer (2012) [HD]

A glimpse of Paul Thomas Anderson's new film

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• There Will Be Blood

György Ligeti's Gravesite

The rather beautiful last resting place of composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) in Zentralfriedhof, Vienna

[Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Krzysztof Penderecki: Horror Composer
• There Will Be Blood

Schrader and Ellis to collaborate on The Canyons (2013)

Youth, glamour, sex and Los Angeles, circa 2012

American novelist Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction) has written a screenplay for a collaboration with director Paul Schrader (who many will remember as the screenwriter of Taxi Driver). The film is entitled The Canyons, is rumoured to star Lindsay Lohan in the lead, and is described as a 'contemporary thriller' that 'documents five twenty-something's quest for power, love, sex and success in 2012 Hollywood.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Taxi Driver to be remade?
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

Robert Walser, Selected Stories

John Self reviews a recent collection of stories from the New York Review of Books (NYRB)

Robert Walser

From the excellent literary blog, Asylum: 'Walser’s Selected Stories must be a high point. Ditto by their exalted design standards: look at that cover, the delicate green and purple like colorizing effects on a black-and-white film. And the composition, or cropping, of the photograph itself: the subject – the author – to one side, as though standing proudly (or tentatively?) by his title; or, not quite in the middle of the road; or, just about to go for a walk.' You'll have to click for more. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• That Other Word: Free Literature Podcast
• That Other Word: Episode 3

Bitesize Theatre

Alexandra Coghlan makes a case for shorter plays

Harold Pinter's One for the Road/Victoria Station, Young Vic, 2011

From The Guardian: 'The short story is a virtuoso form – think of it as the brilliant friend at a dinner party who tells a great story but doesn't outstay their welcome (the novels, meanwhile, are like those guests who plod onwards, droning on about house prices). Yet while we celebrate such technical bravura on the page, on stage the short play has never achieved the same stature. We revere the likes of Kafka, Poe, Saki and Borges primarily – if not solely – as writers of short stories, but where are the major playwrights for whom the short play is more than just an occasional dramatic away-day or bit on the side? Where, in other words, are the great short plays?' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett's Breath
• Lydia Davis on very short stories

Mark Kermode on Unfilmable Novels

A list from the Kermode Uncut Blog

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Mark Kermode's Top 5 David Cronenberg films
• Mr. Movies: Mark Kermode talks to Mark Lawson

Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working

A promising new title from Zero Books

Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working

From the Zero Books website: 'Capitalism has become strange. Ironically, while the ‘age of work’ seems to have come to an end, working has assumed a total presence – a ‘worker’s society’ in the worst sense of the term – where everyone finds themselves obsessed with it. So what does the worker tell us today? "I feel drained, empty… dead." This book tells the story of the dead man working. It follows this figure through the daily tedium of the office, to the humiliating mandatory team building exercise, to awkward encounters with the funky boss who pretends to hate capitalism and tells you to be authentic. In this society, the experience of work is not of dying...but neither of living. It is one of a living death. And yet, the dead man working is nevertheless compelled to wear the exterior signs of life, to throw a pretty smile, feign enthusiasm and make a half-baked joke. When the corporation has colonized life itself, even our dreams, the question of escape becomes ever more pressing, ever more desperate.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Mark Kermode's Top 5 Cronenberg films

A list from the Kermode Uncut Blog

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Mr. Movies: Mark Kermode talks to Mark Lawson
• Gary Indiana on David Cronenberg's Videodrome
• David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
• David Cronenberg Interview: Violence, Gadaffi and A Dangerous Method
• David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

Tate Tanks: Performance Art and the Mainstream

The Big Think assesses the possible impact of The Tanks: Art in Action

From Bob Duggan (The Big Think): 'Performance art and film art have always been the afterthoughts of museums—the new kids on the block with no room of their own in the big culture houses. Institutions designed to house paintings and sculpture usually need to find some temporary corner to stage a performance or screen a film, implying to the viewer, however subconsciously and unintentionally, that those media don’t rank a room of their own. With the opening of the Tate Tanks at the Tate Modern in London, England, performance art and film finally have a big stage all of their own—one that not only celebrates those media but can, in return, inspire practitioners to create knowing where they’ll be working. With such a significant venue for significant pieces, will the Tate Tanks finally bring performance art into the mainstream?' [Read More]

The Tanks: Art in Action runs from 18 July – 28 October 2012. [Website]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Mark Lawson: why don't more visual artists do theatre?

