Navigate the blog with this calendar:
ERROR [HYT00] [MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver]Can't connect to MySQL server on 'MySQL11.webcontrolcenter.com' (10048)
Subscribe to Feeds
To subscribe to one of our feeds, please click the appropriate button below.
Subscribe by Email
If you would like to have each of my blog entries delivered direct to your email inbox, please subscribe here:
|
ReadySteadyBlog
One of the Guardian Unlimited Books' top 10 literary blogs: "A home-grown treasure ... smart, serious analysis"
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
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Thursday 11 March 2010
London discussion of 'Capitalist Realism'
On the 31st of March, the Itchy Chin Club will be discussing Capitalist Realism by recent RSB interviewee Mark Fisher: Candid Arts Trust Cafe, 3 Torrens St, London, EC1V 1NQ, 6:30pm for a 7pm start.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: london, philosophy
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Wednesday 10 March 2010
iPads are coming!
The Bookseller tells me:
The much anticipated Apple iPad will go on sale in the UK in late April, a month later than originally stated by the company's website. International pricing will not be announced until April.
Shoppers in America will be able to get their hands on the wi-fi model of the iPad from 3rd April and pre-orders from the Apple online store will begin on 12th March. The wi-fi + 3G models will be available in late April in the US. All models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news, technical
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Thursday 04 March 2010
The Mistake on Page 1,032: On Translating 'Infinite Jest' into German
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Ulrich Blumenbach quotes Wittgenstein as saying in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article to describe the challenges and inducements of the six years he spent translating David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Unendlicher Spass) into German — something he did without input from the author, who refused to speak to him.
Last summer, Blumenbach finally reaped the benefits of his efforts when the novel was released in Germany to great critical and commercial success, and he was awarded the Hieronymusring for Exceptional Achievement in Literary Translation, as well as the Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Prize for his work (more...)
From Publishing Perspectives.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, language
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Tuesday 02 March 2010
38 Plays: 38 Days -- The Taming of the Shrew
Today is the second day in the 38 Plays: 38 Days challenge to read a Shakespeare play every day for the next thirty-eight days. This evening I shall be pleasuring myself with The Taming of the Shrew (which is online at e.g. Project Gutenberg; I'm using The Oxford Shakespeare).
Wikipedia's synopsis reads:
The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1594.
The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the Induction, in which a drunken tinker named Sly is tricked into thinking he is a nobleman by a mischievous Lord. The Lord has a play performed for Sly's amusement, set in Padua with a primary and sub-plot.
The main plot depicts the courtship of Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew. Initially, Katherina is an unwilling participant in the relationship, but Petruchio tempers her with various psychological torments – the "taming" – until she is an obedient bride. The sub-plot features a competition between the suitors of Katherina's less intractable sister, Bianca.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, technical, william shakespeare
PermalinkComments (1)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Tuesday 02 March 2010
Death as a puzzle to be solved: Jon Fosse on crime fiction
At the launch event for Best European Fiction 2010 a few weeks ago, the Norwegian author and dramatist Jon Fosse made some wonderfully cutting and dismissive remarks about crime fiction.
Here, exclusively for ReadySteadyBook, Jon expands on his thoughts about what he calls the "pornography of death": Literature is basically a personal, and at the same time universal, asking into the fundamentals of existence, made possible by the aesthetic possibilities of language. The more personal it gets, the more universal it becomes. When literature gets private, it looses its quality, as it does if it ends up as universal in this sense: something everyone agrees about.
Of course, one can learn about life in literature, for instance to see how life is for other persons, perhaps in another time, in another culture: in the novel everyone has the right to be understood, nowhere else. And to me dramatic literature is about getting a glimpse of the forces that somehow, in their invisible way, direct life. But more than this, literature is about learning to die, as Harold Bloom has put it.
What then about crime fiction, so highly esteemed as literature, at least here in the Scandinavian countries? Is it at all literature? No it isn’t. The aim of this literature is not to ask into the fundamentals of existence, of life, of death, it is not to try to reach the universal through the unique, it is a try to avoid such an asking, such unique universality, by stating already given answers that are not really answers, but just something one has heard before. It therefore feels as a pleasant and safe answer, and what feels pleasant and safe one could also call entertaining.
Death, perhaps literature’s basic concern, at least when doubled with what cannot exist without it, love, is in crime fiction made into a kind of puzzle which can be solved. Death is made safe by being looked at as something which might well not exist, if it wasn't for a murder, and then is reduced further by making this murder, death, into a puzzle to be solved. And which will be solved.
And when even the aesthetic ambition, this never-ending process of saying it all again, seen from a new perspective, is replaced by filling out a plot with variations, how can one possibly see crime fiction as literature? Add some political correctness to this plot, and we live in a perfectly safe and stupid world.
Literature is writing so strong that one sees life as something else after meeting it. It has to do with the uniqueness in every human being, and with this truth: the most unique is the most universal. Crime fiction is the opposite, to see life as the same all the time and feel safe in one's lie. It's pornography of death, and much less honest than the pornography which has to do with the beginning of life.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, literary criticism, rsb
PermalinkComments (2)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Monday 01 March 2010
Christopher Reid, Wapping, this Thursday
Christopher Reid will be reading from The Song of Lunch, A Scattering and perhaps others at the Wapping Project bookshop, London, E1W 3SG, this
Thursday, 4 March, at 7.30. The space is small; to ensure a place, email lydia.fulton@mac.com (via SonofaBook; thanks Charles!)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events, poetry
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Monday 01 March 2010
A ReadySteady round-up
A quick ReadySteadyBook round-up...
The latest three book reviews:
The latest three articles:
Three from me on Shakespeare:
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: rsb
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
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
PermalinkComments (4)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Monday 01 March 2010
38 Plays: 38 Days -- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Pinch, punch, first of the month... And thus the first day in the 38 Plays: 38 Days challenge to read a Shakespeare play every day for the next thirty-eight days (or thirty-nine if we read on and bag The Reign of King Edward III).
Today, we start with The Two Gentlemen of Verona (which is online at e.g. Project Gutenberg; I'm using The Oxford Shakespeare). Wikipedia's synopsis reads:
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1590 or 1591. It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play, and is often seen as his first tentative steps in laying out some of the themes and tropes with which he would later deal in more detail; for example, it is the first of his plays in which a heroine dresses as a boy. Two Gentlemen also has the smallest cast of any of Shakespeare's plays.
The play deals with the themes of friendship and infidelity, the conflict between friendship and love, and the foolish behaviour of people in love. The highlight of the play is considered by some to be Launce, the clownish servant of Proteus, and his dog Crab, to whom "the most scene-stealing non-speaking role in the canon" has been attributed.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: philosophy, theatre, william shakespeare
PermalinkComments (2)Related PostsEmail to Friend
|
Please let us know about any literary-related news -- or submit press releases to RSB -- using this form.
Serendipoetry
On the Eve of His Execution
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen, yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and found it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
-- Chidiock Tichborne
English Sixteenth-Century Verse (W.W.Norton)
-- View archive
Latest Interviews
- ERROR [HYT00] [MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver]Can't connect to MySQL server on 'MySQL11.webcontrolcenter.com' (10048)
See all Interviews
|