ReadySteadyBook: All

Gone Fishin'

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:51:11 GMT

Actually, I've not gone fishin' at all, but we are freezing the data (!) here on ReadySteadyBook whilst we do a major upgrade of the site (especially in the "back end")...

On Friday, I finished working for The Book Depository after a wonderful four years with them. In July, I start a new adventure (in trade publishing) which I'm very excited about. But, for once, for now, I'm going to put my feet up for a few weeks, unplug from the matrix, and read some big books...

See you in July.

Save Middlesex Philosophy!

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:54:29 GMT

Publishers, including Verso and Bloomsbury Academic, have called for the decision to close Middlesex University's philosophy department to be reconsidered and have branded the suspension of students and three members of staff from the department "an unwarranted and unjustifiable act of intimidation" (via The Bookseller):

The staff - professors Peter Osborne, Peter Hallward, and Christian Kerslake - and students were suspended last Friday, following a sit in to protest against the closure of the department. According to the New Statesman, a spokesperson for the university board of governors alleged that a group of protesters had "forcibly entered the building", breaching a High Court Injunction obtained by the institution a week earlier.

The letter sent to The Bookseller and national media, and signed by 18 publishers, said the decision to close the philosophy department had "roused the indignation of the academic community across the world". The letter continued: "As publishers we have benefited in many ways from the skills of those teaching at the department, and from the lively atmosphere of debate engendered across the disciplines by its work.

"Consequently, we feel bound to speak up in its defence. The closing of this department would be disastrous for the academic and intellectual life of this country, and we urge that the decision to do so be reconsidered."

Other publishers who signed the letter included Serpent's Tail, Pluto, Edinburgh University Press, Earthscan, Manchester University Press, Jessica Kingsley and I B Taurus. It added the publishers had expressed "grave concern" at the suspension of the professors and students.

"We believe this to be an unwarranted and unjustifiable act of intimidation by the administration and board of governors of Middlesex University, and we call for the immediate reinstatement of suspended students and staff."

Last November, The Bookseller revealed the institution's senior management had decided to shut down Middlesex University Press, claiming it was "irresponsible" to invest further in the company (more...)

More at Save Middlesex Philosophy (also on twitter.com/saveMDXphil).

Roubaud and the troubadours

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Tue, 25 May 2010 07:59:02 GMT

Interesting post over on Named Tomorrow about the troubadors and how thinking about them can help us think about the work of Jacques Roubaud (with whom there is a fascinating interview over on Bombsite):

In the collection of essays The Troubadors: An Introduction, edited by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, Stephen G. Nichols argues that, though there are indeed some salient features of the troubadour lyric which support modern ideas about troubadours by harmonizing with the modern conception of the artist (such as a ‘high seriousness’ of style and the distinctly individualized voices of the poets), the traditional conception of a continuous and homogenized school of poetry is more than a little misleading in its development from ‘early troubadour’ Guilhem de Peitieu, through the golden age of the ‘classic period,’ and then on to the end of the tradition in the 13th century (more...)

Vasily Grossman on the up?

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Mon, 24 May 2010 09:20:38 GMT

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

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

Two new Cixous

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Mon, 24 May 2010 08:59:03 GMT

Via Continental Philosophy, I hear we have a new book from Columbia University Press of interviews with Hélène Cixous: White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics:

These interviews with Hélène Cixous offer invaluable insight into her philosophy and criticism. Culled from newspapers, journals, and books, White Ink collects the best of these conversations, which address the major concerns of Cixous’s critical work and features two dialogues with twentieth-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The interviews in White Ink span more than three decades and include a new conversation with Susan Sellers, the book’s editor and a leading Cixous scholar and translator. Cixous discusses her work and writing process. She shares her views on literature, feminism, theater, autobiography, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and human relations, and she reflects on her roles as poet, playwright, professor, woman, Jew, and, her most famous, “French feminist theorist.” Sellers organizes White Ink in such a way that readers can grasp the development of Cixous’s commentary on a series of vital questions. Taken together, the revealing performances in White Ink provide an excellent introduction this thinker’s brave and vital work-each one an event in language and thought that epitomizes Cixous’s intellectual and poetic force.

Readers of Cixous should also be reminded that Zero's Neighbour: Sam Beckett is out next week with Polity: "In this unabashedly personal odyssey through a sizeable range of his novels, plays and poems, Cixous celebrates Beckett’s linguistic flair and the poignant, powerful thrust of his stylistic terseness, and passionately declares her love for his unrivalled expression of the meaningless ‘precious little’ of life, its unfathomable banality ending in chaos and death."