Beckett on Film: Neil Jordan's Not I

National Concert Hall, Dublin, 8 August – 9 September

Julianne Moore as Mouth in Not I (dir. Neil Jordan, 2000)

From Totally Dublin: 'Though conceived for the stage, Neil Jordan presents a film of ‘Not I’ in IMMA’s National Concert Hall exhibition space throughout August. Leaving the text untouched, Jordan’s interpretation derives its interest from experimentation with the medium of film itself: the monologue is presented from six angles, screened simultaneously in a novel set up. Now, Beckett purists will insist that the stage is the only way to go for ‘Not I’. But when viewed as an artwork in its own right, and not as a point of comparison, Jordan’s cinematic exploration of Beckett’s text stands up – and IMMA’s dynamic presentation of it promises to lend a dramatic gravitas lacking on YouTube rehashings of the play’s theatrical runs, however potent the original renderings once were.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett's Not I

Elfriede Jelinek on Sport, Nationalism and War

Production of Jelinek's Sports Play now touring England and Wales

Elfriede Jelinek

Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek talks to The Stage (link via Superfluities Redux): 'It would seem absurd to be disappointed about something as global as the enthusiasm for sport. What disappoints me is rather the disdain for intellectual achievements in comparison to sports achievements. But who am I to complain about this? What I fear — and this is perhaps a kind of obsession — is the way the masses get charged up by sports events, something that at some stage gets out of control. [In Sports Play] I associate the metaphor of sport with war. The unrest in the former Yugoslavia, after all, started with a football match that then became charged in nationalist ways and ended in violence. This was the game on May 13, 1990, between the Croatian club Dinamo Zagreb and the Serbian side Red Star Belgrade at Maksimir Stadium [in the Croatian capital].' [Read More]

Sports Play is currently touring England and Wales with a production by the Just a Must theatre company.

Franz Kafka's Torture Machine

Art sculpture based on the harrow of Kafka's In the Penal Colony

Photograph: Marina Galperina/ANIMALNewYork

Photograph: Marina Galperina/ANIMALNewYork

Photograph: Marina Galperina/ANIMALNewYork

Photograph: Marina Galperina/ANIMALNewYork

From ANIMALNewYork:

So here’s the Harrow IRL. It was originally created for an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1975. The exhibition riffed off Michel Carroughe’s essay “The Bachelor Machines,” which tied the torture device to some others by fancied in fiction and art by Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and Marcel Duchamp.

It’s an impressive machine. Kunsthalle Bern curator Harald Szeemann wants you to recognize what the machines stand for — “the omnipotence of eroticism and its negation, for death and immortality, for torture and Disneyland, for fall and resurrection.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York

Andy Martin on existentialists in America

Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Albert Camus (right)

From The Opinionator in The New York Times: 'In December 1944, Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job of American correspondent. Perhaps, in light of the perpetual tension and subsequent acrimonious split between the two men, he was glad to get him out of Paris. What is certain is that Sartre was delighted to go. He’d had enough of the austerities and hypocrisies of post-liberation France and had long fantasized about the United States. Camus himself would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• On Albert Camus

Mark Lawson: why don't more visual artists do theatre?

Why aren't collaborations between visual and performance art more common?

