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ReadySteadyBlog
One of the Guardian Unlimited Books' top 10 literary blogs: "A home-grown treasure ... smart, serious analysis"
Blog entries for 'March 2010'
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Walks With Paul Celan
Under the Dome: Walks With Paul Celan by Jean Daive (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop) "is an intimate testimony of the poet’s last, increasingly dark years before his suicide. The book tells of the friendship of the author with Paul Celan, their collaborations translating each other, their walks, their conversations, their tensions, their silences, and, discreetly, of Celan’s crises and final suicide in 1970:"
Part memoir, part prose-poem, the book blurs the time of these encounters (1965 -1970) with the present of the author writing, 20 years later, on a Mediterranean island. He thinks and writes about Celan, about the women that led him to the poet, about other encounters that take place under the sign of Celan: Tarkovsky, Marcel Broodthaers.
Encounters, shared conversations, looks, dialogues, silence, angers, rebellion. Paris: the Luxembourg Garden, the Square of the Contrescarpe. And, finally, the questions: who are we, and how can we read the unreadable world.
And you can read a nice selection from Under the Dome over at Golden Handcuffs Review.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, poetry
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Tuesday 23 March 2010
Thomas Jones on 'Solar'
Ian McEwan's new novel Solar has been embarrassingly over-lauded in the Broadsheet reviews I've read. Thomas Jones, writing in the LRB, is a little more circumspect:
In a New Yorker profile of McEwan last year, Galen Strawson is quoted as saying that ‘Ian is essentially a short-story writer,’ that none of his longer books ‘has the unity of drive that the best novels have’. It’s hard to disagree with this assessment. The disappearance of the daughter in the supermarket at the beginning of The Child in Time (1987), the balloon accident in Enduring Love, the retreat to Dunkirk and the arrival of the wounded at a London hospital in Atonement (2001) are among the most compelling passages of English fiction of the last 25 years. The novels they’re in, however, are schematically structured, with occasionally lurching plot development, and the main themes are loudly hammered home. Solar is no exception (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review
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Tuesday 23 March 2010
The Ister
The Ister is a film
based on Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin's poem Der
Ister. Part one is here. (Via This Space, originally via Enowning).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: film, philosophy, poetry
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Monday 22 March 2010
Jeff Bursey reviews Josipovici
Jeff Bursey's review of Gabriel Josipovici’s two short novels, After & Making Mistakes, just went up on The Quarterly Conversation:
Like Beckett’s plays, Gabriel Josipovici’s works fend off resolution; also, his texts have more white space than is found in most novels (mainstream or not), and there’s a great use of dialogue. Great, as in its great compactness, naturalness, and poetry — but also as in a lot. There are few narrative passages in the recent novels Goldberg: Variations (2002) and Everything Passes (2006). The space around the words emphasizes that each line counts, and allows each line to breathe on its own. They have, so to say, sentience. The lulls and repetitions of Josipovici’s prose give readers the opportunity to see how his characters come across while they think, feel, talk, repress, obfuscate, and go about their business (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, gabriel josipovici
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Monday 22 March 2010
Chris Petit's "Content"
Don't miss Chris Petit's superb, Sebaldian new film Content whilst it is still on 4OD. Mark Fisher reviewed Petit's "informal coda" to his 1979 film Radio On in Sight & Sound recently, and wrote:
At one point in Chris Petit’s haunting new film Content, we drive through Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I live – what Petit filmed could have been shot from our car window. What made it all the more uncanny was the fact that Petit never mentions that he is in Felixstowe; the hangars and looming cranes are so generic that I began to wonder if this might not be a doppelgänger container port somewhere else in the world. All of this somehow underlined the way Petit’s text describes these “blind buildings” while his camera tracks along them: “non-places”, “prosaic sheds”, “the first buildings of a new age” which render “architecture redundant”.
Content could be classified as an essay film, but it’s less essayistic than aphoristic. This isn’t to say that it’s disconnected or incoherent: Petit himself has called Content a “21st-century road movie, ambient”, and its reflections on ageing and parenthood, terrorism and new media are woven into a consistency that’s non-linear, but certainly not fragmentary (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: film, internet, w g sebald
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Thursday 11 March 2010
Eagleton on 'the liberal literati'
I'm interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) - the very people you'd have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding - have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I'm very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you'd expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity...
Terry Eagleton interviewed in the New Statesman.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, politics
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Thursday 11 March 2010
London discussion of 'Capitalist Realism'
On the 31st of March, the Itchy Chin Club will be discussing Capitalist Realism by recent RSB interviewee Mark Fisher: Candid Arts Trust Cafe, 3 Torrens St, London, EC1V 1NQ, 6:30pm for a 7pm start.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: london, philosophy
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Wednesday 10 March 2010
iPads are coming!
The Bookseller tells me:
The much anticipated Apple iPad will go on sale in the UK in late April, a month later than originally stated by the company's website. International pricing will not be announced until April.
Shoppers in America will be able to get their hands on the wi-fi model of the iPad from 3rd April and pre-orders from the Apple online store will begin on 12th March. The wi-fi + 3G models will be available in late April in the US. All models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, technical
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Thursday 04 March 2010
The Mistake on Page 1,032: On Translating 'Infinite Jest' into German
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Ulrich Blumenbach quotes Wittgenstein as saying in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article to describe the challenges and inducements of the six years he spent translating David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Unendlicher Spass) into German — something he did without input from the author, who refused to speak to him.
