ReadySteadyBook - a literary site

Tuesday 30 June 2009

Michael Jackson

I'm certainly not the person to write anything insightful on Michael Jackson, but k-punk has stepped up to the plate:

The death of this King - "my brother, the Legendary King Of Pop", as Jermaine Jackson described him in his press conference, as if giving Michael his formal title - recalls not the Diana carcrash, but the sad slump of Elvis from catatonic narcosis into the long good night. Perhaps it was only Elvis who managed to insinuate himself into practically every living human being's body and dreams to the same degree that Jackson did, at the microphysical level of enjoyment as well as at the macro-level of spectacular memeplex. Michael Jackson: a figure so subsumed and consumed by the videodrome that it's scarely possible to think of him as an individual human being at all... because he wasn't of course... becoming videoflesh was the price of immortality, and that meant being dead while still alive, and no-one knew that more than Michael (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, music, philosophy

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Monday 29 June 2009

Publishing Laid Bare Conference

Last Thursday, I spoke at Legend Press's first Publishing Laid Bare Conference. Basically, I said, "the internet is good, bloggers are fab" -- so nothing particularly newsworthy there then! But thanks so much to the good folk at Legend Press for inviting me to speak and thanks to everyone for the warm reception I got from those in attendance on the day.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events, personal, publishing news

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Monday 22 June 2009

Stuff and links

Oh, when am I not busy! Anyway, today I seem even busier than ever... So, a few web goodies to tide y'all over:

• lots of Ezra Pound links from orbis quintus (I've always been an Eliot man rather than a Pound-head, but I'll be taking the Cantos away with me on my next trip to London so maybe that'll change soon...)
• did Joyce coin 'blog'?
• John Self on Zweig Stefan (as my bloglines feed has it!)
• John Berger archive at the British Library
• anyone else going to the TLS party on Thursday? email me if you are...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, personal

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Friday 19 June 2009

David Lodge interview

I interview novelist, critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, David Lodge, over on The Book Depository:

Mark Thwaite: Is Deaf Sentence based on your own experiences David?

David Lodge: The portrayal of the central character's deafness is closely based on my own experience, and it is exceedingly unlikely that I would have thought of writing a novel about this condition if it I hadn't I suffered from it myself. From my late forties I was afflicted with gradually worsening high-frequency deafness, the most common form of hearing impairment, which makes it difficult to distinguish consonants, especially when there is a lot of background noise. The character of Desmond's father is also closely based on my own father who died in 1999. He was also deaf, as a result of old age, but wouldn't wear a hearing aid, so communication between us was often difficult. (More.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, the book depository

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Friday 19 June 2009

World Literature Weekend

World Literature Weekend -- 19th to 21st June 2009:

The idea of dedicating a weekend of talks and discussions to foreign and translated literature has evolved over the six years since the London Review Bookshop first opened and began holding events that have earned it a proud reputation. Looking back at those events, I notice one thing immediately: how lucky we have been in attracting writers from all over the world. This festival is our way of celebrating that; several of the distinguished authors who have agreed to take part are travelling from abroad especially for the festival. (More.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events

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Friday 19 June 2009

Oxford Working Class Bookfair

On Saturday (20th June) the first Oxford Working Class Bookfair is being held:

... between 11 am and 6 pm at Ruskin College, Walton Street, Oxford... On the eve of the Summer solstice there will be a gathering of the tribes - a bookfair - a place to meet likeminded people and exchange ideas and information. There will be talks, badges, posters, DVDs, CDs, workshops, music, culture, short films, magazines, lectures, warm atmosphere, fellowship, meet new people, education, entertainment, magazine, newspapers and BOOKS! (More.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events

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Thursday 18 June 2009

Another take on Iran

SF writer Ken Macleod quotes the Iranian revolutionary communist Mansoor Hekmat writing in early 2001 who said:

In Iran [...] the reality is that the rise of political Islam and religious rule has caused a staggering anti-Islamic backlash, in both ideological and personal spheres. The emergence of political Islam in Iran has become the prelude to an anti-Islamic and anti-religious cultural revolution in people's minds, particularly amongst the young generation, which will stun the world with an immense explosion and will proclaim of the practical end of political Islam in the whole of Middle East...

