ReadySteadyBlog
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All blog entries tagged with 'internet'
Thursday 08 April 2010
Jacques Roubaud interview at Bomb Magazine
Not many writers write from both the right and left brains, but Jacques Roubaud bridges that chasm much like an expert martial artist—in a way that makes it seem simple. Or not. Roubaud is an encompassing author. He writes through a full spectrum of the “simple” (i.e. his poetry for children) to mind-bogglingly dense pieces underpinned by mathematical concepts incomprehensible to many left-brained creative folks. After all, the title for his first book was a mathematical symbol—graphic and discrete, yet to explain what it means would take more words than I have been allotted.
Then there’s his life. Child of French Resistance parents. Member of Oulipo, short for the Ouvroir de Litterature Poténtialle, commonly translated as “Workshop for Potential Literature.” Inventor of the “clandestine hunger strike” during his tour of duty in Algiers and translator of Lewis Carroll. University professor of mathematics, but not “a very important one,” as he says, “I didn’t want power!” Survivor of tragedy—World War II, the early death of his wife. Writer through prodigious memory, therefore inevitably grappling with Proust, with whom one senses Roubaud has a wary relationship. But Roubaud himself is now a revered figure in French literature—a postwar writer who, thanks to the ongoing invention of “constraints” demanded by Oulipo, always seems cutting edge...
Jacques Roubaud interview at Bomb Magazine (via Sponge!)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Monday 22 March 2010
Chris Petit's "Content"
Don't miss Chris Petit's superb, Sebaldian new film Content whilst it is still on 4OD. Mark Fisher reviewed Petit's "informal coda" to his 1979 film Radio On in Sight & Sound recently, and wrote:
At one point in Chris Petit’s haunting new film Content, we drive through Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I live – what Petit filmed could have been shot from our car window. What made it all the more uncanny was the fact that Petit never mentions that he is in Felixstowe; the hangars and looming cranes are so generic that I began to wonder if this might not be a doppelgänger container port somewhere else in the world. All of this somehow underlined the way Petit’s text describes these “blind buildings” while his camera tracks along them: “non-places”, “prosaic sheds”, “the first buildings of a new age” which render “architecture redundant”.
Content could be classified as an essay film, but it’s less essayistic than aphoristic. This isn’t to say that it’s disconnected or incoherent: Petit himself has called Content a “21st-century road movie, ambient”, and its reflections on ageing and parenthood, terrorism and new media are woven into a consistency that’s non-linear, but certainly not fragmentary (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: film, internet, w g sebald
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Thursday 11 March 2010
Eagleton on 'the liberal literati'
I'm interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) - the very people you'd have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding - have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I'm very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you'd expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity...
Terry Eagleton interviewed in the New Statesman.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, politics
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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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Monday 01 February 2010
Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger
Genius -- as ever -- from The Onion:
In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: deaths, internet
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Monday 11 January 2010
Hatherley on Southampton
Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism, and RSB interviewee too, of course, has a wonderful entry about that finest of Southern cities, Southampton, up on his sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy blog:
The main reason for all this obsessive city-cataloguing, this rewriting and rewriting of the same piece - other than certain writing commitments combined with residual guilt from endlessly complaining about the place's provincialism despite my (and almost all my former Southampton friends) contributing to this in our small way, by fucking off to London or even further at the earliest opportunity - is that Southampton presents itself as a puzzle. Every time I go there the question 'how did this happen?' presents itself. How did this city, which by all accounts was once the undisputed regional capital (a perusal of The Buildings of England's extremely complimentary 1966 entry on the city is instructive here) get to the point where an entire stretch of its centre, as large as a small town, was given over to a gigantic retail park? How is it that the 16th largest city in the country has the 3rd highest level of violent crime and the 3rd worst exam results, despite being central to one of the most affluent counties? And does any of this have anything to do with the fact that the city contains what was, when built, the largest urban mall in Britain? (More...)
Those dear friends from other fine Southern towns, for instance Portsmouth, are invited not to comment!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 17 November 2009
Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Raoul Vaneigem
Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Raoul Vaneigem over at Info Exchange:
HUO: Today, more than forty years after May ‘68, how do you feel life and society have evolved?
RV: We are witnessing the collapse of financial capitalism. This was easily predictable. Even among economists, where one finds even more idiots than in the political sphere, a number had been sounding the alarm for a decade or so. Our situation is paradoxical: never in Europe have the forces of repression been so weakened, yet never have the exploited masses been so passive. Still, insurrectional consciousness always sleeps with one eye open. The arrogance, incompetence, and powerlessness of the governing classes will eventually rouse it from its slumber, as will the progression in hearts and minds of what was most radical about May 1968 (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy, poetry, politics
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Monday 16 November 2009
Robert Kelly's The Will of Achilles
Robert Kelly's long poem, The Will of Achilles has just been posted up on the Web Conjunctions website.
But under the rain
a different thing. Vine leaves
Achilles sees, inconsequent
myrtles. There is no end
to weather. The gods are done with him.
(More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, poetry
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Monday 16 November 2009
Patrick Keiller and more at blinkbox
blinkbox.com "is a premium movie and TV site that allows you to stream or download the best programming on the web." They have "over 5,000 movies and TV shows to choose from" which you can purchase or rent, but, on top of that, they have lots of free movies. Normally, I wouldn't bother to mention such a website, but the free movies include Caravaggio, The Draughtsman's Contract, Death And The Compass and Patrick Keiller's superb London and its follow-up Robinson in Space.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: film, internet
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Thursday 22 October 2009
Neglected Classics at the BBC
The BBC's Open Book programme looks into some Neglected Classics:
There's nothing that Open Book likes more than browsing and discovering the forgotten treasures of the literary world - books that have been overlooked or become inexplicably out of vogue.
With Neglected Classics we're digging out some of the lost works and forgotten authors of the world of literature.
Ten of our best known authors have nominated the books that they feel most deserve to be re-read and reinstated onto our bookshelves.
We want you to vote for the title that most appeals to you and the winner will be dramatised on Radio 4 in 2010.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Wednesday 21 October 2009
Luther Blissett is Wu Ming
You may recall Luther Blissett's Q from four or five years back. Well, because the Luther Blissett "shared name" is dead, the Italian anarchists who wrote Q under that moniker now write as Wu Ming. They have a new book out, called Manituana, following their earlier 54. More details about this via the Manituana website.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, politics
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Tuesday 29 September 2009
Borges's 'Arte Poetica'
Nice (thanks vaghe.stelle): a reading of Jorge Luis Borges's Arte Poetica, in the original Spanish, accompanied by some slightly trancey visuals and classical chill-out! Is this Borges himself speaking? (Or download the mp3 file or watch the video.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Monday 28 September 2009
Tindal Street Press is Ten
Independent, Midlands-based publisher, Tindal Street Press, celebrate their tenth birthday this year -- and have, quite rightly, seen fit to upgrade their web presence: www.tindalstreet.co.uk
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, publishing news
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Wednesday 09 September 2009
KRCW reaches a thousand
Michael Silverblatt's KCRW Bookworm programme has posted nearly 1000 interviews online. And -- never expected to link here! -- there is a profile of the programme in Oprah Mag!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Wednesday 09 September 2009
Litro
Litro is "a free monthly literary magazine that publishes new, original short fiction that excites us and offers a creative alternative to disposable free papers. Previous contributors include Irvine Welsh, Yiyun Li, Glyn Maxwell, Benjamin Zephaniah and Andrew Crumey. Litro is published by Ocean Media and 100000 copies are distributed monthly around London and the UK, including in underground stations, libraries, galleries, bars and cafes, as well as online."
As you would expect, they also have a blog, mostly written by the novelist Ali Shaw, which is just beginning to take shape.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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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:
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, personal
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Tuesday 16 June 2009
Bloomsday
Today is Bloomsday, of course. literaryhistory.com has a useful "selective list of online literary criticism for James Joyce, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that comply with MLA guidelines."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, literary criticism
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Thursday 04 June 2009
The Drawbridge
Issue 13 of The Drawbridge contains work by Mario Vargas Llosa, Shalom Auslander, José Saramago, Paul Verhaeghen and Samanta Schweblin. Looks worthy of your attention.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Thursday 04 June 2009
blogRank
blogRank "uses over 20 different factors to rank the blogs in any category. Some of the factors include: RSS membership, incoming links, Compete, Alexa, and Technorati ranking, and social sites popularity."
According to the blogRank ranking ReadySteadyBook is the 21st most popular literary blog out there. Indeed, RSB is the only British blog on the list, aside from the London Review of Books website which most certainly is not a blog. It's an odd list -- a book site list rather than a blog list really -- but it is interesting to be well-placed on a chart which is created via such an array of data.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, rsb
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Monday 16 March 2009
Charlotte Mandell essay on Beatrice
"[T]he curious name of the protagonist, Aue (which looks like the Latin word for hail or hello), certainly didn’t strike me immediately as German, but did seem vaguely familiar. Then memory works: Hartmann von Aue, the mediaeval German narrative poet, whose major poem, Gregorius, tells the story of brother-sister love, and their incest, from which a child is born who will go on to find himself, ignorant as Oedipus, years later in bed with his mother. This is, of course, the story that Thomas Mann renewed for our time in his late novel, The Holy Sinner. So meeting Aue’s name already makes the unconscious mind of the translator, and of the reader, stir with anticipations of incest and outrage — the very emotional core of The Kindly Ones, in fact." Charlotte Mandell writes about translating TKO over on beatrice.com.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Friday 13 March 2009
April/May Bookforum online
The April/May issue of Bookforum is up online. As ever, lots of goodies.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Thursday 29 January 2009
Badiou on Beckett
Via wood s lot -- Figures of Subjective Destiny: On Samuel Beckett by Alain Badiou:
Why there is a close relationship between poetry and philosophy, or more generally between literature and philosophy? It’s because philosophy finds in literature some examples of completely new forms of the destiny of the human subject. And precisely new forms of the concrete becoming of the human subject when this subject is confronted to its proper truth.
I name figure this textual presentation of forms of the subjective truth. The figures are of great interest for a philosophical theory of the subject. My example today will be some figures that we discover in the novels of Samuel Beckett (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy, samuel beckett
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Monday 26 January 2009
n+1 book reviews
n+1 magazinehave a new book review supplement, N1BR, which will "publish reviews of new literature every other month."
First issue includes: Neil Gross's Richard Rorty by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Marilynne Robinson by Charles Petersen and Tony Judt by Saul Austerlitz.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, internet
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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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Monday 12 January 2009
The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known
Via Media Lens: "Craig Murray posted his latest book on his blog. He was forced to do so after his publisher decided not to carry it out of fear for legal costs. Download the book here or if that does not work, you can download it here."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, politics
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Monday 12 January 2009
The Teenage Sontag
New York magazine on Susan Sontag:
The most thrilling stretch of Reborn is its beginning, where we get a sustained look at a heretofore entirely mythical creature: the teenage Susan Sontag. As a grown-up, Sontag was so relentlessly, categorically adult that the very notion of a “teenage Sontag” (I imagine her eating sno-cones, lip-synching into a hairbrush, giggling) threatens to tear open some kind of existential wormhole, like a “male Gloria Steinem.” And yet here she is, at 15, a steaming vat of molten adolescence—possibly the most eloquently self-dramatizing teen of all time. She stays up all night reading André Gide (“Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion,” she writes, “that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!”), uses the word aye unironically, and nearly wears the needle off her turntable playing Mozart records. She compiles epic lists for self-improvement: books to read, difficult vocabulary, central beliefs (“the only difference between human beings is intelligence”). She strains mightily against the philistinism of middle-class life with her mother and stepfather: “Wasted the evening with Nat. He gave me a driving lesson and then I accompanied him and pretended to enjoy a Technicolor blood-and-thunder movie.” When she gets to Berkeley she reads poetry aloud and walks around with friends speaking “brilliantly” (her description) about “everything from Bach cantatas to Mann’s Faustus to pragmatism to hyperbolic functions to the Cal Labor School to Einstein’s theory of curved space.” (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Friday 09 January 2009
Danteworlds
Welcome to Danteworlds...
