That Other Word: Episode 5

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.

In this episode, Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito return to the second season of That Other Word energized by the translators’ duels at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the great work being done at the UK-based press And Other Stories. They look forward to new works in translation this fall, including Antonio Tabucchi's The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, Basque author and Edinburgh guest Bernardo Atxaga's Seven Hours in France, and the latest from César Aira, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira. Daniel Medin hopes that several novels generating interest in Germany and France — Jenny Erpenbeck's Aller Tage Abend, Clemens J. Setz's Indigo, and Jean Echenoz's 14 — will soon be translated as well.

Afterward, Scott Esposito sits down with Margaret Jull Costa, a distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese who has brought Javier Marías, José Saramago, and Eça de Queiroz into English. She is the winner of numerous literary awards for translation, including the IMPAC Dublin award for her version of Marías' A Heart So White. She speaks about her twenty-five year career, her pragmatic approach to translation, her favorite authors and her love of the nineteenth century, as well her thoughts on the evolution of Javier Marías' style and his latest novel, which she has translated as The Infatuations.

Podcast

Listen to Episode 5 on That Other Word website.

Links

The American University of Paris: Center for Writers and Translators
Center for Writers and Translators: Facebook
Center for Writers and Translators: Twitter

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• That Other Word: Free Literature Podcast
• That Other Word: Episode 2
• That Other Word: Episode 3
• That Other Word: Episode 4
• Praise for The Cahiers Series
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside
• Sylph Editions at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

When Mozart met Beethoven

A 17-year-old Beethoven plays for the respected composer

Paul Allais, 'Beethoven with Mozart' (Details)

From Otto Jahn's Mozart, quoted in Michael Hamburger's Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations:

Beethoven, who as a very promising young man came to Vienna in the spring of 1787, but had to return home (to Bonn) after a brief stay, was taken to see Mozart, who asked him to play something. Mozart, thinking that he was listening to some studied show-piece, praised it rather coolly. Beethoven, who noticed this, asked Mozart for a theme suitable for improvised variations. As he always played excellently when excited and, at this moment, was also inspired by the presence of a master whom he respected greatly, Beethoven began to perform the piano in such a manner that Mozart, whose attention increased to the point of fascination, at last went quietly to his friends sitting in the next room and said emphatically: "Keep your eyes on that fellow; one day he'll give the world something to talk about."

Peter Hook, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

The Guardian reviews Joy Division bassist's new memoir

Joy Division: Peter Hook, Ian Curtis, Stephen Morris and Bernhard Sumner. Photograph: Anton Corbijn

Andy Beckett (The Guardian): 'Of all the great doomed rock bands, with their mayfly lives and drawn-out, highly profitable after-lives, few have a legend as potent and precisely defined as Joy Division. They played their first concert in January 1978 and their last in May 1980. In that time they released two albums and a few other songs: a pop music close to unique in its icy, addictive bleakness. They wore stark, photogenic clothes and haunted the hollowed-out cities of a decaying northern England. Their singer, Ian Curtis, was so intense onstage that he had epileptic fits. The day before a pivotal first tour of the United States, he hanged himself. He was 23.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Peter Saville and Joy Division
• Peter Saville on Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures
• Grant Gee on Sebald and Joy Division

Theodor Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music

The Guardian reviews a new edition from Verso

Theodor Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music

Nicholas Lezard reviews Theodor Adorno's Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music: 'Adorno wrote about everything, really, but what he wrote most about was music. He knew what he was talking about: he had entertained attainable ambitions to compose, and been taught by Alban Berg. When Thomas Mann, in exile, needed to have a serialist composer in Dr Faustus, it was to Adorno he turned, and his contribution to the book was invaluable. Schoenberg, exiled a few miles up the road at the same time, was seriously miffed for years that he hadn't been asked – understandably, since he had invented the atonality of Mann's composer. But there was something Adorno could bring to the table which Schoenberg couldn't. As George Steiner put it, "what Adorno contributed [to Dr Faustus] was not only the hard-edged technicalities of compositional and instrumental processes, but his own radical perceptions of what it is to compose music under pressure of previous musical history and of social crisis."' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto
• Travels in Nihilon: Critchley on Beckett and Adorno
• Arvo Pärt on Tintinnabulation
• Will Self on the Symphony and the Novel
• Glenn Gould and Beethoven's Tempest Sonata

Kafka and the Paradox of the Universal: International Conference 2012

University of Antwerp · 12 - 14 December 2012

University of Antwerp

Kafka and the Paradox of the Universal
An International Conference
University of Antwerp, 12-14 December 2012
(Hof van Liere, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerpen)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s saying that “Kafka’s testimony is all the more universal as it is profoundly singular” is indicative of a key paradox in the 20th century Kafka reception which has wide-reaching implications for our understanding of the interface between literature and philosophy. Kafka is indeed often regarded as the ultimate witness to the human condition in the 20th century and, like Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe in their times, is attributed a universal significance. Yet Kafka’s work is also known for expressing the irreducibly singular and unclassifiable. The various conceptions of universality and singularity that underlie these attributions as well as the different guises in which the paradox of their simultaneity appears will be explored in this three-day conference at the University of Antwerp.