Tarkovsky and Levinas

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Mon, 24 May 2010 08:53:07 GMT

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

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

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

Notes on 'Everything Passes'

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Robin Durie) — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:31:35 GMT

Although I know of Josipovici, and of his work, I haven’t, before now, read him. Of course, I know that he has written on Blanchot, and Everything Passes immediately reminded me of The Instant of My Death. In that short work, Blanchot evokes an instant which functions as an ‘immobility’, an immobility that ‘arrests time’, that holds the passing of time ‘in abeyance’. In that short work, the instant which arrests time, the immobility which holds the passing of time in abeyance, is ‘the instant of my death’.

In Everything Passes, it seems to me that the passing of time is at least part of what is at stake. And again, like Blanchot, it seems as if, for Josipovici, the instant of death, of Felix’s death, in fact holds the passing of time in abeyance. The room, with its silence, its bare floorboards, its greyness, its window with the cracked pane, and with his face at that window – that room is the moment of death. It is a moment in which time, and its passing, is stilled. But it is a moment which does not pass. Felix does not pass on. Although the door opens, he does not pass through it, out of the room.

What seems most interesting to me about this ambiguity between time’s passing, and its halting, is the issue of a certain openness within the instant, or, on the contrary, the closure of the instant. The openness, or closure, of the instant is expressed in the figures of the door of the room, and of the window of the room, with its cracked pain. Time stops for Felix as he looks at, or out of, the window. The instant does not pass. He does not die. But, if he goes through the door, if the instant passes, then he dies - and time stops, for Felix. And so, at the heart of the instant is a paradox – time appears to stop whether it passes or not. Thus, the passing of time in the instant, time’s stopping, the openness or closure of the instant – all of these apparent ‘moments’ of time are called into question in the instant of death, or of death deferred, held in abeyance. The passing of time itself is called into question.

This may be an overly abstract rendering of Everything Passes. I certainly wouldn’t want to claim of such a reading that it is the only, or the most significant, interpretation. However, it strikes me as significant within the context of the question that Mark has posed, regarding the relation between the work of fiction as Literature, and the work of fiction as (English) Establishment Literary Fiction (see e.g. here).

I was very surprised in reading Everything Passes by just how explicitly antagonistic Josipovici is towards ELF. The line of demarcation that Josipovici draws is adumbrated in the characterisation that Felix gives of Rabelais. Print removes the particularity of the audience for a work, it universalises the reader. At the same time, it denies the author a certain particularity, the particularity that derives from a direct contact with his or her audience. Rabelais’ insight is that the new medium of fiction entails the solitude of the depersonalised writer and the solitude of anonymous reader.

The failure of ELF is, of course, the failure to embrace this solitude. ELF writing is determined by the projection of a virtual audience – conjured up by the publisher, the agent, the book-seller, the metropolitan reviewers, the book-clubs, or even the creative writing course teachers & fellow students. ELF writing is thus worked from within by a false consciousness, the false consciousness of a general virtual reader. But it is this projected general, virtual, reader who serves to determine, and thus close down, the text of the ELF writer in advance.

As opposed to this closure, the work of Literature remains irreducibly open. This openness is grounded in the passing of the work between the solitude of the depersonalised writer and the solitude of the anonymous reader. Literature is written for no-one, and in being written for no-one, it remains fundamentally open. But it is, precisely, this very openness which allows the work of Literature to pass. The ELF fiction is already closed, closed by its general virtual reader, and thus does not, and cannot, pass. It has no dimension of passing.

And yet, even when things appear to be as clear as this, Josipovici allows a paradox to undermine from within this clarity of perspective.

In the wake of the discussions of literature which occur at the heart of the work, and on which these comments are based, Sal, Felix’s 1st wife, says to him, in exasperation: “You should hear yourself some time.. You don’t hear yourself.” And then, slightly later: “You don’t listen to anything except your own voice.”

Here, then, is the paradox which works the solitude of the depersonalised writer from within. Cut off from their audience, they have nothing to listen to, except their own voice. And yet, when you have nothing to listen to, except your own voice, then you are left unable to hear yourself.

In order to be able to hear yourself speak, you have to listen to a voice other than your own, to the voice of another.

In order that the writer may hear the voice of the other, there must be an opening within the solitude of the writer, within the moment of writing, within which the voice of the other may resonate.

Who speaks to the solitary writer in this instant whose closure is held in abeyance? And, in speaking, who calls on the solitary writer to respond?

Review: 'Britannica Latina' by Mark Walker

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:24:53 GMT

Along with Peter Jones, whose Learn Ancient Greek and Learn Latin courses (subsequently published in book form) enthralled many Daily & Sunday Telegraph readers some years back, and whose Ancient and Modern column continues to adorn The Spectator, Mark Walker should be declared a national treasure...

Now, Walker gives us Britannica Latina: 2000 Years of British Latin, proclaiming via the dust-jacket blurb "It is time for British Latinists who reclaim their heritage." It is, indeed, when we contemplate ignoramus philistines in departments and ministries of education who dismiss Latin and Greek as 'dead' and ancient history as 'elitist' and/or 'irrelevant'.