... an integrated multimedia journey -- combining artistic images, textual commentary, and audio recordings -- through the three realms of the afterlife (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise) presented in Dante's Divine Comedy. The site is structured around a visual representation of Dante's worlds: it shows who and what appear where. Click on regions within each realm (circles of Hell, terraces of Purgatory, spheres of Paradise) to open new pages featuring people and creatures whom the character Dante meets during his journey. Click on individual figures in the regions to view larger images in pop-up windows. Available for each region are explanatory notes, a gallery of artistic images, recordings of significant Italian verses, and study questions -- all aimed at enriching the experience of reading Dante's poetic vision of a voyage literally out of this world (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 30 December 2008
Maurice Blanchot's 100th birthday celebration online
Last year's celebration (in words & music) for Maurice Blanchot's 100th birthday at Bard College is now online on the Espace Maurice Blanchot website (via Nomadics).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, maurice blanchot
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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
McLemee on Negri
Scott McLemee on Negri (in BookForum):
Four new works by Negri appeared in English in 2008 — the year we all found ourselves well downstream from that era when debate over globalization and its discontents took the form of extrapolating long-term trends. The problem now is to find a way through the ruins. I have been studying the books in a state of heightened (indeed, strained) attention — with powers of concentration periodically stimulated and shattered by arteriosclerotic convulsions in the world’s financial markets — but also through tears in my eyes.
They are tears of perplexity and frustration. It is not that Negri’s most recent books pose difficulties, both conceptual and programmatic, that his earlier ones did not. The ambiguities have been there all along, as have the opacities. Still, they seemed poetic—not just in that terms like Empire and Multitude possessed a certain evocative, science-fictional luminosity, but also in something like the root sense of poesis. They did not simply name possibilities; they seemed to create a new thing in the world, if only by inciting the political imagination to new efforts. But the latest books do not have that quality. Negri’s analysis of the emerging system is itself a system — if not a world unto itself — and the movement of his thought is now largely centripetal (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy, politics
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Monday 01 December 2008
The Triumph of Roberto Bolaño
Sarah Kerr writing in the NYRB on The Triumph of Roberto Bolaño:
Well beyond his sometimes nomadic life, Roberto Bolaño was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown he had to go there himself, and then invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results of his work are multi-dimensional, in a way that runs ahead of a critic's one-at-a-time powers of description. Highlight Bolaño's conceptual play and you risk missing the sex and viscera in his work. Stress his ambition and his many references and you conjure up threats of exclusive high-modernist obscurity, or literature as a sterile game, when the truth is it's hard to think of a writer who is less of a snob, or—in the double sense of exposing us to unsavory things and carrying seeds for the future—less sterile (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Tuesday 25 November 2008
More free e-books: ebooksjustpublished.com
If you be a fan of the ebooks, then Mark Gladding's ebooksjustpublished.com has RSS feeds that are probably worthy of your attention... ebooksjustpublished.com is "an easy way to find out about new DRM-free eBooks as they’re released".
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Monday 17 November 2008
International Literary Quarterly no.5
Issue 5 of The International Literary Quarterly has just gone live. It contains:
... new work by many writers including Gillian Beer, Andrew Motion, Stanley Wells, Christopher Lane and Lawrence Venuti. Guest Artist for this Issue is Tom Phillips. (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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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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Friday 07 November 2008
Perec's Un Homme Qui Dort
The Auteurs' Glenn Kenny reports on Un Homme Qui Dort, Perec and Queysanne's 1974 film of Perec's book of the same name (thanks Robin):
In the early '70s Perec and his friend Bernard Queysanne, a filmmaker whose experience had heretofore been as an assistant director, teamed up to make a film of the book Un Homme Qui Dort. While much of the film's narration — which comprises the entirety of the film's verbal content; there is no dialogue — is taken directly from the novel, Perec jettisoned the book's linear structure in favor of, Bellos explains, "a mathematical construction. After the prologue (part 0, so to speak) there are six sections. The six sections are interchangeable in the sense that the same objects, places, and movements are shown in each, but they are all filmed from different angles and edited into different order, in line with the permutations of the sestina. The text and the music are similarly organized in six-part permutations, and then edited and mixed so that the words are out of phase with the image except at apparently random moments, the last of which — the closing sequence — is not random at all but endowed with an overwhelming sense of necessity." (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, film, georges perec, internet
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Wednesday 05 November 2008
Graphic novel fan?
From Publishers Weekly: "BookReporter.com, an online network of book related Web sites covering adult and children’s books, is launching GraphicNovelReporter.com, a consumer-oriented site focused on comics in the book format, later this month."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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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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Friday 31 October 2008
Fiction Collective Two
Bored with ELF!? I've not read anything published by these folk, but they look like they might be interesting: Fiction Collective Two "is an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction. FC2 is supported in part by the University of Utah, the University of Houston - Victoria, University of Alabama Press, Illinois State University, and private contributors."
Of course, just as "Booker-winner" is code for dull, dull, dull, experimental fiction can be code for all over the place, but, regardless, FC2 might be worth y'all taking a look at.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: establishment_lit_fiction, internet, publishing news
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Friday 24 October 2008
David Harvey -- The Right to the City
Via New Left Review, the excellent David Harvey on The Right to the City:
We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, politics
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Wednesday 22 October 2008
Kundera's past
You will have no doubt heard about the accusations against Milan Kundera. One notes, just like every commentator who has no access to the documents and so is in absolutely no position to judge, that the accusations seem to be based on very little.
This is a good rejoinder (from euro|topics):
In the daily El País the Czech writer Monika Zgustova criticises the accusations levelled at her fellow countryman, the writer Milan Kundera, who, on the basis of secret service documents, is suspected of denouncing an anti-communist activist to the police in 1950.
"How can an accusation with such grave consequences be made on the basis of a single dubious document and use so many vague expressions? Dubious because in the Czechoslovakia of the 1950s it was routine for the police to receive denunciations, for every police official who received a denunciation could be sure of being awarded a medal ... Both the Czech and the international press were quick to comment on the article [in Respekt] and to spread the accusations against Kundera. In this way we became witnesses ... to something very grave: we were witness to massive accusations against a person in the midst of democracy, without the documents referred to even being questioned, without knowing whether there were any other documents, without hearing other witnesses and above all without listening to the accused's own version of the events."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Wednesday 08 October 2008
Radical Anthropology no.2
The second issue of the Radical Anthropology Group's journal Radical Anthropology is now online (PDF format, I'm afraid) with an excellent article on The Scarcity Myth: What hunter-gathers can teach us about sharing (Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins might be your follow-up reading), and interviews with a combative Noam Chomsky and with Lionel Sims, Principal Lecturer in Anthropology and Anthropology at the University of East London, who "decodes Stonehenge" for us.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, politics
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Tuesday 07 October 2008
Robert Birnbaum interviews Howard Zinn
Over at identity theory, Robert Birnbaum interviews radical historian Howard Zinn (author of A People's History of the United States):
This whole issue of optimism and pessimism, cynicism and utopianism—these issues will always be with us. Always you can draw up this double list. Always. You can draw up this double list you started to draw up, which is a terrifying list which shows we are still going to stupid wars and still violating people’s liberties and all of that is true. You can’t deny it. On the other hand, you can also draw up a list which says there is a greater consciousness today in this country about the rights of women than there was twenty years ago. There is a greater consciousness of people to sexual privacy. A greater consciousness about that. And the problem is—and there is a greater consciousness of the futility of war–it’s a consciousness which can be set aside when [there’s] a fusillade of propaganda from the government and it’s echoed by the press, and that’s what happened in the Iraq war (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: history, internet
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Thursday 02 October 2008
Credit crunch
Oxford University Press has announced its Word of the Year. It's ...credit crunch!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, language
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Tuesday 30 September 2008
Nick Murray on James Hawes's Kafka
Talking about The JC.com, Nicholas Murray writes a brief demolition in its pages of James Hawes' recent study, Excavating Kafka. Hawes condemns Kakfa scholarship for creating and cultivating "the K. myth" of a saintly, tortured, unknown artist. He quite rightly calls this a nonsense and uses... Kafka scholarship to prove his point! So, Murray (author of a recent Kafka biography himself) nails the biggest absurdity of the book in his review: "it is Hawes's mission to remind us that he liked upmarket porn, consorted with prostitutes, and treated his women rather badly, none of which will be news to anyone who has any basic knowledge of Kafka derived from recent biography."
But Hawes' book isn't all bad. Most Kafka scholarship does have something of an awed tone towards its subject and Hawes is refreshingly cross about this. He seems to dislike Kafka the man as much as he values his work, and he wishes to get the man full square out of the way so that readers can concentrate on his writing free of biographical distractions. But Hawes has created new biographical distractions of his own (his reaction to Kafka's "porn stash" -- omigosh, heterosexual man likes pictures of noody ladies shock! -- is adolescent and priggish in the extreme) and he offers little in the way of new, critical comment on the work. For all that, I enjoyed Excavating Kafka. It is punchy and impassioned and written with some verve, but Kafka and his work remain just as enigmatic after reading Hawes' essay as they do before you begin. And that is only right.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, franz kafka, internet
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Tuesday 30 September 2008
JC.com archive
The Jewish Chronicle online seems to have opened up its articles' archive. Search for Josipovici, for instance, and you get a whole pile of priceless reviews from the man himself. Go play!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici, internet
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Monday 01 September 2008
Atlas of Early Printing
Via Booksurfer: "This neat and informative Atlas comes courtesy of the University of Iowa Libraries. Designed primarily as an interactive teaching aid, it is still useful to the general reader with an interest in the history of the books."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: history, internet
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Tuesday 26 August 2008
Wyndham Lewis in the news
Well, this is an extraordinary coincidence! On Thursday 14th August RSB ran this post on Wyndham Lewis. Then on Tuesday August 19th, the Guardian ran this remarkably similar piece. Remember people, you heard it here first!
Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: authors, internet
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Wednesday 20 August 2008
Hipsters
A good piece in the latest Adbusters on 'hipsters' (which I confess I don't take ordinarily).
With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of "hipsterdom" is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global
phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture. Most critics make a point of attacking the hipster’s lack of individuality, but it is this stubborn obfuscation that distinguishes them from their predecessors, while allowing hipsterdom to easily blend in and mutate other social movements, sub-cultures and lifestyles.
It's a variation on the theme of the 'end of
Bohemia' but powerfully written and points to the tedium of apolitical contemporary culture – this goes beyond music and the counter-culture, but also, I think, infects literature (choose your own offender).
