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Monday 24 May 2010

Vasily Grossman on the up?

Is Vasily Grossman beginning to achieve (in the English-speaking world) the recognition that is his due? I've never read him, so I actually don't know if he is even due said recognition (he doesn't feel like my kind of guy) but RSB interviewee Robert Chandler (Grossman's translator) reckons he is, so I should probably pull my finger out and give him a read. I should probably pull my finger out and interview Robert again too, as we last spoke about 5 years ago!

Recent sightings (and citings) of Grossman include: Vasily Grossman, Russia's greatest chronicler, awaits redemption (in the Guardian); In praise of... Vasily Grossman (Guardian CIF); Anti-Socialist Realism (TNR); Everything flows: Robert Chandler on Vasily Grossman (Vulpes Libris); and A Russian titan revealed... (BookSerf).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book news, rsb

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Monday 24 May 2010

Tarkovsky and Levinas

The nature of film is such that it is difficult to feel that one takes it in completely; no sooner is one frame mentally captured than it is succeeded – in a process that could be called ‘jaillissement’ – by another. Film moves too fast for even the cinematographer to be in full control of the things that it throws up (over and above the way in which any kind of text may be uncontrollable by its author). Directors and editors can choose to minimise these characteristics of the medium, manipulating both images and audience so as to create a final sense of semiotic order and unambiguous declaration: such, according to a somewhat sweeping and antagonistic Tarkovsky, was the practice of Eisenstein, who ‘makes thought into a despot’. But Tarkovsky himself does his best to accentuate the life of its own that film, with its density and speed, possesses. And often, as in The Sacrifice, it is the very profusion and inexhaustibility of the sequence of images and the possible implications and offshoots of narrative that give hope to an otherwise generally bleak set of representations of human existence.

Here, then, there is an obvious starting point for the uneasy project of comparing Levinas with Tarkovsky (or indeed with anyone): both make the most of the resources of their respective media to speak distinctively but with a kind of self-undermining. The saying of the philosophical essay of the moment, and the unrolling of time, both in simulacrum and in the real time of the audience, in film, are both held up as somehow redemptive and transcendent in their resistance to reduction and control.

Tarkovsky and Levinas: Cuts, Mirrors, Triangulations [PDF] by Dominic Michael Rainsford (via wood s lot).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, film, philosophy

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Tuesday 27 April 2010

Beckett and "the absurd"

"... moral values are inaccessible. And they cannot be defined. In order to define them, you would have to pass judgement, which is impossible. That's why I could never agree with the notion of the theatre of the absurd. It involves a value judgment. You cannot even speak about truth. That's what's so distressful. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form to formlesssness. It is only in that way, perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found."

Beckett and "the absurd" over on This Space.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, samuel beckett

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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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Tuesday 23 February 2010

Self on Sebald (and Mitchelmore on Self and Bernhard)

The centrality of melancholy to Sebald's work is probably the equivalent of Bernhard's cynicism; manifestations, that is, of contingent facts of life: the peace of the East Anglian landscapes, for example, compared to the venal denial of Vienna. Writers become who they are for many reasons, some more obvious than others. Self's thesis is that distance from Germany and closeness to the Jewish community in Manchester guided Sebald's determination to bare witness to the Holocaust and thereby help to remove the taint on Germany. But more than that: to bare witness to the presence of destruction in the peace of the English present. He writes about the destruction of German cities by the Allies and the destruction of nature in the abattoir of industry. Self's lecture is particularly welcome for bringing the English taint to our attention (more...)

Excellent post over on This Space which ranges from Amis through to Bernhard and W.G. Sebald...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, w g sebald

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Monday 22 February 2010

38 Plays: 38 Days

I'm not a great one for reading challenges (it is, as I've written before, sometimes quite enough of a challenge simply to read anything at all), but as 2010 has seemingly become my "Year of Shakespeare" I'm thinking of joining the folk over at 38 Plays: 38 Days in their effort at reading each of Shakespeare's 38 plays in as many days...

Yes, it is a somewhat brutal rush through a corpus that should be lovingly savoured but, at the same time, I'm rather excited by the idea that by early April I could have read the whole lot and then I might know which ones I need to return to (to do the loving savouring bit) sooner rather than later.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, personal, william shakespeare

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Friday 05 February 2010

Josipovici's 'Everything Passes'

In a fleeting fit of energy midway through last year, I proposed to some fellow bloggers that a symposium, hosted here at RSB, on Gabriel Josipovici's superb novella Everything Passes would be a jolly good thing. Well, as I've discussed (in my recent Hamlet and Lear pieces) it quickly became obvious to me that, last year, I didn't have the energy to organise anything. So, I owe a sincere apology to those friends who wrote some wonderful pieces (which will soon see the light of day here on the site -- hopefully, next week) expecting the symposium to go ahead.

Happily, several bloggers have posted the would-be symposium pieces on their own sites. Richard Crary, Dan Visel, Steve Mitchelmore and now Waggish have all written pieces that expand upon the review Paul Griffiths wrote for me a couple of years back.

Please do read these excellent contributions, and then I'll have a few more up for you here on RSB next week.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, gabriel josipovici

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Friday 05 February 2010

Tom McCarthy on Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Via Sponge! (the new name for our friend Lee Rourke's Scarecrow blog) I note that Tom McCarthy has been writing in the LRB about Jean-Philippe Toussaint:

For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of psychological language that the nouveaux romanciers so splendidly shun, denial: writing in Artforum in 2008, he claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet novel, since they ‘reminded me of soil cutting’. Other legatees, such as Jean Echenoz, Christian Oster and Olivier Rolin, have come up with more considered answers, ones that, at the very least, acknowledge an indebtedness – enough for their collective corpus to be occasionally tagged with the label ‘nouveau nouveau roman’. Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint (more...)

More on this over at 3:AM too.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review, nouveau roman, tom mccarthy

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Thursday 04 February 2010

Notes on 'One Dimensional Woman'

Richard has been reading Nina Power's excellent and provocative (if far too short) essay One Dimensional Woman (a recent Book of the Week around here):

I like Power's focus on work and the changes to work. And I agree with much of what she says about today's "feel-good" feminism, and in particular with her point that we need to address how "'feminism' as a term has come to be used by those who would traditionally have been regarded as the enemies of feminism". For example, those who defended the invasion of Afghanistan in the interest of "women's rights", among other allegedly Western values; also, the spectacle of Sarah Palin is relevant here, embodying as she does many superficial characteristics of mainstream feminism, namely the obsession with placing women in positions of power (Power spends a section discussing Palin in detail. I admit I don't find her terribly interesting as a figure. I am more interested in the implications of the widespread misogynist attacks on her from liberals—the "enemy women" phenomenon.). With respect to the problem of powerful women, Power notes the Margaret Thatchers and Condoleeza Rices of the world and observes that, "It is not enough to have women in top positions of power, it depends upon what kind of women they are and what they're going to do when they get there." I would go further and say that even that's not enough. What matters is the nature of the power and the structure of the system. Any woman who manages to rise to a position of power in such a patriarchal system as we currently enjoy is bound to perpetuate that system (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, feminism

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Wednesday 03 February 2010

Mitchelmore on David Shields' 'Reality Hunger'

You'll be hearing a lot about David Shields' supposedly iconoclastic Reality Hunger over the next few weeks (it publishes at the end of the month). It will be touted as the "one book of literary criticism" (or some such) that you absolutely must read and is, in the words of its publisher, an "audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future." Actually, it's a dog's breakfast that deserves a really robust response -- happily, Mr Mitchelmore is already on the case:

Reading David Shields’ new book – but in what way is it a book? – is a frustrating experience. As demonstrated by the previous sentence, on almost every page of Reality Hunger the reader is interrupted by responses, doubts and questions. "Every artistic movement from the beginning of time" it begins, "is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art." Why, one asks, half-aware of the question because one is trying to get into the book, does he use "artistic movement" rather than "artist"? The answer is soon clear: he is seeking to galvanise a new artistic movement by expressing his own concern with the relation of art to reality. It has an impact on the form and content of the book, so much so that it fails to become a book yet, as a consequence, ends up enacting part of Shields’ manifesto. However, what remains betrays it (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, literary criticism

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Tuesday 02 February 2010

Stanley Middleton celebration

David Belbin (thanks Dave!) tells me:

On May 8th 2010, the University of Nottingham will host a celebration of the life of one of its most widely respected alumni, the novelist Stanley Middleton. The Booker Prize winning author died in July 2009, a week short of his 90th birthday. The celebration will include live music, readings from Stanley’s novels, poems and unpublished letters, together with short talks on his life and work (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, deaths, events

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Tuesday 02 February 2010

Gently Read Literature

For those needing some poetry reviews in their lives, the February 2009 issue (number 23, don't you know!) of Gently Read Literature is now up online.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry

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Tuesday 12 January 2010

Raymond Federman

Dan Green on Raymond Federman:

Raymond Federman was generally associated with those American writers who in the 1960s and 70s began writing what is now called "metafiction," but there was always something about Federman's work that seemed different, its self-reflexivity even more radical and enacted in a more aggressive way. Where Barth and Coover laid bare the devices of fiction allegorically (J. Henry Waugh as "author" of his fictional baseball world) or through the occasional narrative disruption (the "author" making his presence known, as in Barth's "Life-Story"), Federman's fiction was more direct and unremitting in its undermining of narrative illusion. With its prose freed from the constraints of typographical bondage, climbing up, down, across, and around the page, and its "stories" of writers attempting to tell a story without quite succeeding, Federman's fiction as represented in Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), still his most important books, challenged not only reader's preconceptions about fiction but also basic assumptions about reading itself (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Wednesday 06 January 2010

Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award

The Three Percent blog has posted its 2010 Best Translated Book Award: Fiction Longlist. Some great looking titles on it -- I'm particularly keen to read Ghosts by César Aira -- but no room, it would seem, for Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (translated by my friend Charlotte Mandell)...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere

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Tuesday 05 January 2010

Ellis Sharp's 'Dead Iraqis'

Ellis Sharp's blog The Sharp Side used to be one of the most acute and prickly blogs out there (out here!?) in the blogosphere, but either Ellis stopped blogging as much or I stopped paying as much attention as I should have been doing and he, and his blog, fell from the front of my mind. Regardless of that, it seems that Ellis has actually been rather busy...

Over at the New Statesmen Mark Fisher (author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (part of the excellent Zero Books series) -- which I'll review as soon as I see a copy -- and blogger at k-punk) reviews Ellis's new book of short stories, Dead Iraqis:

Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavented spectral rage of murdered working class martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon that is "timeless", but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape justice (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review

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Monday 04 January 2010

Albert Camus' death

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, on the 7 November 1913 into a working class family. The Diary Junction Blog today continues:

When he was still very young, during the First World War, his father was killed, and his mother suffered a stroke on hearing the news. Camus won a scholarship and studied at the lycée in Algiers until 1932. Thereafter, he took various jobs, joined the Communist Party, studied at the University of Algiers, and married Simone Hié. He also contracted tuberculosis.

Then, 50 years ago today, at the age of 46, he died in a car accident near Sens, in a place named Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. Wikipedia tells me that "in his coat pocket lay an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train, with his wife and children, but at the last minute accepted his publisher's proposal to travel with him. The driver of the Facel Vega car, Michel Gallimard — his publisher and close friend — was also killed in the accident." In the car was the manuscript for The First Man (Le premier homme) an autobiographical work about his childhood in Algeria and was published in 1995.

More cheery fodder, about other gone-but-not-forgotten authors, can be found in the Guardian's Living in the memory: A celebration of the great writers who died in the past decade.

Welcome to the Teenies. Be assured, we can expect more deaths!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, deaths

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Friday 13 November 2009

Shlomo Sand and Avi Shlaim in discussion

Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, and Avi Shlaim, author of Israel and Palestine, were in conversation about their new books at a packed Frontline Club yesterday. Jacqueline Rose, author of The Last Resistance, was chairing. A video of the event is now up on the Verso blog.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, film, politics

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Friday 13 November 2009

50 Books You’ll Want to Read in 2010?

Bookmunch has listed 50 Books You’ll Want to Read in 2010. If you're anything like me, this is mostly a list of the books that you'll be avoiding next year, but will be getting blanket coverage in the papers... Nevertheless, it's a useful selection of what's coming down the publishing pipe.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, publishing news

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Friday 30 October 2009

Thomas Bernhard's stories

Via Steve over at This Space:

In May 2010, the first translation of Thomas Bernhard's early stories is due from Seagull Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The website provides the following information: "First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard’s early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmer’s outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the work. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory—and the mere words, the neverending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, but yet, as Bernhard writes 'not completely crazy.'"

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, thomas bernhard

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Thursday 22 October 2009

The Cork-Lined Room: a new Proust blog

A new Proust-related blog is to launch next Monday:

You know you’ve been meaning to. You’re pretty sure that you’ve got a dusty copy of Swann’s Way sitting around somewhere. You’ve probably even read the book’s famous opening line, “For a long time I would go to bed early,” and thought to yourself, well, not now, maybe some other time.

That time has finally come. Next Monday, Publishing Perspectives is launching The Cork-Lined Room, a blog devoted to the reading, discussion and study of Proust’s masterpiece of 20th century literature, In Search of Lost Time.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 29 September 2009

Defending the 'Sacred Defense'

The Complete Review's Literary Saloon continues to be the blogosphere's principal source of information about the global book business. If you want to know what Chinese, German, Turkish, whatever book has just won something, been reviewed somewhere, finally been translated into English or scandalously been ignored etc then the Literary Saloon will most likely have the story. Michael Orthofer, the site's founder and sole contributor, has wonderfully catholic tastes and casts his net worldwide; his global vision is certainly something fully to applaud and acclaim. He does, however, sometimes say the most stupid things.

Witness today's post about the Winners of Sacred Defense book festival. As Orthofer tells us, the 'Sacred Defense' is what Iran calls the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s. In an offhand remark, tangled as ever inside a parenthesis locked inside yet another bracketed sub-clause, Orthofer complains that it is astonishing and sad that the war "is still a major (and I mean major) one in contemporary Iranian literature." Astonishing and sad!? What is astonishing and sad -- beyond the fact that such a well-respected blog still cannot use ellipses properly -- is that such an ignorant statement should occur so casually.

During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War -- backed and extended by the US for numerous geopolitical reasons -- "perhaps as many as a million people died, many more were wounded, and millions were made refugees" (Iran Chamber Society). That it continues to be a focus for Iranian literature, a mere twenty years after it ended, is hardly astonishing and sad. Indeed, with a belligerent USA still stalking the region, it is entirely understandable. And nor is it particular different to "our" own obsessions. The UK book market continues to be flooded with books, fiction and non-fiction, besotted with both world wars; a growing stack of 9/11 novels infects the US. Astonishing and sad, then, that Iran's literary preoccupations are not seen as being remarkably similar to our own.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 21 September 2009

'Cities' by Robert Kelly

From Steven Fama's blog the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica (don't blame me for the daft name!):

... despite, or maybe because of it ambiguous character given its prose, and somewhat occult status, Cities – a most fantastic work by Robert Kelly – ought to be celebrated as poetry, and more widely read. And thus the mission here today, in the glade: to show and tell a bit about Cities and its prose poetry, and perhaps encourage some to go out a find it (more...)

Steven suggests that Robert's Cities is hard to find -- the limited edition is, but the piece was reprinted in A Transparent Tree which should be a little easier to get your hands on.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, poetry

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Thursday 17 September 2009

Point of view

Interesting post from Andrew Seal on point of view:

At times, I think David Foster Wallace actually takes his reader in the opposite direction: convincing them that they're reading a 'highbrow' modernist novel par excellence, where the question of point-of-view is always problematic and the reader mustn't fall into the trap of identifying with one point-of-view. And then he basically makes you commit to a point-of-view: I question whether anyone can get through it (and enjoy it) without doing so. And that doesn't mean that you pick a character to empathize with for the rest of the novel, but that you have to create a position of provisional coherence from which to view the events and data of the novel and process them—whether that is identified with a character or with the author or with some external position. So by the end, you're just reading a very complex "middlebrow" novel (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, literary criticism

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Wednesday 16 September 2009

Mitchelmore on Bunny Munro

Steve reviews Nick Cave's new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro:

Nick Cave's new novel is an impressive performance. Two features stand out. The first is the pleasure it takes in words and vivid descriptions: Bunny Munro is a man of the world, a cosmetics salesman on the move; he's always swigging from a bottle of whiskey and emitting "furious tusks of smoke" from his Lambert & Butler cigarettes. It's a lifestyle that takes its toll: he eyes are always "granulated", yet he maintains his appearance: the curl of hair on his forehead is always "pomaded". In order to read his watch, Bunny "trombones" his wrist out of its sleeve. And Bunny never closes his mobile, he "clamshells it shut" or "castaneted the phone". Of course, this is very reminiscent not of Cave's darkly romantic songs but of Martin Amis in his moneyed pomp. Had Bunny Munro contemplated a haircut, he would no doubt instead have considered "a rug rethink". This is why The Death of Bunny Munro has a conspicuously anachronistic quality (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book news

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Monday 14 September 2009

'Wandering with Robert Walser' online

Thanks to Dave Lull for pointing me to this from Sam Jones:

A few weeks ago, my fellow literary obsessive and author of the wonderful blog Vertigo shared some interesting news. Bob Skinner, who began an English-language translation of Wandering with Robert Walser long before Smyth and I began ours, has shared his translation online. This is the first time that Seelig’s book has ever been available in English in (what seems to be) its entirely. Do check it out. It’s a bit of a revelation for Walser lovers.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Thursday 10 September 2009

Review of new Josipovici

The Jewish Chronicle offers the first review of After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici's two new novels in one (very handsome) volume (via This Space):

Dissatisfaction is a peculiarly middle-class indulgence. A life that from the outside appears perfect — moderate success, sufficient income, a loving family — can from feel from within claustrophobic and merely adequate, plagued by thoughts of the successes unachieved, the ones that got away, and a nagging lack of purpose.