In my opinion, the Islamic movement in the Middle East and internationally will run out of breath with the fall of the Islamic regime in Iran. The question is not that Islamic Iran will be a defeated model, which others can disassociate themselves from. The Islamic Republic's defeat will arise within the context of an immense mass secularist uprising in Iran, which will touch the foundations of reactionary Islamic thought and not only discredit but condemn it in world opinion. The defeat of the Islamic regime will be comparable to the fall of Nazi Germany. No fascist can easily hold on to their position by merely distancing themselves organisationally and ideologically from this fallen pole. The entire movement will face decades of stagnation. The defeat of political Islam in Iran is an anti-Islamist victory, which will not end within the confines of Iran. (More.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: politics

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Tuesday 16 June 2009

Tomas Tranströmer

From Contemporary Poetry Review:

Every year, as the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature approaches, partisans of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer hold a collective breath, hoping against hope. A win for their man is unlikely for a number of reasons. One is the residual fallout from 1974 when the Swedish Academy gave the prize to two of its own members, Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson. Both were fine writers, but the appearance of nepotism was impossible to avoid. No Swede—no Scandinavian—has won the prize since. There’s also the unfortunate fact that the choice of recipient often seems guided as much by politics as by literary considerations. Tranströmer is not an apolitical poet, but there is nothing about him—no confinement by the state, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Joseph Brodsky, no sense that he speaks for his people, like Heaney or Walcott, no rabid opposition to the United States, as with Pinter—to excite the more narrowly political (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: poetry

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Tuesday 16 June 2009

You're Human Like The Rest Of Them

Thanks to Sukhdev Sandhu for bringing my attention to this:

You're Human Like The Rest Of Them is the name of a rather special event taking place this evening at London's National Film Theatre. Curated by Nigel Algar, it's a celebration of the film works of one of the most intriguing English writers of the last half century: B.S. Johnson. A dynamic and compelling figure, an advocate of experimental and avant-garde literature at a time (the 1960s and early 1970s) when naturalism and social realism dominated British fiction, he produced a number of novels that raged with passion and invention.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, film

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Tuesday 16 June 2009

Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, of course. literaryhistory.com has a useful "selective list of online literary criticism for James Joyce, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that comply with MLA guidelines."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, literary criticism

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Monday 15 June 2009

let me tell you review and Aharon Appelfeld

Very warm review of Paul Griffiths' let me tell you over on Dan Green's blog which I should have mentioned last week:

...the pleasure one takes in a work like let me tell you is precisely the pleasure of witnessing in a particularly intent way the way a writer is using a structural device to bring character and event into existence (more...)

Good stuff from Dan on Aharon Appelfeld recently too:

I also have trouble reading Appelfeld's novels as allegories, as many other reviewers and critics seem to do, although in their relative brevity and episodic structure they undeniably do seem closer to fabulation than to slice-of-life realism. The two most recent of his novels to be translated into English, All Whom I Have Loved and Laish, might especially seem to invite allegorical interprepation, but while I would not begrudge readers their attempt to find in these novels the kind of accessible "meaning" usually associated with allegory, assuming that the allegorical content is an adequate measure of what Appelfeld's fiction has to offer seems to me at best mistaken and at worst just a way of assigning it to some manageable category that excuses inattentive reading (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Thursday 11 June 2009

Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy

Via the Booksurfer blog:

Jeff Klooger who runs the occasional Castoriadis blog has written a critical exploration of the "underpinnings and implications of Cornelius Castoriadis’ reflections on Being, society and the self [Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy.] The book introduces the reader to the main concepts of Castoriadis’ work, but goes further to uncover the fundamental philosophical issues addressed by Castoriadis, and to critically examine the issues his work opens up."

Never an easy read, but always rewarding, Castoriadis' work deserves to be better known in the UK. My introduction was by those wonderful pamphlets run off on an old duplicator by the Soldiarity group many years ago - which somehow still seem more appropriate for the subversive spirit that lays at the heart of Castioradis' writing.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book news, philosophy, politics

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Thursday 11 June 2009

Why Heidegger matters

RSB-interviewee Simon Critchley is writing in the Guardian's Comment is Free blog on Heidegger's Being and Time. I link here to what is promised to be the first of eight articles that Critchley hopes will "give a taste of the book and offer some signposts for readers who would like to explore further."