See Momus's response
and the masterful K – Punk's rejoinder.
Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: internet
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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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Monday 28 July 2008
Reader's block
Tom refers me to an article on reader's block:
The Guardian ... published an article on "reader's block", that tendency to buy books and never read them or to start them and not finish them. Apparently spending on books in Britain (£4.4bn per year) is rising faster than any other country in Europe while the number of hours spent reading books is declining.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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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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Tuesday 22 July 2008
Beckett and Schopenhauer
As a young man, Beckett read Schopenhauer again and again...
... and not only because of his beautiful style, despite his claims to the contrary. Schopenhauer’s pessimism was very close to Beckett’s own, and he was to heed the three ways of enduring the misery of existence that Schopenhauer recommended: art, or aesthetic contemplation, compassion, and resignation.
Gottfried Büttner's essay (pdf!) "explores the ways in which Schopenhauer’s thought made it possible for Beckett to create his literary work and to come to grips with his own life." (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, samuel beckett
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Tuesday 22 July 2008
Kleist's On The Marionette Theatre
In a fascinating short essay in James Knowlson and John Pilling's Frescoes of the Skull: the later prose and drama of Samuel Beckett (1979), Pilling writes:
Beckett's admiration for Heinrich von Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater, written in 1810 [Kleist shot himself a year later], emerged clearly in October 1976 during rehearsals of the first production on BBC television of his recent television play Ghost Trio...
It is not at all surprising, of course, that Beckett should have been so strongly attracted to Kleist's essay. For trapped as he is by his own consciousness of self, Beckett's man yearns to escape from the limitations of his mortal state ... his sense of the disaster of self-consciousness in man (and the inadequacy of the human intellect to arrive at any form of salvation) finds an unusually faithful echo in Kleist's remarkable essay.
If you want to read Kleist's essay for yourself, Idris Parry's translation is online at the Southern Cross Review.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, samuel beckett
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Wednesday 16 July 2008
The 50 outstanding literary translations from the last 50 years
The Translators Association of the Society of Authors celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion they have compiled a list of the 50 outstanding literary translations from the last 50 years.
Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style comes in at the top spot, but there is no room for Edith Grossman's Don Quixote.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, language
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Thursday 10 July 2008
Dispatches from America's Class War
Dave Pollard reviews Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus (via wood s lot):
My friend Joe Bageant's book Deer Hunting With Jesus explains through personal stories his brutal assessment of just how strong the class system in the US really is, why the classes are and always have been at war, and why that plays perfectly into the hands of the right-wing political and economic interests there. These are stories about the people Joe grew up with and calls friends, and to write about their lives so bluntly and candidly is an act of incredible courage and honesty.
This is a society where poverty and illness are stigmatized as symptoms of laziness, ignorance and self-neglect, a society built on two-way class vs class fear of the unknown and misunderstood. The principal determinant of one's class in America, and the hermetic worldview that comes with it, is education.
More than anything, Deer Hunting With Jesus is a plea to those of progressive inclination to meet with their working-class peers, at a grass-roots level, to understand how they live, how they think, and why they think that way, and to find, as hard as it will be to do so, common cause with them against the corporatist exploiters and their right-wing political and religious handmaidens, and common cause for universal health care, quality education for all, a fair pension and a decent wage for a day's work -- the end of the "dead-end social construction that all but guarantees failure".
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, internet, politics
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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
James Wood critiqued
Good, long review of Wood's How Fiction Works in The Australian (via 3Quarks):
In How Fiction Works Wood holds up Flaubert as the turning point in the novel's becoming modern: for introducing, all in one package, acute visualisation, a lack of sentimentality, unshowy narration and, above all, an instinct for "truth", no matter how unpalatable. For Wood, this is a moral mission. Flaubert is bent upon a scrupulous investigation of how people really are. But the problem is that Flaubert also seems to represent the novel's endgame for Wood. As a yardstick, Wood's strictly defined ideal of the real leaves him a restricted space in which to move as a critic, and the novel little wriggle room to develop further. It is not nearly as flexible as Kundera's more historical understanding of the novel, as a kind of enlightened mindset, which leaves room for its form to shift and evolve. For in spite of the fact that Wood's books pay lip-service to (and borrow much of their gravitas from) Kundera's two chief preoccupations, scepticism and humour, Wood lacks his cannier understanding that novels are also always strategic. (No wonder Wood, who never openly acknowledges his debt to Kundera, and who differs so fundamentally on the issue of an author's freedoms to self-consciously reflect upon such matters in his work, distances himself from that author at the beginning of How Fiction Works with a snide comment about the lack of "inkiness" in The Art of the Novel.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, literary criticism
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Thursday 26 June 2008
The Unfortunates reviewed
A new review of an old classic: Thomas McGonigle takes a look at B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates ("the British author's experimental novel is made up of sections that can be changed at random so that no two readings are the same).
McGonigle's review begins:
The writer B.S. Johnson was one of a handful of modern authors -- among others, Alan Burns, Ann Quin, Zulfikar Ghose -- who extended the range of the English novel by moving beyond the innovations of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Johnson was trivialized by a ferociously traditional British literary establishment wedded to the conventional realistic novel. He committed suicide in 1973, but thanks to his very loyal readers, his novels continue to be reprinted because they are so deeply human, formally innovative and pay microscopic attention to detail.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review, internet
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Wednesday 25 June 2008
Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey
Right, now you have no excuse: Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey (thanks Rowan!)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, politics
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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 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 09 June 2008
if:book London
if:book London has launched: futureofthebook.org.uk:
We are a small think and do tank based in London exploring the potential of new media for creative readers and writers & investigating the evolution of cultural discourse as it moves from printed page to networked screen.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Saturday 07 June 2008
Reading Walser
Words Without Borders hosts an online book club which this month is discussing Robert Walser’s The Assistant.
Sam Golden Rule Jones acts as moderator for the discussion and we’re joined by a host of Walser lovers who will take turns discussing the author and his work. Susan Bernofsky’s afterword to the book is already up, as is Sam’s introduction. Head over to the page and take a look, and be sure to check back often as we roll out work from Tom Whalen, Damion Searls, Tamara Evans, Mark Harman, Millay Hyatt, Jonathon Taylor, Bernhard Echte, Peter Utz, James Tweedie and others. We hope that after reading the commentary from our group of artists, writers, scholars, and Walser translators and aficionados, you’ll feel moved to add your own thoughts over at our Walser Discussion Forum.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Thursday 05 June 2008
The Believer Book Award
The fourth annual Believer Book Award has been awarded to Tom McCarthy's all-conquering Remainder.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, internet
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Thursday 05 June 2008
Bolaño at Triple Canopy
Over at the interesting looking Triple Canopy magazine, amongst other goodies you can find the first complete English translation of Bolaño's 1999 speech accepting the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel The Savage Detectives (translated by David Noriega).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Monday 02 June 2008
Not the son of the more famous Anthony
So, like an excited young puppy, yesterday I woke early and ran to the local shops to buy a copy of the Sunday Times. My first ever review for that prestigious organ was due to appear and I was beside myself with glee and anticipation.
I grabbed the paper, flung the correct change at the newsagent, and opened the paper. There it was. My review. In glorious black and white type. And -- wait a minute! what's this? -- credited to the poet Anthony Thwaite. I was gutted! Floored! And me poor mother ... well, I doubt she'll ever recover.
Happily, the review is now attributed correctly online. So if you want to see my take on The Dying Game: A Curious History of Death by Melanie King pop over to the TimesOnline.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, personal
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Thursday 22 May 2008
Berger's Ways of Seeing
John Berger's Ways of Seeing is up on YouTube (thanks Rowan).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, internet
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Monday 19 May 2008
The International Literary Quarterly no.3
Issue 3 of The International Literary Quarterly is now online featuring new work by Geoffrey Hartman, Irina Ratushinskaya, Marjorie Agosin, Zulfikar Ghose, Roberta Gordenstein, Michael Blumenthal, Jill Dawson, C.J.K. Arkell, Anthony Rudolf and Denise Duhamel. Artwork is by Cuban artist Lydia Rubio.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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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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Monday 12 May 2008
The Child on the Street
Good pal of ReadySteadyBook, Ken Worpole, writes about children's street games and the importance of play in underpinning a free society (via Booksurfer):
As the events of 1968 are commemorated, it is worth noting that it was the postwar celebration of children's play that anticipated the reclamation of the street as a domain of political liberty. Even the Opies realised that many children's games were an implicit form of political protest, as when they saw that dangerous games of risk such as Last Across the Road were an "impulse of the tribe" against the encroachment of the car into their sacred territory. This position was endorsed by the anarchist Colin Ward in his seminal 1970s book, The Child in the City, the last great expression of belief in the power of play to turn the street and the playground, if not the world, upside down (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, politics
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Monday 12 May 2008
Translated Fiction
Booktrust's Translated Fiction site is worth a look -- not an RSS feed in sight, however!
Booktrust, which runs the translated fiction website, is committed to encouraging people of all ages and cultures to discover and enjoy reading. We are proud to be able to expand our work into the world of translated fiction and believe we are well placed to celebrate and broaden readers’ awareness of these amazing novels.
We also want to support the authors who wrote the books in the first place, and the publishers who have committed themselves to publishing these books in a highly competitive and increasing homogeneous market.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Thursday 01 May 2008
French Theory in America, Part Two
"My editor thought that a column on French theory would elicit a small number of responses from readers interested in continental philosophy. More than 600 comments later, it is clear that terms like deconstruction and postmodernism still have the capacity to produce excitement and outrage." Stanley Fish revisits his original French Theory in America post from last month and responds to commenters.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Wednesday 30 April 2008
Wood v. Franzen
Mark Athitakis brings my attention to a public discussion between James Wood and Jonathan Franzen (the latter cattily saying that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times" i.e. Michiko Kakutani):
The relation between those who create art and those who critique it is notoriously fraught, something that was evident quickly to the standing-room only crowd in Sever Hall last night that watched novelist Jonathan Franzen face English professor James Wood, who has been one of his toughest critics (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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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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Tuesday 29 April 2008
Eurozine
"Eurozine is a network of European cultural journals, linking up 70 partner journals and just as many associated magazines and institutions from nearly all European countries. Eurozine is also a netmagazine which publishes outstanding articles from its partner journals with additional translations into one of the major European languages" (via wood s lot which brought my attention to the article On the economy of moralism and working class properness).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 29 April 2008
The Modernist Journals Project
The Modernist Journals Project collects literary arts journals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including both issues of Wyndham Lewis' Vorticist manifesto Blast, the first ten years of Poetry magazine (with Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and foreign correspondent Ezra Pound), topical essays, the Virginia Woolf-inspired December 1910 Project, the amazing proto-dada zine Le Petit Journal des Réfusées and a searchable biographical database of famous and not so famous artists and writers (via MetaFilter; thanks Steve!)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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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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Monday 21 April 2008
Manuscript Genetics ... and a Woolf quote
I've just been sent a copy of Manuscript Genetics: Joyce's Know-how, Beckett's Nohow by Dirk van Hulle (University Press of Florida; I was also kindly sent Cannibal Joyce). I have precious little idea what "manuscript genetics" is/are, so, before I've read it, here is what the UPF website has to say about van Hulle's book:
By taking the principles of manuscript genetics and using them to engage in a comparative study of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Dirk Van Hulle has produced a provocative work that re-imagines the links between the two authors. His elegant readings reveal that the most striking similarities between these two lie not in their nationality or style but in their shared fascination with the process of revision.