Gabriel Josipovici’s two new novellas — each barely over 130 pages and issued together under one, elegant cover — both deal with this quiet despair of the bourgeoisie (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, gabriel josipovici

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Thursday 10 September 2009

Cambridge University Library attempt to acquire Sassoon's papers

Interesting news via Booksurfer: "Cambridge University Library have launched a fund-raising campaign to acquire the archive of First world War poet Siegried Sassoon's personal papers. These include a draft of the controversial anti-war statement A Soldier's Declaration. The archive is comprised of seven boxes of material, among which are 'Sassoon's journals, pocket notebooks compiled on the Western Front, poetry books and photographs, love-letters to his wife Hester, and letters sent to Sassoon by writers and other distinguished figures'."

The Soldier's Declaration, made in July 1917 was "an act of wilful defiance of military authority. Sent to his commanding officer, it states his refusal to return to duty and his belief that the war, which he "entered as a war of defence and liberation", had become "a war of aggression and conquest" which was being "deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it."

The declaration was subsequently read in the House of Commons on July 30, and caused a storm which only abated after fellow officer Robert Graves persuaded the authorities to send Sassoon to Craiglockhart Hospital for the treatment of shell-shock.

The power of Sassoon's statement resonates as powerfully now as when first written:

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry, politics

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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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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

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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Friday 15 May 2009

Wee weekly round-up

Before I rest up for the weekend, a coupla things to draw your attention to:

• Steve provides us with "a selection that might be called The Best of This Space"
• The Armies by Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (as you know, I was judge, and I'm still scratching my head as to how come Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18 wasn't even shortlisted!)
• interviews over on The Book Depository site with historian Andy Beckett ("The British 70s are full of political surprisess if you make yourself look at them with fresh eyes... the Labour vote in the 1979 election actually went up, especially among wealthier voters -- the idea that the behaviour of the unions sent the electorate running screaming away from Labour is a myth...") and Thomas Traherne expert Denise Inge ("Readers with imagination fall for Traherne. He takes you on unexpected interior journeys into desire and lack, infinity, time and eternity. Reading him isn't always easy since the language of his day is so different from ours and his world view sometimes challenges the assumptions of our time, but he will thrill, surprise and exhaust you...")
• a brief interview with Béla Tarr
• trailer for new Godard film Socialisme

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere, film, IFFP09, personal, politics

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Tuesday 28 April 2009

On Human Smoke again

In Max Dunbar's response to Stephen Mitchelmore's critique of Max's review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke (yes, the internet is an echo-chamber!), Max quotes Steve's summing-up of some of the parallels between World War Two and the Iraq war. The parallels are important -- and it is especially important to draw attention to them to someone who suppported the slaughter in Iraq, as Max did.

Max quips that "it may stun Mitchelmore to know that the facts around Western support for Saddam, and the true motives behind the 2003 invasion, are available outside the Medialens chatboards." Well, indeed. But there is an interesting slippage when Max continually suggests that, with regard to that invasion, and to WW2, "it’s outcomes, not motives" that matter. This is, of course, a very convenient way to forget -- to ignore the history of -- how and why wars occur, how we got into Iraq, how the invasion was sold to us, and how those who bought the lies that created the conditions that allowed for invasion further communicated those lies to their own constituencies. This is very similar to WW2. The myth, so often told that very many people do believe it, is that the Allies were White Knights who came to the defence of the Jews. Are we to forget that that is a lie because "it’s outcomes, not motives" that matter? Because saving the Jews became the post-facto justification for the Allies war to prevent German imperial ambitions, are we to forget the anti-semitic nature of much Anglo-American domestic discourse in the 20s and 30s (and beyond)? Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the outcome of the Anglo-American adventure in Iraq has been chaos and death on a huge scale. If "it’s outcomes, not motives" that matter then the outcome here has been catastrophic for ordinary Iraqis.

Mitchelmore, we are told, "upbraids" Max:

... for using the term 'lazy moral equivalence': which is no surprise, as it's a technique he's fond of using. Thus: 'The recent invasions by US and UK forces are direct equivalents of the Nazi assaults on Poland and Russia'.

But as Steve makes very, very clear in his example (which Max does not quote in full): "The recent invasions by US and UK forces are direct equivalents of the Nazi assaults on Poland and Russia in that they violate the sixth Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention." A factual equivalency then, not a moral one.

Max jokes that those who supported the slaughter in Iraq don't bear any responsibility for what has happened there ("I suppose that's for the tribunal to decide when we are all shipped off to the Hague"). Well, sadly, those who clamour for war from the safety of their front rooms don't have to take responsibility for their words, but they should be reminded that they help create the conditions that make war acceptable and that they thus bear some of the responsibilty for the death and destruction that war brings. It might be a laughing matter for Max, but I reserve the right not only to find it far from funny, but to find such a political position morally reprehensible.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, politics

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Thursday 02 April 2009

More from Mitchelmore on TKO

Now that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is all but decided (see details about the shortlist here) I'm feeling the need to opinionate so, next week, I'll try to pick up the blogging baton again (not least because I want to write about the IFFP09 shortlist)...

In the meantime, Mr Mitchelmore is in superb form opinionating once again about Littell's The Kindly Ones:

The Kindly Ones is perhaps the first novel I have read and felt the need to write about before any hype kicked in. Had it been another, quieter publication, such as Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee or Thomas Glavinic's Night Work, then the review itself would have been enough. All three novels, however different and however removed from the vicious modernist circle familiar to this blog, prompted long attention because they opened a space making narrative possible, even necessary. Or, to put it another way, the space became palpable only through writing like this. Each review was an attempt to make this space clear and thereby to ease future readers into a different kind of reading than that practised elsewhere (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, IFFP09, personal

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Wednesday 18 March 2009

Thoughts on Stephen Crane

Gabriel Josipovici enthusiastically mentioned reading Stephen Crane in last year's Books of the Year symposium here at ReadySteadyBook: "what a great writer he was! Not just The Red Badge, which is indeed one of the great books about war, up there with The Iliad and War and Peace, even though it is less than a hundred and fifty pages long, but also such short stories as The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel. In fact everything he touched he turned to gold."

Where Gabriel goes we follow; and Richard is already on the trail:

I was struck by the fact that Crane was born November 1, 1871. That is, four months after Marcel Proust (born July 10, 1871). Younger than Proust! In my mind, where Proust feels present, his concerns relevant, Crane has always seemed locked in the dusty past -- not only were some of his writings required reading in grade school, but the subject of his most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage, is the Civil War. His association with this war is so complete, I think, that it has only served to reinforce the sense I had of him belonging to a much earlier period than he does. In truth, of course, Crane's realism was innovative in its time, and I can see now that it stands as a precursor to the writing of some of the historical Modernists, Hemingway in particular (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, gabriel josipovici

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Tuesday 03 March 2009

Nomadic Nomadics

Celan-translator, poet and essayist, Pierre Joris has moved his Nomadics blog. You can now found him at pierrejoris.com/blog/

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry

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Tuesday 03 March 2009

James Wood's Best Books Since 1945 (circa 1994)

Mark Sarvas has been sent a PDF of an article James Wood wrote about fifteen years ago listing out what Wood then considered to be the best books since 1945. Mark has reproduced the list, amongst other reasons...

... as a corrective of its own to some of the foolishness that has cropped up around Wood of late. He certainly doesn't need me to defend him but this list should give the lie to the popular cliche of Wood as the hidebound dean of realism who thinks fiction stopped with Flaubert. The list appears in its entirety after the jump, typed up exactly as it ran (with its idiosyncrasies), but I think you'll find some surprises. Pynchon! Barthelme! DeLillo! And quite a few others. (More...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, literary criticism

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Thursday 26 February 2009

Orwell Prize for political blogs

The longlist for the Orwell Prize for political blogs has been announced. The best political blog out there, Lenin's Tomb (whose latest post is a review of Badiou's The Meaning of Sarkozy) is not longlisted.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, politics

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Tuesday 24 February 2009

The Letters of Samuel Beckett

Mr Mitchelmore tell us that:

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 are exceeding even my high expectations. Above all the gift these letters offer is the chance to follow a young writer as he seeks a way forward, finding glimpses of a path in both writing, music and painting. In July 1937, Beckett responded to Axel Kaun, who worked for Kafka's publisher Rowohlt Verlag and had suggested that he translate a German poet. Beckett declines but doesn't stop there. He complains of finding writing in formal English "more and more difficult, even pointless" (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, samuel beckett

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Tuesday 10 February 2009

TRE Prime

Dan Green's The Reading Experience blog has "just recently passed its fifth anniversary, and to mark this occurence [Dan has] created a new site, called TRE Prime":

TRE Prime... features past posts from The Reading Experience, selected and arranged in order from the earliest posts I'd like to highlight to the most recent. If you access the site, you will find that these posts appear both unsorted on the main page and arranged into categories (links provided on the right), each containing a thread of posts related to that subject.

This site might be called a "best of" blog, although I really see it as an opportunity to identify the main subjects and concerns The Reading Experience has explored and to show how these concerns have been developed, restated, and modified over the course of the blog's existence. Each of the categories could to some extent be taken as separate chapters in a larger cybertext that isThe Reading Experience, at least in this circumscribed and idealized form.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 09 February 2009

Marcel Aymé

Via the increasingly useful Alma Books Bloggerel:

Marcel Aymé, virtually unknown in the English-speaking world these days, is also to some extent not appreciated at his just value in France, where – although some of his short stories and children’s writing are considered undisputed classics – the rest of his considerable body of fiction and drama is now essentially ignored. He was born in rural Burgundy in 1902, spending his childhood there before moving to Paris to become a journalist. His first novel Brûlebois was published in 1927 to critical acclaim, and his follow-up, La Table aux crevés, won the prestigious Prix Renaudot two years later, but it was with 1933’s La Jument verte that his fame became widespread...

Aymé’s 1941 novel La Belle Image (which has recently been published for the first time in English, as Beautiful Image, by Pushkin Press [beautifully translated by our good friend Sophie Lewis]) uses a similar technique: its protagonist, a successful married businessman, suddenly finds out that his appearance has been transformed into that of darkly handsome stranger. This leads him to observe his friends and family as an outsider and, among other things, to seduce his own wife – revelatory experiences which lead him to question his former life of comfort and elevated social standing (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Monday 02 February 2009

Spurious on Bolaño's 2666

Spurious writes about thinking about writing about Bolaño's 2666:

I look at my notes, wondering what I was thinking. Slog, says one. Wonders on every page, says another. Whimsically mad, says another. Keeping the wheels turning. Logorrhea - no doubt spelt wrong, and didn't I mean graphomania? But who knows what I meant. And then, literary splendour, with a dash to V. What could V mean? Ah yes, the fifth part of the book. And literary splendour, which must have been double edged. Splendour, to be sure, incidents and panoramas, wonders and splendours, all that: but of a literary kind. It was all too terribly literary: was that what I meant?

But then I enjoyed V, part five, I have to admit that. Part IV, The Part About the Crimes, was terribly boring. It must explain the word slog, and perhaps the misspelt and misused logorrhea. Admit it, you liked part five. Another note: V madness of narrative. And another V: narrative rush, anxious - where's it going?, almost too fast, almost outracing the narration. And then, so much happens anything could happen (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Thursday 29 January 2009

Best Translated Book of 2008

I should have linked to this earlier, Three Percent's Best Translated Book of 2008: Fiction Finalists:

• Tranquility by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein (Archipelago) (Overview)
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) (Overview)
• Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions) (Overview)
• Voice Over by Céline Curiol, translated from the French by Sam Richard (Seven Stories) (Overview)
• The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans, translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke (Overlook) (Overview)
• Yalo by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux (Archipelago) (Overview)
• Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions) (Overview)
• Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge, translated from the French by Richard Greeman (New York Review Books) (Overview)
• Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis (Melville House) (Overview)
• The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (New York Review Books) (Overview)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere, language

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Thursday 29 January 2009

Interview with Charlotte Mandell

Maitresse interviews Charlotte Mandell:

The translator Charlotte Mandell did the heavy lifting for two of the more exciting imports from France: this year's The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, and next year's Zone, by Mathias Enard.  Mandell, who lives in Upstate New York, is also the virtuoso translator behind Proust's The Lemoine Affair, a collection of literary parodies of writers like Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourt Brothers, and Saint-Simon (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 20 January 2009

"On the 20th of January Lenz was walking through the mountains"

Via the KR blog:

Although Richard Sieburth’s magnificent new rendering (available from the essential Archipelago Books) omits the date (following the latest scholarship), I still read Büchner’s unassailable Lenz every January 20th. As does the wonderful poet/translator Andrew Shields, with whom I share a favorite passage in Lenz – but could anyone really have another? Not Paul Celan, for one. Like Shields, I always follow up with Celan’s Meridian speech, which stands with Lincoln’s “Gettysburg” as an address for the ages, and is in some sense a midrash on Lenz’s famous first line (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 20 January 2009

Beckett links

Scars of Différance (which says its "project is to create an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieuan sociology") provides a nice pile of Beckett links (thanks Steve).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy, samuel beckett

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Thursday 15 January 2009

Some thoughts on the (historical) novel and its definition

As noted earlier, Richard wonders "why we insist on having the word 'novel' encompass so much. Why must it be asserted that the books written by Sebald and Bolaño 'are certainly' novels? Are they?"

Well, the actual is real and all that, so, yes, Sebald and Bolaño's books are novels because that is what we call "a fictitious prose narrative of book length"! I don't think we should worry too much about how restrictive the term might be because, in practice, it has always been a wonderfully capacious and imprecise thing. And a perenially contested term to boot: indeed, each and every new work of art potentially contests it... 

According to my Shorter OED, short stories of the type contained in works like the Decameron and Heptameron were being called novels by 1566. By 1643 the definition had morphed to be "a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length, in which characters and actions representative of real life are portrayed in a plot of more or less complexity."

What is going on in writing in English over this time? Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, (written circa 1470) was published in 1485, Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia in 1581, the first English translation of Don Quixote was 1620, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress 1678, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe 1719, Swift's Gulliver's Travels 1726 and Samuel Richardson's Pamela 1740 (dates thanks to Wikipedia). Sterne's Tristram Shandy first appeared in 1759 two years after the OED says the word novel was being used to describe "this type of literature."

The problem with the term, as Richard points out, following Josipovici, is that the Victorian novel became fused and confused with all that fiction could be ("Josipovici has argued that the narrative mode of the 19th century novel became so dominant... that we expect it to hold true for very different sorts of narratives") but, as we've seen, the coinage pre-dates the Victorian era by hundreds of years (Victoria reigned 1837-1901).

In The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Doody argues -- to quote the blurb -- against the "conventional view of the novel, arguing that instead of being the defining achievement of the English middle class, the novel is an older more cosmopolitan creation, a protean form that emerged from the ancient cultures of Africa, Asia and Europe." Doody says, "One of the most successful literary lies is the English claim to have invented the novel.... One of the best-kept literary secrets is the existence of novels in antiquity." Doody is arguing against Ian Watt whose influential Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957) traced the rise of the modern novel "to philosophical, economic and social trends and conditions that become prominent in the early 18th century". But we can recognise the truth in Watt's history of the modern British novel whilst accepting Doody's corrections to his parochialism: "novels" pre-date novels, considerably pre-date Victorian novels, certainly pre-date the use of the word novel in England, and have, for sure, existed in many forms in many cultures (the work of Franco Moretti, the novel as a "planetary form" and all that, is important here).