Organizing Committee:
Prof. Vivian Liska; Prof. Arthur Cools, Dr. Jo Bogaerts, Dr. David Dessin

Keynote speakers:
Prof. Stanley Corngold - Princeton University
Prof. Rodolphe Gasché - University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Prof. David Suchoff - Colby College
Prof. Jean-Michel Rabaté - University of Pennsylvania

Thank you to Wayne Stables for alerting me to the conference.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Will Self: Kafka and Dissonant Bohemia
• Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist: Illustrated
• Franz Kafka Centenary: 100 Years of The Judgement
• Will Self, Kafka's Wound: A Digital Literary Essay

Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova

A new title from Contra Mundum Press

Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova

From Contra Mundum Press:

Translated by Tim Wilkinson for the very first time into English from the original Hungarian, this publication, which has already received an award from the Petofi Literary Museum, may prove to be one of the most momentous releases of the decade.

Szentkuthy is hailed by many as the Hungarian equivalent of Joyce, Proust, and Musil and, to date, his works have been translated into French, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, and Spanish. Marginalia on Casanova is the first book of Szentkuthy’s epic ten volume St. Orpheus Breviary which, as Csaba Sík noted, “represents the greatest enterprise in scope, in worth? – undertaken in the Hungarian novel.”

Marginalia on Casanova is the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, Miklós Szentkuthy’s synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. As Szentkuthy’s Virgil, St. Orpheus is an omniscient poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, an endless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, and mentalité.

Through St. Orpheus’s method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, mutual difference and essential similarity. “Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions,” says Szentkuthy, “is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems.”

Marginalia on Casanova relives the spiritualization of the main protagonist’s sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life and more his intellectual mission, the sole determinant of his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th century and its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary on Casanova’s memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy’s very own philosophy of love.

Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity and a taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.

Featuring an introduction by Zéno Bianu , an afterword by Maria Tompa, the literary executor of the Szentkuthy Estate, and an original cover design by noted Hungarian artist István Orosz.

About the Author & Translator

Miklós Szentkuthy (1908-1988) is the author of masterpieces such as Prae, the St. Orpheus Breviary, Testament of the Muses, and Towards the One and Only Metaphor, and is recognized as one of the most significant and prolific Hungarian writers of the 20th century. Szentkuthy composed an oeuvre both imposing and complex, centered on the conflict between art and life, or the aspiration for holiness and eroticism. In addition to his many novels, essays, short stories, and memoire-interviews, he also translated numerous texts into Hungarian including Joyce’s Ulysses, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and works by Twain, Poe, and many others.

Tim Wilkinson has translated a number of substantial works on Hungarian history and culture including Éva Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs 1765-1800 (1997), Domokos Kosáry, Hungary and International Politics in 1848-1849 (2003), and others. In the literary field, he has translated works by Imre Kertész and many other contemporary prose writers. The US edition of his tr. of Fatelessness was awarded the PEN American Center’s PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (2005). His tr. of Kertesz’s Fiasco is a finalist for Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award (2012).

Excerpts and Information:

• http://www.hlo.hu/news/zeno_bianu_boudoir_theology
• http://www.hlo.hu/news/miklos_szentkuthy_marginalia_on_casanova_excerpts

Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012).
ISBN 9780983697244.
20 USD, 16 GBP, 14 €.
Bookstores can order through Ingram. Otherwise, copies can be acquired through local retailers or via Amazon and similar sites worldwide.

For a review, desk copy, or interview request, write to: info@contramundum.net

Website

Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

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

Will Self: Kafka and Dissonant Bohemia

Kings Place, London · 7 October 2012 · 2:00pm

Notes and Letters

From Kings Place:

Kafka was said by his friend Max Brod to have such a tin ear that he couldn’t distinguish between Tanhauser and the Merry Widow - yet Brod also asserted that this was because his readings of his own prose were so perfectly modulated that they employed all of his great musicality. Which was the truth?

And can it be that Kafka was immune to the aural impact of the distinctively Czechoslovakian brand of musical Modernism, one that, to the contemporary ear, seems to so perfectly complement his prose?