Van Hulle's thoughtful application of genetic theory -- the study of a work from manuscript to final form in its various iterations -- marks a new phase in this dynamic field of inquiry. As one of only a handful of books in English dealing with this emerging area of study, Manuscript Genetics: Joyce's Know-How, Beckett's Nohow will be indispensable not only to Joyce and Beckett scholars but also to anyone interested in genetic criticism.
Indispensable: you heard the man!
The book opens with a nice epigraph quoting Virginia Woolf:
It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, internet, samuel beckett, virginia woolf
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Monday 21 April 2008
George Steiner profile
Decent George Steiner profile in the Guardian on Saturday:
Visitors to George Steiner's house in Cambridge are likely to be greeted at the door by Ben, an enormous Old English sheepdog. Like his owners, Ben is used to dealing with the press. "Monsieur Ben, the French call him," Steiner says. "French journalists in particular are always fascinated by him." Ben has appeared, Steiner notes, on the cover of a distinguished literary journal. Is it true that he has discriminating taste in music? "Ravel's Bolero - he growls. But he is fond of Tchaikovsky." "And Duke Ellington," Steiner's wife Zara, a Cambridge historian, adds from across the kitchen (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Friday 18 April 2008
Back from the LBF ... and a Simon Critchley link
I'm back from the London Book Fair. I had an excellent time and met some lovely people, but right now I'm really, really shattered!
So, whilst I recover (drink lots of tea, cuddle the dogs), go read a piece about Simon Critchley (via wood s lot) for your edification -- Middle Spaces: Media and the Ethics of Infinitely Demanding by Daniel Punday:
The novel has long been associated with ethics. This link goes back to F.R. Leavis, but Andrew Gibson has shown that this tradition is alive and well today not only in the work of humanist critics like Wayne Booth, but among postmodernists like Richard Rorty and J. Hillis Miller. One way to interrogate Simon Critchley's theory of ethics and political resistance in Infinitely Demanding is to set it alongside of contemporary novels and to ask how they respond differently to the same cultural moment (more ...).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, personal, philosophy
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Tuesday 15 April 2008
Philip Roth's birthday bash
Audio from Philip Roth's 75th birthday celebration at Columbia Univesity in New York on Friday can be heard via the website or downloaded as podcasts at wnyc.org (thanks to David Bukszpan).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Friday 11 April 2008
Ulrich Grothus on Thomas Mann
Sixty Years of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus by Ulrich Grothus (via the a reader's words blog):
As the subtitle says, Doktor Faustus is The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Leverkühn is born in 1885 in central Germany. He studies the piano and some composition as a boy but first earns a degree in theology before returning to his German-American music teacher Wendell Kretzschmar to study composition in Leipzig. The very day Leverkühn arrives in Leipzig he is led to a brothel by a tour guide and first meets a prostitute whom he later revisits. She will then infect him with syphilis. The infection is interpreted as a stimulant to artistic creativity - and as a silent pact with the devil who makes his appearance exactly half-way through the novel, probably only in Leverkühn’s fantasy. The primary infection is not adequately treated and 24 years later, in 1930, will lead to Leverkühn’s mental breakdown and paralysis, from which he will not recover until his death ten years later. The paralytic shock happens when Leverkühn has invited his friends from Munich to the nearby village where he lives, apparently for a presentation of his last composition The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, but in fact to confess his nefarious trade of love and warmth for artistic creativity.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, thomas mann
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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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Wednesday 09 April 2008
Open Yale Courses
Nigel Beale brings my attention to Open Yale Courses:
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 08 April 2008
World Literature Forum
Stewart from Booklit has created a World Literature Forum:
... I’ve been a member of many book related communities on the web these past five years. Most of these tend to be general book forums, encompassing as much as possible. To me, this can lack focus... So to this end, I’ve created World Literature Forum, which I hope will offer an area of the internet for people to discuss, review, recommend and publicise translated works. Fingers crossed.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Thursday 03 April 2008
Willa Cather Archive
Via the Literature Compass Blog I note the existence of The Willa Cather Archive:
The Willa Cather Archive is team-based scholarship. Each component requires the substantial work and interactions of Cather specialists, technical specialists, graduate and undergraduate students, administrators, and more. The Cather Archive brings together the Cather Project from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln English Department, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL, and the Archives and Special Collections of the UNL Libraries, and a full list of the individuals working on the project can be found here: cather.unl.edu/staff.html. As a scholar working on this project, I feel extremely grateful to learn so much from so many, and to create something that I feel at once is extremely useful for the scholarly community and can push that community in new directions.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Friday 28 March 2008
Dark Room
Should be writing? Easily distracted? Try Dark Room (via doshdosh):
I’m busy with some other projects now and instead of leaving the blog alone for several days, I thought I’ll do a quick post on a helpful tool that I’ve been using for more than a year.
It’s called Dark Room and its a minimalist fullscreen word processor which forces you to focus on the writing process and nothing else.
This free Windows/.Net application transforms your entire computer screen into a dark background and removes all the usual word processor toolbars and quick buttons. The only thing you’ll see is the words. I feel that it really improves my ability to concentrate on the blog post or school essay I’m writing.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, technical
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Friday 28 March 2008
Tournament of Books final
Guess who is in the Tournament of Books final? Yup: Tom McCarthy ... and he could well be pitching up against Roberto Bolaño. Interesting!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, tom mccarthy
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Tuesday 25 March 2008
New Bookforum online
The new issue of Bookforum is now available online. Enjoy!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 11 March 2008
Marguerite Duras (and Robbe-Grillet)
Are duras.ifrance.com and Société Marguerite Duras really the best the web can do for Marguerite Duras pages? Goodness. This is woeful. I needs to sort me out my minisites and knock something decent together for Ms Duras asap!
Robbe-Grillet doesn't fair much better either. John Leo's Robbe-Grillet Homepage and The Modern Word's page are the best he gets. Hmmm. Work to do!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: alain robbe-grillet, authors, internet, marguerite duras
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Tuesday 11 March 2008
Warner on Beckett
Babble with Beckett: How foreign languages can provide writers with a way out of the familiar (thanks Dave Lull):
About twenty years ago, a friend from Paris gave me a copy of Premier Amour (1945), one of Samuel Beckett’s very early works in French. This friend especially treasured this little-known short récit, but there was a word he did not understand. The protagonist does some kind of business with a “panais”. “Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un panais?”, he asked. “It’s a parsnip.” “Yes, so the dictionary says. But what is a parsnip? The French don’t eat parsnips. They feed them to animals.” The appearance of the panais in Premier Amour is ruefully comic; it brings into play the cryptic, the abject and the theatrical. It hints, according to punning dream logic, at the proverb, “Fine words butter no parsnips”. Beckett was finding his way out of fine words.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, samuel beckett
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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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Tuesday 04 March 2008
A new Quarterly Conversation
A new issue of The Quarterly Conversation (issue 11, Spring 2008) is up online.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 04 March 2008
Feast day of Saint Casimir
Today is the feast day of Saint Casimir, patron saint of Lithuania and of those suffering from, or wishing to avoid, the flea-borne plague. Love wikipedia!
And a word that means being full of fleas? Pulicosity!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: history, internet
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Friday 29 February 2008
Garfield minus Garfield
Via Garfield minus Garfield
I've seen this linked to at a number of blogs and sites now but, still, it is certainly worth passing on: very funny -- Garfield minus Garfield:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Thursday 28 February 2008
Ferri on Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard "is often accused of writing novels that feel like cruel jokes. So dark, so difficult, and so misunderstood..." so writes Jessica Ferri (many thanks to Dave Lull for the link):
Bernhard offered me a language for these nascent, creeping feelings of misanthropy and also relief from them, with his melodrama and humour. I can't think of a writer who better captures the intensity and ridiculousness of big-city living. Bernhard's books are the only ones I want to open on the subway. He managed to capture the most beautiful aspects of life using the most wretched, miserable situations and characters. Such glimmers of humanity are similar to those brief moments of serenity that can be found on a crowded subway station, if one looks closely enough.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, thomas bernhard
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Tuesday 26 February 2008
Wood on Conrad
Well, really Wood on Peter Carey and Hari Kunzru (over at The New Yorker), but it opens with this nice riff (he's good at riffs is Wood) on Conrad:
Ever since the attack on the World Trade Center, we have all heard a lot about “the Professor,” the chilling anarchist in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, who walks around with a bomb strapped to himself and one hand on the detonator. Far more attention has been paid to this ruthless fanatic—unsuggestively reprised by Cormac McCarthy as Anton Chigurh, in “No Country for Old Men”—than to Verloc, the harried, soft, pithless entity who is the novel’s actual protagonist. But Verloc is more interesting than the Professor because he is so much less confident. The Professor is an arrow; Verloc is a target, helplessly bearing the gouges of the various assaults made on him. He works for the anarchists, but he also works against them, as a double agent; he is despised by his handler at the embassy, and feels bullied into following the diplomat’s order to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, a job that he fatally bungles; he is a minor London shopkeeper, who sells pornography under the table; he moves through his shabby domestic existence sluggishly, as if under water.
Verloc is vivid because he is trapped...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Tuesday 26 February 2008
Augustus Young webzine
Menard Press author Augustus Young has embarked on "a regular webzine of new and unpublished work." He has a nice short essay on the site entitled Sacrificial Lamb discussing Bacon and Giacometti. The layout is a bit scary -- a blog would've been easier to write and much easier to read and navigate, but nice to see him online anyway!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Monday 18 February 2008
The International Literary Quarterly no.2
Issue two of The International Literary Quarterly is now online:
A central tenet of ILQ is that it play a part in sponsoring an ethos of literary internationalism. To this end, Issue 2 showcases new work by Aamer Hussein, brought up in Pakistan; Mimi Khalvati, born in Iran but raised in Switzerland; and Mohamed El-Bisatie, whose novel, exploring the mores of modern Egyptian life, is translated by Cairo-based Denys Johnson Davies.
Closer to home, this issue is enriched by masterful contributions from four well-considered British writers: Jenny Diski, Sara Maitland, Dilys Rose and Iain Sinclair.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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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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Friday 08 February 2008
Taking Sides: Jacques Rancière and Agonistic Literature
In Taking Sides: Jacques Rancière and Agonistic Literature (link via wood s lot; thankfully now available to me because of the wonder of Page2RSS) author Hector Kollias discusses:
... Jacques Rancière's theory of literature as centred on an agonistic concept of literature, where literature is seen as a ‘positive contradiction’. This positive contradiction arises from what Rancière sees as literature's origins in the ‘errant letter’, which is conceived as an intrinsically democratic principle that, for Rancière, also results in the tendency of literature to incarnate the word and to propose an extra-textual truth which would signal the end of literature as democratic errancy. Asking whether it is possible to identify Rancière as ‘taking sides’ in what he sets up as a struggle, the article analyses three examples of Rancière's engagement with literary texts (Balzac, Mallarmé, and Proust) in which he demonstrates the necessity for literature to maintain its constitutive contradiction, resulting in a conception of literature as an agonistic field and as a self-critical mode of writing.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Thursday 07 February 2008
New Borges interview
Via TEV: "A never-before-seen-in-English interview with TEV hero Jorge Luis Borges can be found in the latest issue of the excellent journal Habitus."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Monday 04 February 2008
Page2RSS
One of my favourite websites is wood s lot, but I do find it hugely annoying that it doesn't have an RSS feed. I do nearly all my web-reading via a newsfeeder (Bloglines, in fact) so when a site doesn't have a feed it is all but lost to me these days.