What I don't know is "why a term of art derived from the French word for 'new' under a very historically contingent set of circumstances" actually arose -- what was deemed to be so new? Presumably -- and Josipovici has argued something along these lines -- Epic poetry, mystery/miracle plays and folk tales no longer functioned as successfully as they once did and what was new was that storytelling was becoming writing. Is that right?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, history

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Thursday 15 January 2009

Why "novel"?

Dan Green and Richard Crary, and their many commenters, are discussing what the novel is and whether the term is useful/restrictive (Richard: "I've wondered why we insist on having the word "novel" encompass so much. Why must it be asserted that the books written by Sebald and Bolaño "are certainly" novels? Are they? What is a novel?").

I'll respond at the weekend, but do read both Dan and Richard's excellent posts and get involved in the discussion.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, literary criticism

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Thursday 15 January 2009

Book Cover Archive

Very good book cover porn (a "database of sortable, searchable, credited book covers") over at the Book Cover Archive -- oh, and they also have a blog (via The Book Oven).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, blogosphere, internet

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Thursday 15 January 2009

What are the coordinates of theory?

Nice post from blah-feme -- What are the coordinates of theory? (via wood s lot):

... I find myself in an ever more hostile political and epistemological environment in which the backlash against theory has not only taken up its place in those ‘post-theoretical’ rhetorics of well known well-trodden high-profile debates (Eagleton, et al) but the backlash has become absolutely generalised: to theorise, it now seems, is to leave oneself open to the distinction of mere crass generalisation.

I am, to be sure, perplexed by the wholesale academic abandonment of theory in my own discipline. But it is not localised there, of course. My discipline’s falling out of love with theory is, inevitably, a falling out of love with the idea of thought as having a kind of ‘power’ as Simon Critchley has put it. For some, the decline of philosophy into theory is the beginning of the problem, but for me that moment marked a particular fecundity in the idea that the given-ness of the world is available to radical question (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Tuesday 13 January 2009

The Post Office Girl

Tom Cunliffe reviews Stefan Zweig's The Post Office Girl:

Many thanks to Sort Of Books for publishing yet another posthumous work by Stefan Zweig - even if as in the case of The Post Office Girl, Zweig's intentions for the book were somewhat unclear. In an Afterword, the translator, William Deresiewicz, points out that Zweig "nibbled away at The Post Office Girl for years... and given that he chose his own time of death (by suicide)... it seems clear that he never managed to hammer the novel into a shape that satisfied him. Despite its less than perfect state however, we can be grateful for substantial segments of "classic Zweig". In some ways, it could be seen as a short story (although nearly 250 pages long) and that would allow us to be tolerant of its less than satisfactory ending. We could then perhaps put its incompleteness down to modernism, or to an attempt by the author to create a deliberate literary enigma (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Friday 09 January 2009

The poetics of submission

Dan Green reports that Josh Corey detects an "anti-literary" attitude behind much contemporary poetry and fiction:

We have overshot, then, the hermeneutics of suspicion that characterized "theory" in the 1970s to arrive at a poetics of suspicion: only literature that puts the very premises of the literary into question can now summon the aesthetic impact we associate with great literature.

Well, half of me wishes that Corey was -- even just empirically -- correct, but most (nearly all) contemporary fiction has been neither troubled by modernism nor postmodernism. I've called it "Victorian literature with Jamesian knobs on" and I think that gets it down pretty well. Establishment Literary Fiction is rarely characterized by a poetics of suspicion, rather it clearly evidences a poetics of submission -- submission to a particular brand of realism that thoroughly holds sway in publishing. A "postmodernist" like e.g. Salman Rushdie uses his postmodernism merely to pay lip service to the existence of the hermeneutics of suspicion, but never so that it will stop the creation of a rollicking read.

Corey, I think, is talking about a particular sub/parallel Canon of American postmodernists which the American academy has -- rightly or wrongly -- valorised. Pynchon, Delillo, Coover, Sorrentino and Barthelme produce "great literature" (books which are studied as examples of great literature in American universities, that is) and they are, indeed, postmodernists. But postmodernism was always a minority sport; sadly, what is generally called great is mind-numbingly dull.

I agree with Corey, however, in some of what he is saying: "only literature that puts the very premises of the literary into question" should be called literature. And why? Not because game-playing is a way to revivify an ossified genre, but because any work that begins already knowing how it will progress (i.e. by following the pattern of a thousand other novels that have gone before) cannot by definition be art. What is created can, doubtless, be artful, but the piece will be merely an exercise in cleverly filling in the dots, following an old pattern and, inevitably, producing yet another version of what we've all read before. Each work of art must begin with the question of how it can best express itself being right at the heart of its creation. And it must produce an answer of its own that is genuinely sufficient to itself, not an answer that is sufficient only to a question asked (and answered) previously of something else. If it doesn't do that its genre fiction, and however well-written, intelligent, moving etc. it is, it ain't literature.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, establishment_lit_fiction, literary criticism

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Thursday 08 January 2009

Paul West and J.M. Coetzee

Mark Sarvas has been watching Valkyrie (if you want to know more about the plot to assasinate Hitler, the Sunday Times recommends Valkyrie by Philipp von Boeselager, Germans Against Hitler by Hans Mommsen and Luck of the Devil by Ian Kershaw) and it brought to his mind "the related Coetzee/West contretemps of a few years back":

For those who missed it the first time, Coetzee used Paul West's novel, The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg, (he of the failed July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler upon which the film is based) as a leaping off point for Elizabeth Costello's meditation as to whether the depiction of certain kinds of evil lies beyond the boundaries of art (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Wednesday 07 January 2009

Joris on translating Celan

My friend Pierre Joris has "been working on finishing/revising/preparing [his] translation of the variorum edition of Paul Celan's Meridian Speech." Pierre is going to post "a few excerpts over the next 3 or 4 weeks" -- so keep an eye out for them. Up on his blog last week he has posted a jpg showing "some fragmentary rewriting around what poetry does..."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry

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Monday 05 January 2009

Best literature blog?

Happy new year y'all! Finding it a wee bit difficult to readjust to, you know, working and thinking and sitting still for hours on end, so it might be a bit quiet here this week. Bear with me!

Very kindly, ReadySteadyBook has been shortlisted for the 2008 Weblog Awards in the Best Literature Blog category. How nice! You can vote for RSB -- or any of the 9 other shortlisted blogs -- via the 2008 Weblog Awards website. Thanks so much!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, rsb

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Monday 29 December 2008

BritLitBlogs update

I've just added a few more blogs to BritLitBlogs. Any further additions required / deletions needed? Let me know!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Saturday 20 December 2008

Benjamin's Capitalism as Religion

Via wood s lot, a suggestive reading of Benjamin's Capitalism as Religion from Leniency. One of his commenters rightly suggests Philip Goodchild's Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety and Theology of Money as excellent follow-up reading:

Rather than the usual model of capital as abolishing or rationalising the sacred -- making everyday a workday -- Benjamin reverses this to argue that everyday is the feast day. What capitalism imposes is this unremitting requirement for its own worship without mercy. I'm reminded of Blanchot's quip that we have prisons to try to remind us that we are not all living in a prison (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Tuesday 16 December 2008

James Wood's ten best of 2008

This will be widely linked to, for sure, but here tis anyway: James Wood's Ten Favorite Books of 2008.

As you'd expect, both Netherland and The Rest is Noise get the nod, but he also gives James Kelman's Kieron Smith, Boy some deserving approbation: "challenging, late modernist, fairly unpunctuated, and written in run-on Glaswegian dialect, which must be why it has been received with indifference or hostility in America, and was ignored in Britain by this year’s middlebrow Booker Prize committee. It is Kelman’s tender evocation of his own childhood" and is his "best novel so far".

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 15 December 2008

John Pilger's Groundhog Day

A Practical Policy quotes John Pilger:

One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama? … He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, politics

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Monday 15 December 2008

Seven theses about the history of literary theory

D.G. Myers has a provocative -- if also rather silly -- pop at Theory, Seven theses about the history of literary theory, over on his excellent A Commonplace Blog. Provocative because each of the seven theses contain banalities, truisms and misapprehensions in equal measure; silly because -- well, attacking Theory (which is so capacious) in such a bluff way always strikes as fatuous. Nonetheless, the post warmed me up for the day, and you can't ask for more than that on such a frosty morning!

Myers does pull out a quote that I did very much enjoy from J.V. Cunningham who wrote:

If I read books I should know how books are made and where to find them. If I read Shakespeare I should know it may not be Shakespeare. We call the one bibliography, the other textual criticism. If I read a language I should know the language, whether it be of Tudor London or contemporary Western American. We call this philology. If what I read has any real reference I should know something of the referent. We call this history. If the referent is, in part, as it is in Lycidas, prior literature, I should know that. We call this literary history (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, literary criticism

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Friday 12 December 2008

Best of the year lists

There is a useful round-up of some of the Best of the Year lists over on Dani Torres' A Work in Progress blog. BTW, the RSB Books of the Year symposium will land in a few weeks.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, rsb

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Friday 12 December 2008

Eagleton on Milton

Milton’s republic by Terry Eagleton (via A Practical Policy):

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, poetry

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Friday 12 December 2008

Animal Farm in forty-five minutes

Flippin' heck! (I so have speed envy):

One day a reader came into the library and we got chatting about reading in general and he said that he had been on a speed reading course as he found he had lots to read and peruse during his working life and needed to get through things more quickly. This was a three day course and at the end of it they had been given Animal Farm by George Orwell as their speed reading task and he was delighted to find that he could now read it in 45 minutes. I beamed at him and said how wonderful and did not tell him that I had read it in half an hour as I did not want to upset him (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 10 December 2008

Le Clézio's lecture

I've been working away for a few days, so I'm a bit shattered. Here's another link for you whilst I recover and drink tea!

Via a reader's words:

This year’s Nobel laureate Le Clézio gives an impassioned Nobel Prize lecture, in a sense taking off from where Doris Lessing had left it last year. He quotes a passage from Stig Dagerman that influenced him as a writer and touches on many themes including a call for re- claiming the word “globalization” as well as for reclaiming a place for literature in face of the audio and visual media. Among others, he dedicates his lecture to the Mauritian Hindi writer Abhimanyu Unnuth, Qurratulain Hyder (for Aag Ka Darya) and the Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere

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Wednesday 10 December 2008

The Infusion by Léon Bloy

A Journey Round My Skull reprints The Infusion: An "Unsavory Tale" by French novelist, essayist, pamphleteer and poet Léon Bloy (translated from the French by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, first English translation).

Since the death of her husband who was killed at Champigny and whom the young man barely remembered, she had never stopped mourning, and devoted herself exclusively to the education of her son, who never left her side for so much as a day. She shrank from the idea of sending him to school and, in dread of who knows what sorts of dubious persons he might come in contact, she took the burden of his instruction entirely upon herself, until his soul had been built with bits of hers. He drew from this regimen a restless disposition and uniquely vibrant nerves, which engendered in him a sensitivity to the most ridiculous aches and pains -- but also, perhaps, to very real dangers more...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Friday 05 December 2008

Best Translated Book of 2008?

Over at Three Percent, Chad announces that after "weeks of reading, researching, voting, taking recommendations, discussing, and passionately defending, we’ve finally come up with our 25-title fiction longlist for the Best Translated Book of 2008."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Friday 05 December 2008

On Hammershøi

Via A Piece of Monologue:

Much like Edward Hopper, Vilhelm Hammershøi often paints solitary figures that appear on the brink of some kind of narrative. There is also a keen attention to light and shade in austere, minimalist spaces that are characteristic of much of Hopper's work. But, for all their similarities, the two painters are of course worlds apart. Edward Hopper is a painter of Americana, of familiar twentieth-century settings and Hollywood everyman archetypes. While Vilhelm Hammershøi often paints faceless solitary women contained within a Victorian domestic space (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, blogosphere

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Tuesday 02 December 2008

Borges' Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Via Public Poems:

Attention all Borges readers. Borges's great translator and collaborator Norman Thomas di Giovanni has recently posted up on his web-site his translation of Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one of Borges's finest fictional achievements. I can confirm that it reads beautifully.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 02 December 2008

Thoughts about philosophy and film

Last Saturday saw a great post from infinite thøught about films that reveal philosophical issues – and no, she doesn't mean the Matrix! We get a fantastic alternative must see film list where infinite mentions what sounds like an incredible Argentinian film called Mobius about a disappearing subway train. There then follows a great post about flimsiness. Flimsy is a word to be used more!

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: blogosphere, film, philosophy

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Thursday 27 November 2008

Diski on The Philosopher and the Wolf

I quite fancied reading Mark Rowlands's The Philosopher and the Wolf, but Jenny Diski has rather put me off calling it an "emotionally lamentable memoir":

Rowlands was in his twenties when he bought Brenin, a hybrid wolf-dog puppy. It was the early 1990s and he was lecturing in philosophy at Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In his spare time he hung out with the students, getting through a bottle or two of bourbon a night, playing rugby and lending Brenin to his team mates because, of all their big, bold dogs, Brenin was the best “chick magnet. In fact, they used a slightly different expression: more colourful, but not really repeatable”. There is a good deal more testosterone in this autobiography than an older cat-keeping lady can easily relate to.

More than a spitz-loving blogger can probably cope with too, then! (Fact-checking, my understanding is that Brenin, Rowlands' "dog", was actually pure wolf, or so Rowlands was assured. You can buy a wolf-dog hybrid in the States that is up to 96% wolf, but buying and selling pure wolves is illegal. Rowlands didn't know this when he bought Brenin, and says he wouldn't have cared that much anyway.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, personal, philosophy

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Friday 14 November 2008

More on Zadie's Paths

Anthony Cummins has written to me responding to the recent discusion around here on Zadie Smith. With his permission, I reproduce Anthony's email to me below:

Excuse the ramble which follows, but it's fascinating to follow the cackhanded response to Zadie Smith's superb NYRB essay via ReadySteadyBook. Via Monk's House I note: "And maybe Smith in quarreling with Netherland is quarreling in part with James Wood, from whom she has famously diverged before, and who ecstatically reviewed O'Neill in the pages of The New Yorker."

I think this is the key -- not a side issue -- in understanding what Smith's on about: "Lyrical Realism" -- an odd term she must repeat so much only because of Wood's "hysterical realism" tag; the emphasis on Flaubert, the darling of How Fiction Works; the fact that Wood effectively made the reputation of Netherland; HFW vs DFW. The NYRB already reviewed Netherland, too, when Alan Hollinghurst wrote about it the other month: how often does that happen? I reckon it's a more calculated attack on Wood and How Fiction Works than people seem to have realised.

Did you catch this interview with Robert Silvers? "'[Zadie's article is] an ambitious essay, a daring and original piece by a brilliant mind,' Silvers said. In it, she dismantles the status quo in the form of a review of two new novels - Netherland and Remainder - that she holds up as representing where the novel's been and where it's going. 'Some people will be slightly shaken,' Silvers said, with delight." Among them James Wood? It's quite curious since John Banville's moderate piece on HFW immediately precedes Smith's essay. I suspect it has something to do with heralding Smith's arrival as a Wood-status critic pre-Fail Better.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, establishment_lit_fiction, literary criticism, rsb

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Thursday 13 November 2008

Complexity and criticism

One of the things that every human being learns as they mature is that human relationships are an odd mixture of the simple and the complex. A mother is simply the person who gave birth to you. Simply? Oh my goodness no! A mother is the person who gets you going, but from whom you'll never get away, the person who gets you started, but with whom you'll never finish...

Art, too, is marked by such complexity. Kasimr Malevich's Black Square (1913) is just a painted black square, but it is also the focal point of a thousand years' worth of conversations about painting and representation, and the starting point for a thousand more conversations.

Melville's Moby-Dick, then, is just a great, big book about a whale. Or it is a kind of palimpsest of such complexity that we can and must write anything we like upon its canvas to help to explain it to ourselves. And very many of the differing literary critical strategies we might invoke will help us to explain different bits of its complexity: a Marxist reading that focusses on the experience of working on the Pequod and on slavery; a feminist reading that focusses on the lack of female characters; a religious reading alive to Melville's exquisite symbolism; a psychoanalytic reading that focusses on Ahab's mania... All can help, but none will finally pin Moby-Dick down. Indeed, the lack of success of any such critical strategies to say the final word on such a book is testimony to the wonderful ambiguity of Melville's art.