Barry Baldwin reviews Britannica Latina by Mark Walker here on ReadySteadyBook.

Britannica Latina: 2000 Years of British Latin

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Barry Baldwin) — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:09:29 GMT

Along with Peter Jones, whose Learn Ancient Greek and Learn Latin courses (subsequently published in book form) enthralled many Daily & Sunday Telegraph readers some years back, and whose Ancient and Modern column continues to adorn The Spectator, Mark Walker should be declared a national treasure.

Walker, as the Greeks and Romans would have styled him, is an opsimath, coming to Latin as an adult. Having mastered it, he has devised a course, Latin For Everyday Life, which he now offers to fellow late learners through the Buckinghamshire Adult Education programme, combining this in true classical style with expertise in guitar and mandolin, also on his didactic menu.

For the Latin course, Walker has produced two books: Annus Horribilis (the Queen's most famous excursion into ancient tongues) and Annus Mirabilis (which I equate with whatever year England wins The Ashes), respectively sub-titled Latin for Everyday Life and More Latin for Everyday Life. Their readers will be hoping for Still More Latin, Yet More Latin, and (as Mrs Thatcher famously wished) to go on and on.

Now, Walker gives us Britannica Latina: 2000 Years of British Latin, proclaiming via the dust-jacket blurb "It is time for British Latinists who reclaim their heritage." It is, indeed, when we contemplate ignoramus philistines in departments and ministries of education who dismiss Latin and Greek as 'dead' and ancient history as 'elitist' and/or 'irrelevant'.

This elegant 'libellus' (except for the miniscule Latin print - you need the Hubble Telescope) provides a well-chosen miscellany of texts, from Julius Caesar and Suetonius for introductory background, via British historians (Bede, Gildas, Nennius) scientists (the two Bacons - The Two Ronnies don't qualify, Harvey, Newton), Renaissance Goonery (George Ruggles' Ignoramus playlet), poets (Bourne, Buchanan, Landor, Swift), down to modern Anglo-Latin verse, including Walker's own skilful paean to his stamping-ground of Coombe Hill.

I could have done with more of this last category, for instance something from the cleverest of modern practitioners, A.D. Godley, James Joyce's recently discovered Balia, and so on. On his own evidence, P.G. Wodehouse's favourite pastime at Dulwich was writing Greek and Latin verse. A fellow (though not overlapping) Dulwichian, Raymond Chandler, credited the Classics for his initimable English prose. So did that other lapidary stylist, Muriel Spark. I spent three years in the Classical Sixth doing verse composition in both languages. It is the best way to appreciating the originals' metrical dexterity, also the reason I can still quote chunks of English poetry by heart.

A lavish amount of Fortean material includes King Arthur's astonishing fightng feats and no less remarkable bodily preservation; Merlin the Magician; St Alban's martyrdom; the Loch Ness Monster's début; a mediaeval vampire; weird lunar phenomena. Plus, a dash of soft porn with Lady Godiva's bare-backing, as told by Roger of Wendover - surely here to be re-Christened Bendover.

The nine sections comport valuable biographica and historical background, tersely informative grammatical notes, bibliographical tips, nicely spiiced with humour. Tactfully tucked away at the end are English cribs for those who like Peter Cook don't have the Latin for the judging.

Verdict: Optimus hic liber est; necnon est optimus auctor. Mark's Mark, X out of X.

Beth Steel's 'Ditch'

no-reply@readysteadybook.com (Mark Thwaite) — Mon, 10 May 2010 07:57:37 GMT

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed Beth Steel's play Ditch plugged in the Guardian Guide this weekend: "Following the sell-out London transfer of Stovepipe in 2009, HighTide transfers Ditch from the HighTide Festival to The Old Vic Tunnels for a limited season:

"I've listened to all the stories of my generation, then watched 'em get sick or fade away. And it wasn't this world that killed 'em. It was the other... the memory of it."

Britain, the near future. Much of the country is underwater and the government has been reduced to a group of fascist strongmen. In a rural outpost of the state, the men patrol the moors for illegals whilst the women run a self-sufficient farm to provide what all they need to survive. The living conditions are harsh, every meagre ration is grown from scratch and they must battle with inclement weather and a draconian government. As their numbers dwindle, they struggle to retain a semblance of civilisation in the face of the inevitable onset of global war.

Stark and imperative, but shot through with a sense of warm compassion, Beth Steel's debut play Ditch is a clear-eyed look at how we might behave when the conveniences of our civilisation are taken away, and a frightening vision of a future that could all too easily be ours. Ditch is a brutal and uncompromising play, with a grounded, earthy sense of humanity. The result is both heart-rending and chilling, depicting a convincing, bleak vision of the future.

Beth is a good friend of mine, so I'm thrilled her play is getting all this well-deserved attention. Anyway, for more, see Ditch the movie (well, trailer!) on YouTube; or just head over to the Old Vic website.