Last summer, Blumenbach finally reaped the benefits of his efforts when the novel was released in Germany to great critical and commercial success, and he was awarded the Hieronymusring for Exceptional Achievement in Literary Translation, as well as the Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Prize for his work (more...)
From Publishing Perspectives.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, language
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Tuesday 02 March 2010
38 Plays: 38 Days -- The Taming of the Shrew
Today is the second day in the 38 Plays: 38 Days challenge to read a Shakespeare play every day for the next thirty-eight days. This evening I shall be pleasuring myself with The Taming of the Shrew (which is online at e.g. Project Gutenberg; I'm using The Oxford Shakespeare).
Wikipedia's synopsis reads:
The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1594.
The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the Induction, in which a drunken tinker named Sly is tricked into thinking he is a nobleman by a mischievous Lord. The Lord has a play performed for Sly's amusement, set in Padua with a primary and sub-plot.
The main plot depicts the courtship of Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew. Initially, Katherina is an unwilling participant in the relationship, but Petruchio tempers her with various psychological torments – the "taming" – until she is an obedient bride. The sub-plot features a competition between the suitors of Katherina's less intractable sister, Bianca.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, technical, william shakespeare
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Tuesday 02 March 2010
Death as a puzzle to be solved: Jon Fosse on crime fiction
At the launch event for Best European Fiction 2010 a few weeks ago, the Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse made some wonderfully cutting and dismissive remarks about crime fiction.
Here, exclusively for ReadySteadyBook, Jon expands on his thoughts about what he calls the "pornography of death": Literature is basically a personal, and at the same time universal, asking into the fundamentals of existence, made possible by the aesthetic possibilities of language. The more personal it gets, the more universal it becomes. When literature gets private, it looses its quality, as it does if it ends up as universal in this sense: something everyone agrees about.
Of course, one can learn about life in literature, for instance to see how life is for other persons, perhaps in another time, in another culture: in the novel everyone has the right to be understood, nowhere else. And to me dramatic literature is about getting a glimpse of the forces that somehow, in their invisible way, direct life. But more than this, literature is about learning to die, as Harold Bloom has put it.
What then about crime fiction, so highly esteemed as literature, at least here in the Scandinavian countries? Is it at all literature? No it isn’t. The aim of this literature is not to ask into the fundamentals of existence, of life, of death, it is not to try to reach the universal through the unique, it is a try to avoid such an asking, such unique universality, by stating already given answers that are not really answers, but just something one has heard before. It therefore feels as a pleasant and safe answer, and what feels pleasant and safe one could also call entertaining.
Death, perhaps literature’s basic concern, at least when doubled with what cannot exist without it, love, is in crime fiction made into a kind of puzzle which can be solved. Death is made safe by being looked at as something which might well not exist, if it wasn't for a murder, and then is reduced further by making this murder, death, into a puzzle to be solved. And which will be solved.
And when even the aesthetic ambition, this never-ending process of saying it all again, seen from a new perspective, is replaced by filling out a plot with variations, how can one possibly see crime fiction as literature? Add some political correctness to this plot, and we live in a perfectly safe and stupid world.
Literature is writing so strong that one sees life as something else after meeting it. It has to do with the uniqueness in every human being, and with this truth: the most unique is the most universal. Crime fiction is the opposite, to see life as the same all the time and feel safe in one's lie. It's pornography of death, and much less honest than the pornography which has to do with the beginning of life.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, literary criticism, rsb
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Monday 01 March 2010
Christopher Reid, Wapping, this Thursday
Christopher Reid will be reading from The Song of Lunch, A Scattering and perhaps others at the Wapping Project bookshop, London, E1W 3SG, this
Thursday, 4 March, at 7.30. The space is small; to ensure a place, email lydia.fulton@mac.com (via SonofaBook; thanks Charles!)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events, poetry
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Monday 01 March 2010
A ReadySteady round-up
A quick ReadySteadyBook round-up...
The latest three book reviews:
The latest three articles:
Three from me on Shakespeare:
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: rsb
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Monday 01 March 2010
The Quarterly Conversation (and its new blog)
The latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation has landed "with essays on Nobel laureate Herta Mueller, Jonathan Swift, Per Petterson, and more, plus 19 reviews, includin William Gaddis, Jose Manuel Prieto, and Gilbert Sorrentino, and interviews with David Shields and others."
They also have an all-new blog: "The Constant Conversation [has] a group of contributors drawn from TQC's ranks, the site delivers book news, reviews, and fresh links every day."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Monday 01 March 2010
38 Plays: 38 Days -- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Pinch, punch, first of the month... And thus the first day in the 38 Plays: 38 Days challenge to read a Shakespeare play every day for the next thirty-eight days (or thirty-nine if we read on and bag The Reign of King Edward III).
Today, we start with The Two Gentlemen of Verona (which is online at e.g. Project Gutenberg; I'm using The Oxford Shakespeare). Wikipedia's synopsis reads:
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1590 or 1591. It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play, and is often seen as his first tentative steps in laying out some of the themes and tropes with which he would later deal in more detail; for example, it is the first of his plays in which a heroine dresses as a boy. Two Gentlemen also has the smallest cast of any of Shakespeare's plays.
The play deals with the themes of friendship and infidelity, the conflict between friendship and love, and the foolish behaviour of people in love. The highlight of the play is considered by some to be Launce, the clownish servant of Proteus, and his dog Crab, to whom "the most scene-stealing non-speaking role in the canon" has been attributed.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: philosophy, theatre, william shakespeare
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Serendipoetry
To a Stranger
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me
as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate,
chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours
only nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you
take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or
wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
-- Walt Whitman
-- View archive
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