And how we feel about the book, its aesthetic effect upon us, can never be fully explained. We can use critical tools (formalist, narratological, structuralist, deconstructivist... whatever) to help us see how certain effects of the writing are achieved, but its overall aesthetic effect will remain beyond our ken (it is, in the end, an aesthetic effect on us, and we are forever just beyond our own ken). Art's effects are, finally, inexplicable. Like love, or family ties, there are explanations, but none that are fully complete.

In a post yesterday, Dan Green discusses the "descriptive mode of criticism" which he suggests is the best way "to carefully elucidate the manifest qualities of a given text." He quotes Rohan Maitzen who suggests that "one of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms." Well, that is lit crit 101. If you are reading a comic novel and not laughing something isn't right; if you are reading a book called The History of Sport and it doesn't mention football, something may well be going wrong; if you are reading a book called The History of Cricket and football isn't mentioned, don't panic.

Every novel sets up an almost Platonic ideal of itself, and you can and should be able to measure it up against itself. That might be your first evaluative move. The question here being: what is the novel trying to do/say? It would be unfair to criticise it, at this point, for not doing something it never set out to do. (You might then judge one book against another -- not unlike how in a dog show a chihuahua can be judged against a dalmation -- by seeing how well it lives up to its own ideal of itself. If the vampire novel is scarier than the comic novel is funny and you have just one prize to give, the vampire novel gets it.) But evaluation is just one task. The next question might be, how well is it saying it? This has at least two parts to it. How well is it saying it on its own terms (if it is a dialect novel, its own terms are set differently to a novel in, for instance, Standard English) and how well is saying it per se (above and beyond the dialect, how good is this?)?

But, after this, we are left with at least one other question: was it worth saying? There is, then, an evaluation that needs to be made above and beyond the individual text itself. You can, of course, choose not to make this evaluation and stay with the difficult task of carefully elucidating "the manifest qualities of a given text", but the question of what literature is remains in the air. And that question can't be answered by e.g. a tenacious new critical focus. What literature is -- like what is a mother -- might be both very complex or very simple, but -- just like a mother -- it isn't something we can easily get away from. It may simply be an Ideal, but all is measured against that Ideal whether we like it or not.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, establishment_lit_fiction, literary criticism

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Wednesday 12 November 2008

Responses to Zadie Smith

A Pragmatic Policy has an extremely bloated and yet rather dull-witted response to Zadie Smith's recent, excellent NYRB article Two Paths for the Novel. It can be enjoyed alongside a similarly uncomprehending attempt at a rejoinder, Zadie Smith’s annoying Critique of ‘Realism’ (sic!), from Nigel Beale.

There are countless non-sequitors and much out-of-place hubris in both responses, which I'll leave y'all to chew on yourselves, but I would like to respond to both parties failure to understand Smith's central point that the "perfection" of what Smith calls lyrical Realism (ELF to me) is not a good thing.

Talking about Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, Smith says, "It seems perfectly done -- in a sense that’s the problem." Neither Beale nor APP gets why this is so spot-on. Perhaps a visual analogy would help them? Artists could keep painting wonderful, detailed landscapes -- different landscapes, in competing realist styles -- but art wouldn't move forward until a dude put a bog in an art gallery and called it art or, 20-odd years later, another dude put a canvas on the floor and started dribbling paint all over it!

The Victorian novel with a few Jamesian knobs on (lyrical Realism, ELF, call it what you will) is not the only path the novel can take. Its dominance means that each year a flood of Booker-ready novels in the sclerotic genre of literary fiction are declared masterpieces. Some of them are near-perfect embodiments of the genre which their near word-perfect amanuenses have bodied forth, but that perfection pushes them far away from literature itself.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, establishment_lit_fiction

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Wednesday 12 November 2008

Critblogs again

Good sense, as ever, from Dan Green, about the lack of critical writing on the vast majority of litblogs:

In a post criticizing science fiction blogs for allowing "the SF blogosphere [to] become a venue for crassly commercial interests far more concerned with selling things than encouraging intelligent discussion," Jonathan McCalmont notes my own previous post distinguishing between "liblogs" and "critblogs" and suggests such a distinction is "more about retreating from the existing public sphere than it is about changing it."

I think he's probably right, although I would describe the effort to establish the category of "critblog" more as a separation of blog-centered critical writing from the necessarily ephemeral "daily digest" style of blogging than a full-on retreat from the "public sphere." Nevertheless, I share McCalmont's dismay that many litblogs have simply accomodated themselves to the "public sphere" of superficial literary discourse rather than continuing in the attempt to provide an alternative to that discourse. This is even more discouraging for "mainstream" literary fiction and criticism, since it gives in not merely to the commercialization McCalmont decries in the SF community but also to the unexamined assumptions and shallow thinking that make journalism-based commentary on "literary fiction" so crippling to begin with.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 12 November 2008

László Krasznahorkai at HLO

Hungarian Literature Online have two pieces on László Krasznahorkai: János Szego's review of his new (Hungarian) story collection, Seiobo járt odalent (In essence concealed, in appearance expressed; see also the Magveto publicity page), and Ottilie Mulzet's piece Asian simulacrum: The Chinese journeys of László Krasznahorkai (via the complete review).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Wednesday 12 November 2008

The Book Trib

BookTrib is a new, US-based aggregator which claims it is "the place where you can find all the book news that matters from all over the web. It’s also the home of The Great American Book Giveaway, where every week you can win books -- free books -- no strings."

At the moment, all the links on their homepage seem to be to the Complete Review's Literary Saloon, but presumably they'll get this sorted:

BookTrib is the result of our endless searching for book news, reviews, and gossip. We yearned for a single place, a starting point, where we could find all the book news as it’s updated, all the time. That’s what BookTrib is, an aggregator that gathers the best, the most outrageous, the most fun, informative, and creative blogs that relate to books and puts them all in one easy to find place.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet

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Monday 10 November 2008

Irène Némirovsky and the Death of the Critic

Via Steve, Tadzio Koelb's Irène Némirovsky and the Death of the Critic. The title rather says it all, I think.

The scope of Suite Française, had it been finished, would certainly have been remarkable, taking in the whole of the occupation, with dozens of characters, both French and German, and a storyline featuring violent murders, daring escapes, forbidden loves and more. It is not finished, however, and lasting art requires more than broad scope. Several French novels about the war have been celebrated by francophone readers but met with indifference in the English-speaking world, for example The Last of the Just by André Shwartz-Bart, a magisterial work of art and probably the best work of fiction ever written about the Shoah. Given the relative differences in popular response, we must wonder whether Suite Française would have been so favourably received in the UK had it not been for the incredible circumstances of the book’s composition, and the horrors that left it unfinished (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review

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Monday 10 November 2008

Slowness

Via So Many Books, Oxford University Press have a post on slow bloggingand, from that, a link to the Slow Blog Manifesto:

Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy. It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly, and that many thoughts are best served after being fully baked and worded in an even temperament.

Slow Blogging is speaking like it matters, like the pixels that give your words form are precious and rare. It is a willingness to let current events pass without comment. It is deliberate in its pace, breaking its unhurried stride for nothing short of true emergency. And perhaps not even then, for slow is not the speed of most emergencies, and places where beloved, reassuring speed rules the day will serve us best at those times (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 05 November 2008

FireFox 3 as blogging tool

For the more technically-minded of you lot out there... via ProBlogger, Jeff Chandler shows how FireFox 3 can be a great tool for bloggers:

If there is one thing that sets FireFox apart from any other web browser, it would have to be the third party support in the form of themes and extensions. There are so many extensions available for the browser, you can virtually do just about anything. As I become more entrenched as a blogger online, I’ve started to transform FireFox into more than just a browser,  it has become my ultimate blogging toolbox (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, technical

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Wednesday 05 November 2008

November Open Letters Monthly

The November issue of Open Letters Monthly is now available (via Readerville):

Highlights: John G. Rodwan, Jr., finds The Same Man -- David Lebedoff’s provocative double biography of Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell -- “unpalatable”; Irma Heldman finds that P. D. James’s latest -- perhaps last -- mystery novel, The Private Patient, “delivers the best that P.D. James has to give”; and Sam Sacks actually likes the Booker-Prize-winning (and, to my mind, utterly undeserving) The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet

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Thursday 30 October 2008

In honour of Charles Rosen

In November, the University of Rochester Press will publish Variations on the Canon, a collection of essays by leading musicologists in honour of Charles Rosen’s 80th birthday. The book covers a range of topics from Bach to Modernism... more over on From Beyond the Stave, the Boydell & Brewer music blog.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book news, music

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Wednesday 29 October 2008

PUP blog

Princeton University Press "is delighted to announce the inauguration of their blog. The Princeton University Press blog is a new forum that brings original content and expert commentary from our distinguished authors and editors straight to you—without the paper cuts."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 29 October 2008

Moby Lives

The Moby Lives blog is up and running once again. Welcome back!

News of The Lemoine Affair is very good to hear about.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book news

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Wednesday 29 October 2008

Apocalypse any day now!

And when you've given up puzzling over that, this far more practical website will help you decide whether you should be booking that next holiday.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: blogosphere, rsb

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Wednesday 29 October 2008

Apocalypse now!

Infinite Thought, fast becoming my favourite blog, is currently running an occasional series of some of the finest philosophers/theorists on the financial crisis. Currently unearthed are Badiou, Virilio and Jacques Alain Miller.

Also IT has been attending numerous panels and discussions on the crisis and provides a handy digest of the of the views of the likes of Chris Harman, Peter Gowan, Alex Callinicos, Alan Freeman and Robin Blackburn.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy, politics

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Monday 27 October 2008

Contra Wood: Fiction Gutted

Tony Christini has posted a PDF of Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel (thanks Steve) which is "a sustained and passionate critique of James Wood's How Fiction Works" (according to the Contra James Wood blog):

As Gideon Lewis-Kraus notes, writing in the Los Angeles Times, James Wood is a writer who matters. People read him, people of the educated, monied, controlling part of the populace. That's why it's important that what James Wood writes does not matter – in central ways. Nowhere is this more on display than in How Fiction Works, the star critic's most recent book, a truncated politically-charged though aesthetic appreciation of fiction that is spectacular in its misrepresentation of reality, or "the real, which is at the bottom of [Wood's] inquiries." Ask Wood to annotate a novel, and he provides sometimes splendid views of narrative lines by way of an at times "uncannily well-tuned ear," as Terry Eagleton notes. He is eager to discourse at length, often with quick pith, on how to strive toward reality in fiction (or criticism), reality of the profound sort, the truth, a worthy aim. Unfortunately, HFW is resolute in not accurately representing central elements of reality in both fiction and, call it, actuality, life outside fiction (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, establishment_lit_fiction, literary criticism

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Monday 13 October 2008

Dan Green, James Wood and others on Williams' Dostoyevsky

An interesting discussion is taking place over on The Reading Experience following Dan Green's provocative wee post about A.N. Wilson's review of Rowan William's new book on Dostoevsky. The discussion is marred by the aggressive and rude tone of many of the comments -- especially following James Wood's intervention. As is so often the case, the level of unmannerly boorishness exhibited by some commenters is in a direct, inverse relationship to them having anything useful, sophisticated or insightful to add to the thread.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Monday 13 October 2008

Editor's Corner

Don't forget, if it is quiet here on ReadySteadyBook you will find me blogging (posting a couple of times a day sometimes) over on The Book Depository blog Editor's Corner (RSS).

Recent highlights over at The Book Depository include:

• an interview with a rather curmudgeonly Peter Ackroyd: "I have always been interested in the spiritual wealth of London, and have written about it on numerous occasions. I do not like the term psychogeography. I prefer to call it the territorial imperative, whereby a certain patch of ground – or street, or house – actively influences the behaviour and the character of the people who inhabit it."
• a free e-book of In Stitches by Dr Nick Edwards
• Andrew Motion on poetry's primitive attractions
• Financial meltdown? book list

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, personal, the book depository

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Wednesday 08 October 2008

wood s lot is 8 (and RSB is 5)

Yesterday, Mark Wood's incomparable wood s lot announced that it is eight years old. Congratulations Mark!

I have my own little announcement too: the first incarnation of ReadySteadyBook went live in October 2003. We are five!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, rsb

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Thursday 02 October 2008

Gently Read Literature

Lots of new and interesting stuff up at Gently Read Literature, but I'm not sure the blog format really works that well with what they are doing. A good, old-fashioned website would be a better way to go, I think.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, poetry

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Wednesday 24 September 2008

Mark Sarvas on Roth's Indignation

Mark Sarvas reviews Philip Roth's Indignation:

An uncharitable interpretation would suggest that Roth is either unaware he's repeating himself or doesn't mind (or care). He has, after all, given his normally recursive tendencies an unfettered hand in his last few books: From the conclusion of the Zuckerman saga in Exit Ghost to the conclusion of the saga of the body in Everyman to the mining, once again, of his childhood in The Plot Against America, Roth has scarcely stepped away from himself. But perhaps the counterfactual structure of The Plot Against America suggests a more charitable reading of Indignation as something of an anti-history itself. The self-righteous, unyielding Marcus Messner can stand in for any number of earlier Roth heroes, and perhaps Indignation -- the song will have a chilling relevance for Marcus -- is meant to be read as a consideration of what might have happened had Portnoy or Zuckerman or Sabbath (or Roth) not had their hour upon the stage. This seems in keeping with Indignation's stated theme, adumbrated in The Plot Against America: namely the great reverberations of seemingly insignificant choices. Roth, it seems, has discovered chaos theory, but, having done so, delivers a disappointingly heavy-handed treatment of his material.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Wednesday 24 September 2008

Ian Sinclair on Berger's From A to X

Via A Practical Policy, I note Ian Sinclair reviewing John Berger's From A to X:

Ultimately, though, this is a disappointing and strangely unmoving read. The limits of the novel’s unusual structure are often painfully clear - there is a complete lack of narrative tension and regular, awkward passages that are clearly written for the reader’s benefit, rather than the intimate thoughts of separated loved ones.

In addition, A’ida’s letters, which are supposed to be profound musings on life, longing and resistance, often come across as embarrassingly pretentious waffle (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Tuesday 23 September 2008

Blanchot links

Heap load of Blanchot links over at wood s lot yesterday.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, maurice blanchot

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Friday 19 September 2008

Beckett and B.S. Johnson

Edmond Caldwell, over at The Chagall Position, on B.S. Johnson's relationship with Beckett:

In Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe tells how Johnson got to meet his hero, Samuel Beckett, in Paris in 1966. Johnson had already been sending the older writer what Coe describes as “fan letters” as well as copies of his first couple of books, and as a result of this first meeting Beckett became an even more important figure to Johnson. They would meet on further occasions over the subsequent years, to “drink whiskey and play billiards together” whenever Johnson went to Paris, and they exchanged letters and postcards in between times. On Beckett’s side these were invariably rather “brief and functionally worded,” Coe reports, and although the relationship was clearly a significant prop to Johnson’s morale Coe is agnostic about Beckett’s investment in it beyond hazarding the opinion that there was probably more to it than mere “writerly courtesy.” Beckett certainly proved ready to give practical support to Johnson on several key occasions, including writing a letter to a recalcitrant editor testifying to Johnson’s talent, sponsoring Johnson for an Arts Council grant, and even helping him out financially. In 1973, however – a bad year generally for Johnson – he found the limit of Beckett’s generosity when he used a flattering remark from their private correspondence as a jacket blurb for Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry without Beckett’s permission. Beckett replied with an angry letter that seemed to have brought an end to their relations. On a Sunday night in the November of that same year, Coe reports that Johnson tried unsuccessfully to reach Beckett on the phone a number of times. The next night Johnson successfully opened his arteries in the bathtub.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, samuel beckett

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Wednesday 17 September 2008

Thomas Glavinic's Night Work

Steve is at it again: excellent review of Thomas Glavinic's Night Work over at This Space.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Tuesday 16 September 2008

László Krasznahorkai interview

There isn't anything anywhere any more: an interview with László Krasznahorkai (author of The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War) over at Hungarian Literature Online (via wood s lot).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 16 September 2008

Sony Reader: gateway drug?

Just like Scott Pack (indeed, in exactly the manner he describes, including nice email from Huw from i-level), I have received a freebie Sony Reader. I understand Steve and DGR are each getting one too.

Well, it's very nice! Free stuff is always nice. As a device it is pleasant enough but, I have to admit, I'm a little underwhelmed: I can't read under my favourite reading light because of reflected screen glare; page turn is slow -- and one forgets that with real book one flicks a lot e.g. to see how many pages before the chapter ends thus whether to read on or not; also, reading two books simultaneously, only the last one you were reading is conveniently saved, you have to search for other one (I think); and the alphabetical of authors is so wrong -- Melville is under H for Herman!!