Will Self explores these questions and more. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Writers: Will Self
• Will Self, Kafka's Wound: A Digital Literary Essay
• Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist: Illustrated
• Franz Kafka Centenary: 100 Years of The Judgement

Ludwig Wittgenstein on Writing

From Culture and Value

Photograph: Ralph Gibson

From Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, edited by G. H. Von Wright and translated by Peter Winch:

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Ludwig Wittgenstein: Looking not Thinking
• Ludwig Wittgenstein and Architecture
• Ludwig Wittgenstein's Lifestyle

Documentary: Gerhard Richter Painting

A 2011 documentary film by Corinna Belz

(Via 3:AM Magazine) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Gerhard Richter: Panorama
• Tom McCarthy on Gerhard Richter

Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist: Illustrated

Artist Jürgen Schlotter reconceives Kafka's Ein hungerkünstler

Jürgen Schlotter's illustrated edition of Franz Kafka's Ein hungerkünstler [The Hunger Artist]

Jürgen Schlotter's illustrated edition of Franz Kafka's Ein hungerkünstler [The Hunger Artist]

Jürgen Schlotter's illustrated edition of Franz Kafka's Ein hungerkünstler [The Hunger Artist]

Jürgen Schlotter's illustrated edition of Franz Kafka's Ein hungerkünstler [The Hunger Artist]

From Zeixs: 'The graphic designer Jürgen Schlotter, Franz Kafka’s 1922 story published in a very unusual way into graphic information. Typography and illustration merge into one unit that interprets and accentuates the text visually. Kafka’s story is a parable about the insulation of the artist from his audience through his work, whose true nature is finally understood. For the lettering of this bibliophile edition of the 26 letters plus punctuation marks were carved in Linolplatten and then digitized in order to make it through the rough, edgy and cool image of the font in the torn protagonists themselves felt. Schlotters idiosyncratic interpretation of the story has already won several awards: red dot award, ADC (Art Directors Club) award, Vida-paper award.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Mister K & Franz Kafka Exhibition
• Introducing... Franz Kafka
• Thomas Bernhard: Graphic Essay

Mister K & Franz Kafka Exhibition

Mota Italic Gallery, Berlin · 17 September – 27 October 2012

From Mota Italic Gallery (link via fontfont.com):

When one thinks of the novel “The Trial” by Frank Kafka, gloominess and pessimism quickly come to mind. But a look into Kafka's wonderfully handwritten notebooks shows there is also another side to this writer: an ironic, absurd, humorous and light side full of wisdom. And just as impressive as his texts is Kafka's powerful handwriting style, which ranges from relaxed, calligraphic to energetic, impatient and almost unreadable. The exhibition focusses on all of this in a colorfully ‘kafkaesque’ way – with a mix of typographic installations, objects, prints, posters, textiles, books (Mendelsund series by Schocken). At the same time, the show tells the "Real Travels of Mister K" – a journey in which Kafka's handwriting moves through time, space, and different physical and energetic states to finally arrive as the digitized script typeface FF Mister K by Julia Sysmäläinen. The book Too Long to Tweet accompanies the exhibition. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Ritchie Robertson on Kafka's The Metamorphosis
• Judith Butler on Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka Centenary: 100 Years of The Judgement

Lars Iyer reads from Dogma

A 40 minute video of Iyer reading at Northeastern University, Boston.

(via Spurious)

  Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Franz Kafka Centenary: 100 Years of The Judgement

Tonight marks the centenary of Kafka's breakthrough short story

An edition of Franz Kafka's Das Urteil ['The Judgement']

On the night of 22 September 1912, one hundred years ago, Franz Kafka sat down at his desk to write his breakthrough prose text, 'The Judgement'. The following is an extract from Kafka's diary, dated 23 September 1912, translated by Joseph Kresh:

23 September. This story, 'The Judgement', I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during the night I heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strongest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. How it turned blue outside the window. A wagon rolled by. Two men walked across the bridge. At two I looked at the clock for the last time. As the maid walked through the ante-room for the first time I wrote the last sentence. Turning out the light and the light of day. The slight pains around my heart. The weariness that disappeared in the middle of the night. The trembling entrance into my sisters' room. Reading aloud. Before that, stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, 'I've been writing until now.' The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in. The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul. Mornng in bed. The always clear eyes. Many emotions carried along in the writing, joy, for example, that I shall have something beautiful for Max's Arkadia, thoughts about Freud, of course; in one passage, of Arnold Beer; in another, of Wasserman; in one, of Werfel's giantess; of course, also of my 'The Urban World'.

Treasures of the Bodleian: The Manuscript

Manuscript page of Kafka's 'The Judgement'. MS. Kafka 6, fol. 27r. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

From Treasures of the Bodleian:

These notebook pages are a witness to the moment when a great writer found his true voice. Kafka wrote Das Urteil in one sitting, between ten o’clock at night and six in the morning. Shown here is the close of the story, by which time the humdrum tone of its opening had changed inexplicably into the strange and expressionistic. At the foot of the right-hand page Kafka has written a diary entry: ‘the fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water … Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and soul.’

