Simon Critchley on the Tragic and its Limits

An interview with The White Review

John Douglas Millar (The White Review) interviews philosopher Simon Critchley:

To Critchley, one attraction of tragedy lies in ‘its savage and troubling beauty, its conflict with and superiority to philosophy, and its massive and unacknowledged relevance to the contemporary psychical and political situation.’ Since the beginning of his career he has been concerned with the antagonism between literature and philosophy, telling me earlier this year that ‘Literature was always my passion. It was what philosophy was meant to serve in a sense . . . Literature was served by philosophy rather than the other way around.’ His work on tragedy may be read in this light, and can also be seen as a model for reading the present state of permanent war in which we find ourselves. In the following interview we discussed the significance of tragedy for him, his use of collaboration as a working method, and how his latest obsession has lead to the new book. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Continental Philosophy
• Simon Critchley on Critical Theory
• The Big Think Interviews Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Anton Chekhov on Leo Tolstoy

An extract from Chekhov's correspondence

Leo Tolstoy at his writing table. Portrait by Leonid Osipovich Pasternak (1908)

Anton Chekhov, in letter to M.O. Menshikov (28 January 1900):

I fear Tolstoy's death. His death would leave a large empty space in my life. First, I have loved no man the way I have loved him. I am not a believer, but of all beliefs I consider his the closest to mine and most suitable for me. Second, when literature has a Tolstoy, it is easy and gratifying to be a writer. Even if you are aware that you have never accomplished anything, you don't feel so bad, because Tolstoy accomplishes enough for everyone. His activities provide justification for the hopes and aspirations that are usually placed on literature. Third, Tolstoy stands firm, his authority is enormous, and as long as he is alive bad taste in literature, all vulgarity in its brazen-faced or lachrymose varieties, all bristly and resentful vanity will remain far in the background. His moral authority alone is enough to maintain what we think of as literary trends and schools at a certain minimal level. If not for him, literature would be a flock without a shepherd or an unfathomable jumble. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Leo Tolstoy on Film
• Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? The Experts Decide
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• A Jubilee for Anton Chekhov

Teju Cole on Sebald's Poetry

A review in the New Yorker

W. G. Sebald

Teju Cole, author of Open City, looks over W. G. Sebald's poetry: 'Throughout his career, W. G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur. To this he added a willful blurring of literary boundaries and, in fact, almost all his writing, and not just the poetry and prose, comprised history, memoir, biography, autobiography, art criticism, scholarly arcana, and invention. This expert mixing of forms owed a great deal to his reading of the seventeenth-century melancholics Robert Burton and Thomas Browne, and Sebald’s looping sentences were an intentional homage to nineteenth-century German-language writers like Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller. But so strongly has the style come to be associated with Sebald’s own work that even books that preceded his, such as those by Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard, can seem, from our perspective as readers of English translations, simply “Sebaldian.”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: W. G. Sebald
• Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald
• W. G. Sebald, Across Land and Water
• W. G. Sebald as Academic

Review: Beckett's Waiting for Godot / Pinter's The Caretaker

Charles McNulty on the erudition of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett

Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, with Jonathan Pryce, left, and Alan Cox. Photograph: Helen Warner / March 8, 2012

Writing for the Los Angeles Times, theatre critic Charles McNulty reviews revivals of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot:

Sometimes you can't put your finger on what you've been missing until you encounter it again. After seeing two fine revivals of plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter — "Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum and the British production of "The Caretaker" at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, respectively — I suddenly realized how ravenous I was for language in the theater with poetic density and grit.

Beckett, 20th century playwriting's No. 1 game-changer, and Pinter, his most original disciple, were writers steeped in literature. Their education and training didn't come courtesy of an M.F.A. program, with its cramped curriculum divorcing the stage from the other arts. They were carving paths for themselves as wide-ranging men of letters, to use a phrase that has sadly gone the way of "bibliophile" and "public intellectual."

Of course great artists such as Beckett and Pinter are anomalous. (Nobel laureates still haven't gone into mass production.) Yet there's something to be learned from the example of two writers whose spectacular destinies can be glimpsed in their literary beginnings.

Beckett, a brilliant student of Romance languages, had a formative association with James Joyce, wrote a penetrating essay on Proust early in his career, and was as conversant with Dante as he was with the major philosophical currents of his day. Remarkably, he wound up having as profound an impact on the novel as he had on drama. (Only Chekhov, who revolutionized the short story while transforming the future of playwriting, can match this legacy among modern authors.)

Pinter, a young devourer of Dostoevski, Kafka and Joyce, was an actor and director as well as a playwright and screenwriter, but his identity as a poet preceded his dramatic work and he confined himself to poetry (and political rabble-rousing) in the last years of his life. Although Julian Sands' recent one-man tribute to Pinter at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble didn't convince me that Pinter's standing as a poet matches his standing as a playwright, the tensile strength of his dialogue, with nary an extraneous work, is inseparable from his lifelong poetic labors. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter's 'Umbrellas' Discovered
• Harold Pinter on meeting Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter in Krapp's Last Tape

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky read Nikolai Leskov

Acclaimed translators read from their new collaboration

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

The American University of Paris is now hosting free audio content online. The first posting is a series of readings by acclaimed translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: 'Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, renowned translators of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Gogol, Pasternak, and Chekhov, joined the CWT and the students of the MA in Cultural Translation to discuss and read from their forthcoming translation of Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895). Leskov, much beloved in Russia and held in almost equal esteem with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, was a master of the short story. He sought to write about ‘good people,’ who, as Pevear points out, are notoriously difficult to write about. Pevear and Volokhonsky read, in both English and Russian, selections from the stories “Lefty,” “Singlemind” and the preface to “Singlemind,” and “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Praise for The Cahiers Series
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