However, it is very slim and tidy, and having a hundred-odd books within such a neat, wee package is very exciting. I'll live with it for a bit and report back anon.

Personally, I think e-readers represent a cul-de-sac technology: they'll go off on their own merry way for a bit, improve screen and e-ink technology, iron out their other glitches, and get really good at what they do -- and then the technology will be bundled back into the third or fourth generation i-phones and their competitors. The standalone e-reading device is only ever going to be a minorty-interest toy. However, if good e-reading technology is bundled back into mainstream devices (notebook laptops and phones) I can see it acting as a gateway drug that might lead some innocent young thing from the relative safety of reading on a screen to the hardcore activity of reading actual, real books. Too much hot air has been guffed about e-readers killing books -- I think they might lead a new generation back to them.

Update: Rob over at SnowBlog has some interesting things to say about the device too.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, technical

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Friday 12 September 2008

Inequality -- our special relationship

It’s been a week of inequality. First off, I finished Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s Unjust Rewards - one of the most compelling political books of the year. The magnitude of inequality across Britain is extraordinary, the level of self-denial by the rich disgusting - and next time someone mutters something about dole scroungers to you, simply reel off the figures in here about how much tax dodging the rich do.

What’s this got to with the world of books? Well, this may be an unfair connection but with the dreadful levels of literacy of the young working class you can’t help but think that all the World Book Days won’t make an ounce of difference compared to what could be done simply providing enough funding for schools, and for pre-school help, to teach kids to read.

Secondly, Mark and I went to hear Joe Bageant talking about his new book Deer Hunting With Jesus at the Royal Festival Hall. Eloquent and fascinating, he warned about the disconnection between middle class liberals and an increasingly impoverished American working class and how the Republicans had filled the space left. Although the (mainly middle class) audience were anxious that the American poor should vote in their own interests and for Obama, it was oddly refreshing to hear an American progressive sceptical about what Obama would be able to do for them anyway. I paraphrase, but Bageant’s pessimistic view is that the US needs to reach apocalypse before it wakes up. Check out his blog.

Also at London's Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday 17th September, Barbara Ehrenreich is talking with Polly Toynbee about the great wealth divide in America.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: authors, blogosphere, politics

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Friday 05 September 2008

Notebook porn -- beyond the Moleskine

Stationery love: notebooks notebooks notebooks! And yet more at blackcover.net. (Via Scott.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, blogosphere

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Friday 05 September 2008

Mike Leigh demolition job

I’m a bit slow on this but The Impostume’s demolition of Mike Leigh is superb, particularly on the role of gender. I love a thoroughly vicious polemic, me!

Check out also the responses from K-punk and Infinite Thought.

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: blogosphere, film

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Wednesday 03 September 2008

Sebald's "blurbing"

Vertigo on Sebald's "blurbing":

In the August 15, 2008 New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio wrote about the business of blurbing, that “tangled mass of friendships, rivalries, favors traded and debts repaid, not always in good faith.”  Recently, Fourth Estate, a HarperCollins (UK) imprint, published a book by Philip Hoare called Leviathan - with an approving quote by W.G. Sebald. Since Sebald died in 2001, I was instantly curious (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, w g sebald

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Wednesday 27 August 2008

Our Horses in Egypt wins prize

Best news I had on returning from my holiday was that Rosalind Belben's wonderful Our Horses in Egypt has won the 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

More on this over at This Space where Steve calls for the reissuing of Rosalind's "remarkable earlier novels Dreaming of Dead People (1979) and Is Beauty Good (1989)." Here, here!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere

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Tuesday 05 August 2008

Schopenhauer: On Noise

Via The Rock Blogger: "A quietly breathtaking video that features a reading of Schopenhauer's writings on noise and the determent of thought in the modern world. The audio is paired with stunning images from the film Koyaanisqatsi which uses time-lapse photography to reveal the almost computerized flow of bodies within a massive city." The excerpts are from Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism, read by D.E. Wittkower, with the soundtrack coming from Richard Wagner's Rheingold.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Monday 04 August 2008

Dan Green reviews James Wood

The latest issue of Open Letters Monthly is online featuring an excellent review of James Wood's How Fiction Works from Dan Green:

Ultimately the most disconcerting thing about How Fiction Works, and about James Wood’s criticism in general, is that while Wood on the one hand expresses near-reverence for the virtues of fiction, the terms in which he judges the value of fiction as a literary form implicitly disparages it. He doesn’t want to let fiction be fiction. Instead, he asks that it provide some combination of psychological analysis, metaphysics, and moral instruction, and assumes that novelists are in some way qualified to offer these services. He abjures them to avoid “aestheticism” (too much art) and to instead be respectful of “life.”

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Thursday 31 July 2008

Vila-Matas interview

Orbis Quintus has posted up a "choppily machine translated" of a short interview with Enrique Vile-Matas (originally, in Spanish, from Milenio).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 29 July 2008

The Quarterly Conversation

The Summer 2008 edition of The Quarterly Conversation is up online -- and the site has a neat new look and feel (and RSS feed). Particularly noteworthy is the interview with Christophe Claro author of Madman Bovary (recently reviewed here on ReadySteadyBook).

As most of you will know, The Quarterly Conversation is the brainchild of Scott Esposito. Something I should've mentioned previously is Scott's excellent review of J.J. Long's W.G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, w g sebald

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Tuesday 29 July 2008

Misconceptions about Blake

Out of the Woods Now finds that Northrop Frye is brilliant at confronting misconceptions about William Blake:

[I]t is only by cutting out two-thirds of Blake's work that [one] will be able to wedge the rest of it in with that of the minor pre-Romantics (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, poetry

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Tuesday 29 July 2008

New Sebald poetry: Über das Land und das Wasser

Via Vertigo: W.G. Sebald’s German publishing house Hanser is announcing that a new book of his poetry will be out September 10, 2008. Called Über das Land und das Wasser:Ausgewählte Gedichte 1964-2001, it’s a 120-page volume edited by Sven Meyer (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry, w g sebald

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Monday 28 July 2008

The search for gravity

Mr Mitchelmore ponders the use of the word literary and wonders what is happening:

Last month, there was a puzzling story summary in The Guardian: "Lisa Jewell wins top prize at awards set up to rebrand chick lit and bolster its literary credentials". How, I wonder, can a prize bolster a genre's literary credentials? No doubt the word is meant as a loose definition of serious fiction, and a prize surely affords that; yes, even the Melissa Nathan Award for comedy romance. "Serious" is also loosely-defined: serious subject matter, serious attention, serious sales. But shouldn't "literary" mean more than that? Or rather, don't those who use this troublesome word imply that it means more? Perhaps not. Yet, when ever I read such articles, I smell anguish; a hunger for elusive gravity (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Thursday 24 July 2008

Beckett's voice

Jim Murdoch:

Like George Orwell before him, Samuel Beckett had a strong aversion to being filmed or even having his voice recorded...

You might imagine that Beckett's reluctance to be interviewed came as a result of the overnight fame he achieved after Waiting for Godot but this is not the case. It is a little known fact that an abridged version of the play was first broadcast on French radio. Beckett had the opportunity to say a few words before the play went out but preferred to send a polite note that Roger Blin read out on his behalf. I find it amusing that the opening words of that statement were: "I do not know who Godot is," something he continually had to restate for the rest of his life (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, samuel beckett

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Thursday 24 July 2008

Diski on Sleep

Nice diary piece from Jenny Diski in the London Review of Books (via Zembla):

Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness. One of my earliest memories of sensual pleasure (though there must have been earlier, watery ones) is of lying on my stomach in bed, the bedtime story told, lights out (not the hall, leave the door open, no, more than that), the eiderdown heavy and over my head, my face in the pillow, adjusted so that I had just enough air to breathe. I recall how acutely aware I was of being perfectly physically comfortable, as heimlich as I ever had been or ever would be, and no small part of the comfort was the delicious prospect of falling slowly into sleep. Drifting off. Moving off, away, out of mindfulness. Leaving behind. Relaxing into hypnagogia (a condition I may always have known about and desired, if not been able to name), anticipating the blurring of consciousness.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet

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Wednesday 23 July 2008

Calder on Beckett

John Calder at Textualities (via Lee):

I feel that Beckett's thinking has been misrepresented. That's one reason I wrote The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. At one Beckett conference in America I mentioned Beckett's view, expressed in Worstword Ho, that one reason for human existence is that pain should exist. And one professor actually said, 'I can't teach that to my students, I'd lose my job!' There may be many people who believe that while pain surrounds us all the time it is somehow constructive to try to ignore it. Beckett doesn't. His thinking is very close to Schopenhauer's in this, although I think by the time he discovered him he'd already come to the same conclusions. Schopenhauer thinks that everything is caused by a kind of Will: Nature has a Will that for him is evil, the cause of suffering. Standard religions - not so much Hinduism or Buddhism - of course, deny this. Beckett asks deeply searching questions about conventional beliefs. Why should a god want to be worshipped, admired, praised? All we're doing is replacing a parental figure with a god: Please, daddy, give me this.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, samuel beckett

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Monday 21 July 2008

B.S. Johnson again, but this time with pictures!

Another review of B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, but this time from Caustic Cover Critic so, you know, you get pictures of the box too!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Thursday 17 July 2008

Additions to BritLitBlogs

I've added a few more blogs to BritLitBlogs today: go see.

Oh, also, if you have a British-based literary blog (no author blogs, thank you!) and you aren't on the list -- get in touch.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Thursday 17 July 2008

The author's death

Reginald Shepherd thinks about authorship with Barthes and Foucault:

For us, the idea of the text and the idea of the author are inseparable. This has not always been the case, nor need it continue to be: the author is only one possible specification of the subject. “The author-function is not universal or constant through all discourse” (What Is an Author?, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p.125). Not only has the importance of the attribution of a given text to a specific subject varied widely from one historical period and/or discursive field to another, but in many discursive fields (the oral tradition of ballad and folk-tale, for instance) there can be no attribution of a particular text to an individual author. We think of a discrete text as invariably produced by a discrete author, but many texts are what might be called negotiated texts, the products of far more numerous and disparate determinations than are taken into account in the blanket application of the author concept as causal or explanatory more...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, literary criticism

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Tuesday 15 July 2008

Simon Appleby’s review of War plc

Neat wee review of War plc: The Rise of the New Corporate Mercenary over on the bookgeeks blog:

If the Reagan / Thatcher era of the 80s got us accustomed to one paramount concept, it was that of privatisation - outsourcing, selling on, hiving off - and very few things were exempt, from health-care to education, personnel to transport. We became used to the involvement of private companies in what was previously seen the business of the state, and Stephen Armstrong’s compelling book documents the logical extension of that ethos in to the privatisation of war and armed protection, enabled by the end of the Cold War and the resulting ‘peace dividend’ that made for much smaller national armed forces.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review

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Tuesday 15 July 2008

Loving Orlando

"For many Woolfians, Orlando is one of our most-loved, rather than most-loathed, of Woolf’s novels..." Lots and lots of Orlando links over on Blogging Woolf.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, virginia woolf

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Thursday 10 July 2008

Complexity award: The Warwick Prize for Writing

The University of Warwick has launched a £50,000 writing prize, but the best part is that our good friend Stephen Mitchelmore, ReadySteadyBook-contributor, blogger at the peerless This Space, has been asked to be one of the judges:

How does writing evolve? Where is its moving edge? Is all writing at its very best a type of creative writing? To explore these questions and to identify excellence and innovation in new writing The University of Warwick is today launching the £50,000 Warwick Prize for Writing.

This substantial prize stands out as an international and cross-disciplinary award. It will be given biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in the English language, in any genre or form. The theme will change with every prize: the 2009 theme is Complexity.

China Miéville, award-winning writer of what he describes as weird fiction, will chair the panel of five judges. Other judges include mathematician Professor Ian Stewart and literary blogger Stephen Mitchelmore. A longlist of 15 to 20 titles will be announced in October 2008 followed by a shortlist of six titles in January 2009. The winner will be announced in February 2009 in Warwick.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere, rsb

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Thursday 10 July 2008

More on Kafka's "new" papers

I mentioned yesterday that some papers of Kafka had been newly discovered. There is much more on this at the Diary Junction blog, including this nugget about Max Brod:

Interestingly, however, Brod was also a keen diarist, and his diaries formed part of the estate left to [his secretary Ilse Esther Hoffe]. According to Haaretz, a German publisher, Artemis and Winkler, paid Hoffe a five-figure advance for Brod’s diaries in the 1980s, but never received them. In 1993, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Hoffe had removed the Brod diaries from her apartment and transferred them to a safe at a bank in Tel Aviv, where they remain to this day. Artemis and Winkler is now owned by a large publisher, apparently, who is still negotiating access to the diaries. They are thought to contain intimate details about Brod’s life, and may well provide interesting information on Kafka’s life.

Oh, and Zadie Smith has an essay on Kafka in the New York Review (via Conversational Reading).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, franz kafka

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Monday 07 July 2008

Anderson on Baker's Human Smoke

whoeverfightsmonsters brings my attention to the "final words from Sam Anderson’s online review of Human Smoke in the New York Magazine":

To dismiss Baker’s project as a failed work based on the traditional criteria of history writing, however, is to misunderstand its actual purpose and power—and also to underestimate the good sense of the average reader. No one is likely to mistake Human Smoke for a comprehensive scholarly history of the war. It’s an auto-didact’s record of his own obsessive, subjective research. It devotes generous airtime to characters who tend to get excluded from popular history (secretaries, pacifist students, journalists), excavates great lost quotes ('What is the difference between throwing 500 babies into a fire and throwing fire from aeroplanes on 500 babies? There is none'), and powerfully questions canonical events based on carefully identified sources. As in all of Baker’s work, the strength of Human Smoke comes from the defamiliarizing charge it brings to a familiar subject. Its unorthodox form allows it to capture, with brutal efficiency, the daily texture of the war—the suffering, the confusion on the ground, the strike among Viennese mail carriers from the stress of delivering too many death letters. Baker doesn’t hide his omissions or his anecdotes’ lack of context—in fact, each vignette is surrounded by generous white space, so the lacunae are a constant visible presence in the book. It’s the kind of project that encourages, rather than closes off, further reading. Its texture is deeply convincing, and a much stronger message of peace than mere argument could ever muster.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, politics

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Monday 07 July 2008

Perloff on Davenport

Learning from Lexington: a brief reminiscence of Guy Davenport by Marjorie Perloff (via Anecdotal Evidence).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, poetry

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Friday 04 July 2008

Lost Book Club

The Lost Book Club is a "very elegant and slick site [...] supposed to be the 'home to any and all literary references made on the show — from Stephen King to Kurt Vonnegut.' (Or Adolfo Bioy Casares to Vladimir Nabokov.)" Via Three Percent.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet

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Wednesday 02 July 2008

Banville on Celan and Heidegger

Apropos the publication of his play Conversation in the Mountains (which Pierre Joris described here on RSB as "absolute awful drivel"), TEV asks John Banville "What first inspired you to write about the meeting between Celan and Heidegger?"

Well, I’ve always been fascinated by the thought of these two extraordinary figures encountering each other—the philosopher who had been a Nazi, the poet whose parents had been destroyed in a Nazi work camp—at the famous “hut” in the Black Forest. The meeting took place on July 25th, 1967, the day after a reading by Celan in Freiburg which Heidegger had attended. The conversation in the hut was not recorded, and neither man gave an account of it. Hans-Georg Gadamer, the philosopher, later reported that Heidegger had told him that “in the Black Forest, Celan was better informed on plants and animals than he himself was.” Besides the flora and fauna, did they talk about the war, about Nazism and Heidegger’s refusal publicly to account for, much less apologise for, his membership of the Party? I could not resist speculating (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy, poetry, theatre

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Thursday 26 June 2008

Žižek on Liberal Utopia

The Secret Clauses of the Liberal Utopia by Slavoj Žižek, the text of his Law and Critique Keynote Lecture given at the 2007 Critical Legal Conference at Birkbeck on the 13th September 2007, is now online (via Continental Philosophy).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Wednesday 25 June 2008

Coetzee's censors

Via the literary saloon: J.M. Coetzee and his censors.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 24 June 2008

if:book on Google

if:book (via googlizationofeverything) have a useful review/overview of their coverage of Google over the past four years:

Fair use, digitization, public domain, archiving, the role of libraries and cultural heritage are intricately interconnected. But the name that connects all these issues over the last few years has been Google. The Institute has covered Google's incursions into digitization of libraries (amongst other things) in a way that has explored many of these issues - and raised questions that are as urgent as ever. Is it okay to privatize vast swathes of our common cultural heritage? What are the privacy issues around technology that tracks online reading? Where now for copyright, fair use and scholarly research?