Kafka then dashed off a note to his superior at work: ‘Dear supervisor! I suffered a little fainting spell this morning and have a slight fever. For that reason I am staying at home.’ [Read More]

Treasures of the Bodleian also includes excerpts from Kafka's 'The Judgement' in German and English, read by Reinier van Straten. [Listen]

For more on Kafka's life and work, take a look at the A Piece of Monologue online guide. The index includes links to articles, reviews, events, excerpts and other miscellaneous material. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Ritchie Robertson on Kafka's The Metamorphosis
• Judith Butler on Franz Kafka

Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka

Alex Shepard interviews the author of Spurious and Dogma

Lars Iyer

From a 2011 interview by Full Stop:

[In Spurious,] Lars and W. worship Kafka and wonder if they more resemble Kafka or Max Brod, his executor. Is Kafka one of your heroes? Do you, like Lars and W., think of yourself as more of a Max Brod than a Kafka?

I do not even see myself as a Brod! Max Brod was the most energetic of men – he wrote a great deal, he was active in various intellectual circles – and he placed himself most genuinely in the service of others. A remarkable combination. W. and Lars seem to form the entirety of each other’s intellectual circle, and the question whether they actually help anybody is an open one.

Am I a Brod? But I wrote a novel. And one writes novels, I think, in the hope that one might be more than a Brod. Brod, no doubt, wanted to be more than a Brod. At what stage did he realise that he was no Kafka? My argument: he never realised it. Perhaps to write a novel is to be a Brod who wants to be Kafka. And perhaps that’s why Kafka couldn’t finish his own novels. He, too, in his own way, was a Brod.

But we live in a different time from Kafka’s, when the hope of being a Kafka will result in something altogether different than becoming Kafka. Kafka’s displaced relations to Jewish traditions have their counterparts today, perhaps, in our displaced relations with the novel, and with figures like Kafka. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Christopher Plummer plays Vladimir Nabokov on Kafka

Excerpt from a 1989 television film

From The Book Haven:

It’s not quite Vladimir Nabokov (witness the video of the real thing on video here), but rather the actor Christopher Plummer takes a shot at performing the Russian author, who taught at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.

There doesn’t appear to be much online about Peter Medak‘s short television film from 1989, Nabokov on Kafka, which dramatizes Nabokov’s lectures on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Despite NEH funding and TV airing, this film seems to have pretty much disappeared from public awareness. Certainly I had never heard of it before. Anyone know anything about this quirky show? [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Vladimir Nabokov: Literary Psychologist
• New Nabokov editions from Penguin
• Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov
• Lydia Davis on Madame Bovary and Vladimir Nabokov

Kafka, Religion, and Modernity Conference 2012

International symposium, St. John's College, Oxford · 24-26 September 2012

Kafka, Religion, and Modernity

International symposium, St. John's College, Oxford
24-26 September 2012

Until recently, the religious interpretations of Kafka's work, which began with his friend Max Brod and continued into the heyday of existentialism, were considered outdated and discredited. For some decades, religion has featured in Kafka interpretation only as an aspect of his relation to Judaism. This means ignoring important areas of his work, notably the Zürau aphorisms of 1917-18, and overlooking e.g. the fact that a central chapter of The Trial is set in a cathedral.

Until recently, the religious interpretations of Kafka's work, which began with his friend Max Brod and continued into the he Now, however, it has become possible and even necessary to speak, with Daniel Weidner, of a 'religious turn', or, with Jürgen Habermas, of a 'post-secular society'. Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde has asked whether modern societies can themselves provide a foundation for the values on which they are founded, or whether, in Böckenförde's words, 'The liberal secular state is based on assumptions which it cannot itself guarantee'. Evidently modernity can no longer be equated with an inevitable and irreversible process of secularization, understood as the disappearance of religion. Instead, we want to consider 'secularization' as a transfer of meaning from one domain to another, in which art and literature take over tasks previously reserved for religion.

Until recently, the religious interpretations of Kafka's work, which began with his friend Max Brod and continued into the he Within this framework, we want to investigate Kafka's relation to religion in new ways. We want to explore how religious questions are addressed by literary means; to ask how far this leads to individual, heterodox, and creative constructions of religion; and to generate new research both on modern developments within central European Judaism and on Kafka's later texts. Hence we aim to pose broad questions, to test them against Kafka's oeuvre, and thus to shed further light on Kafka and his intellectual milieu. [Read More]

Convenors

Manfred Engel, Ritchie Robertson

Conference venue

New Seminar Room, St. John's College

Accommodation for speakers

St. John's College, St. Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JP (www.sjc.ox.ac.uk)

Conference fee (for guests)

£ 20 (reduced fee for students: £ 10)

Website

Oxford Kafka Research Centre

Contact

niklas.gaupp@sjc.ox.ac.uk

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Ritchie Robertson on Kafka's The Metamorphosis
• Judith Butler on Franz Kafka
• McCrum on Kafka's Manuscripts

Litquake: San Francisco's Literary Festival 2012

5-13 October 2012

Litquake is San Francisco's nine-day literary festival for booklovers, complete with cutting-edge panel discussions, unique cross-media events, and hundreds of readings. Litquake's Lit Cast is our selection of the best-of in writerly conversations and readings from throughout the year, many of them recorded at the "Epicenter", a monthly Litquake series which embraces a theater of ideas between writers and readers.

