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ReadySteadyBlog
One of the Guardian Unlimited Books' top 10 literary blogs: "A home-grown treasure ... smart, serious analysis"
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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Wednesday 23 July 2008
Lewis on Claro's Madman
The latest book review, here on ReadySteadyBook, is Sophie's review of Madman Bovary by Christophe Claro (congratulations, too, to Ms Lewis, for the recent publication of her translation of Marcel Aymé's Beautiful Image, which we'll have more to say about soon):
In this literary hijack, Claro infiltrates a classic text and takes the controls. Or does the novel submit willingly?
Our narrator, unnamed until he adopts this twisted title, is reeling from his lover Estée’s departure. He retreats to bed, where for solace he reaches for the nearest novel: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. He will cure himself of his hopeless attachment by a non-stop re-reading, ‘like a derailed train’. A few pages into Madman Bovary’s journey, ‘derailed’ looks like a serious understatement (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, rsb
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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
The Strange Luck of V.S. Naipaul
The Arena documentary The Strange Luck of V.S. Naipaul is available now via BBC iPlayer.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, film
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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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Monday 21 July 2008
Hass on Stanlis on Frost
Robert Bernard Hass reviews Peter Stanlis's Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher (via Books, Inq.):
On Robert Frost’s 85th birthday, Henry Holt and Company, Frost’s lifelong publisher, threw a party in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria and invited the eminent critic Lionel Trilling to deliver the keynote address. Widely regarded at the time as the champion of high modernist culture, Trilling stunned Frost’s friends and supporters by confessing that he had long disregarded Frost as a purveyor of rural pieties and had only recently begun to admire him for the “Sophoclean” horror he saw in the poems. "I regard Robert Frost as a terrifying poet," he announced. "The universe he conceives of is a terrifying universe." In the wake of the controversy his address instigated, Trilling sent a letter to Frost apologizing for any discomfort his remarks had caused. "Not distressed at all," Frost wrote back. "You made my birthday party a surprise party." Frost then concluded his letter with a sentence that would prove prophetic: "No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down" (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, poetry
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Monday 21 July 2008
Skolkin-Smith on Ann Quin
I should've mentioned last week (especially for those who read the site via RSS) that I recently posted Leora Skolkin-Smith's wonderful review of Passages by Ann Quin on the site:
As one reads Ann Quin's Passages a kind of language serum is injected into the system is a potent as any intoxicant. The end result is akin to an experience of literary drunkenness. I simply stopped caring that I didn't know who Quin meant when she wrote “I” ,“She” or “He”. And, although I was perpetually confused as to what the emotional storms her narrators were experiencing were all about, I was immersed and too “drunk” on her language to care. The concrete, literal reference points stopped having meaning. I was content to simply luxuriate in Quin's emotional pool of words and allusions, of poetry (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, rsb
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Monday 21 July 2008
B.S. Johnson again, but this time with pictures!
Another review of B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, but this time from Caustic Cover Critic so, you know, you get pictures of the box too!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review
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Thursday 17 July 2008
Additions to BritLitBlogs
I've added a few more blogs to BritLitBlogs today: go see.
Oh, also, if you have a British-based literary blog (no author blogs, thank you!) and you aren't on the list -- get in touch.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere
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Thursday 17 July 2008
Adorno and Heidegger
An investigation of the relation between the philosophical thought of Adorno and Heidegger (via continental philosophy):
The editors write, “there is much to be gained from working through and reassessing the differences that have kept these two thinkers’ works quarantined from each other for more than seven decades.” The book is, without a doubt, an important contribution to the field. However, the range of articles would have benefited from a more detailed introduction indicating the contents and interrelation of the various contributions (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, philosophy
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Books of the Week
In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the postmodern. Biopolitics, biopowers, control, the multitude, people, war, borders, dependency and interdependency, state, nation, the common, difference, resistance, subjective rights, revolution, freedom, democracy: these are just a few of the themes Negri addressed in these experimental laboratories. Postmodernity, Negri suggests, can be described as a "porcelain factory": a delicate and fragile construction that could be destroyed through one clumsy act. Looking across twentieth century history, Negri warns that our inability to anticipate future developments has already placed coming generations in serious jeopardy. Describing the years 1917-1968 as the "short century," Negri suggests that by the end of it, all of the familiar markers of modernity (including that of socialism) had lost their relevance. Confronted with an intolerable reality, indignation and the revolutionary will to transform the world have both taken new forms and must be understood anew, free of modernist assumptions. In the impassioned debates recounted in this book, Antonio Negri attempts to describe the formation of an alternative political horizon and looks for a way to define the practices and modes of expression that democracy could take.
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In 1925, Fernando Pessoa wrote a guidebook to Lisbon for English-speaking visitors, and wrote it in English. The typescript was only discovered amongst his papers in the 1980s. The book is fascinating in that it shows us Pessoa's view of his native city – and Pessoa, as an adult, rarely left Lisbon, and it figures large in his poetry. The book can still be useful to visitors today, given that the majority of the sights described are still to be found. A fascinating scrap from the master's table...
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Serendipoetry
An Immorality
Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.
Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.
And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,
Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men's believing.
-- Ezra Pound
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