In-depth coverage of Google and digitization has helped to draw out many of the issues central to this blog. Thus, in drawing forth the narrative of if:book's Google coverage is, by extension, to watch a political and cultural stance emerging. So in this post I've tried to have my cake and eat it - to trace a story, and to give a sense of the depth of thought going into that story's discussion.

More at if:book.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, technical

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Monday 23 June 2008

Real media star!

Who are the "true stars of London's creative industries and the powers behind the throne"? Well, funnily enough, despite living in Stockport, it turns out yours truly may be one of them! (Actually, I take this to be, if anything, a vote of confidence in brit-lit-blogging in general.)

The Hospital Club 100 will be the definitive list of who shapes the creative landscape in what is, after all, the most creative city in the world. We're not after fat cats and big wigs. Corner offices and chauffeurs are not a prerequisite for inclusion. We want to know the secret influencers, the creative catalysts, the unheard of power players; the unsung heroes who make the media world spin.

So, if you "feel someone on the long list deserves to be part of the finalists [I'm in the "publishing" category by the way!] on The Hospital Club 100 list, you have one week to cast your vote at thehospitalclub.com where each voter is entitled to nominate up to two people per category and voting is from Monday 23 June until 6pm on Monday 30 June.

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

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Friday 20 June 2008

Footy, Euro2008 and books

Kit of Marion Boyars is bored, but fortunately has football to keep him going:

I am thoroughly enjoying the 2008 European Championship and not solely because England aren't in it. It has now got to the quarter finals stage, and the matches are getting much more difficult to predict (not that anyone who watched the Czech Republic/Turkey game would claim that the group matches were exactly predictable). To help, I have turned, as I often (always) do, to books.

I have developed a system: literary five a side. Five 20th century (otherwise it gets too difficult) authors from each country in question are pitted against each other and then a judgement is made (by me) as to who would win. Marion Boyars authors will feature prominently of course - thank god that the French are out, that would have made for some very difficult decisions.

And Kit's genius system predicted yesterday's Germany 3 Portugal 2 result!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 18 June 2008

Chris Marker

Wood S Lot had lots of Chris Marker links yesterday. Nice.

And it also had a link to the first issue of Salt's international literary magazine.

Hella busy here!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, film

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Monday 16 June 2008

Deep reading under threat?

Via Pages Turned:

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace (Is Google Making Us Stupid?)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet

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Monday 16 June 2008

Vila-Matas and Blixa Bargeld

Via orbis quintus: "Enrique Vila-Matas [has] collaborated with Blixa Bargeld to create an audio piece for Alicia Framis's Welcome to Guantánamo Museum project."

Bargeld is the driving force behind art-rock combo Einstürzende Neubauten.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 10 June 2008

Woolf essay competition

The Julia Briggs Memorial Prize 2009 will be awarded to the top essay on the topic of Virginia Woolf and the Common Reader in a competition sponsored by the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. The competition is being held in memory of noted Woolf scholar Julia Briggs, who died in August (via Blogging Woolf).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, virginia woolf

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Monday 09 June 2008

Waggish on Stoner

Waggish reads John Williams' Stoner:

I cannot recall any other academic novel that treats its subject material with such unremitting gravity. The standard model of an academic novel is to either indulge in high melodrama (Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch) or to make light of the intellectual pretenses of its characters (Kinsley Amis's overrated Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury's far funnier Stepping Westward). Williams's approach seems to have been to adopt the social realist approach of George Gissing and Sinclair Lewis's more sober moments and apply it to the incongruous and hermetic world of a university. Consequently, he treats the small events of Stoner's life with a sense of real consequence, as though they were matters of life and death. And so they become.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Saturday 07 June 2008

Philosophers on 9/11

For the tenth anniversary issue of The Philosophers' Magazine, the editors have put ten questions to ten leading thinkers. On the Talking Philosophy blog they list out how the chosen thinkers have answered just one of them: has philosophy responded adequately to the big events and debates of the last decade, such as climate change and the post-9/11 world?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Friday 30 May 2008

The Boiling Earth: Spurious on Golding

Spurious reads Golding's The Spire and it has left him needing "more Golding - immediately. I need to read everything if only to have done with it. I need to know of what this book is part - what movement. Madness - but not a private madness. Not the malaise of one character. A kind of existence-madness, being gone mad, the boiling earth ... "

Finishing William Golding's The Spire, I felt the same way as I had done at the end of Muriel Spark's The Hothouse on the East River: a need to read about the book and about Golding if only to contain what I had read, to contextualise it. Above all, I couldn't allow the book its distance, the distance it seems to take from itself in itself such that I was never quite sure what was happening, or rather that what was happening was (in the world of the book) really happening; Dean Jocelin, with whom the narrator sticks, seemed untrustworthy - or was it that he had entrusted himself to something else, manifest as a kind of madness. That he was entrusted to a rambling, coagulating madness that had thickened itself into the narrative.

What had happened in the book? I wasn't sure. I googled 'William Golding The Spire' for study notes to help me. What had happened? I lacked the distance. No: I lacked my distance by which I could hold what I read apart from me. I was struck to its surface like a fly ... Little to say about the book itself, though. Itself: as if it wasn't too heavy for commentary. As though it were not already lost in itself, falling into itself, a book like the spire and cathedral it describes unable to sit squarely on the restless earth. A book beneath which a kind of abyss opens, an anti-spire, the stirring of the earth 'like porridge coming to boil in a pot' which means everything, therefore is as unsure as the visitations Dean Jocelin receives.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Friday 30 May 2008

Beale vs. McDonald

Interesting back and forth over on Nigel Beale's blog betwen Nigel and Rónán McDonald, author of The Death of the Critic. The boys are arguing over whether the democracy of the web can ever foster good criticism, or whether "criticism thrives best not in a democracy, but in a meritocracy" (McDonald).

Actually, I don't think that there is that much distance between Nigel and Rónán's positions. McDonald's book is primarily about the demise of the academic critic as public intellectual (but with the best bits in the book being about the rise of the perennially troubled ontological status of Eng. Lit.) and as such makes a nice companion piece to Stefan Collini's Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (both follow John Gross' The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800; interestingly, Gross gave Collini's book something of a kicking in last week's TLS).

Blogging obviously wasn't at the front of McDonald's mind when he wrote his book and it has been shoehorned into the wider (mostly facile) "bloggers versus critics" debates a little unfairly. McDonald says, "My fear is that those voices [bloggers with a fresh, critical voice] might get drowned out by the mediocre, the banal, the ad hominem and the bilious." Well, isn't this the reality both online and offline? The banal threatens to drown us all, all of the time! But five years ago only e.g. the TLS and the LRB offered a break from this reality, now This Space, The Existence Machine, Vertigo and countless other blogs (hopefully, ReadySteadyBook too!) offer something of a haven from dreary dominant culture.

The next question is: will the intelligent comment that is undoubtedly offered by some blogs grow into strong, critical commentary? I believe so, yes. And if we look at something like e.g. Dan Green's The Reading Experience we can already see a blog being used to build just such a sustained critique.

 

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 28 May 2008

Richard reads Blanchot

Richard, over at The Existence Machine, is reading Blanchot's The Space of Literature:

In his recent post "against science", Steve Mitchelmore writes of this tendency. He notes that Jonathan Gottschall's attempted "scientific" refutation of Barthes' notion of "the death of the author" "relies on a reduction of a complex essay to a 'statement'". Later in the post, Steve quotes at length from Blanchot's "The Essential Solitude" -- at length, he says, because:

Blanchot's writing - its unique and relentless patience - is performative rather than didactic. Neither information or wisdom is being imparted but, as Barthes says, it is writing "borne by a pure gesture of inscription" tracing "a field without origin - or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins".

Performative rather than didactic: I quote this in order to help myself keep this in mind. When I've spoken of my difficulty with these texts, I realize that this is the primary difficulty I've had. I want to force the text to teach me something, as an authority. I want it to impart information, for this is the mode of writing I have been accustomed to. But if Blanchot's writing is not giving me information, if it is performative, how do I approach it?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, maurice blanchot

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Wednesday 28 May 2008

Editor's Corner posts

Posts up on my Editor's Corner blog today about the: Inaugural Desmond Elliott prize shortlist; Charles Leadbeater's We Think and the Hay Festival's 21 of the best up and coming writers.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, the book depository

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Tuesday 27 May 2008

Paul Verhaeghen's Top Ten

Paul Verhaeghen, who recently won the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with Omega Minor (which I'll be reviewing for The Liberal soonish), has a Tuesday Top Ten list up on my Editor's Corner blog over at The Book Depository.

Also up on Editor's Corner today: 50 Open Source Resources for Online Writers and some info about the National Year of Reading.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, awards, blogosphere, the book depository

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Tuesday 27 May 2008

Gallix on Warhol

Andrew Gallix, over at 3:AM, takes a look at Andy Warhol: I’ll Be Your Mirror: Andy Warhol’s Writing Degree (Less Than) Zero.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Tuesday 27 May 2008

Calling Nietzsche fans: The Mole

The Mole is the Official Blog of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society. Lots of info on new Nietzsche-related books and conferences etc. I know I've linked to it before, but it deserves a second shout (you know, eternal return an' all!)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Friday 23 May 2008

TomDispatch

D'you guys know TomDispatch? Verso are publishing The World According to TomDispatch: America and the Age of Empire in July and it looks pretty good.

TomDispatch styles itself as a regular antidote to the mainstream media and says it is written "for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of our post-9/11 world and a clear sense of how our imperial globe actually works." Well, goodness knows we always need a bit more of that, but I must admit I hadn't come across the site until t'other day. Anyway, looks good as I say: go read!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book news

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Wednesday 21 May 2008

Meis on Esterházy

Morgan Meis on Péter Esterházy (at 3 Quarks, via wood s lot):

If you want to talk about Péter Esterházy you have to dredge up the past a little. That isn’t always a fun thing to do, especially if you hail from anywhere in the between lands, Mitteleuropa. Still… somebody, as they say, has to do it and for whatever reason Esterházy is up to the task. Why does he do it? I think it is a simple as a line from his novel Helping Verbs of the Heart. “I’m terrified,” writes Esterházy, “yet I feel better now.” (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Wednesday 21 May 2008

The Millions on Bolaño

A review of Roberto Bolaño's stunning Nazi Literature in the Americas over on The Millions blog:

It must have appealed to Roberto Bolaño's sense of irony that novels, rather than poems, won him his place in the contemporary pantheon. For Bolaño's protagonists, (and, we can imagine, for Bolaño himself) poetry is the art that endures. Still, to read Amulet or By Night in Chile is to find oneself immersed in verse - not because the prose is self-consciously lyrical (not in translation, anyway), but because all of the major characters are poets. Were these characters merely unheralded virtuosos, like Kerouac's Subterraneans, the novels might take on an air of wish fulfillment. As it stands, however, Bolaño's fictionalized Lives of the Poets are an inversion, or complication, of Kerouac's: He seems more interested in the bad poets, the failed poets, than he is in the angelic ones (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Tuesday 20 May 2008

Mitchelmore v. Gottschall

According to Jonathan Gottschall (writing in the Boston Globe a week or so ago), "Literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition. But first, it needs a radical change: embracing science." Understandably, this tosh has been batted about the blogosphere, but the finest response came on Sunday from our very own Stephen Mitchelmore who marshals Barthes (whom Gottschall caricatures and misreads), Blanchot and Heidegger against Gottschall's silly scientism:

Power is what Gottschall and the literary bloggers sympathetic to his call remain in thrall to. In their case it is the understandable desire for "relevance", a respected academic career and a book-buying public ready to afford criticism the same market share as popular science. However, for Barthes and Blanchot (and Heidegger before them in Poetry, Language, Thought) the focus remains literature itself.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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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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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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Friday 02 May 2008

Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

The Literary Saloon tells me that they've announced the shortlist for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize "for translations into English from any living European language which have been published, are book-length, and are distributed in the UK."

Always good to see translated books getting some love but, as The Literary Saloon point out, "every title on this list [below] save the Mayröcker poetry collection is a new translation of a previously-available-in-English title. (Yes, even the Hermans, though that Roy Edwards translation from nearly half a century ago pretty much disappeared without a fight.) Surely this can't be a good thing." Indeed.

The list:

• Margaret Jull Costa for Eça de Queiroz's The Maias
• Richard Dove for Friederike Mayröcker's Raving Language: Selected Poems 1946-2006
• Jamie McKendrick for Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
• Mike Mitchell for Georges Rodenbach's The Bells of Bruges
• Natasha Randall for Yevgeny Zamyatin's We
• Ina Rilke for W. F. Hermans' The Darkroom of Damocles

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere

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Friday 02 May 2008

The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt (and Mann's translators)

A Common Reader takes a look at Wilhelm Genazino's The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt:

I read The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt while relaxing in a snow-bound hotel in Northern France... I like books that create previously unheard of occupations for their main characters (Anne Tyler is also adept at this) and the concept of a shoe-tester is up there with the best - being paid to walk all day around the city of Frankfurt testing up-market shoes and writing reports for the manufacturers. Of course, the job is a pretext for a meandering dissertation on life and its unliveability - for the narrator is a true existentialist, living at the sharp-end where nothing is a given, and the everyday is seen in its remarkability as though through eyes just born to this planet ("through the open door I once again hear the little noises the birds make as their tiny feathered bodies take off with a dense and compact flutter").

A Common Reader (a blog I only found out about this morning after noticing Tom had left a comment here yesterday and which has now duly been added to BritLitBlogs) also brings my attention to the fact there are now at least three English translations of Thomas Mann on the market.

I have the Vintage Classics Manns and my copy of e.g. Doctor Faustus has an unsigned translator's note (!) and is a translation that dates from 1949 (just two years after it was published in German). I know that David Luke translated their Death in Venice, but I'm presuming that Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter who, according to wikipedia, "enjoyed the exclusive right to translate the works of Thomas Mann from German into English for more than twenty years" must have rendered the versions of Doctor Faustus, The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks that I own. The Manns that Tom brings my attention to are new(ish -- 1990s I think) translations by John E. Woods (some of which are available in lovely Everyman editions). You can find out a bit more about Woods at the Goethe-Institut USA and Random House in the States tells me:

John E. Woods is the distinguished translator of many books -- most notably Arno Schmidt's Evening Edged in Gold, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize; Patrick Suskind's Perfume, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Mr. Suskind's The Pigeon and Mr. Summer's Story; Doris Dorrie's Love, Pain, and the Whole Damn Thing and What Do You Want from Me?; and Libuse Monikova's The Facade.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, thomas mann

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Thursday 01 May 2008

May Day

Wood s lot provides some excellent May Day links including The Origins and Traditions of May Day by Eugene Plawiuk (from La Revue Gauche), The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day by the peerless Peter Linebaugh (author of The Many-headed Hydra: The Hidden History Of The Revolutionary Atlantic and The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century) and The May-Pole of Merry Mount by Nathaniel Hawthorne (from Twice-Told Tales).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, politics

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Tuesday 29 April 2008

Cortázar profile

Ooh, I am in a linking mood today!

Via TEV, a Julio Cortázar profile in the Yemen Times:

Cortázar belonged to the boom generation of Latin American writers who broke new ground with their works during the 1950s and 1960s. His literary career, which lasted almost 40 years, includes short stories, novels, plays, poetry, translations, and essays of literary criticism. His work is strongly influenced by surrealism with attempting to raise consciousness above reality in his fantastical short stories. He combined existential questioning with experimental writing techniques in his works and many of his stories follow the logic of hallucinations and obsessions.

I've never read Cortázar, but I understand that Hopscotch is the one to start with. That right?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet

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Friday 25 April 2008

Coates on Nabokov

Steve Coates unearths Vladimir Nabokov’s remarks about The Original of Laura, his final, unfinished manuscript (via Maud Newton).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Thursday 24 April 2008

Plot: "a dumb, creaky mechanism"

Steven Shaviro has Some thoughts on “character”:

For me, this is a key to understanding genre fiction — or maybe I should just say, fiction in general. Plot is overrated. SF novels and comics and movies and the like where it’s all about the plot, how well it is put together, how if a gun is on the table in Act One, it has to be used in Act Three, and so on, bore the hell out of me. The better and more cleverly it is put together, the more it seems to me to be just a dumb, creaky mechanism which provides neither pleasure nor insight. I know that lots of people (readers/viewers as well as creators) get off on carefully crafted plots; but such things do nothing for me.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Thursday 24 April 2008

Structure is Stricture: Lydia Davis interview

Blanchot translator Lydia Davis interviewed by Jason McBride at the Poetry Foundation:

Many of Lydia Davis’s best stories involve problems of language, its insufficiencies and irregularities, how lives can be undone—or remade—by a preposition or pronoun. A sound. Punctuation. Misunderstandings pivot on the misapplication of an adjective or the absence of one. Quite literally, tenses make people tense. The page-long story “A Mown Lawn” was included in Best American Poetry 2001. Its opening lines: “She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman.”