Litquake co-founders, Jack Boulware and Jane Ganahl, act as hosts of Lit Cast and banter freely about the history of famous venues in San Francisco or tell personal anecdotes from their experiences with writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and so forth. Adam Johnson, Peter Carey, Geoff Dyer, Carolyn Burke, and Alice LaPlante are all currently featured in conversation with other artists or reading from current works. Irvine Welsh, Steve Erickson, Nathan Larson, Joshua Cohen and others to come soon. Many events from this year’s festival, 5-13 October, will also be live-streamed or recorded and published later. [Read More]

Samuel Beckett: Form and History Conference

Halifax, Nova Scotia · 28-30 June, 2013

Design: Rhys Tranter

Samuel Beckett: Form and History
Halifax, Nova Scotia
28-30 June, 2013

Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, Nova Scotia)
Saint Francis Xavier University (Antigonish, Nova Scotia)

What forms of historical knowledge might be usefully addressed to Beckett’s works? In what ways might Beckett’s formal explorations, or formal analysis of those explorations, be conceived of as intrinsically historical? While Beckett studies has often been structured by an opposition between formalist and historical approaches, the aim of this conference is to think collectively about how form and history are related in Beckett’s writing and in critical responses to his work. We welcome papers that engage with various historical contexts, and are particularly interested in how historical analysis might address the formal complexities of Beckett’s work. Specific points of engagement might involve the following questions: how might the conditions in post-war France have informed Beckett’s formal experimentation? What is novel, for example, about the post-war Beckettian novel? How is Beckett’s writing involved (or at odds) with the histories of modernist and postmodernist forms, particularly in view of the ongoing re-mapping of these terms of literary periodization and their temporal and spatial parameters? What forms of history (feminist, queer etc) might contribute to a history of Beckettian forms? Our hope is to generate conversation across the boundaries and binaries (archive/text, for example, or history/theory) that have begun to structure Beckett studies in recent years. How might these different emphases be brought together? What form might a collaborative approach to Beckett studies take? There will be no keynote address, but rather a series of workshops addressing how to integrate the differing strands of work that have been done in recent years. These workshops will accompany the more traditional three paper panel format. There will also be no parallel sessions, in order to facilitate depth of engagement, and priority will be given to submissions that address the conference theme.

Submissions

Proposals of no more than 300 words to be sent to Michael D’Arcy and Seán Kennedy (beckettinhalifax@gmail.com) by 30 January 2013.

Registration

Faculty $100
Students/Unwaged Free

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Ritchie Robertson on Kafka's The Metamorphosis

A peek at Kafka's original manuscript at the University of Oxford's Bodleian library

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Judith Butler on Franz Kafka
• McCrum on Kafka's Manuscripts
• Franz Kafka, Sleep and Transformation
• Kafka Safety Deposit Boxes to be opened
• McCrum on Kafka's Manuscripts

Author's Talk: Alison Bancroft, Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self

Freud Museum, London · 24 September 2012

Alison Bancroft, Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self

Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self
Author's Talk: Alison Bancroft
24 October 2012 · 7pm

There is an increasing trend within both the study of visual culture and fashion itself to restore fashion to an aesthetic role - one that moves beyond its commercial success as a global industry and places fashion within a nexus of art, the body, and femininity. This emphasis aims to separate fashion from mere clothing, and illustrate its cultural power as an integral aspect of modern life.

In this innovative new book, Alison Bancroft re-examines significant moments in twentieth century fashion history through the focal lens of psychoanalytic theory. Her discussion centres on studies of fashion photography, haute couture, queer dressing, and fashion/art in an attempt to shed new light on these key issues.

According to Bancroft, problems of subjectivity are played out through fashion, in the public arena, and not just in the dark, unknowable unconscious mind. The question of what can be said, and what can only be experienced, and how these two issues may be reconciled, become questions that fashion addresses on an almost daily basis.

By interpreting fashion within a psychoanalytic frame, Bancroft illustrates how fashion articulates some of the essential, and sometimes frightening, truths about the body, femininity and the self.