Alberto Giacometti (left) with a sculpted tree for Samuel Beckett's (right) Waiting for Godot

From The Guardian: 'Stage design is clearly a form of art, but full-time painters and sculptors have only rarely become involved in theatre – although two current exhibitions demonstrate the potential when they do. The thrilling Edvard Munch exhibition at Tate Modern in London includes a room devoted to the Norwegian artist's work in theatre, and the sculptor Antony Gormley has on show at Castle Coole in Enniskillen a work called Godot Tree – Gormley's interpretation of the opening stage direction ("A country road. A tree. Evening.") in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The tree, which is required to grow four or five leaves during the interval, will be used in a world-touring production that begins in Australia later this year.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Kafka's Metamorphosis as Dance Theatre
• Rivane Neuenschwander adapts Beckett's First Love as Art Installation

Colm Tóibín on Samuel Beckett and his mother

Dan Barrett on New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Colm Tóibín, New Ways to Kill Your Mother

In Dan Barrett's (Pop Matters) review of Colm Tóibín's recent work, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, he draws attention to the essay on Beckett and the uneasy relationship with his mother, May:

Another character who will stick in my memory is Samuel Beckett. Toibin writes about Beckett when he was in his early adulthood, and suffering under the oppressive influence of a rather provincial, rather narrow-minded mother. What to do with young Samuel Beckett? He was listless, rude, and self-loathing. He spent a great deal of time sleeping and loitering in the National Gallery. He claimed that he struggled to produce a single sentence; he thought of his work as “turds”.

Learning this, it’s gratifying to think about what this young man eventually did with his life, and it’s an inspiring story for any writer in his 20s (or 30s, or even 40s) who is panicking about the struggle to “find a voice”. This struggle is as old as time. Just because you’re taking long naps and feeling desperate today, it doesn’t follow that you won’t one day produce a Happy Days, or a Waiting for Godot. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Colm Tóibín on Fiction and Reality

Audio: W. B. Yeats, When You Are Old

Read by Fiona Shaw and Edna O'Brien

W. B. Yeats

From The Guardian: 'Actor Fiona Shaw and novelist Edna O'Brien read WB Yeats's When You Are Old. The recording forms part of Peace Camp, an installation playing love poems simultaneously at eight sites around the British coast' [Listen]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. B. Yeats and Modernism
• Listen to Yeats Read Poetry
• Freud and Yeats on Wikipedia
• PJ Harvey on Pinter, Joyce and Yeats

New Wave Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard

'Perhaps the most famous cinematographer of the nouvelle vague'

Cinematographer Raoul Coutard shooting Breathless from a Paris rooftop.

From Criterion Collection: 'Perhaps the most famous cinematographer of the nouvelle vague, Raoul Coutard shot more than seventy-five films during his forty-three-year career. A war photographer (in Indochina) turned freelance photojournalist (his images appeared in Paris Match and Look), Coutard turned to film, hesitantly, only in the late fifties. After fumbling his way through a few film assignments (he was inexperienced with a movie camera), he was hired by producer Georges de Beauregard to shoot the debut film of a young critic named Jean-Luc Godard. His ragged, incisive shooting style on Breathless became iconic in modern cinema, and Godard kept him on board for the rest of the sixties and beyond, while other directors, like François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Jean Rouch, and Costa-Gavras, also called upon his skills. His exacting images, which vary from rich and luxurious to gritty and documentary-like, can be seen in countless indelible films, including Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, Contempt, Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, and Z.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Waiting for Godard
• Godard, Coffee and the Universe

The Great Gatsby: 47 Endings

Slate Magazine has the scoop

Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby (dir. Jack Clayton, 1974)

Nathan Heller (Slate Magazine) has posted all 47 possible endings drafted by F. Scott Fitzgerald while he was finishing The Great Gatsby: [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Robert McCrum on F. Scott Fitzgerald
• F. Scott Fitzgerald and Alcohol
• The Great Gatsby: Re-Covered

Robert Towne on Hitchcock's The 39 Steps

Screenwriter takes another look at Hitchcock's classic

Screenwriter Robert Towne talks to New Yorker writer Michael Sragow about Hitchcock's The 39 Steps: '“I think it’s interesting,” he said, “Because most ‘pure’ movie thrillers, especially when you think of Hitchcock, are either fantasies fulfilled or anxieties purged. The 39 Steps is one of the few, if not the only one, that does both at the same time. He puts you into this paranoid fantasy of being accused of murder and being shackled to a beautiful girl—of escaping from all kinds of harm, and at the same time trying to save your country, really. A Hitchcock film like Psycho is strictly an anxiety purge. The 39 Steps gives you that and the fantasy fulfilled. It’s kind of a neat trick, really.”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alfred Hitchcock on Happiness
• Alfred Hitchcock on Mystery and Suspense
• Truffaut and Hitchcock Audio Interviews
• Alfred Hitchcock on the Dick Cavett Show
• Alfred Hitchcock and his Signature Style