William Boyd on J. G. Ballard

Boyd and other writers select their favourite short stories

J. G. Ballard

The Guardian has selected a number of high profile writers to select their favourite short stories. William Boyd opted for a work by J. G. Ballard:

Willliam Boyd: My Dream of Flying to Wake Island, by J. G. Ballard (1930–2009)

In the short history of the short story – not much longer than 150 years – very few writers have completely redefined the form. Chekhov, pre-eminently, but also Hemingway and Borges. JG Ballard has to be added to this exclusive list, in my opinion. Ballard's models for his haunting stories are closer to art and music, it seems to me, than to literature. These are fictions inspired by the paintings of De Chirico and Max Ernst, which summon up the mesmerising ostinatos of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Character and narrative are secondary – image and symbol dominate with a surreal and hypnotic intensity, and the language reflects this. Ballardian tropes – empty swimming pools, abandoned resorts, psychotic astronauts, damaged doctors, the alluring nihilism of consumer society and so forth – are unmistakably and uniquely his. "My Dream of Flying to Wake Island" is a true Ballardian classic.

Source: 'Writers pick their favourite short stories', The Guardian, 11 December 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: J. G. Ballard

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Promotional poster for AMC's Mad Men

Literature:

Franz Kafka: Marmaduke, a comic-strip that illustrating extracts and aphorisms from Kafka's work
William Shakespeare: Howard Jacobson names Hamlet his Book of a Lifetime
Poetry Hardback Collections: Faber and Faber collaborate with British printmakers on a new series of poetry editions
Literary Last Words: The last words of writers including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Samuel Johnson and more
Entitled Opinions: Stanford University's online radio show discussing life and literature
Thomas Bernhard: Three Percent reviews Prose, a recently-translated edition of Bernhard's work
J. G. Ballard: Tim Martin browses the recently donated manuscript archive at the British Library
The Next Village: Keith Ridgway supervises a series of works inspired by the Franz Kafka short story
Vladimir Nabokov: New Penguin editions of Nabokov's work
Bookworm: KCRW radio show discussing recent literature
Gabriel Josipovici: Bibliographic Blogger reviews Josipovici's 2001 memoir, A Life
Lydia Davis: On writing very short stories
Stewart Lee on Shelves and Collecting
James Joyce: 1920s footage of Joyce in Paris

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Freud Museum London: A part-time curatorship at the Freud Museum has become available

Theatre

Samuel Beckett: Sean Mathias' successful London/Australia/New Zealand production of Waiting for Godot moves to Khayelitsha, South Africa

Film & Television:

Mad Men: Career tips from Don Draper. What's next? Marriage advice? A guide to healthy living?
Mad Men: New York Times surveys the language of AMC series, Mad Men
Mad Men Unbuttoned: A romp through 1960s America
Mad Men on Charlie Rose: Roundtable discussion with show creator Matthew Weiner, and actors Jon Hamm (Don Draper) and John Slattery (Roger Sterling)
Mad Men on Twitter: Don Draper / Joan Holloway / Peggy Olson / Pete Campbell / Roger Sterling / Harry Crane / Hollis / Betty Draper / Ken Cosgrove / Xerox 914 / Bertram Cooper / Sal Romano
David Lynch: Lynchian tributes to the late Dennis Hopper at a recent screening of Blue Velvet
Guillermo del Toro to adapt H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness to be brought to the screen

Art, Design & Photography:

Harold Chapman's best shot: Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in Paris, 1956

Etc.

Will Self: On drinking after alcoholism

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

A Jubilee for Anton Chekhov

A tribute to the Russian writer

Hampstead Theatre is celebrating the 150th birthday of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov:

From 18 – 23 January 2010, Michael Pennington, one of Britain’s finest actors, and leading Chekhov specialist Rosamund Bartlett will host a series of shows dedicated to the work of this fascinating writer.

The event has been organised to raise money to restore the White Dacha – the house in Yalta where Chekhov wrote Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, which has now lost its state funding and is in serious disrepair.

Renowned writers and directors have chosen their favourite Chekhov stories and plays, and will be discussing them alongside readings and performances by eminent actors. Michael Pennington will also perform his acclaimed one-man show about Anton Chekhov himself. A different show will take place each day and some performances will be accompanied by audience discussions about the great man's work.

Performance Schedule

Monday 18 January, 7.30pm
Chekhov’s Vaudevilles: Michael Frayn (with David Horovitch, Miriam Margolyes and Steve McNeil)

Tuesday 19 January, 7.30pm
Chekhov's Women: Lynne Truss on In the Cart and The Darling (with Rosamund Pike)

Wednesday 20 January, 7.30pm
Chekhov’s Major Plays: Richard Eyre (with friends)

Thursday 21 January, 7.30pm
Chekhov's Doctors: William Boyd on Ionych (with Eileen Atkins)

Friday 22 January, 7.30pm
The Perfect Short Story: David Hare on The Lady with the Little Dog (with Penelope Wilton)

Saturday 23 January, 3pm
Anton Chekhov: Michael Pennington’s one man show

Saturday 23 January, 7.30pm
Chekhov and Unrequited Love: William Fiennes on Verochka (with Simon Russell Beale)

Hampstead Theatre website.