Davis is almost as well known for her translations (of, among others, books by Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, and Marcel Proust) as for her fiction. William Gass has described translation as reading (“of the best, the most essential, kind”), but for Davis it’s the obverse, a kind of writing: “everything but the invention.” The work of translation is indeed, on one hand, very Davisian labor, a way of creating and engaging with entirely new problems of language as well as new solutions (more ...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, marcel proust, maurice blanchot, poetry

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Tuesday 22 April 2008

Clay Shirky and Sharon Blackie

I've just posted an interview with web-superstar Clay Shirky over on The Book Depository site (Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody, the book-puff of which runs thusly: "Our age’s new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us. New groups are doing new things in new ways, and we’re doing the old things better and more easily. Business models are being transformed at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is in a way so profound that it’s under-appreciated. In Here Comes Everybody, one of the culture’s wisest observers give us his lucid and penetrating analysis on what this means for what we do and who we are.")

Perhaps a bit more ReadySteadyBook-ish, my Tuesday Top Ten over on Editor's Corner today is with Sharon Blackie:

Sharon Blackie is the author of The Long Delirious Burning Blue, translator of Raymond Federman's memoir of Samuel Beckett, The Sam Book, and editor of the forthcoming Cleave: New Writing by Women in Scotland and Riptide: New Writing from the Highlands and Islands. She has a croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland and in her spare time runs Two Ravens Press with her husband, David Knowles (publishers of recent RSB Book of the Week Auschwitz by Angela Morgan Cutler).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet, the book depository

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Tuesday 22 April 2008

Stanford goes searchable

"Stanford University Press is pleased to announce that you can now search the full text of our books via Google Book Search. We are currently still in the process of uploading and scanning our backlist, but there are already over a thousand Stanford titles in Google Book Search. When the project is completed, all of our books will be searchable electronically" (via SUP Blog ...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Monday 21 April 2008

Book World: resting

Sad news: Sandra -- that's Mrs Book World to you lot -- has said farewell to the "blogworld":

Far too much of my time pours itself into the void of the internet and I'm running out of energy and enthusiasm for it. So in future I'm not planning to update Book World save for my list of books read and maybe the occasional interesting quote from books in progress.

I hope Sandra does come back soon -- she was one of the original BritLitBloggers and I always liked her blog because it struck me as a "proper" blog: conversational, intelligent, warm and personal.

I've kept Sandra's feed on BritLitBlogs, but as she is going to go quiet for a while (let's hope not for too long) I've promoted Eve's Alexandria to the top tier in her stead.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Friday 11 April 2008

Picador.com

I have a small blog/article going up on Picador.com's blog next week sometime (about Oliver Sacks and the importance of narrative to our self-perception). But I can't access the site (and this has long been the case).

The rest of my web connections all seem fine, but Picador.com (and parent company Pan Macmillan's site) just ain't 'appening! Picador reckons the site is live their end, so is this just me?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, personal

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Thursday 10 April 2008

BritLitBlogs

Oi! Do you have a British (based in the UK) literary blog, or know of one, that isn't featured on BritLitBlogs.com?

BritLitBlogs.com doesn't feature author or publisher blogs so, if you are a British author who blogs or a British publisher who has a blog ... erm, sorry!

But anyone else who blogs about books ... let me know and I'll add you to the BLB aggregator.

Update: as requested, I've just added Castrovalva, Logophilia and Vulpes Libris. Any more for any more!?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 07 April 2008

Mitchelmore's critical picks

Stephen Mitchelmore picks "a selection compiled from memory of critical and philosophical books about literature that I've enjoyed in recent years ... Be warned though, they may contain erudite literary argument":

• Michael Wood - The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
• Eduardo Cadava - Words of Light
• Malcolm Bowie - Proust among the stars
• Stanley Corngold - Kafka: The Necessity of Form
• Teodolina Barolini - The Undivine Comedy: Detheogolizing Dante
• John Freccero - Dante: The Poetics of Conversion
• Lacoue-Labarthe - Poetry as experience
• Timothy Clark - The Theory of Inspiration and Martin Heidegger
• Christopher Ricks - Beckett's Dying Words
• William Large & Ullrich Haase - Maurice Blanchot

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 02 April 2008

FSG poetry blog

Ooh, more poetry! FSG are running a month-long poetry blog. Highlights include:

• an all new couplet composed by Robert Pinsky and available for download as your ringtone (which strikes me as bonkers!)
• a whole week devoted to poetry in translation, with posts from many of FSG's award-winning translators
• more original audio recorded exclusively for the blog by Frank Bidart, Les Murray, August Kleinzahler, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more
• free, downloadable broadsheets appropriate for brightening up even the most boring cubicle

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry

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Tuesday 01 April 2008

Back from Oxford

I'm back from Oxford and from speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival. Busy day yesterday what with my Today programme appearance and all! If the warm and generous comments left on the blog are anything to go by the talks have gone down pretty well. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to leave a comment.

And a big welcome to everybody who has just come across ReadySteadyBook ... I hope you enjoy looking around the site.

If you want to read more about last night's Blogging the Classics debate, reports from the OLF can be found at the Times, Other Stories, Eve's Alexandria and Torque Control.

Some of these reports have photographs. Yes, I do look fat. Yes, the stripey jumper was probably a bad idea!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, events, personal

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Friday 28 March 2008

Littérature et blogues

For a look at the situation of French Canadian (not French -- thanks Fausto!) blogs see Nicolas Ritoux's Littérature et blogues: le mariage difficile in La Presse (via the complete review).

French Canadian not French. So, what's the situation like in France then?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Friday 28 March 2008

Two from Lee Rourke

Two from Lee Rourke: Lee's top 10 books on boredom (see his top ten books on London too); and a nice piece about Chris Marker's "photo-roman" La Jetée -- The film that thinks it's a novel.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, film

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Thursday 27 March 2008

Dovid Bergelson

Great piece on Dovid Bergelson over on Three Percent. The further reading rightly points folk to David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism edited by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh. I interviewed Joseph back in November 2005 here on RSB and hope to do so again (over on The Book Depository this time) very soon.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Thursday 27 March 2008

Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing

Hahaha: Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing (worth reading the comments thread too: "nuanced" also makes me want to claw my eyes out, Brian.)

The seven "deadly" words are: poignant; compelling; intriguing; eschew; craft; muse; lyrical. I have to admit, I do cleave to compelling. I'd already noted that when I'm stuck for an adjective, especially in my short, capsule reviews for The Book Depository, I do lazily and regularly reach for "compelling". Shall consider myself admonished!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 26 March 2008

Dimock on Friedrich’s The Fire

First published in English in 2006, Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 will soon be available in paperback: "Upon publication of the hardcover edition of the book, Peter Dimock, the editor of The Fire, wrote the following essay discussing the book’s importance, its relevance to contemporary events, and how we think about the conduct of modern warfare..."

Sometimes an editor can feel in his bones when the prose on the page of a manuscript he is holding in his hands marks a possible turning point in the way the present decides to understand itself. I have been lucky enough to have had this feeling once or twice in the course of my twenty-two years in publishing. It happened again when, at the urging of another author, I and Columbia University Press took on the project of publishing the English-language edition of Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire.

The essay can be found on the Columbia University Press blog.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book news

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Wednesday 26 March 2008

Waggish quotes Kruggman

Waggish quotes Krugman:

Reading some of today’s news, it suddenly struck me: we’re living in the age of the anti-Cassandra.

Cassandra had the gift of prophecy — she saw, correctly, what was coming — but was under a curse: nobody would believe her.

Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything — but are still, mysteriously, treated as men of wisdom, whose judgments should be believed. Those who were actually right about the major issues of the day can’t get a word in edgewise.

What set me off was the matter of Alan Greenspan; as Dean Baker like to remind us, news analyses of the housing and financial crisis almost always draw exclusively on “experts” who first insisted that there wasn’t a housing bubble, then insisted that the financial consequences of the bubble’s bursting would remain “contained.”

It’s even worse, of course, on the matter of Iraq: just about every one of the panels convened to discuss the lessons of five disastrous years consisted solely of men and women who cheered the idiocy on.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, politics

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Wednesday 26 March 2008

Stories About People

Dan Green:

Fiction does do more than tell stories about people, but it can also do more than pretend to "enter into the consciousness" of people. To believe this by now fairly standard technique of faux-psychological probing into the minds of characters is the only thing that separates fiction from history, or from film, is a rather impoverished view of the possibilities of fiction as a literary form. Indeed, the purely literary possibilities of the "interior" strategy were, it seems to me, pretty much exhausted in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner. Adventurous writers following on their achievement -- Beckett, Burroughs, Barthelme, Sorrentino -- discovered fresh ways of extending their experiments in form, of showing us how fiction can be different not just from history or film, but from previous versions of fiction as well. More such discoveries can be made.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 26 March 2008

Spurious' words

The inimitable Spurious:

I never liked hoarders of books: old men and women who would never lend or give me, when I was young, what I wanted from their bookshelves. Hoarders, collectors, saving books - from what? for what? - and hence depriving them from me. How unreasonable I was (and am), but now I must turn my prejudice on myself. Have I not replaced old editions of my books with new, hardbacked ones? Am I not able to afford 3 or 4 pounds to buy a book out of curiosity? Have I not a row of unread books and that I might not read for many years - editions of Gaddis, Canetti, Milosz, Perec; and even Lydia Davis' The Way By Swann's, in the American edition? How deplorable!

I wonder whether I buy these books, and replace order ones in order to satisfy the victim of literary deprivation I once thought I was - and whether I've missed out on that kind of reading where a book can really be everything. But this, too, is absurd: how foolish to look for a Reading behind reading, and to think it lay there when I was young. I was as foolish a reader then as I am today - as distracted, as frivolous: then and now I felt I never really read a book, but only grazed its surface: that beneath, say, the printed pages of The Sleepwalkers, in that old, handsome Quartet Encounters edition, there was an experience of reading that I'd missed, as though the real book lurked there like a kraken.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Thursday 20 March 2008

Against Happiness

3quarksdaily quote The Smart Set on Eric Wilson's Against Happiness:

Against Happiness is not a cultural critique, it’s a love letter to Wilson’s own emotional state. As the book progresses, the potential audience gets smaller and smaller. It opens talking to all Americans, but by the second chapters he has narrowed his focus to “we melancholics,” and later to “melancholic intellectuals.” By the end he’s just curled up with his aloneness, and we somehow stumbled into his interior monologue.

He sees himself as apart from and superior to all others, referring to the American culture with a sinister “they.” “They haunt the gaudy and garish spaces of the world and ignore the dark margins… They adore the Lifetime channel. They are happy campers. They want God to bless the world. They want us to ask them about their children… They join Book-of-the-Month clubs and identify with sympathetic characters.” These happy types are to be despised and avoided. Wilson turns away from America to take long walks in the woods and contemplate dead sparrows. “I must admit then that regardless of my own efforts to take flight through many escapes America offers, my basic instinct is toward melancholia – a state I must nourish. In fostering my essential nature, I’m trying to live according to what I see as my deep calling. Granted, it’s difficult at times to hold hard to this vocation, this labor in the fields of sadness.”

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Thursday 20 March 2008

The merits of slow reading

I've mentioned before that I'm not a fast reader. As I said back last year, I'm a 30-pages an hour man!

Bookninja recently posted on the merits of slow reading (more on Slow Reading over on John Miedema's blog -- thanks Dave!) noting Michael Henderson's mild mocking of Philip Hensher who reckons he reads five novels a week, something I probably manage in a good month:

What a relief it was, last year, to learn of Milan Kundera's opinion that he based his reading on the premise that he got through books at the rate of 20 pages an hour...

Good to know that me and my mate Milan are on the same page. Literally, on the same page, near the beginning, whilst the rest of you have no doubt almost finished!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, personal

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Wednesday 19 March 2008

The "why" not the "what" of fiction

My recent post asking why fiction is (in response to James Wood's book How Fiction Works) prompted some interesting comments here on RSB and a very good discussion over on This Space, where I've attempted to elucidate my original post by writing, "the 'ontological status', then, of fiction is what I'm thinking about here. Blanchot and Heidegger guide the thinking. For sure, my question touches on the personal reasons as to why a writer might choose fiction to express themselves, but I wanted to draw attention to fiction's own being, to its own ground, to our assumptions about it before we approach or write or read it. These assumptions are rarely aired, but a strain of writing from Sterne through to Robbe-Grillet has attempted to grapple with them in their own fiction."

And now this excellent post from the No Answers blog:

... fiction itself is very much about its own response to this argument. More than representation, more than beauty, perceived or otherwise, more than didactic elucidation, it remains the very thing that rebuffs such questions, and it is within such a general rebuttal that it defines itself. Note that I don't mean by this that fiction is somehow inherently ambiguous, or contradictory, or disingenuous: fiction is simply this -- that which continues to escape.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, establishment_lit_fiction, philosophy, rsb

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Wednesday 19 March 2008

Capitaine Achab

"French film maker Philippe Ramos has recently released a film titled Capitaine Achab (Captain Ahab). It's the story of Herman Melville's obsessed sea captain, from the time he was a young boy until his last, fatal meeting with Moby Dick" (more via Literary Kicks).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, film

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Friday 14 March 2008

More on Larval Subjects

On Wednesday I mentioned an excellent post on the Larval Subjects blog discussing Social Multiplicities and Agency. Well, the post has spawned a number of interesting comments: go read the discussion!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, science

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Wednesday 12 March 2008

Social Multiplicities and Agency

Larval Subjects (via wood s lot) discussing Social Multiplicities and Agency:

Increasingly I am coming to feel that Continental social and political theory – especially in its French inflection coming out of the Althusserian, Foucaultian, Lacanian, and structuralist schools – woefully simplifies the social and therefore is led to ask the wrong sorts of questions where questions of political change is concerned ... [we] need to look at the variety of different social formations from individuals, to small associations like groups (the blog collective for instance), to larger groupings and institutions, to global interrelations, treating none of these as hegemonizing all the others, but instead discerning their varying temporalities, organizations, inter-relations, points of antagonism, and so on. This, I think, is far closer to Marx’s own vision – or at least the spirit of his analyses in texts like Grundrisse and Capital.

E.P. Thompson’s critique of Althusser in his excellent The Poverty of Theory (1978) hangs in the air here — and rightly so. Thompson's account is still sharp and wholly relevant: empirical, local and humanistic (and I know that that is a bogey word!)

With regard to evolutionary theory highlighting the possible ways that change can occur in societies, the work of Chris Knight (Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture) shows the way. Knight argues that we became human via a revolutionary sex strike ... you’ll learn more from radicalanthropologygroup.org.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, politics, science

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Friday 07 March 2008

The Litopia Writers’ Podcast

Tonight, I'll be nattering away on The Litopia Writers’ Podcast, the "Original Podcast for Writers", hosted by Peter Cox.

You'll be able to hear me banging on, and Lola and Marnie barking away in the background, at the Litopia site on Sunday.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, personal

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Wednesday 05 March 2008

Everett on Rathbone

Martyn Everett on "old school lefty" Julian Rathbone:

Nick Coleman, in the Guardian describes Rathbone as "an old-school lefty. He said so himself. His detestation of privilege and the structures which maintain it was profound. His contempt for them was expressed by turn frighteningly, wittily and sexily, and often all at once, but never, ever dully or merely rhetorically," but Julian Rathbone was more than that, describing himself in an article for the Independent as "a romantic optimist with anarchist leanings."

It was this libertarian socialist vision that suffuses Rathbone's books and makes them quite unlike those of any other modern English writer, giving them an alternative system of values and ideas which appealed to the ordinary reader.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, politics

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Wednesday 05 March 2008

Psalms

Via Anecdotal Evidence: Robert Alter and Marilynne Robinson discussing and reading from Alter's recent translation of Psalms.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, rsb

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Thursday 28 February 2008

Crary on Hitchens

Richard Crary dismantles Hitchens' clumsy and pointless polemic God is Not Great:

In the last few years, there have been several books by writers urgently seeking to not only discredit religion, but also to advance the atheistic viewpoint and to defend "reason", or rationality, from the forces of darkness. Though I often agree with many of the basic points these authors tend to make, my essential position is that the focus on religion by these writers is misplaced. Indeed, if the elimination of religion or, more realistically, the lessening of its influence, especially the influence of its more extreme manifestations, is the goal, then they are taking exactly the wrong approach. But to these writers and others the matter is urgent: they are worried about the survival of the species. Well, let me tell you: in my view, there are numerous good reasons to be worried. But such concern, if genuine, should focus attention on our disastrous political and economic situation, yet it rarely does.