Alison Bancroft is a writer and cultural critic. She specialises in interdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary art and visual culture, and is committed to working across all media and contexts. Her research interests include visual culture and theory, psychoanalytic thought, and sexualities. She was awarded her PhD by the University of London in 2010. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Author's Talk: Adam Phillips, Missing Out
• Katja Behling, Martha Freud: A Biography
• Sigmund Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher
• Freud and Global Economic Collapse
• Ballard: 'Freud was a born storyteller'

Author's Talk: Adam Phillips, Missing Out

Freud Museum, London · 24 October 2012

Missing Out
Author's Talk: Adam Phillips with Lisa Appignanesi
24 October 2012 · 7pm

In his latest book, Missing Out (Hamish Hamilton), acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips probes another intriguing feature of the human condition: the 'unlived life'. So much of our mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on', he notes. But is frustration a necessary part of the good life? He discusses missing out, frustration, satisfaction and the many wishes and wants inbetween with Lisa Appignanesi, author of All About Love (Virago) and Chair of the Freud Museum. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Author's Talk: Alison Bancroft, Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self
• Katja Behling, Martha Freud: A Biography
• Sigmund Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher
• Freud and Global Economic Collapse
• Ballard: 'Freud was a born storyteller'

Arvo Pärt on Tintinnabulation

Liner notes from Fratres

Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt (via Spurious): 'Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers - in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certainty that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises - and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements - with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitve materials - with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I called it tintinnabulation.'

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• György Ligeti's Gravesite
• Krzysztof Penderecki: Horror Composer
• There Will Be Blood
• Glenn Gould and Beethoven's Tempest Sonata

An American in Oulipo: Harry Mathews Symposium

The Quarterly Conversation · Issue 29, Fall 2012

Design: Rhys Tranter. Photograph: Sigri d Estrada

Articles and reviews:

• Dan Visel, 'Solving (and Not Solving) The Conversions
• Ed Park, 'Hymns to Misunderstanding: Harry Mathew's First Three Novels'
• Jeremy M. Davies , 'Tch, Tch: notes on Cigarettes'
• A. D. Jameson, 'I Read it for the Plot: The Narrative Artistry of Harry Mathews' Cigarettes
• Laird Hunt, 'My Life in CIA, a series of overlapping interactions'
• John Beer, 'Short Disclaimers. Extravagant Tableclothes: Harry Mathews, Poet'
• Daniel Levin Becker, 'My words aren't stones to harm you but fences to make you not harm me: On the peculiar generosity of Selected Declarations of Dependence'

Paul Auster reads from Winter Journal

American novelist and translator reads from his new memoir

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Paul Auster
• Paul Auster, Winter Journal
• Auster/Tolstoy: Winter Journal
• Auster: 'You write sentences, you cross out sentences.'

W. G. Sebald on Being a Writer

A 2000 interview by Jens Mühling

W. G. Sebald

From Vertigo:

Sebald: Being a writer is by no means an easy profession. It is full of difficulties, full of obstacles. For a start, there is the psychology of the author, which is not a simple one. There are these situations when suddenly nothing seems to work anymore, when you feel unable to say anything. In such cases it is very helpful if someone can tell you that this happens to everybody, and show you how one might deal with such problems. In these situations it is very often the case that people neglect the research aspect. Every writer knows that sometimes the best ideas come to you while you are reading something else, say, something about Bismarck, and then suddenly, somewhere between the lines, your head starts drifting, and you arrive at the ideas you need. This research, this kind of disorderly research, so to speak, is the best way of coping with these difficulties. If you sit in front of a blank sheet of paper like a frightened rabbit, things won’t change. In such situations you just have to let it be for a while.

Another important psychological problem occurs the very moment a publisher shows interest in your first manuscript. That is a most vulnerable situation for a writer. The publisher presents you with some contract, and you will sign anything, without thinking about the consequences, if only it helps to get your book published. It is very important to remind students that there are certain rules for such contracts – not many, but there are some. For example, you should never sign a contract for life, you should only sell the rights for the hardback edition, and so on. If you sign that standard contract that is used in England and Germany and anywhere else today, you will lose lots of money, which is something that few people know about. If you become a dentist, the way you earn your money is all regulated. But if you become a writer, you have to sort it all out for yourself. [Read More]

Full Interview: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: W. G. Sebald
• Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald
• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• W. G. Sebald on his life and work
• W. G. Sebald on History, Memory and Austerlitz

Brian Eno: 1980 Radio Interview

Brian Eno interviewed on KPFA's Ode to Gravity

Brian Eno

From UbuWeb:

Charles Amirkhanian and Brian Eno discuss Phonetic Poetry, how Brian writes his lyrics, and the spirit of inquisitiveness at KPFA Radio on Saturday February 2, 1980. Listen to some of Brian Enos pieces; After the Heat, Everything Merges With the Night, Another Green World, Spirits Drifting and sections of other pieces. Brian Eno also discusses the artist Peter Schmidt and their work on the Oblique Strategies Cards, being a producer, Process vs Product and looping. Reel I ends with some thoughts on Steve Reich and his music.