Well, the web has a solution: enter Page2RSS: "a service that helps you monitor web sites that do not publish feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS aggregator." Nice. Very nice.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 29 January 2008
Walter Benjamin links
Via Dispatches from Zembla:
two reviews of English translation of Walter Benjamin's scraps, notebooks and other miscellany in Guardian and Financial Times.
And to brighten up the evening, an excerpt from his essay The Storyteller (PDF). I like the first two paragraphs too in which he talks about how the art of storytelling has declined in the modern age in commensurate with a parallel decline in the ability to exchange experiences...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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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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Monday 14 January 2008
Top Ten Drunk American Writers
My final offering of a linktastic day is: Top Ten Drunk American Writers!
And look -- a book: More Literary Drinkers!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Friday 04 January 2008
Camus on In Our Time
Via Three Percent: Radio 4's In Our Time has a show dedicated to the life and work of Albert Camus.
Shortly after the new year of 1960, a small family car crashed in the French town of Villeblevin in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants. One was the publisher Michel Gallimard; the other was the writer Albert Camus. In Camus’ pocket was an unused train ticket and in the boot of the car his unfinished autobiography The First Man.
Camus was only 46 when his life was cut tragically short but had already worked for the French Resistance, fallen out with Jean-Paul Sartre, written a series of brilliant novels and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And although he has been dead for nearly 50 years, his ideas on the absurdity of life and the richness of his writing live on.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Monday 31 December 2007
Situationist telly
Some great videos about the Situationists can be found at brightcove.tv (courtesy of ChristieBooks).
People, you know that there is nothing decent on the telly at this time of year so watch these!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Tuesday 11 December 2007
George Saunders on Daniil Kharms
Via Three Percent: "It's a few days old now, but the New York Times review of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing is worth checking out. Saunders does a good job of explaining how Kharms isn’t simply an "absurdist," but an author who basically objected to the essential artifice of fiction:"
All of us who write fiction have, I suspect, felt some resistance to this moment of necessary artifice. But for Kharms this moment hardened into a kind of virtuous paralysis. I imagine him looking out his little window there in St. Petersburg, seeing people walking around out there in those Russian hats, and just as he’s about to invent some “meaningful,” theme-causing things for them to do, he freezes up, because per his observations, such meaningful, drama-exuding things do not happen so tidily in reality.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Monday 26 November 2007
That's the best thing we've read all year
The Observer's Books of the Year list -- the first of the many to come -- is up online. Like Steve, I was really pleased and very surprised to see Toby Litt choose Pierre Joris's translations of Paul Celan (issued by Green Integer Books; Celan, it seems, would have been 87 last Friday had he not killed himself back in 1970) and intrigued by Peter Ho Davies' recommendation of the work of Charles Baxter. I'm a big fan of Pierre so it was a real thrill to see the Litt notice; the Baxter book, The Art of Subtext, arrived here a week or so ago -- I'll try to get around to it this coming weekend. The rest of the list didn't really bring anything exciting to light ... but, regardless of the almost inevitable disappointment, one always trawls such lists in the hope that they might turn up something good or surprising.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Tuesday 20 November 2007
Beckett and van Velde
Mick Finch reviews Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (via This Space):
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of their encounter is the degree of difference in each man's presentation of their world. Van Velde's nihilism weighs heavily upon the reader and this is not alleviated by his repeated claims that laughter is the only true response to the existential conundrum. Beckett, on the other hand, embodied such a response in both his life and his work and laughter is a product of his writing, not a subject.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, internet, samuel beckett
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Monday 19 November 2007
Book 2.0?
Today, Amazon launch their e-book reader, the Amazon Kindle. There is a very chunky article in Newsweek (thanks Lee!) with the details:
This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0. That's shorthand for a revolution (already in progress) that will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish. The Kindle represents a milestone in a time of transition, when a challenged publishing industry is competing with television, Guitar Hero and time burned on the BlackBerry; literary critics are bemoaning a possible demise of print culture, and Norman Mailer's recent death underlined the dearth of novelists who cast giant shadows.
Evan Schnittman, OUP's Vice President of Business Development and Rights for the Academic and USA Divisions, has a review of the Kindle Device up on the OUPblog.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, technical
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Thursday 08 November 2007
17 Ways to Get Free Books
Via The Frugal Panda, a nice article entitled 17 Ways to Get Free Books: "You can never have too many books, so we are delighted to share with you some ways to get them for free. From children’s books to technical books, there are numerous resources that offer literature for free. Some of the following sites offer actual printed books, while others feature electronic books (aka “ebooks”)."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Wednesday 31 October 2007
The International Literary Quarterly
Editor Peter Robertson has brought my attention to the first issue of The International Literary Quarterly which contains contributions by, amongst others, Lydia Davis, Gabriel Josipovici and Suzanne Jill Levine. Looks damn fine:
We strive to publish the best in contemporary literature while shunning all ideological affiliations. Indeed, the driving force behind The International Literary Quarterly is that it be a broad church in the world of letters, a forum for outstanding poetry and prose, whether in its original version or in translation, and for criticism that is trenchant and thought-provoking.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 30 October 2007
Lydia Davis again
We've already mentioned Lydia Davis twice today, now I note (via the PEN America blog) that her talk, The Architecture of Thought, "originally presented at a Twentieth-Century Masters Tribute to Marcel Proust" is up on the PEN American Center site.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet, marcel proust
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Wednesday 24 October 2007
Reading Sándor Márai
Via Maud Newton: at "Words Without Borders, Mark Sarvas and David Leavitt consider Sándor Márai’s The Rebels, his body of work, and intimacy between men."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet
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Wednesday 24 October 2007
The Googlization of Everything
Interesting new blog from Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything:
This blog, the result of a collaboration between myself and the Institute for the Future of the Book, is dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc. The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google's ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Friday 19 October 2007
Free e-TLS
The ePaper version of the TLS is free of charge this week (you need to register, mind).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Friday 19 October 2007
A new scarecrow
Lee Rourke has just written to say that there is a "new scarecrow up." Best go read it then!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Tuesday 16 October 2007
Sutherland speaks to Moretti
I missed this, so I guess that one or two of you might have missed it as well: John Sutherland meets Franco Moretti.
Moretti has spoken previously of making criticism less like a Platonic academy, and more like a laboratory. But what does he mean by that? "A Platonic academy, or symposium," he says, "is a group of people sitting round a table discussing ideas, which is a great thing to do. But it may have run its course, historically. What I mean by talking about laboratories is that larger and larger banks of data are becoming available, and we have absolutely no idea of how to deal with them. In just a few years, all the texts in existence will be online, and searchable. We really do not know how to pose useful questions to that mass of information.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 16 October 2007
Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration
The Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration (via Literature Compass):
... contains records and images of 868 literary illustrations that were published in or around 1862, providing bibliographical and iconographical details, as well as the ability for users to view images at exceptionally high quality.
The database is the culmination of a three-year project, based in Cardiff University’s Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The aim of the project has been to examine the feasibility of developing an online database application that would allow users to view images at high quality, as well as providing access to images by accurate bibliographic classifications and an appropriate iconographic taxonomy.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, libraries
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Friday 12 October 2007
Wood on Roth
John Self, over on his Asylum blog, has written an excellent review of Roth's Exit Ghost. John's review could easily grace the pages of any broadsheet, but it misses what makes Roth's book so exciting and different to the mass of adequate Establishment Literary Fiction that crowds the shelves.
James Wood gets nearer to what makes Roth special in his New Yorker article Parade’s End: The many lives of Nathan Zuckerman:
Roth has been the great stealth postmodernist of American letters, able to have his cake and eat it without any evidence of crumbs. This is because he does not regard himself as a postmodernist. He is intensely interested in fabrication, in the performance of the self, in the reality that we make up in order to live; but his fiction examines this “without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or magic-realist gimmickry,” as Zuckerman approvingly says of Lonoff’s work. Roth does not want to use his games to remind us, tediously and self-consciously, that Nathan and Amy and Lonoff are just “invented characters.” Quite the opposite. Unstartled by their inventedness, he swims through depthless skepticism toward a series of questions that are gravely metaphysical, and more Jamesian than Pynchonian: How much of any self is pure invention? Isn’t such invention as real to us as reality? But then how much reality can we bear? Roth knows that this kind of inquiry, far from robbing his fiction of reality, provokes an intense desire in his readers to invest his invented characters with solid reality, just as Nathan once invested the opaque Amy Bellette with the reality of Anne Frank. In this kind of work, the reader and the writer do something similar—they are both creating real fictions.
Roth "does not regard himself as a postmodernist." And neither do I. The power of Exit Ghost comes from Jamesian questions, as Wood says, not postmodernist answers. The power comes from Roth's modernism.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, establishment_lit_fiction, internet
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Friday 05 October 2007
Costa-Gavras and Peter Watkins' films
From ChristieBooks:
Two recent additions to the 400+ documentaries, shorts and feature films on ChristieBooks' Brightcove site are Costa-Gavras' Z (1969) and Peter Watkins' rarely seen 1967 film Privilege.
Z (1969; Costa-Gavras)
Z is a 1969 French language political thriller directed by Costa Gavras, with a screenplay by Gavras and Jorge Semprún, based on the novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos. The film presents a thinly fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of democratic Greek politician Gregoris Lambrakis in 1963. With its satirical view of Greek politics, its dark sense of humor, and its chilling ending, the film captures the sense of outrage about the military dictatorship that ruled Greece at the time of its making.
Privilege (1967; Peter Watkins)
After directing several extraordinary documentaries for the BBC, Peter Watkins made his first dramatic feature with this flawed but striking film about Steven Shorter (Paul Jones), a pop singer in a future society where entertainment is controlled by a totalitarian government. Shorter's music and image is used to channel the impulses of rebellious youth; in one concert sequence, the crowd watches him sing a plaintive plea for love and understanding while locked in a cage surrounded by police officers armed with clubs. While Shorter is remarkably popular, he's also living a life created for him by the government, which Steven knows is a sham. When Shorter's handlers decide to revis image into that of an obedient, religious boy, he rebels, to his peril. Model Jean Shrimpton made her film debut here as an artist comissioned to paint a portrait of Shorter. Privilege later became something of a cult film; one of the film's admirers was rock poet Patti Smith, who recorded one of "Steven Shorter"'s songs, Set Me Free, on her 1978 album Easter.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, politics
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Monday 03 September 2007
Philosophers on YouTube
The European Graduate School has made lectures from Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler available on YouTube. Literature Compass Blog has all the details.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Monday 03 September 2007
Semantic web?
Via Petrona, I note an article about the semantic web in The Economist magazine. Semantic web? Here is The Economist's definition:
The semantic web is so called because it aspires to make the web readable by machines as well as humans, by adding special tags, technically known as metadata, to its pages. Whereas the web today provides links between documents which humans read and extract meaning from, the semantic web aims to provide computers with the means to extract useful information from data accessible on the internet, be it on web pages, in calendars or inside spreadsheets.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 14 August 2007
A new CONTEXT
There is a new CONTEXT up online which includes:
Reading Aidan Higgins, Robert Pinget, and Witold Gombrowicz.