... against all expectations, I did recently read Christopher Hitchens’ god is Not Great: How Religlion Poisons Everything. My in-laws have a copy, so it was easily available, and I admit to having had a sort of mordant curiosity about it. I also admit I came into it not expecting much by way of argument, but in fact it's much worse than I imagined it would be. The book is quite terrible, for a variety of reasons. But the things that make it bad (and to my mind, virtually unpublishable) are not necessarily those elements that make up my main problems with it and with the popular so-called “atheist books” it exemplifies. It's bad not least because it's hard to figure what Hitchens really thinks he's doing with the book. He's said that, in effect, he's been writing the book his whole life (the link is to an interview, but he also says as much in the acknowledgments). You'd think he'd have taken more care with it. It's full of sloppy thinking, awkward writing, adolescent point-making, and of course, his stylistic trademarks: withering, sometimes glib scorn, and ostentatious displays of erudition (not to mention outright errors: he has Saddam Hussein invading Iran in 1979, rather than 1980). Occasionally he gets out of his own way long enough to tell us about an interesting historical event or figure, but these passages are the exception.

There is nothing in god is Not Great that can't be found elsewhere, other than the ubiquitous presence of Christopher Hitchens himself, with his rhetorical winks and nudges. The book is poorly argued, tonally inconsistent, and frankly childish, from the title and sub-title on down. The inconsistency in tone--as if he intended to destroy religion once and for all with the power of his scorn, but then occasionally realized that he needed to make a feint in the direction of persuasion, with disingenuous displays of humility thrown in for good measure--is part of what I mean when I say the book is sloppily written. For me, these qualities ought to mean that the book should have been sent back for considerable re-tooling before it got anywhere near being published. And yet it was not only a best-seller, but was nominated for a National Book Award. The latter in particular is another tiny sign of an intellectual culture in poor health. Hitchens may say that he'd been effectively writing the book his whole life, but it has the feel of something slapped together quickly in order to cash in on a trend.

And now go and read the whole of Richard's great piece!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy, politics

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Wednesday 27 February 2008

No more gatekeepers

More of the kind of eloquence that we've come regularly to expect from Dan Green:

I've never understood the print critics' plaint that without their gatekeeping the literary marketplace will be flooded with inferior work that will unavoidably drown the valuable work. This assumes a "commons" occupied by clueless vagabonds who just happen to be passing through and who need guidance by their settled betters. In fact the literary commons, especially the part of it devoted to poetry, is the preferred destination of those who already value what is offered there, already know how to distinguish good work from bad, and will be perfectly capable of judging the former against the latter. Literature will still be literature once the gates have been torn down. It's just that there will be fewer people claiming the authority to define its boundaries for everyone else.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Wednesday 27 February 2008

Poetry vs. Nothing

A discussion of poetry's value over on Bookninja:

“Those who want poetry to make things happen forget the last line of [Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats]: that poetry is itself a way of happening.”

As the world’s politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards eco-Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But if Seferis and Heaney are right, poetry can at the very least be “strong enough to help”.

I think “strong enough to help” is wrong. “Strong”, here, is wrong. Perhaps better would be: weak enough to give pause.

I'm thinking here of something reminiscent of Rowan Williams’ description of God as a nine-year-old spastic child: “This is the solitude of truth, the solitude, finally, of God: God as a spastic child who can communicate nothing but his presence and his inarticulate wanting.”

Not poetry versus nothing, then, but poetry as nothing, the very weakest of glimmers, barely there yet still lambent. Not enough to steer by, for sure, but just enough to recognise that the darkness is not quite all-conquering.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry

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Wednesday 27 February 2008

Meta-Philosophy: Reflections on the Practices and Institutions of Philosophy

Via Continental Philosophy -- "John Protevi has a new blog (John McCumber and Robin Durie are also contributors): Meta-Philosophy: Reflections on the Practices and Institutions of Philosophy."

John explains: "As the title indicates, we’d like to provide a forum for discussion of issues relative to philosophy in the world and in the university."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Tuesday 19 February 2008

Beale (and me) on Wood

Very decent article by Nigel Beale on James Wood, that deserves a considered response, over on Filthy Habits.

Just at the moment, I really don't have a minute to write anything substantial, but I've just finished Wood's hugely disappointing How Fiction Works, so I would like to respond, both to Nigel's article and to Wood's rather weak new book. Perhaps over the weekend? I'll try.

Very briefly, my major beef with How Fiction Works is, I suppose, how it is being sold to us. "His first full-length book of criticism" this is supposed to be a definitive -- a summing up of "two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work" -- and "searching" statement from "one of the most prominent critics of our time" about "the machinery of story-telling." But it is little more than a Dummies guide to narrative, detail and characterization. It heats up a little towards the end -- in Truth, Convention, Realism, the key chapter, and one that really needed working up into something a good deal more substantial -- when Wood argues for the persistence in art of a realism really better called lifeness. But most of the rest of the book is pretty meagre stuff.

His assertion that the history of the novel is really the history of free indirect style is interesting. And it surprised me that Barthes and Viktor Shklovsky are his favourite literary theorists -- even if this book "conducts a sustained argument with them." Sustained I didn't find it. It's a great crib, no doubt, but "one of the most prominent critics of our time" should surely be doing a lot more than writing a kind of student's guide to the novel.

 

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Thursday 14 February 2008

Reading the World

They've announced this year's Reading the World list over on Three Percent. And I've listed out all the titles on Editor's Corner for y'all too. Many of these look like pretty decent books. I'm particular keen to read Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano (translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews), The Assistant by Robert Walser (translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky) and The Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge (translated from the French by Richard Greeman)

And it won't surprise the keen ones amongst you that today is Valentine's Day. Origins explained over on The Book Depository February newsletter.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, publishing news, the book depository

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Wednesday 13 February 2008

Blogging and the "common reader"

A longish post from me, entitled Blogging and the "common reader", can be found over on Editor's Corner.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, the book depository

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Wednesday 13 February 2008

Bronte Studies

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 33, Issue 1, March 2008) is available online -- but you have to pay for most all the content! BrontëBlog provide the table of contents and abstracts.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet

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Tuesday 12 February 2008

Mark E Smith reading Lovecraft

Ooh, it seems to be becoming a bit of a music day: Mark E Smith reading Lovecraft (via k-punk; the excellent The Fall online is always worth a visit too).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, music

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Tuesday 12 February 2008

Only following orders

Lenin reads Traverso:

There are two cliches about the Nazis: one is that there wasn't a single one to be found after WWII; the other is that those who were discovered were only following orders. Both are reasonably well-founded. But actually, as Enzo Traverso points out in The Origins of Nazi Violence, the alienation that this implies, the separation between conception and action, was already embedded in the capitalist social pattern.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, politics

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Tuesday 12 February 2008

Beale's best book covers

_{T.S. Eliot's Notes, via Beale's Flickr}

Nigel Beale has put some of his favourite book covers up on flickr. Nice.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 11 February 2008

Steve's back!

Mitchelmore is moving about! Good to see that Steve of This Space seems to be recovering well.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, personal

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Wednesday 06 February 2008

Agamben e-books

Via Continental Philosophy: 10 books by Giorgio Agamben downloadable at: farkyaralari.blogspot.com.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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Wednesday 06 February 2008

Ch...ch...changes: Sebald's The Emigrants

Interesting stuff on Vertigo, the Sebald blog, on changes made to one of Sebald's work prior to full publication:

A fellow book collector who also concentrates on the works of W.G. Sebald recently asked me if I had ever taken a close look at the uncorrected bookproof that Harvill Press issued in 1996 prior to the release of Sebald’s book The Emigrants. I had not; it had been sitting, ignored, on the shelf since I purchased it years ago.

I have written earlier about some of the changes that occurred when Sebald’s book Die Ausgewanderten was published in English. In the original German version the epynomic character of the fourth story is Max Aurach, but in Harvill’s published edition he becomes Max Ferber, in order to hide the fact that this figure was partly based on the living British painter Frank Auerbach...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 04 February 2008

The Sunday Salon

Sunday is the one day of the week that I try not to blog, not to read other blogs, nor even, if I can help it, look at a computer. So, The Sunday Salon is absolutely not for me ... but it is a nice idea:

Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people --students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them, and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake....

That's what happens at the Sunday Salon, except it's all virtual. Every Sunday the bloggers participating in that week's Salon get together--at their separate desks, in their own particular time zones--and read. And blog about their reading. And comment on one another's blogs. Think of it as an informal, weekly, mini read-a-thon, an excuse to put aside one's earthly responsibilities and fall into a good book.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 04 February 2008

Oe's way

Imani reproduces part of The Art of Fiction interview no.195 with Oe Kenzaburo from The Paris Review. In the article, the interviewer says at one point, "In America, literary criticism and creative writing are, for the most part, mutually exclusive." I'm not sure that that has ever been quite true but, regardless, Oe's response is perfect:

I respect scholars most of all. Although they struggle in a narrow space, they find truly creative ways of reading certain authors.

To understand literature we need the three-pronged attack that Oe outlines: submersion in the author's work; submersion in the critical response to the work (both general critical and academic); and then we need to triangulate that reading with ourselves and dwell on how this study plays with our previous reading and learning.

The interview ends with this gem: the interviewer says, "It sounds like when you travel you spend most of your time in your hotel room reading." Oe Replies:

Yes, that’s right. I do some sightseeing, but I have no interest in good food. I like drinking, but I don’t like going to bars because I get in fights.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Friday 01 February 2008

This quiet Space

Many readers of ReadySteadyBook are also readers of Stephen Mitchelmore's peerless This Space. You will have noticed, no doubt, that an uncharacteristic quiet has settled over Steve's blog of late. Sadly, this is because he was involved in a serious road accident on Saturday 19th January.

Steve was cycling near Ditchling Beacon, in thick fog, and was hit from behind by a car. He was taken to The Royal Sussex Hospital where he underwent a head scan. His broken arm was then plastered up and he was placed under observation for 48 hours. He was released from hospital, but a few days later readmitted when a fracture at the base of his skull was found. Happily, is he now out of hospital again, with his parents, and slowly recovering from his ordeal. I'm sure all readers will want to wish him well. However, if he ever scares me again like that, he's a dead man!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, personal

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Monday 28 January 2008

Esther Leslie

I've just posted a nice, chunky interview with Professor Esther Leslie over on The Book Depository. Professor Leslie is the author of of Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde and Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry and two books on Walter Benjamin: of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism and the recent, excellent mini-biography cunningly entitled Walter Benjamin.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, the book depository

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Thursday 24 January 2008

New Bookforum online

Dispatches from Zembla brings to my attention that there is a new issue of Bookforum online. Latest issue includes an article on Knut Hamsun, an extract from Roberto Bolano's forthcoming book and a short review of the fab sounding Against Happiness: "... happiness as immediate gratification, happiness as superficial comfort, happiness as static contentment ... may annihilate melancholia."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet

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Thursday 24 January 2008

Peer-reviewed blogs?

Do blogs need to be peer-reviewed? Well, some blogs some of the time might benefit I suppose (although blog comments are a form of peer-review, of course)... Anyway, lots of links about this at the The MIT PressLog.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 21 January 2008

Like looking in the mirror: Jounal to Stella

The quote below is taken from the excellent electronic edition of Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella.

"The site has been designed with a dual purpose in mind. In the first place, it is a diversion for curious readers and for lovers of Jonathan Swift's more famous works. But it is also intended as a scholarly resourse for students and teachers of Swift's writings, and for literary historians of the eighteenth century more generally. The biographies, booklists and chronologies that support the Journal have been prepared to a high academic standard, and all the information on this site may be used with confidence."

Morning. It has snowed terribly all night, and is vengeance cold. I am not yet up, but cannot write long; my hands will freeze. "Is there a good fire, Patrick?" "Yes, sir." "Then I'll rise; come, take away the candle." You must know I write on the dark side of my bed-chamber, and am forced to have a candle till I rise, for the bed stands between me and the window, and I keep the curtains shut this cold weather. So pray let me rise; and Patrick, here, take away the candle.

Well, ok, it didn't actually snow last night. But it did rain. It's been raining for days. I don't remember life before rain. It's a good job Patrick is here to make the tea. Patrick? Patrick!?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 14 January 2008

DGR on Belben

How lovely to read: dovegreyreader has completely fallen for the charms of Rosalind Belben's wonderful Our Horses in Egypt:

Our Horses in Egypt is an unusual, less-is-more book and I had to concentrate hard because Rosalind Belben has a unique narrative style and the dialogue often doesn't quite seem to make sense. In the early chapters I often found myself reading it aloud to really grasp the meaning and then it dawned on me, this is pure dialogue, a conversation as you would really hear it. It's pared down and spare, often unfinished, the voicing of a seemingly random thought. Here was a writer who wanted me to work.

Rosalind Belben a writer who is constantly challenging her reader to fill in the gaps and silences and make the connections for themselves.You most certainly do not get it all on a plate, the challenge of ambiguity and the potential for confusion all far more representative of real life.It is often several chapters on before one moment of confusion becomes a eureka one.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Friday 11 January 2008

On ARCs and profits

From the Bibliophile Bullpen blog:

One of the viral conversations bouncing from biblioblog to biblioblog, is about Advanced Review Copies, everyone wants to pitch their 2 cents. If you are on the Bookfinder Insider Mailing list you already have an inbox filled with tuppences. For more in depth reading Scott Brown's pennies can be picked up here and Adrien Kohn's can be collected here.

In a nutshell, publishers have been sending out review copies since the beginning of time. Freelance and salaried reviewers read and review the books, try to get some reviews published and then have been free to keep, sell, burn, eat or otherwise dispose of the books. Because booksales are down all over the map, publishers are pinning the blame this profound drop in sales on the tiny percentage of advanced review copies, bound galleys, proofs and other prepublication copies that have found their way into the used book market. This in a word is 'bullshit.'

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, publishing news

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Monday 07 January 2008

Dieckmann’s Guantanamo wins 3 Percent prize

Via Three Percent:

When we first opened the voting, for the Best Translation of 2007, it looked like Bolano was going to win by a landslide, but in the end, it was Dorothea Dieckmann’s Guantanamo that came in first by a substantial margin.

The Savage Detectives finished a strong second, and Out Stealing Horses (which I thought would win), came in third. The Assistant was fourth, and all the other titles were pretty much bunched together.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere

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Wednesday 02 January 2008

One to watch: Gonçalo M. Tavares

Over at Golden Rule Jones, Sam brings my attention to the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares who hit Sam's radar "because of a short book of essays he wrote on Walser". (Robert Walser that is.)

Sam gives us a nice quote from the web site of his literary agency, Dr. Ray-Güde Mertin:

Gonçalo M. Tavares was born in 1970. He spent his childhood in Aveiro in northern Portugal and studied Physics, Sport and Art. He teaches Theory of Science at a university in Lisbon. Tavares has surprised his readers with the variety of books he has published since 2001 and has been awarded an impressive amount of literary prizes in a very short time. In 2005 he won the Saramago Prize for young writers under 35. In his speech at the award ceremony, Saramago commented: “Jerusalém is a great book, and truly deserves a place among the great works of Western literature. Gonçalo M. Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him!”

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Wednesday 02 January 2008

The Sharp Side shuts down

One of my favourite blogs, Ellis Sharp's The Sharp Side has sadly given up the ghost. Yesterday, Ellis closed down his blog with these words: "The Sharp Side terminates here. Farewell."

Ellis had a vibrant and pungent voice and I'll miss his blog. He was always an attentive reader: his recent post on The 5Oth anniversary of Malcolm Lowry’s death being a case in point.

I wonder why he has decided to stop blogging?

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere

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Monday 31 December 2007

Interview with Lee Rourke

Well, the blogging will begin again in earnest on Wednesday. Probably. Depends on how drunk I get tonight. Sadly, Mrs Book is rather unwell, so I doubt I'll be getting too damaged! 

In the meantime, I have just posted my interview with Lee Rourke (RSB contributor, of course, and author of Everyday) up on The Book Depository.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, rsb, the book depository

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Thursday 20 December 2007

The Middle Stage's Books of 2007

The ReadySteadyBook Books of the Year 2007 Symposium will, all being well, be up on the site tomorrow. Yay!

In the meantime, here is the