Richard Long: Walking Artist

A selection of work from Long's career

Richard Long, A Nine Day Walk In The Serra Do Geres/Sierra De Kures, Portugal and Spain, 2003

Richard Long, A Seven Day Walk On Chokai Mountain, Honshu, Japan, 2003

Richard Long, Dusty Boots Line, The Sahara, 1988

Richard Long, A Thousand Stones Added To The Footpath Cairn, England, 1974

Richard Long, Walking A Line In Peru, 1972

You can see more of Richard Long's sculptures, photographs and textworks at his official website, richardlong.org [See More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Grant Gee on Patience (After Sebald)
• Documentary: London Perambulator (2009)
• Will Self: Walking out of London
• Will Self: Walking is Political

Grant Gee on Patience (After Sebald)

Recorded Q&A with the documentary filmmaker

Grant Gee, the filmmaker behind Radiohead documentary Meeting People is Easy (1998) and the more recent Joy Division (2007), answers questions about his recent documentary on German writer and academic W. G. Sebald. [Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Grant Gee, Patience (After Sebald)
• Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald
• Documentary: London Perambulator (2009)
• Will Self: Walking out of London

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

An extract from The Quarterly Conversation

Clarice Lispector

Leora Skolkin-Smith reviews Giovanni Pontiero's translation of The Hour of the Star in The Quarterly Conversation: 'Reading Clarice Lispector we enter a realm in which one person is every person, and the boundaries of otherness—especially those between reader, audience, and writer—dissolve along with the usual artifices of plot and character that usually make for us a novel. Private being-ness and public otherness are porous materials in Lispector’s authorial hands.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Clarice Lispector: New Translations
• Clarice Lispector: Cult Hero
• That Other Word: Episode 3

Marguerite Duras and Yann Andréa Steiner

Victoria Best on the acclaimed French writer and her muse

Marguerite Duras

Victoria Best (Open Letters Monthly) recounts the relationship between French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and Yann, a devoted follower of her work: 'In 1979, aged 65, the iconic French writer Marguerite Duras was exhausted, creatively emptied out and drinking herself to death. For many months, the only thing that had sustained her was writing fragments of letters to an imagined addressee, perhaps as notes to be turned into an epistolary novel but mostly because she needed a confidante and would have to create one if he didn’t exist. The notes were full of exclamations like ‘I must stop drinking at night, I must go to bed early so that I can write you long letters and not die.’ These were perilous times for Duras who, despite a hectic life in the thick of political and artistic movements, was lonely, in a way that not only ate at her soul, but undermined her creative vitality. She had always needed to give voice to her inner violence, either in difficult love affairs or in her difficult texts and films, but here she was, old and ugly and all washed up. What would become of her now?' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Gabriel Josipovici: Why Modernism Matters

Peter Welz, whenever on on on nohow on | airdrawing

A video installation inspired, in part, by the work of Samuel Beckett

Source.

whenever on on on nohow on | airdrawing is a five screen video installation by Peter Welz, featuring the choreographer William Forsythe. The title is inspired by Samuel Beckett's late prose work Worstward Ho. [See more]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Happy Days: Enniskillen International Beckett Festival
• The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett

The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett

David Wheatley reviews the new volume from Faber & Faber

Photograph: Lütfi Özkök/Sipa/Rex

David Wheatley (The Irish Times) reviews Faber and Faber's The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, edited by Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (link via Susan Tomaselli): 'While some authors’ posthumous work threatens to swamp their published oeuvre (Philip Larkin springs to mind), Beckett has yet to reach any such tipping point, and with the publication of his Collected Poems we at last have a reliable text of all the poetry Beckett published in his lifetime and the fullest picture to date of his uncollected and unpublished poems: it marks a key moment in Beckett studies, joining the revised editions of his prose that have appeared in recent years and with the bonus of a full scholarly apparatus.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Happy Days: Enniskillen International Beckett Festival

Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald

A 2011 article from The New Yorker

W. G. Sebald

Mark O'Connell (New Yorker) on why you should be reading W. G. Sebald (link via David Pearce): 'It is probably too early to predict the extent of the influence Sebald’s hybrid books will exert on the shape of the novel, but it isn’t an exaggeration to say that he erased and redrew the boundaries of narrative fiction as radically as anyone since Borges. British writers like Will Self and, in particular, Geoff Dyer, have been inspired by Sebald’s figurative and literal rambling. Dyer’s work—part essay, part travelogue, part fiction—sometimes reads like a less melancholy, more comic (and more English) variant of Sebald’s peregrinatory prose. One of this year’s most impressive novels, Teju Cole’s debut “Open City,” owes a clear debt to Sebald. James Wood, in his enthusiastic review in the magazine, commented on the way in which Cole moves “in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work.” On a more superficial level, Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” adopted the trademark Sebaldian tactic of integrating photographs into its text.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Making of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn
• Grant Gee, Patience (After Sebald)
• W. G. Sebald, Across Land and Water
• W. G. Sebald as Academic
• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• James Wood on Sebald's Austerlitz

Colm Tóibín on Fiction and Reality

A reflection on biography, fiction and writer's lives

Colm Tóibín

An extract from 'What is Real is Imagined', a recent essay by Colm Tóibín published on the The New York Times website:

I have been writing about writers and their families so it is strange that the idea of rights versus responsibilities does not preoccupy me. I feel that I have only rights, and that my sole responsibility is to the reader, and is to make things work for someone I will never meet. I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels. It is odd that the right these people have to be left alone, not transformed, seems so ludicrous.

Within a few months of marrying, Thomas Mann wrote a story suggesting that his wife had had an incestuous relationship with her twin brother. Samuel Beckett, in his first book of stories, used a letter from a dead cousin, thus causing offense to her family. Brian Moore’s father, who was a doctor, worked tirelessly during the bombing of Belfast in 1941; in his novel “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” Moore has the father, who is clearly based on his own father, fleeing Belfast for the safety of Dublin during the air raids.

No one suggests that Mann or Beckett or Moore was an especially bad person. Indeed, all three were known for their courtesy and much loved by those close to them and by readers. But when it came to the moment when they were putting their stories together, working out the details, mixing memory and desire, they had no qualms, no problems about appropriating what they pleased. They used what they needed; they changed what they used. Their soft hearts became stony. [Read More]

Colm Tóibín is the author of the recent book, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Colm Tóibín on Joyce's Dublin
• Top Ten Novels about Solitude

Hari Kunzru on Krasznahorkai's Hipster following

Hungarian novelist becomes fashionable among aspiring NY writers

Housing Works, New York

Writing for The Guardian, Hari Kunzru describes New York's literary hipsters at a Krasznahorkai reading in New York (link via Susan Tomaselli): 'The other day I attended a reading by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. The venue was Housing Works, a charity bookstore in New York's SoHo. The 58-year-old author is, it's fair to say, relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. His first novel, Sátántangó (the third of his works to be translated by the poet George Szirtes), written in the 80s, has just appeared in a handsome edition published by New Directions press. He deals in despair and metaphysical stasis, one part Kafka, one part Beckett, plus a dollop of earthy comedy. In the film world he has received acclaim for his collaborations with the director Béla Tarr, whose work (including a seven-hour adaptation of Sátántangó) often attracts the adjective "uncompromising". In short, this wasn't the sort of event where you'd expect to have to arrive an hour early to get a seat.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Mythology of László Krasznahorkai
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside

60 Years in Sixty Poems

Faber & Faber release an interactive online poetry site

60 Years in Sixty Poems

Visual interpretations of poetry, from 60 Years in Sixty Poems

60 Years in Sixty Poems draws upon a variety of archival materials

From The Thought Fox (thanks to Jenn Mann for the link): 'Visually and aurally, ‘60 Years in 60 Poems’ transforms the poems, suggesting alternative interpretations and new ways of exploration. Audio lies at the very heart of the site and we commissioned four fine actors to record versions of the poems, each in their own distinctive voice. So we have Dan Stevens’ baritone alongside Alex Lanipekun’s bass, and Samantha Bond’s charismatic, clipped pronunciation alongside Lyndsey Marshal’s reassuring, Manchester vowels. We suggest you start with your year of birth – who’s the reader? – then make your way through the other 59 years…' [Read More]

CFP: The International Journal of Badiou Studies (IJBS)

The IJBS is looking for contributions for its second issue

Alain Badiou

About The International Journal of Badiou Studies (IJBS)

The International Journal for Badiou Studies is an international, peer-reviewed, open-source journal dedicated to the philosophy and thought of, and surrounding, the French philosopher Alain Badiou. The IJBS is dedicated to original and critical arguments that directly engage with the works of Badiou, as well as pertinent intellectual colleagues and related concepts. The aim of the IJBS is to develop a clear and transparent site for scholars interested in these ideas to come together from around the world to share their research and develop productive dialogues.

Second Issue: Call for Papers

You could almost say my entire enterprise is one giant confrontation [démêlé] with the dialectic.

Alain Badiou

The second issue of The International Journal of Badiou Studies will be dedicated to the dialectic. What are the consequences of the dialectic for Alain Badiou’s thought? What are the effects of Badiou’s thought on dialectics? The editors are soliciting papers that interrogate the dialectic in Badiou’s thought and the implications of this thinking to disciplines across the humanities and the sciences. Although our interest is in keeping the ambit for response as wide as possible, it would be particularly interesting to consider:

• The relationship between materialist dialectics and dialectical materialism.
• Dialectics from the 19th century to the 21st century.
• The development of dialectics in Badiou’s work from Théorie de la contradiction and Théorie du sujet to Logiques des Mondes and the Circonstances.
• The relationship between the dialectical, the non-dialectical and disjunctive synthesis to Badiou’s reading of Le Siècle. What are the consequences for our own ‘Circumstances’?
• How are we to define the term dialectics in the wake of Badiou’s work?

We welcome articles that examine the conditions of Badiou’s thought, and papers that use Badiou’s thought as a catalyst for considering the circumstances – whether scientific, amorous, political or artistic – in which we live.

Prospective articles should be in the range of 6,000-8,000 words, prepared for blind review, and accompanied by an abstract of not more than 250 words. Full articles should be sent by the 30 September 2012.

Authors should follow the standard guidelines for online submission.

In line with the ethos of the IJBS, we will accept articles in supported world languages, although an English abstract is required for all submissions.

Contact

Michael J. Kelly: hymjk@leeds.ac.uk
Arthur James Rose: enajr@leeds.ac.uk

Website

The International Journal of Badiou Studies: www.badioustudies.org

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Nina Power on Protest and Alain Badiou
• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett
• Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek

Nina Power on Protest and Alain Badiou

Radio Free Everybody talks to philosopher and activist Nina Power

Nina Power

Stir to Action has posted a new edition of its interview series, Radio Free Everybody (RFE). In the second episode, which includes a transcript, Matt Callahan talks to philosopher and activist Nina Power about the work of Alain Badiou, her thoughts on Defend the Right to Protest, and her book One-Dimensional Woman:

Matt Callahan: Ok, that’s sufficient. Well then, let’s go right into this, the first question that I wanted to ask you is how do you distinguish philosophy from science, art and politics?

Nina Power: Ok, well I think, well the way you pose the question is obviously very Badiouian, in the sense that these are his distinctions, although you missed out love. [Laughs]

Matt Callahan: That’s true.