Letters from Macedonia and Poland.
Interviews with Dumitru Tsepeneag, Louis Paul Boon, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.
Commentaries by Roger Boylan, John Taylor, Michael Pinker, Lindsay Waters, Ros Schwartz, and Jim Knipfel.
Contributors include Céline Bourhis, Joos Florquin, Shushan Avagyan, Evgeny Pavlov, Goce Smilevski, and Przemyslaw Czaplinski.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Wednesday 18 July 2007
Janet Gezari interview at TBD and other bits
Lola the puppy is at the vet's (getting spayed, god bless her). Stupidly, I'm quite frantic with worry, but the nervous energy at least means I'm cracking on with lots of work...
I've just posted a great interview up on The Book Depository with Janet Gezari, author of the excellent Last Things - Emily Bronte's Poems.
And -- in addition to The Official ReadySteadyBook.com Fanclub -- I've also created the Editor's Corner on Facebook group so you can stay up-to-date with what is posted on my Book Depository blog, Editor's Corner, what reviews I've recently added to The Book Depository site and what is going on behind the scenes at The Book Depository (a facelift for the website if you're curious to know ... and soon -- yay!)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, poetry
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Tuesday 10 July 2007
How To Read Elfriede Jelinek
There is a detailed overview of the work of Elfriede Jelinek by Tim Parks over in The New York Review of Books: he isn't that impressed!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Saturday 30 June 2007
Robert Macfarlane interview
I've been away to Big London. Mostly, I was meeting publishers with my Book Depository hat on (although I did also mananage briefly to attend a very pleasant bloggers bash organised by Penguin).
I'll be spending the weekend catching up with myself, walking Lola if it ever stops raining, and reading War & War. Might I suggest that if you have a moment you read my interview with Robert Macfarlane? Or read Ellis Sharp on Malcolm Lowry?
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Monday 25 June 2007
Book Depository stuff
Sorry! Sorry! I've been very busy with lots of stuff over at The Book Depository (a nice interview with author Miranda Miller is just the latest thing). The Book Depository and also playing around with crazy Shelfari and Facebook: how addictive are they!?
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, personal
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Friday 15 June 2007
The Black Swan
I keep hearing intriguing things about Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan. Frustratingly, my copy hasn't landed yet, so I can't tell you much, but there is a small interview with Nassim over on the Penguin website:
Q: The Black Swan is an intriguing title - can you give us an overview of what a black swan looks like?
A: The Black Swan is about these unexpected events that end up controlling our lives, the world, the economy, history, everything. Before they happen we consider them close to impossible; after they happen we think that they were predictable and partake of a larger scheme. They are rare, but their impact is monstrous. My main problem is: We don't know that these events play such a large role. Why are we blind to them?
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, internet
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Thursday 14 June 2007
Words Without Borders
Words Without Borders ("The Online Magazine for International Literature") has got itself a nice new look (via CruelestMonth).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Thursday 14 June 2007
Byliner
Martyn at Booksurfer brings my attention to Byliner:
Byliner allows you to keep up-to-date with your favourite writers. You can set up a personal list of writers and Byliner will look out for new articles by them. You can be sent daily or weekly emails containing links to these articles, or you can simply return here and they'll be waiting for you on this page.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Wednesday 13 June 2007
The Book Depository up for retail awards
Sorry I've been so quiet: very busy! I'll try to mention a few bits and pieces tomorrow (not least I want to brag to y'all about the fact that an essay of mine is now available in an actual, real book!)
Also, The Book Depository have been shortlisted in three categories for The Bookseller Retail Awards 2007. We are in the running for:
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The Nielsen Supply Chain Initiative of the Year
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The Peter Jones Award for Entrepreneurship in Bookselling
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The Direct to Consumer Bookselling Company of the Year
Yay, a possibility of slipping into my tux again!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, internet, personal, rsb
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Wednesday 06 June 2007
Author interviews
FYI, the last ten author interviews over at The Book Depository have been with John Marks, John Ray, Christopher Robbins, Martin Stephen, Julie Maxwell, Mikael Niemi, Adele Geras, Jeremy Blachman, Michael Muhammed Knight and Catherine O'Flynn
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Wednesday 06 June 2007
More Twitter stuff
Since I put ReadySteadyBook, The Book Depository and BritLitBlogs up on Twitter, there suddenly seems to be a lot of other lit-activity over there.
For those who want to discover more, the excellent Debra Hamel has got a very useful list together of literary Twitters.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Monday 04 June 2007
RSB on Twitter
You can now get RSB blog posts via instant messaging, SMS and other new-fangled ways through Twitter (thanks, Lee, for all your help here). If you're already a Twitter user, just add ReadySteadyBook at http://twitter.com/readysteadybook. If you're not, signing up is nimps (old scouse for "easy"). If you wish to avoid such nonsense, I don't blame you!
Update: I've now also added The Book Depository to Twitter: http://twitter.com/bookdepository.
Update II: And now also BritLitBlogs -- http://twitter.com/britlitblogs.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, technical
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Monday 04 June 2007
Habitus magazine
News from Habitus magazine:
An exclusive essay by acclaimed novelist Aleksandar Hemon is now available online from Habitus: A Diaspora Journal.
The essay, entitled "Sarajevo Is..." is one of two pieces that Hemon contributed to the just-released second issue of Habitus, devoted to writing from and about Sarajevo. Other contributors include David Rieff, Courtney Angela Brkic, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Muharem Bazdulj, and photographer Simon Norfolk.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Wednesday 30 May 2007
3:AM Brasil
3:AM Magazine have just launched 3:AM Brasil, a Portuguese-language version of the site dedicated to new writing, music and culture from Brazil.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Friday 25 May 2007
Two links
Two links via CruelestMonth:
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The Continental Review -- "The Web's first Video Forum for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics"
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BooksPrice.com -- finds the "best price for new & used books and textbooks at major online stores."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Tuesday 08 May 2007
Tom McCarthy's top 10 European modernists
An unusually good day over at the Guardian. First, Lee's piece on Ann Quin, and now we also have Tom McCarthy's top 10 European modernists. About Maurice Blanchot, Tom says:
Nobody has better thought through the question of what literature fundamentally is than this man: it's a non-space, a vanishing, a being-towards-death. Blanchot was lined up in front of a Nazi firing squad in 1944, but was reprieved at the last minute and lived, albeit as a virtual recluse, until 2003, endlessly narrating the unnameable disaster - of history, thought, writing itself.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Wednesday 18 April 2007
Leonora Carrington
Here are some Leonora Carrington web links via Victoria over at Eves Alexandria who calls Carrington "woefully undernoted". In the same post, Victoria brings my attention to "Susan Aberth's excellent book on her, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, which is well worth the cover price."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, internet
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Monday 02 April 2007
Happy birthday yesterday!
Yesterday, the complete review celebrated eight years of being online. A magnificent milestone; a great website. Well done!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Thursday 22 March 2007
Paul Griffiths in Handcuffs
The excellent writer and music critic (and RSB contributor) Paul Griffiths (whose The Substance of Things Heard I heartily, nay vigorously, recommend) is featured in the latest Golden Handcuffs Review. The issue features two chapters from Paul's latest novel let me tell you (the full work is out next year with Reality Street Editions). As Steve noted, Paul explains that the novel is "a narrative in which the Ophelia of Shakespeare's Hamlet tells her story in her own words – literally, in that she is restricted to the 481 different words she speaks in the play (including both quartos as well as the First Folio text). Where other characters from the play speak, they are similarly confined to the words Shakespeare gave them."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, music
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Tuesday 20 March 2007
A Kibitz on Pure Reason
Via Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence, I note that a fascinating debate is taking place between Rebecca "Betraying Spinoza" Goldstein and Michael Weiss. The two writers are conducting "a sort of epistolary book review and kibitz on Spinoza’s life and philosophy" over at A Kibitz on Pure Reason.
I loved Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza -- a very special book indeed to my mind. And last night, with my growing affection for Spinoza happily spiralling out of all reasonable control, I started reading Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (OUP):
At the heart of Spinoza's Heresy is a mystery: why was Baruch Spinoza so harshly excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community at the age of twenty-four?
In this philosophical sequel to his acclaimed, award-winning biography of the seventeenth-century thinker, Steven Nadler argues that Spinoza's main offence was a denial of the immortality of the soul. But this only deepens the mystery. For there is no specific Jewish dogma regarding immortality: there is nothing that a Jew is required to believe about the soul and the afterlife. It was, however, for various religious, historical and political reasons, simply the wrong issue to pick on in Amsterdam in the 1650s.
After considering the nature of the ban, or cherem, as a disciplinary tool in the Sephardic community, and a number of possible explanations for Spinoza's ban, Nadler turns to the variety of traditions in Jewish religious thought on the postmortem fate of a person's soul. This is followed by an examination of Spinoza's own views on the eternity of the mind and the role that that the denial of personal immortality plays in his overall philosophical project. Nadler argues that Spinoza's beliefs were not only an outgrowth of his own metaphysical principles, but also a culmination of an intellectualist trend in Jewish rationalism.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Tuesday 06 March 2007
First chapter of A Voice from Elsewhere online
The first chapter of A Voice from Elsewhere, Charlotte Mandell's latest Maurice Blanchot translation, is now online. The book, as you'll have noted, is one of my Books of the Month this month:
A Voice from Elsewhere represents one of Maurice Blanchot’s most important reflections on the enigma and secret of “literature.” The essays here bear down on the necessity and impossibility of witnessing what literature transmits, and—like Beckett and Kafka—on what one might call the “default” of language, the tenuous border that binds writing and silence to each other. In addition to considerations of René Char, Paul Celan, and Michel Foucault, Blanchot offers a sustained encounter with the poems of Louis-René des Forêts and, throughout, a unique and important concentration on music—on the lyre and the lyric, meter and measure—which poetry in particular brings before us.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, maurice blanchot, rsb
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Friday 23 February 2007
Lynn Truss interview
I've just posted a nice interview with punctuation guru Lynne Truss over at The Book Depository:
Dickens and Chekhov are my two greatest heroes. I was telling someone the plot of Uncle Vanya the other day in a pasta place in Brighton, and by the end of it we were both in tears.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Thursday 22 February 2007
William Morris Internet Archive
You may have noted this mentioned on Booksurfer -- a still-growing William Morris Internet Archive:
Not yet complete but still an amazing online resource -- it will eventually provide free access to "virtually all written material from William Morris that was published in his lifetime." Most of the material in the archive was provided and transcribed by the late Nick Salmon (author of the William Morris Chronology). In particular the website includes many articles and talks that are difficult to locate including Morris's contributions to Commonweal, as well as the remarkable Socialist Diary, edited and annotated by Florence Boos (originally published by the History Workshop Journal in 1982). This is a website to bookmark and return to again and again.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, politics
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Thursday 22 February 2007
New Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe website
A message from Daniela Hurezanu about the recently deceased French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (cross-posted over at Editor's Corner):
After the announcement of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's death three weeks ago, a friend of mine and I tried to find a way of remembering and publicly honoring him, and decided, for lack of a better solution, to put together a web site where his ex-students and friends can share memories and honor the exceptional philosopher, writer and teacher who was Philippe. We finally came up with something and we invite you to take a look at the site and, if you have anything to contribute, please do so; if not, maybe you can pass the information along to someone else. So far we have a text in French and one in English, and either language is acceptable for future contributions. Considering that this is a work in progress, any suggestion is welcome. Thank you.
http://lacoue-labarthe.solidether.net/
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Monday 12 February 2007
Blanchot in America
Charlotte Mandell has put her essay Blanchot in America (which was written after Blanchot's death) up on her website. It joins another shorter essay on Blanchot, A Language of Absence (via Burhan).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, maurice blanchot
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Friday 09 February 2007
Ecclesiastical Proust Archive
The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is "a site for researching and discussing Proust. It provides a searchable database of all church-related passages in the Recherche along with related images." (Via the Institute for the Future of the Book.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, marcel proust
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Friday 26 January 2007
Mark Sarvas profile
Via the literary saloon: "The Elegant Variation-man Mark Sarvas is profiled by Tom Teicholz in The Jewish Journal, in Literary paprika. Lots of background information!"