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was the most important and influential philosopher in the continental tradition in the 20th century. Being and Time, first published in 1927, was his magnum opus. There is no way of understanding what took place in continental philosophy after Heidegger without coming to terms with Being and Time. Furthermore, unlike many Anglo-American philosophers, Heidegger has exerted a huge influence outside philosophy, in areas as diverse as architecture, contemporary art, social and political theory, psychotherapy, psychiatry and theology... the basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls "being-towards-death". (More...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Wednesday 10 June 2009

Owen Hatherley interview

The latest interview here on ReadySteadyBook is with Owen Hatherley who blogs at sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy, which focuses on aesthetic and political issues in architecture and music, and who has just written his first book -- Militant Modernism:

For myself, and numerous others who aren't part of any old boy networks, or who are neither adept at nor interested in networking and private views, [the internet] provided an outlet which simply wouldn't otherwise exist, or if so in the more retro form of the fanzine. I first started reading on the internet rather than regarding it as a kind of expensive Ceefax because of a rash of blogs around 2002 – Blissblog, New York London Paris Munich, then the less musically-focused, philosophical, political and poetic blogs like K-Punk, Infinite Thought, Heronbone, Citta Violenta, The Pillbox, Lenin's Tomb. I had wondered where the critical writing about popular culture which used to have a space in the music press and to a lesser extent the likes of The Face had disappeared to, and there it was, on the internet. It took another few years of procrastinating before I got mine together. These blogs seemed a reaction to the closing-down of discourse which occurred in the late 90s, where the music press no longer existed as an entity interested in politics and wider culture, and the internet actually created something better, something where there was more potential for response, more space, more depth, and yes, more democracy (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, rsb

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Friday 05 June 2009

Lynette Roberts

There are poets and there are Poets and the process we know as canonisation makes the former into the latter. It is part of the fun of part of the role of critics and other readers to argue, over time, why the range and skills and strengths of one particular poet should give them a leg-up into the Big League. The ongoing BBC poetry season (which I blogged about last week) has, inevitably, focussed on major writers like Arnold, Donne, Milton, Plath and Wordsworth. These writers are known far beyond poetry reading circles -- and sometimes not even for their poetry (fame is a by-product of canonisation, or is that the other way around?) and so presumably are thought to guarantee some kind of audience. But one name that was new to me (so I presume to others too), and was a surprise to see featured, was Lynette Roberts.

The BBC gloss her thus:

She only published one full collection of poems and her work has been almost forgotten, but her vivid, modern, hot-blooded writing about a Welsh village and her time there during the Second World War reveals an extraordinary woman and a brilliant poetic voice who Robert Graves described in the 1940s as "one of the few true poets now writing." Roberts was brought up in a wealthy family in Argentina but married a writer from Carmarthenshire in 1939 at the outbreak of war and spent the next nine years living in poverty in a Welsh-speaking village. She involved herself in every aspect of village life and despite being accused of being a spy found a fierce passion for the local people and the landscape.

In Owen Sheers' television programme the focus was on Roberts' life and on Poem from Llanybri "an invitation to the young soldier poet Alun Lewis to pay her a visit" to the small village where she lived. She was published by Faber (her first collection, Poems, appeared in 1944 when she was thirty-five) when decisions about poetry there were decided by T.S. Eliot -- a major poet, if ever there was one. He admired her voice; according to Patrick McGuinness's excellent long introductory essay to her Collected Poems the fact that her work "communicated before it made sense" was testament to its strength. Roberts might be a forgotten poet nowadays, but Eliot's interest in her work, the praise of Graves, the fact that Wyndham Lewis drew her portrait and that Dylan Thomas was best man at her wedding suggest that she was once very well regarded. The canonisation process is not a scientific one: good poets get left out.

Of course, it shouldn't worry -- or surprise -- us that the canon creaks and leaks. And finding our own paths to minor writers is far more satisfying than passively consuming the greats. Historically, women haven't faired so well at getting full recognition of their writing talents, and Roberts marooned herself in a Welsh-speaking Welsh village in Wales and wrote in a Modernist style. And then after the war she all but dried up. So, you know, it's her own fault that I hadn't heard of her until last week!