Reel II starts with the history of the recording studio as a compositional tool;" and collaboration with David Byrne on album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Eno also talks about and listens to Elvis, The Supremes, Sly Stone, Lee Perry and Jimmy Hendrix. Then he offers some unfinished pieces from his upcoming album with David Byrne. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Brian Eno on the Apollo Moon Landings
• Another Green World
• David Bowie's Lodger: 30th Anniversary
• Picador, Beckett and Russell Mills
• David Bowie: 40 Years
• David Bowie and the Berlin Period

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Looking not Thinking

Ray Monk on Wittgenstein's propensity towards visual thinking

From the New Statesman:

“Thinking in pictures,” Sigmund Freud once wrote, “stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.” There is, in other words, something primordial, something foundational, about thinking visually.

Such a view is anathema to many philoso- phers, a good many of whom believe that all thought is propositional, that to think is to use words. For some of the most distinguished philosophers in history, thinking and verbalis- ing were practically the same thing. Bertrand Russell sometimes to his great frustration, was hopeless at visualising and was more or less indifferent to the visual arts. His mental life seemed almost entirely made up of words rather than images. When his friend Rupert Crawshay-Williams once gave him an intelligence test that involved matching increasingly complicated geometrical shapes, Russell did extremely well up to a certain point and then exceptionally badly after that. “What happened?” Crawshay-Williams asked. “I hadn’t got any names for the shapes,” Russell replied.

In this, as in many other respects, Ludwig Wittgenstein was Russell’s opposite. For Wittgenstein, to think, to understand, was first and foremost to picture. In conversation with his friends, he several times referred to himself as a “disciple” or “follower” of Freud and many people since have been extremely puzzled what he might have meant by this. I think Freud’s remark quoted above might provide the key here, that it might have something to do with the emphasis one finds in Freud on the primordiality of “thinking in pictures”.[Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Ludwig Wittgenstein and Architecture
• Ludwig Wittgenstein's Lifestyle
• Ludwig Wittgenstein on Science and Industry
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: Polymath
• Alain Badou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs

A page from Blanchot's corrected proof of L'Entretien Infini (The Infinite Conversation)

A page from Maurice Blanchot's corrected proofs of L'Entretien Infini, showing changes made by Blanchot. MS Fr 497. Purchased with the Class of 1952 Manuscript Fund, the Amy Lowell Trust, and the Patrick Grant Second Memorial Fund, 2009.

A 2010 news story from the Harvard Gazette:

As a novelist, literary theorist, journalist and philosopher, Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) had a profound impact on the thinking of dozens of philosophers, novelists, and writers. Until recently, however, it remained unclear how Blanchot’s thinking had evolved over his lifetime. A famously reclusive figure in the literary world, it was believed Blanchot had destroyed most of his personal papers before his death.

With the Houghton Library’s recent acquisition of corrected page proofs of Blanchot’s major 1969 work L’Entretien Infini (“The Infinite Conversation”), however, scholars should soon be able to shed new light on Blanchot’s changing political and literary attitudes.

The pages were salvaged from a rubbish bin by the husband of Blanchot’s long-time housekeeper, and contain numerous handwritten annotations by Blanchot, along with typewritten sheets inserted into the proofs – some of which consist of small slips taped over pages, while others are multiple pages in length.

The proofs, along with several other Blanchot manuscripts, came up for sale in March 2009. Hoping the material might find an institutional home where it could be preserved and made accessible to scholars, Smith Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature Christy McDonald approached Leslie Morris, Houghton Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts with the idea of purchasing the items. [Read More]

See also: A conversation about the proofs of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Entretien infini at Houghton Library [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Corrected Proof: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• J. G. Ballard Manuscripts at British Library
• Manuscript page of Don DeLillo's Libra
• Watt: Samuel Beckett's Wartime Manuscripts
• Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Teju Cole talks to 3:AM Magazine

An interview by Max Liu

Teju Cole

Max Liu interviews the author of Open City, Teju Cole, for 3:AM Magazine:

Increasingly, novels are praised for how much of the culture they manage to include. Open City is entirely contemporary and worldly and it includes a great deal. What are the possibilities and pitfalls of literary inclusiveness?

In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don’t mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects – maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books – and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don’t think it’s as simple as literary inclusiveness. That phrase, in fact, brings to mind David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Dave Eggers. They are keen to include and, in fact, itemize the present in all its gaudy multiplicity. My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There’s an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there’s enough of the present included to lull the reader. So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn’t use a smartphone, and he doesn’t discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail. [Read More]

Will Self on Digital Distractions

From a recent article exploring the relationship between writing and the internet

Will Self writing in Liverpool's (now demolished) Linosa Close tower block during the Further Up In The Air project

Will Self, quoted by Carl Wilkinson in The Telegraph (via Susan Tomaselli):

'“I think I felt oppressed by the distractions of digital media and longed for a certain level of clarity and simplicity that the typewriter afforded,” he says. “The internet is of no relevance at all to the business of writing fiction directly, which is about expressing certain kinds of verities that are only found through observation and introspection. It’s an incredibly powerful tool and you’d be stupid not to use it, but it’s a distraction in the actual business of writing.”

[...]

As a former addict, Will Self is acutely aware of the internet’s potential power to lure users into cul-de-sacs of distraction. “It fulfils the criteria of addiction, which is obsessive mental content connected to compulsive action,” he says. “The machine itself seems like a paradigm of the addictive state. I can see it as something that needs to be put down the way an alcoholic puts down drink.”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Will Self interviewed in The Paris Review

Philip Roth writes to Wikipedia

Writer publishes letter in New Yorker to produce 'secondary source'

Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk in The Human Stain (dir. Robert Benton, 2003)

From the New Yorker:

Dear Wikipedia,

I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip—there is no truth in it at all.

Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.” Thus was created the occasion for this open letter. After failing to get a change made through the usual channels, I don’t know how else to proceed.

My novel “The Human Stain” was described in the entry as “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.” (The precise language has since been altered by Wikipedia’s collaborative editing, but this falsity still stands.)

This alleged allegation is in no way substantiated by fact. “The Human Stain” was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years. One day in the fall of 1985, while Mel, who was meticulous in all things large and small, was meticulously taking the roll in a sociology class, he noted that two of his students had as yet not attended a single class session or attempted to meet with him to explain their failure to appear, though it was by then the middle of the semester. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• Where to start with Philip Roth?
• The Later Work of Philip Roth
• Roth on the fate of the Great American Novel
• Philip Roth: In his own words
• Philip Roth on Ageing

The Poetic Riddle of Clarice Lispector

Brad Johnson looks at the distinctive quality of Lispector's prose

Clarice Lispector

Brad Johnson The New Inquiry: 'Though she never considered herself a poet, Clarice Lispector’s prose inhabits this poetic riddle in a way that is only recently beginning to gain the recognition it deserves. In his biography of Lispector, Benjamin Moser deems her “the Sphinx of Rio de Janeiro,” noting her defiant comments about staring down the Sphinx in Egypt: “I did not decipher her. But neither did she decipher me.” By Moser’s reckoning, whose editorial hand and evangelistic enthusiasm has guided Lispector’s entry into New Directions’ catalogue, it is precisely the mysteriousness of Lispector’s style that has made a mess of previous translations and stunted her reception in the United States. In interviews and in the afterword to his translation of The Hour of the Star (2011), Moser never goes so far as to blame these early translations for failing to cement Lispector’s place among other Latin American literary heroes like Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, but neither does he think her books simply require some new marketing and another chance. These translations are new for a reason. Moser bristles at what he sees as English translators trying to tame Lispector’s strangely composed Portuguese, ironing out the wrinkles in her syntax and cleaning up what would be bad grammar if it weren’t intentional.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Clarice Lispector and Jewishness
• Why You Should Know Clarice Lispector
• Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
• Clarice Lispector: New Translations
• Clarice Lispector: Cult Hero

Gabriel Josipovici on Franz Kafka

A review from the Times Literary Supplement

Franz Kafka

Writing in the TLS, Gabriel Josipovici reviews June O. Leavitt's The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka, Stanley Corngold and Ruth V. Gross's Kafka for the Twenty-First Century, Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner's Franz Kafka, David Suchoff's Kafka's Jewish Languages and Shachar M. Pinsker's Literary Passports: 'On September 23 it will be 100 years exactly since Franz Kafka wrote his breakthrough story, “The Judgement”. We are probably no nearer to understanding that or any other of his works today than his first readers were, nor should we expect to be. These books help to show us why.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Judith Butler on Franz Kafka
• 'At last I understand Kafka'
• How to read Kafka
• Introducing... Franz Kafka
• Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened To Modernism?

Maeve Binchy on meeting Samuel Beckett

An article first published in 1980

Original feature in The Irish Times, published Wednesday, 14 May 1980

The Irish Times has republished an article by Maeve Binchy, recounting her experience meeting the writer and playwright Samuel Beckett in London, 1980: 'Beckett looks 54 not 74; he looks like a Frenchman, not an Irishman, and he certainly looks more like a man about to go off and do a day’s hard manual work rather than direct one of his own plays for a cast which looks on him as a messiah come to rehearsal.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter on meeting Samuel Beckett
• Paul Auster on meeting Samuel Beckett
• William Burroughs and Susan Sontag on meeting Beckett
• Gerald Thomas meets Samuel Beckett

Friedrich Nietzsche on Dangerous Books

An extract from Assorted Opinions and Maxims

Georg Friedrich Kersting, 'Man Reading at Lamplight' (1814)

From Friedrich Nietzsche's Assorted Opinions and Maxims, translated by R. J. Hollingdale:

Dangerous books. - Somebody remarked: 'I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful.' But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible. - Altered opinions do not alter a man's character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognisable.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Franz Kafka: 'A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us'
• Emrys Westacott on Friedrich Nietzsche
• 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
• Friedrich Nietzsche: A Perspectivist Thinker