Mark Sarvas, a New York-born son of Hungarian parents, a voracious reader, a Francophile and a foodie, comes to Los Angeles to be a writer, sells some screenplays and starts an acclaimed literary blog, The Elegant Variation.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Thursday 25 January 2007
New look for 3:AM
Fellow Britlitbloggers, the good folk of 3:AM magazine, and their blog Buzzwords, have a great new look and feel. Go see!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Tuesday 23 January 2007
MIA facing "very significant challenges"
The encyclopedic Marxists Internet Archive is in trouble:
In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of the kernel and rebooting the system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary access to get the system back into the previous configuration. More...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Monday 15 January 2007
Wilkinson on László Krasznahorkai
Over at Hungarian Literature Online, Tim Wilkinson reviews László Krasznahorkai's Satan Tango (via the literary saloon). Once you've read that, mouse over to HLO's interview with Krasznahorkai:
Whenever I manage to state my view in its full extent, my partner in conversation at any point of the world invariably reminds me: if you paint such a gloomy picture of the world, then why write? This is a subtle way of asking why I don´t shoot myself in the head right there and then and, indeed, why I hadn´t done so a long while ago. My critical remarks do not mean that I think or have ever thought that literature could directly interfere with the workings of the society it criticises or rejects. The impact that a writer can exert over his or her own society is far more subtle, almost indecipherably complex and indirect, working through a number of transformations. I even doubt whether at such a degree of remoteness you can still call this an impact and an influence.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Monday 15 January 2007
Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action
Affinities "is a web-based journal that focuses on groups, movements, and communities that set out to construct sustainable alternatives to the racist, hetero-sexist system of liberal-capitalist nation-states." Contributors include Steve Wright, author of the excellent Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism. Beware the PDFs, though!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, politics
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Thursday 04 January 2007
The Thomas Gray Archive
The Thomas Gray Archive is a ...
virtual archive for the study of the life and work of English poet Thomas Gray (1716-1771). It consists of two major sections: the Primary Texts section and the Materials section. The former contains searchable electronic editions of Gray's complete poetry with critical apparatus and extensive collaborative commentary, selected prose works, a browsable calendar to Gray's complete correspondence, a concordance to the poetry, a digital library of primary sources and audio-visual media, and a finding aid to Gray MSS. The latter section is comprised entirely of contextual materials, such as criticism, a biographical sketch, an introductory chronological table of Gray's life and work, a glossary of names and terms, a select bibliography of print materials, a picture gallery, and links to related online resources.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Tuesday 12 December 2006
December Words without Borders
The December issue of Words without Borders is online, with a focus on NewHebrew Writing from Israel (via the literary saloon).
Also included in this issue is Words without Borders Celebrates New Translations in 2006. Esther Allen has the following to say about a book that will certainly be in my Books of the Year list, César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Language Painter (translated by Chris Andrews):
The most extraordinary book in translation of 2006 was César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Language Painter, brilliantly translated by Chris Andrews (and published by New Directions). Aira is a rather unusual writer who composes his short books (more than thirty of them so far) in uninterrupted bursts of inspiration and without looking back or correcting, or so I'm told. As you might expect, such a methodology leads to a highly varied and uneven though always fascinating body of work. In this brief, incandescent book, about an actual incident in the life of the German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas who traveled in Argentina in the early nineteenth century, lightning strikes.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 05 December 2006
Angier on Jelinek
Carole Angier on Elfriede Jelinek's Greed at the Literary Review (via 3 Quarks):
If you have read Elfriede Jelinek's most famous novel, The Piano Teacher, you'll know what to expect from Greed. First of all, pathological characters, rendered with glassy fury: traditional Austrian self-hatred, like that of Kraus, Canetti and Bernhard, but - I know it's hard to imagine - even more hateful. Second, something you don't find even in them: a great deal of violent, sado-masochistic, four-letter sex. In sum, a horrifying vision of human nature ('friends, that is, greedy beasts') and nature itself ('fundamentally evil'), in which human beings are objects, and objects are human - days stretch their limbs, valleys grin, handkerchiefs 'are quite stiff from everything they've had to swallow in their lives'.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Friday 01 December 2006
Fathers and Sons: WG Sebald
Mark M Anderson has a piece in the new Bookforum entitled Fathers and Sons: WG Sebald (thanks Dave) and Rob Spillman has a piece on Cormac McCarthy called Book of Revelation. I'm off to put the kettle on, make a nice cuppa, and then read them both!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Friday 01 December 2006
Philosophy Now: The "Wittgenstein" Issue
The November/December issue of Philosophy Now is out (via wood s lot) and the latest issue is devoted to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not much is freely available online, but you can read Tim Madigan's Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life and Mark Jago's Pictures and Nonsense.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Tuesday 28 November 2006
Me at the PF on EB and PC
My "guest-blog" on Elizabeth Bishop is up on the Poetry Foundation website ... as is today's piece on Paul Celan.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, personal, poetry
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Friday 17 November 2006
The Waves
I've just finished reading another Virginia Woolf novel. The Waves was wonderful; every bit as good as To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. (Worth noting: the University of Adelaide Library’s collection of Web books [http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/] has the entire text of The Waves online as well as lots of other goodies.) I'll think and write about the book over the weekend. In the meantime, this from an essay by Lisa Marie Lucenti:
Pamela Caughie writes that "Woolf's characters and narrators do not present a consistent theory of self and world. Instead, they make us self-conscious of theorizing about self and world by making the narrative strategies self-conscious." With such slippery characters to work with, it is perhaps less important -- or even feasible -- to try to define the form of Woolf's subjects than to trace a few of their paths and crossings. To do so is an even greater challenge when, as Bernard says in The Waves, "We melt into each other with phrases.... We make an insubstantial territory". In this novel, six "characters" or voices alternate between acceptance and rejection of their own insubstantiality. And, Woolf would have us realize, her characters are not alone in this struggle, since they are caught within the most basic and most irresolvable questions of ontology -- what it means to be and how one goes about that business.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, virginia woolf
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Thursday 16 November 2006
Peter Nicholson's 3QD articles
The Australian writer Peter Nicholson has now handily gathered together a page of links to all his Poetry and Culture columns (written for the excellent Three Quarks Daily).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet, poetry
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Wednesday 15 November 2006
Habitus
A new literary and culture magazine arrives: Habitus -- A Diaspora Journal. The first issue is devoted to Budapest:
Habitus Magazine is a new, international journal of Diaspora literature and culture. Our focus is the Jewish experience in the Diaspora, and Diaspora as a universal experience that mirrors and invigorates our own. Emphasizing literature, photography, criticism and reportage, our goal is to explore the lives of Jews and others in various locales around the globe.
The experience of Diaspora is not the sole property of Jews or Judaism; many other peoples have found themselves in an undiscovered country, turning back towards memory. These multiple Diasporas contribute to the cultural complexity of our modern world. They are the basis for a common experience that Habitus will try to address.
Each issue will focus on a new city as our venue for illuminating a different corner of the world, and a different perspective on the issues that define us.
Much isn't online, but the site has more than you'd think on first glance including editor Joshua Ellison's Welcome and My Jewish Budapest by George Szirtes. There are also some web-only articles which look good, including: Günther Grass and Imre Kertész in Conversation with György Dalos (which I've not read yet, but looks fascinating) and Ilene R. Prusher's Looking for My Tribe: A Journey to the Jewish Roots of Afghanistan’s Pashtuns.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, publishing news
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Thursday 09 November 2006
TJ Clark interview
There is a good, chunky TJ Clark interview over at Brooklyn Rail (The Painting of Modern Life, Farewell to an Idea and most recently The Sight of Death; and, as part of the Retort team of writers and political activists, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War):
“Yours is not a book in which darkness is winning” ... Well, I guess I agree with that judgment, taking The Sight of Death as a whole. Though obviously the book does look certain kinds of darkness more fully in the face than anything else I have written. It’s not called The Sight of Death for nothing! I think (or I hope) that you and other readers come away from it without a sense of terminal glumness because you’re carried along by the simple, central pleasure of looking that drives things forward—and the astonishment at what one or two pictures have to offer, if you give them half a chance. This pleasure and astonishment are unnegotiable. Nothing the world can do to them will make them go away. And yes, I agree: the world does plenty. Pleasure and astonishment seem to me qualities that the world around us, most of the time, is conspiring to get rid of. Or to travesty—to turn into little marketable motifs. It amounts to the same thing.
Apropos Afflicted Powers, he goes on to say:
Well, you’ll guess that there’s an aspect of this that drives me and the other Retorters mad! I wrote Afflicted Powers with an economic geographer, Michael Watts, a novelist who was once a defense lawyer fighting it out in the California prison system, Joseph Matthews, and an historian of past and present capitalist enclosures, Iain Boal. Not exactly a Situationist (or even palaeo-Situationist) line-up! Obviously our book takes advantage of certain Situationist concepts and hypotheses, and tries to apply them to current politics. And yes, we do think that the power of the image, and the control of appearances, are more and more part of the very structure of statecraft (and resistance to statecraft). We think the established Left suffers—suffers badly—from an inability to think about the new conditions of social control, and social struggle ...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, internet
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Tuesday 07 November 2006
The Road
In his review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Alan Warner is way off beam with his "we can divide the contemporary American novel into two traditions, or two social classes" nonsense. But towards the end of his review, his affirmation of McCarthy's latest -- "it makes the novels of the contemporary Savants seem infantile and horribly over-rated" -- half-convinces me. Moreover, a friend sent me a text telling me it was wonderful, and that doesn't happen that often, so ... perhaps.