Nina Power: But yeah, in that sense I would say to Badiou when he says that philosophy in a sense is empty, and actually what distinguishes philosophy is not it’s particular subject matter or its content, but its function in the way that it sort of weaves all these other disciplines and talks about them in a certain kind of meta-way. You know, that it can hold together certain kinds of abstractions or truths that are generated by these other disciplines, but it doesn’t generate any truths of its own. So in a way, for me, philosophy is not a particular method or a particular set of questions as you might be taught as an undergraduate, you know, let’s say it’s all these different ways of thinking about ethics or politics or epistemology or metaphysics or something like that. I think it seems to be more humble or more interesting to say that philosophy has no content of its own, it generates no questions that are specific to it, but it can, nevertheless, have this sort of capturing or compossibilizing function, you know, that it can draw things out of other disciplines.

Matt Callahan: How does that relate to Marx’s famous statement that philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however it is to change it? Is Badiou’s use of the term or what you are referring to as the Badiouian view of philosophy related to that?

Nina Power: You can’t force something, you can’t say, well alright, we’ve got to stop thinking, let’s just do something, ok, without knowing what you’re doing. Obviously there’s lots of kind of wasted action, if you like, there’s no sense in wasting time either, thinking through problems that are irrelevant, but at the same time it’s also, you’ve got to know what you are doing, you’ve got to understand enough of the situation in order to be able to act. When Badiou talks about the event and there are lots of questions that follow from this but it’s about saying something happened that you may not be able to exactly describe in the political situation but what truth might be is your fidelity to whatever’s happened. So, let’s say you’re involved in a political action and something is revealed about the relationship between the state and the way in which, people figured in this state and you see something and you don’t know what to call it, you see something that seems to you true, but isn’t what the state generally tells you is true and you hold true to this so you think about the way in which immigrants are excluded from the way in which the state figures itself or a certain way of seeing the world differently in terms of how you can organise it or maybe without money or something and you hold true to that.

Matt Callahan: I was asking it more, you might say, rhetorically it seems that Badiou is responding to a number of different contradictions. One of which is the original critique of philosophy as such by in Marx’s thesis on Feurbach and on the other hand, he was referring to the fact that all through the 20th century he talks about the destitution of philosophy, referring to Heidegger’s The End of Philosophy of 1969, where he’s offering over philosophy to science on the one hand, and the poet on the other. I mean you can look as these figures as just philosophers or whatever name you want to give them, but there’s really a question of well, does philosophy really have a role at all?

Nina Power: Yeah, I mean this is why the emptiness of philosophy’s really important. So, with ontology, Badiou basically hands over ontological questions concerning multiplicity and so on to mathematics. He says, look, I mean why is philosophy still trying to answer these with this useless language, that mathematics does far better? And that’s to say, well if we can pass that over to mathematics then philosophy has more time, if you like, to think about how we combine events, how we discuss subjects, so what are the subjects of these events? So, instead of spending all of our time coming up with yet another ontology you actually try to think much more about precisely the more practical questions. So what are the truths that are generated in these other areas, in politics, in love, you know, and what philosophy do to put them together to think through different kinds of subjects: the faithful subjects, the loyal subjects, the loving subject, the scientific subject, the collective subject. So in that way, I think he’s paring down philosophy, so although there’s something rather grandiose about Badiou’s system, I think at the end of the day it’s actually really minimal in a certain sense and quite humble, oddly.

Matt Callahan: The last few years, renewed inquiry into what Badiou called the communist hypothesis and really whether or not this was just because of the financial crisis. Is this only amongst philosophers and what does it have to do with communist parties and so on and so forth?

Nina Power: Well, I guess that I think the communist hypothesis idea and the return of it was actually floated before the economic crisis so I don’t think it was really responding to that just chronologically. But, I think there is something slightly problematic about it for me because it retains this kind of idealist element. I think on the one hand it’s very brave how people want to be talking about communism again-”have we left enough time after the horrors etc.” But, I think that it’s a very interesting kind of project, let’s say there’s this idea of invariance so that certain kinds of movements and certain kinds of political situations retain or maintain a kind of similarity that you can point to across the ages. Say, this is where in the Paris commune, May ’68, there’s something similar about that kind of… [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett
• Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek