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ReadySteadyBlog
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Wednesday 14 May 2008
Blanchot and May 68
Via Spurious (where else?)
He was, said Derrida, involved 'body and soul' in the Events. Michel Leiris, in his journals, laughed at him: what was he doing running along with the students? Couldn't he see it would lead nowhere? Levinas, his closest friend, wrote, without identifying him, of an eminent man of letters who "participated in the May Events in a total but lucid manner." "Blanchot is not an ordinary man, a man whom you can meet in the street," says Levinas in an interview. But there he was on the streets (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, maurice blanchot
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Wednesday 14 May 2008
Procrastination Lit
In Procrastination Lit (via the Literary Saloon) Jessica Winter looks at "great novels about wasting time" -- though she includes non-novels such as Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. Lots of Thomas Bernhard too!
Anyone out there know anything about John Edgar Wideman's Fanon which is mentioned in the piece? Looks interesting.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Wednesday 14 May 2008
Clay Shirky video
I interviewed the excellent Clay Shirky the other week over on the The Book Depository. And I heartily recommend Clay's book Here Comes Everybody to anyone interested in web-culture. Indeed, go and see how impressive he is by watching the video I've just posted over on Editor's Corner (which I sourced from LibrarianInBlack) where Clay talks about gin, sit-coms and "cognitive surplus".
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, the book depository
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Tuesday 13 May 2008
Middlebrow Mediocrity
Daniel Green is -- quite correctly it seems to me -- cross about the Middlebrow Mediocrity of many contemporary novels:
Everything that keeps our current literary culture mired in midddlebrow mediocrity is exemplified in Amy Bloom's novel, Away, and its reception by mainstream book reviewers when it was published last fall. The novel itself is not per se a "bad" novel -- many worse ones are published and reviewed every season -- but it is entirely undistinguished, to the point that my most immediate reaction to it was to wonder why it needed to exist in the first place. Moreover, that book reviewers would so exorbitantly praise such a novel, as in fact most of them did, strongly calls into question the standards being applied by those working in that branch of "literary journalism" represented by newspaper book sections. If Away is considered by "professional" book reviewers to be an exemplary work of serious literary fiction, which my reading of the reviews leads me to think is the case, then as a culture attuned to the possibilities of fiction as literary art, we in a sad state indeed (my italics).
Dan then takes Lionel Shriver to task:
Shriver's review [of Away in the LA Times] reeks of the kind of rationalization book reviewers constantly offer when recommending "formulaic" fiction written "comfortably within a conventional form." Such fiction may otherwise seem "standard" in its use of all of the hand-me-down practices of traditional narrative, but it's still full of "finely wrought prose, vivid characters, delectable details," as Shriver puts it a few paragraph later. It may be utterly predictable, reinforcing safe and complacent reading habits by going no farther than to pour some "new wine into old skins," but if its "execution is exquisite," then no more should be asked of it. Who needs fiction that challenges formal expectations, offers an alternative to our hackneyed notions of "finely wrought prose"? Writers who pursue such challenges and alternatives are just "game-playing," anyway, so why not just settle for another feel-good novel and its "soft-smile, along-the-way humor."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere
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Monday 12 May 2008
The Child on the Street
Good pal of ReadySteadyBook, Ken Worpole, writes about children's street games and the importance of play in underpinning a free society (via Booksurfer):
As the events of 1968 are commemorated, it is worth noting that it was the postwar celebration of children's play that anticipated the reclamation of the street as a domain of political liberty. Even the Opies realised that many children's games were an implicit form of political protest, as when they saw that dangerous games of risk such as Last Across the Road were an "impulse of the tribe" against the encroachment of the car into their sacred territory. This position was endorsed by the anarchist Colin Ward in his seminal 1970s book, The Child in the City, the last great expression of belief in the power of play to turn the street and the playground, if not the world, upside down (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, politics
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Monday 12 May 2008
Translated Fiction
Booktrust's Translated Fiction site is worth a look -- not an RSS feed in sight, however!
Booktrust, which runs the translated fiction website, is committed to encouraging people of all ages and cultures to discover and enjoy reading. We are proud to be able to expand our work into the world of translated fiction and believe we are well placed to celebrate and broaden readers’ awareness of these amazing novels.
We also want to support the authors who wrote the books in the first place, and the publishers who have committed themselves to publishing these books in a highly competitive and increasing homogeneous market.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Monday 12 May 2008
Omega Minor
Last Thursday, I attended the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize awards at the Serpentine gallery in London (currently showing an exhibition of Maria Lassnig's dreadful paintings). As you'll all know by now, Paul Verhaeghen's massive Omega Minor (Dalkey Archive Press) -- vexing for me -- won the day.
Why my problem? Well, The Liberal magazine ("devoted to a renaissance in liberal politics and the liberal arts. First founded in 1821 by the Romantic poets Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, the magazine is committed to regenerating liberalism and reinvigorating the public sphere") asked me to review whatever was the winner -- so now I have actually to read the monster!
I was privileged to have a meal with Paul and gang after the prize giving, and I'll be interviewing him here on ReadySteadyBook soon.
The prize money was £10,000, but, as Paul said in his acceptance speech, and as quoted on his blog, Babylon Blues, he is giving it all away:
... to avoid supporting the regime with more tax dollars than I already owe them, I have asked the Arts Council England to donate the money associated with the Prize, all 10,000 pounds of it, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink — its cost is currently 3,810 dollars per second — but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, book news, personal
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Thursday 08 May 2008
The Blue Fox
The latest book review here on ReadySteadyBook, by RSB debutante Sarah Hesketh (welcome Sarah!), is of The Blue Fox by Sjón:
Rarely does an author come loaded with such impressive indie and establishment credentials. As Björk’s long time collaborator, Sjón was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics for the film Dancer in the Dark. Renowned throughout Iceland for his numerous plays and poetry collections (the first of which was published when he was just sixteen) in 2005, Skugga-Baldur (The Blue Fox) was awarded the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize – the Nordic equivalent of the Booker. Bile might start to rise in certain quarters at the thought of musical hipsters who think they can pull off a novel. But in this beautiful, tiny book, Sjón has produced the literary equivalent of a snowflake, a hundred page riff on the literature, landscape and history of Iceland which reads more like an epic poem, albeit with one striking piece of modernity thrown in more...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: rsb
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Wednesday 07 May 2008
The Uses of Literary Biography
Nicholas Murray gets involved in the debate about literary biography that continues to rumble 'round the 'sphere:
The always stimulating blog of Stephen Mitchelmore, This Space, is currently growling [correction: see Stephen's post below, he was not 'growling' merely demurring] at a recent defence of literary biography, citing Proust, who in his essay Contre Sainte-Beuve, attacked the famous French critic for his belief that the biographical method was the only one for critics. Proust disagreed, arguing memorably that his work proceeded not from the bundle of accidents that sat down for breakfast in the Proust household, but from "l'autre moi". Proust, it seems to me, was absolutely correct so how can I justify earning my living as a literary biographer? The answer is that biography cannot "explain" or account for a work of art but neither can criticism (more...)
The "anti-biographical" argument -- Dan Green of The Reading Experience has been doing much to advance a new New Criticism here! -- is against those who would claim that biography should be the first and foremost method of understanding a writer and their work. The argument has become sharpened because biography plus plot synopsis is the main method of reading and discussing a work that one sees in e.g. the Broadsheet newspapers or with a critic like e.g. Tim Parks. Biography has the virtue of contextualising a work, but biographical reductionism does violence to reading itself. One has to start with the words on the page. Any piece of writing is simultaneously about both itself and the relationship of the writer to the work expressed in and through that work -- so biography enters here, it has a place, but it should not be the primary prism. Biography should not be a substitute for careful rereading: rereading is the beginning of understanding, not scattered life-facts.
For sure, like so many readers, I can't help but be interested in the lives of those I come to know so little about via reading them. But I don't suppose I can understand their work any better just because I now know about their birth and schooling, their marriages and heartaches ...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere
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Wednesday 07 May 2008
PEN World Voices
I should have mentioned this earlier, of course ... between April 29th and May 4th PEN World Voices has been going on -- if you want to catch up with all that's gone on during the extended event MetaxuCafé is your best bet for lots of reports and impressions (and yet more links can be found via Golden Rule Jones).
Also see Leora Skolkin-Smith's article here on ReadySteadyBook about A.B. Yehoshua.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere
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Books of the Week
The logic of capitalism, boom and bust, is unremitting and unforgiving. But what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world? In The Post-Office Girl (translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg), Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism. Christine toils in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine's rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same. Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within. Left unpublished at the time of his death. The Post-Office Girl transforms our image of a modern master's achievement.
-- View archive
Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century, Omega Minor (translated from the Dutch by the author himself) is a tale of the survival of the soul. A novel of big ideas, the book's whirlwind plot is set between Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and takes in neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoctorate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe and a Holocaust survivor, who tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Omega Minor is Paul Verhaeghen's second novel and his first to be translated from Dutch into English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist; his work focuses on memory and the basic aspects of cognitive ageing. He currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
-- View archive
Serendipoetry
How Fortunate The Man With None
You saw sagacious Solomon
You know what came of him,
To him complexities seemed plain.
He cursed the hour that gave birth to him
And saw that everything was vain.
How great and wise was Solomon.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's wisdom that had brought him to this state.
How fortunate the man with none.
You saw courageous Caesar next
You know what he became.
They deified him in his life
Then had him murdered just the same.
And as they raised the fatal knife
How loud he cried: you too my son!
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's courage that had brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.
You heard of honest Socrates
The man who never lied:
They weren't so grateful as you'd think
Instead the rulers fixed to have him tried
And handed him the poisoned drink.
How honest was the people's noble son.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's honesty that brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.
Here you can see respectable folk
Keeping to God's own laws.
So far he hasn't taken heed.
You who sit safe and warm indoors
Help to relieve our bitter need.
How virtuously we had begun.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's fear of god that brought us to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.
-- Bertolt Brecht
-- View archive
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