But, no! I remain unconvinced. Steven Shaviro seems nearer the money with this:
The prose is polished to a point of minimalist perfection; blinding in its clarity and yet (or, I should say, and therefore) almost devoid of metaphorical or metaphysical resonance. There’s no splendor here; echoes are muffled, even as the sky is a perpetual gray ... I suppose that this extreme closure, this more-than-granite hardness and power, is one definition of the sublime. But for me, it is something that ultimately limits the novel. I read the book with avidity and intense attention; but once I finished, it almost entirely slipped from my mind. I do not brood over it ...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, internet
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Tuesday 07 November 2006
Chicago Manual of Style Q&A
The Chicago Manual of Style Online ("the bible of the publishing and research community," so it tells me) features "a Q&A page, where the manuscript editors from the University of Chicago Press interpret the Manual's recommendations and uncoil its intricacies" (via The Chicago Blog).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet
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Monday 06 November 2006
Žižek clobber
What would Slavoj Žižek say!? Get the T-shirt or, even, the boxer shorts. Bonkers.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Thursday 02 November 2006
New WLT
The new November/December issue of World Literature Today is now online (see the table of contents (PDF); note lots of Orhan Pamuk coverage). Via the Literary Saloon.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Wednesday 01 November 2006
Ellmann on Jelinek
Fairly widely linked to this, but it was nice to see: Lucy Ellmann (whose latest novel is the unappetisingly entitle Doctors and Nurses and whose work I don't know)applauding "the tireless, scathing fury" of Elfriede Jelinek when reviewing the Nobel prize-winners' latest novel Greed (translated by Martin Chalmers):
What is killing the novel is people's growing dependence on feel-good fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. With this comes an inability or unwillingness to tolerate any irregularities of form ... For anyone who wants to write or read daredevil, risk-taking prose, therefore, it was tremendously encouraging that Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel prize for literature in 2004 ... Jelinek's work is brave, adventurous, witty, antagonistic and devastatingly right about the sorriness of human existence, and her contempt is expressed with surprising chirpiness: it's a wild ride.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Friday 27 October 2006
Green Integer Review 5
The latest issue of the Green Integer Review is now online. It includes some poetry (including four poems by Christopher Middleton), Douglas Messerli on Harry Mathews' My Life in CIA and Brian Evenson on Jon Fosse's Melancholy (which Max Dunbar reviewed recently here on RSB and hated!) Messerli also writes on the Polish novelist and dramatist Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet, rsb
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Thursday 19 October 2006
The complete work of Charles Darwin
The complete work of Charles Darwin are now online over at darwin-online:
This site currently contains more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images of both publications and handwritten manuscripts. There is also the most comprehensive Darwin bibliography ever published and the largest manuscript catalogue ever assembled. More than 150 ancillary texts are also included, ranging from secondary reference works to contemporary reviews, obituaries, published descriptions of Darwin's Beagle specimens and important related works for understanding Darwin's context.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Wednesday 18 October 2006
Frost review
Michael Hofmann's translation of Thomas Bernhard's first novel Frost is just out from Alfred A. Knopf. Dave Lull (thanks!) has just brought my attention to Benajamin Lytal's review in the NY Sun:
Frost can almost be read as a book of aphorisms. The artificial plot makes an unconvincing but also inoffensive device for delivering them.Meanwhile, the narrator's gradual corruption is almost meaningless, as we know little of what he was before he met Strauch. Bernhard's later novels would develop richer, more compelling relationships between the analogous narrator and subject. What is notable about Frost is the early toughness of Bernhard's pessimism.
There is, I note, a Thomas Bernhard blog. Not his, obviously, and not updated since January of last year, but still with some nice quotes and pictures. More links to more Thomas Bernhard resources (most in German as you might expect) can be found on the Freie Universität Berlin site.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, internet
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Wednesday 18 October 2006
Nietzsche's Features
Nietzsche's Features attempts "to collect ALL files we can find on the web, in English, that are directly related to Nietzsche's works, and archive them in what has become the Nietzsche's Features website."
In the About section of they site they bemoan "the experience we had over the last years that although several individuals invested a lot of time and effort in creating Nietzsche pages, after a while they somehow seemed to disappear from the web ... Of course that resulted in a lot of dead links and lost files." Sadly, I don't think the Nietzsche's Features folks have carried on with their good work ... The site was last updated January 1st, 2002. Still, full texts of a number of publications from The Birth Of Tragedy to The Will to Power make this a useful resource.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Monday 16 October 2006
Dante Today
Via Jenny Davidson's Light reading blog: Arielle Saiber, associate professor of Italian literature at Bowdoin College, has created Dante Today (a website featuring citings and sightings of Dante in a wide variety of contemporary media).
This experimental website, inspired by students of Arielle Saiber'a “Dante’s Divine Comedy” course, has been built to archive occurrences of Dante and his works in popular and contemporary culture of the twentieth century and beyond. The goals are twofold: 1) to provide a central access point for said references; and 2) to offer data that students and scholars of Dante can use to think about the Nachleben (“afterlife”) of Dante’s works in terms of reception theory, resonance, and cultural studies.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Tuesday 10 October 2006
Underneath the Bunker
Spoof literary website Underneath the Bunker celebrates its first year online:
Underneath the Bunker, the online home of Europe's Premier Cultural Journal, has now been functioning for a year. During the last twelve months it has published no less than twenty-one reviews of novels from Georgy Riecke's Greatest Novels By Contemporary Writers as well as exclusive excerpts from D H Laven's Story of Forgotten Art and Yevgeny Nonik's novel subtle carnivores.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Thursday 05 October 2006
Old Penguin book covers
Widely noted (see e.g. GalleyCat), but worth bringing your attention to: Joe Kral's collection of old Penguin book covers. Bootiful.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: art, internet
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Thursday 05 October 2006
WorldCat
At WorldCat, you can search for "1.3 billion items in more than 10,000 libraries worldwide":
WorldCat is the largest library network in the world. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their free resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.
WorldCat will supersede the soon to be defunct RedLightGreen service (which you probably won't know about unless you are a librarian anyway!)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, libraries
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Friday 22 September 2006
Primo Levi: "new" book
From The Independent today an overview of Levi's Auschwitz Report (Verso): "Primo Levi's earliest account of the Holocaust was not a memoir or a novel but a document detailing what happened inside the Nazis' most notorious death camp. Compiled in collaboration with a fellow survivor at the request of their Soviet liberators, the Auschwitz Report is a work of extraordinary restraint and lucidity. As it appears for the first time in English, we tell the story of how it came to be written, and publish extracts."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, internet
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Friday 08 September 2006
Jameson on Žižek
Widely linked to this, but certainly worth reading (and hence repeating the link): Fredric Jameson on Slavoj Žižek's Parallax View in the LRB.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Friday 08 September 2006
Salt
FYI (as the young people say), I've just posted a nice interview with Chris Hamilton-Emery, of the poetry publisher Salt, over on The Book Depository site (as part of the Publisher of the Week slot I do over there).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Thursday 31 August 2006
Tonkin on the Germans
Last week, in his A Week in Books column Boyd Tonkin discussed German literature. Thankfully, instead of saying something pointless about "Günter Grass's teenage fling with the Waffen SS", Tonkin did a brief, but useful, overview of recent German books and brought to my attention a few names that might deserve a closer look: Michael Krüger ("distinguished as a versatile writer and equally so as a publisher with Hanser Verlag in Munich"); Daniel Kehlmann who, though favourite, failed to win the German Book Prize with Measuring the World, "his vastly successful novel about the explorer Humboldt and the mathematician Gauss (which we will see [in English translation] from Quercus Books next year)"; Bulgarian-born Ilija Trojanow (whose The World Collector is "a sweepingly ambitious novel about the Victorian adventurer, Orientalist and pornographer Sir Richard Burton" -- "sweepingly ambitious" leaves me cold, but hey ho); Ingo Schulze; Feridun Zaimoglu ("one of an increasingly influential group of Turkish-origin German writers"); and Martin Walser (who shares, with Grass, "roots in the "Gruppe 47" set of post-war firebrands"): "Now Walser is back with Angstblüte, (almost, but not quite, "The Bloom of Doom"), a tale of sex, speculation and starlets among the brutal bourgeoisie of contemporary Munich. Think Roth (or maybe even Bellow) by the Bodensee."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, internet
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Thursday 31 August 2006
Spectacular Times
Larry Law's renowned series of situationist booklets, Spectacular Times, are online over at cornersoul. I tried to take a nostalgic peak at Bigger Cages Longer Chains but, frustratingly, it took an age to download (the text seems to have been captured as images of each individual page) ...
The world is full of ideologies that claim to offer freedom, but in reality simply offer us bigger cages and longer chains. The demand for an end to cages and chains may seem idealistic to some people, but the real idealists are those who think we can carry on as we are.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, politics
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Wednesday 30 August 2006
Australian Book Review
So, I'm surfing. And I come across the Australian Book Review (" ... founded in 1961, revived in 1978, and has appeared continuously since then. In April 2003 we published our 250th issue, a milestone for any publication. Peter Rose is the editor of ABR. ABR is widely regarded as offering the fullest coverage of Australian books and literary culture. But it is not just interested in writers and writing. Our interests lie everywhere, and encompass current affairs and the broader culture.") Coming highlights include "Gail Jones on Blanchot". So, you have to remind me to go back again and check! I'm off now to read Anthony Cordingley's essay Waiting on Beckett and then I'll probably read Peter Rose's The Sound and the Fury: Uneasy Times for Hacks and Critics.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet
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Wednesday 23 August 2006
Top tomes on the Bible
Opinion Journal (thanks Dave) list the top five books on the Bible. Good to see that they have the very good good sense to include RSB interviewee Gabriel Josipovici's wonderful The Book of God:
Gabriel Josipovici is a prominent British critic and novelist who at a midpoint in his career became interested in the Bible and acquired a competence in Hebrew (he already knew Greek) in order to engage with it seriously. The Book of God is an imaginative overview, sensitive to narrative detail and to stylistic nuance, of both Testaments. Josipovici sees how the Bible constitutes a unique kind of literature--a book, as he says, meant to change your sense of reality--which is nevertheless linked with certain later writers. He proposes surprising comparisons with Proust, Kafka and other modernists. Some biblical passages, he observes, "bring us face to face with characters who can be neither interpreted nor deconstructed. They are emblems of the limits of comprehension."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, philosophy
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Saturday 19 August 2006
Whitman in Washington
From Eleanor (at Carcanet):
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. has launched a wonderful new Walt Whitman website, to coincide with their current exhibition, One Life: Walt Whitman, a kosmos ... [includes an] online gallery of Whitman portraits ... [and] fascinating recordings of the poet reading America and Leaves of Grass.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, poetry
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Thursday 03 August 2006
French Book News
Useful site, this, for the francophile: French Book News. The list of recent translations is handy, as is the list of recent France-related books in English.
Of William C. Carter's Proust in Love (warmly reviewed in the Guardian last week by Ian Sansom alongside The Memoirs of Ernest A Forssgren, Proust's Swedish Valet) French Book News say:
The acclaimed Proust biographer William C. Carter portrays Proust´s amorous adventures and misadventures from adolescence through his adult years, supplying where appropriate Proust´s own sensitive, intelligent, and often disillusioned observations about love and sexuality. Proust is revealed as a man agonizingly caught between the constant fear of public exposure as a homosexual and the need to find and express love. In telling the story of Proust in love, Carter also shows how the author´s experiences became major themes in his novel In Search of Lost Time. Carter discusses Proust´s adolescent sexual experiences, his disastrous brothel visit to cure homosexual inclinations, and his first great loves. He also addresses the duel Proust fought after the journalist Jean Lorrain alluded to his homosexuality in print, his flirtations with respectable women and high-class prostitutes, and his affairs with young men of the servant class. With new revelations about Proust´s love life and a gallery of photographs, the book provides an unprecedented glimpse of Proust´s gay Paris.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, internet
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