Strange Victories: Grove Press 1951-1885

Palitz Gallery, New York · 18 November 2013 - 6 February 2014

From George Hunka (The Theatre Bar):

Opening on November 18, 2013, Palitz Gallery at Syracuse University’s Lubin House at 11 East 61st Street in New York will present Strange Victories: Grove Press 1951–1985, an exhibition of books, documents, and other material relating to the history and continuing cultural significance of Barney Rosset’s counterculture publishing house. The first major exhibition to focus on the publisher, “The exhibition traces the history and evolution of Grove Press, from its role at the center of national censorship trials over the first American editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer to its ascension as one of the twentieth-century’s great avant-garde publishing houses,” the university says. “Strange Victories will include original letters and manuscripts by several authors including Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans as well as a facsimile of Malcolm X’s letter to Alex Haley written during his first pilgrimage to Mecca. Also included are archival documents relating to the censorship trials, Grove’s iconic book jackets, and newspaper clippings documenting the context of Grove’s publishing efforts.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon
• The Beckett Circle on Barney Rosset
• Barney Rosset 1922-2012
• Barney Rosset on Samuel Beckett
• Kenzaburō Ōe on Barney Rosset

Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

A new title from Columbia University Press

Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

From Columbia University Press:

Aldous Huxley decried “the horrors of modern ‘pleasure,’” or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism’s signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss.

In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic play of Joyce, Lawrence, Stein, Rhys, and others. She considers pop cultural phenomena and the rise of celebrities such as Rudolph Valentino and Gypsy Rose Lee against contemporary sociological, scientific, and philosophical writings on leisure and desire.

Throughout her study, Frost incorporates recent scholarship on material and visual culture and vernacular modernism, recasting the period’s high/low, elite/popular divides and formal strategies as efforts to regulate sensual and cerebral experience. Capturing the challenging tensions between these artists’ commitment to innovation and the stimulating amusements they denounced yet deployed in their writing, Frost calls attention to the central role of pleasure in shaping interwar culture. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Brian Boyd, Stalking Nabokov
• David Foster Wallace: Fate, Time and Language
• Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch
• Peter Sloterdijk, The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice

The Beckett Circle on Barney Rosset

Official Samuel Beckett newsletter pays tribute to the founder of America's Grove Press

Barney Rosset

Tom Bishop pays tribute to the legendary American publisher over at The Beckett Circle:

For Beckett people, Barney Rosset, who died on February 21, 2012, earned his place of great honour in the Beckettian firmament by having been Beckett’s publisher in the United States at his Grove Press. Thanks to Grove Beckett’s works were more widely disseminated in the U.S.—and especially on American campuses—than in any other country, and Waiting for Godot alone sold more than an astounding 2.5 million copies.

But for the publishing world at large, Barney Rosset was not only responsible for making Beckett a well-known writer long before his Nobel Prize, he was, beyond a doubt, the enfant terrible of American publishing, the man who fought numerous, highly controversial legal battles to assert the First Amendment in a climate of political and sexual censorship. His most celebrated—and successful—battles earned Grove Press the rights to publish and distribute D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and changed the face of publishing in the United States. Rosset spent large sums of his own money (he came from a wealthy family), fought the U.S. government, and even went to jail, but he made Grove Press ‘a breach in the dam of American Puritanism’, as he himself termed it.

Having broken down the barriers to sexually explicit language and subject matter in literature, Rosset turned to film. He imported the then-sexually daring Swedish film, I Am Curious (Yellow), bought a small Greenwich Village movie house to show it, and then went to court once again when the film was banned. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and again he won and again his success marked a landmark victory against censorship laws and mentality. Life magazine may have entitled a 1969 article about him ‘The Old Smut Peddler’ but Rosset was not only unfazed, he belonged to the ‘it-doesn’t-matter-what-they-say-as-long-as-they-spell-the-name-right’ school. Most likely he felt that at 47 he should not have been labeled ‘old’. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Kenzaburō Ōe on Barney Rosset
• Barney Rosset 1922-2012
• Barney Rosset on Samuel Beckett
• The Beckett Circle: New Website
• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Writers: William S. Burroughs

Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press

Trailer for a 2007 documentary on the founder of Grove Press

Source

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Barney Rosset 1922-2012
• Samuel Beckett and the Grove Press
• Writers: William S. Burroughs
• Barney Rosset on Samuel Beckett
• Alan Schneider on Samuel Beckett's Film