But I have heard of her now and her sense of place, her focus on nature, her ordered prosody with its moments of free enquiry, and her joyous radicalism are all seducing me:

Where whimbrels, redshanks, sandpipers ripple
For the wing of the living. Under tin of earth
And wooden boles where owls break music:
From this killing world against humanity,
Uprise against, outshine the day's sun.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: poetry

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Friday 05 June 2009

Little lights

Clavdia writes that she grows "weary of the 'philosophy' and the 'teaching' I do here. It breaks my spirit. Maybe I would like it better if it masqueraded under a different name -- but it is both too close and far too far from the philosophy and the teaching I have done elsewhere..."

There are little lights though -- the light today when reading Koffka's strange Gestalt theories -- a hybrid of Whitehead and Leibniz. The light reading Spinoza last week and speaking of his creation -- learning what it was he had done, and how little it is understood. The light reading these small, simple books -- books about love and friendship and communication and understanding. The light that comes from thinking about a paper project -- a paper on perception and beauty that turns outward to understand the inward. But the greatest light comes from remembering to be strange and to be open and to be sensitive and to remember laughter and make-believe and finding voices and understanding in the places that others have forgotten to look. (More.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Thursday 04 June 2009

The Drawbridge

Issue 13 of The Drawbridge contains work by Mario Vargas Llosa, Shalom Auslander, José Saramago, Paul Verhaeghen and Samanta Schweblin. Looks worthy of your attention.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet

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Thursday 04 June 2009

blogRank

blogRank "uses over 20 different factors to rank the blogs in any category. Some of the factors include: RSS membership, incoming links, Compete, Alexa, and Technorati ranking, and social sites popularity."

According to the blogRank ranking ReadySteadyBook is the 21st most popular literary blog out there. Indeed, RSB is the only British blog on the list, aside from the London Review of Books website which most certainly is not a blog. It's an odd list -- a book site list rather than a blog list really -- but it is interesting to be well-placed on a chart which is created via such an array of data.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, rsb

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Thursday 04 June 2009

The Hospital Club 100

Last year, I was listed as one of The Hospital Club 100. These things are rather daft, of course, but its always nice to feel appreciated, so if you want to put my name in the hat -- please go for it. And, you know, thanks!

The Hospital Club 100, in association with The Independent, is a search for the most influential people in the creative and media industries with the emphasis on current contribution and importance, not just the size of someone’s celebrity status, profile, bank balance, titles or past reputation (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal

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Thursday 04 June 2009

ReadySteadyUpdate

The latest book review here on ReadySteadyBook is by Alexandra Masters writing about Gide's The Immoralist:

For André Gide, writing The Immoralist was a near-death experience. "I have lived it for four years and have written it to put it behind me," he wrote to a friend. "I suffer a book as one suffers an illness. I now respect only the books that all but kill their authors." Now that's dedication. If this is the case, novelists today might think twice before penning their next oeuvre, or at least take a very deep breath (more...)

The three previous book reviews around here have been: Lucy Popescu on Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction; novelist Leora Skolkin-Smith on J.M.G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star; and writer and poet Carey Harrison on Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones.

Whilst I'm at it, the three previous articles on ReadySteadyBook have been: an interview with Lenin's Tomb blogger Richard Seymour; an interview with novelist Paul Griffiths; and Sophie Lewis's joint review of The Erotic Potential of My Wife and The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

And the last three long blog posts have been: me on reading poetically; me on liking whatever you like; and me on Anita Brookner.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: rsb

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Tuesday 02 June 2009

#wilckenwatch

Building on Stephen Mitchelmore's excellent review of Hugo Wilcken's Colony, last week John Self, on his Asylum blog, wrote a very positive piece on Hugo's novel which he says his readers should regard "as a recommendation as strong as any I've given this year."

Over on Twitter, John has set up the #wilckenwatch tag (which simply means that all Tweets about Colony tagged with #wilckenwatch get organised together so that they can easily be browsed). Over on The Book Depository I popped Colony onto the homepage and made it my Something for the Weekend selection last Friday. I've also made Colony one of my June Books of the Month here on ReadySteadyBook.

All this, as John has said, is because Colony is "an exceptional achievement whose overlooked status is little short of scandalous." Hopefully, this wee blog-based campaign can get Colony more of the readers that it undoubtedly deserves.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, the book depository

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