Susan Bernofsky on Robert Walser

An online podcast

Robert Walser

From Scott Esposito (Center for the Art of Translation):

In 1993 when Susan Bernofsky published her first book-length translation of Robert Walser, the author was little-known in English and virtually unread in the United States. By 2009, when Bernofsky’s translation of The Tanners signified that all of Walser’s novels were available in English for the first time, the release of that book was greeted with praise from publications as diverse as BookForum, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.

The rise of Walser in translation over the past two decades has been nothing short of stunning, and it is thanks in no small part to a group of fine translators, of whom Bernofsky has played a leading roll. Since her first publication of Walser in 1993 she has published two other books by him, with two more on the way, as well as a critical biography of the author. No less a reader than the Nobel-winning novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee—one of Walser’s great contemporary admirers—has praised Bernofsky’s translations for their “ingenuity” and “resourcefulness” in dealing with his wide vocabulary and highly precise prose.

Walser lived from 1878 to 1956, although it is widely believed that he gave up writing after 1933 when he committed himself to a sanatorium. In his time his writing received praise from the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin, but after his death he fell into obscurity in Europe, and it was only in the 1960s and ‘70s that he began to be known again on that continent. Susan Sontag took up the cause of Walser in the U.S. in the 1980s, but wasn’t until the late ‘90s and the ‘00s, with the translation of a number of his major works, that he began to become known here.

Bernofsky has described Walser’s prose as walking “a fine line between the maudlin and the trivially playful,” going on to say that he “always manages to stay right in the middle, in that sweet spot where he achieves a sort of guileless profundity that takes the reader by surprise again and again.” The translation of such writing is difficult to say the least, and we are fortunate that Bernofsky has proven herself up to the challenge time and time again.

In addition to Walser, Bernofsky has translated German-language works from the renowned Japanese author Yoko Tawada, as well as Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse for The Modern Library, and others. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including ones from the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, and the Lannan Foundation. [Read More]

Find Robert Walser on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Robert Walser, Berlin Stories
• The Small Voice of Robert Walser
• Robert Walser, A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories
• W. G. Sebald on Robert Walser
• J. M. Coetzee on Robert Walser

I See Myself: David Lynch on Eraserhead

From interviews conducted by Chris Rodley

Working the night shift: Cast and crew members of David Lynch's Eraserhead

An excerpt from Chris Rodley's wonderful book, Lynch on Lynch, quoted by Criterion Collection:

Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been completely dedicated to the film to sustain both the project and your own enthusiasm over such an extended production period. What was it about the idea that you loved?

It was the world. In my mind, it was a world between a factory and a factory neighborhood. A little, unknown, twisted, almost silent lost spot where little details and little torments existed. And people were struggling in darkness. They’re living in those fringelands, and they’re the people I really love. Henry’s definitely one of those people. They kind of get lost in time. They’re either working in a factory or fiddling with something or other. It’s a world that’s neither here nor there. It came out of the air in Philadelphia. I always say it’s my Philadelphia Story. It just doesn’t have Jimmy Stewart in it!

I could be on the set at night, and I would imagine the whole world around it. I imagined walking out, and there were very few cars—there might be one far away, but in the shadows—and very few people. And the lights in the windows would be really dim, and there would be no movement in the window, and the coffee shop would be empty except for one person who didn’t speak properly. It was just like a mood. The life in that world . . . there was nothing like it. Things go so fast when you’re making a movie now that you’re not able to give the world enough—what it deserves. It wants to be lived in a little bit; it’s got so much to offer, and you’re going just a little too fast. It’s just sad.

When he reviewed Blue Velvet, novelist J. G. Ballard said that the film was “like The Wizard of Oz reshot with a script by Franz Kafka and decor by Francis Bacon.” Kafka certainly comes to mind in Eraserhead. Do you like his work?

Yeah. The one artist that I feel could be my brother—and I almost don’t like saying it, because the reaction is always, “Yeah, you and everybody else”—is Franz Kafka. I really dig him a lot. Some of his things are the most thrilling combos of words I have ever read. If Kafka wrote a crime picture, I’d be there. I’d like to direct that for sure.

In a way, Henry is akin to Josef K in Kafka’s The Trial—a man by turns bemused and alarmed by what is happening to him.

Henry is very sure that something is happening, but he doesn’t understand it at all. He watches things very, very carefully because he’s trying to figure them out. He might study the corner of that pie container just because it’s in his line of sight, and he might wonder why he sat where he did to have that be there like that. Everything is new. It might not be frightening to him, but it could be a key to something. Everything should be looked at. There could be clues in it.

There seems to be little differentiation between the outside and the inside in Eraserhead—something that becomes much more pronounced later in Twin Peaks. Views through windows are of brick walls, and although the sounds might be different, it’s mostly just as noisy inside Henry’s apartment block as it is in the world outside. The feeling is of no letting up. There’s a constant . . .

Pressure. Well, again, it’s industry and different things going on—a lot of it unseen but heard. But to me, even though there was plenty of ambiguous torment in Henry, his apartment—actually, his room—was, you know, fairly cozy. It was just this one little place he had to mull things over. The anxiety doesn’t let up, but it doesn’t really let up for anybody. Pressure is, you know, always building. In a way, I’d like to live in Henry’s apartment, and be around there. I love Hitchcock’s Rear Window because it has such a mood, and even though I know what’s going to happen, I love being in that room and feeling that time. It’s like I can smell it.

How did Eraserhead come about?

Well, fate stepped in again and was really smiling on me. The Center [the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies] was completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great. And you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing. If you could get it going, they would support it. They didn’t have any kind of real program. They ran films all day long, and you could look at them. And if there was something you wanted to see, or something somebody said you’d gotta see, you’d go up, and there it would be. It was an unbelievable screening room. Anything that was on film, they could show there. And people would get ahold of really rare prints. The chandelier would drift up into the ceiling and dim as it went. And they had the greatest projectionists!

My first year at the Center was spent rewriting a forty-five-page script I wrote called Gardenback. The whole thing unfolded from this painting I’d done. The script had a story, in my mind, and it had what some people could call a “monster” in it. When you look at a girl, something crosses from her to you. And in this story, that something is an insect.

Well, a couple of things happened. Caleb Deschanel read this script, and he called me up and said he loved it. He was a fellow at the Center and a director of photography. He said he wanted to shoot it. And that was really great with me. I’d worked with Caleb on a film he was shooting for a guy named Gil Dennis. They wanted a snake to crawl between the wall and the wallpaper in this thing, so I built this snake and this rig and did this thing for Gil. It didn’t work out real well, but it was okay. So Caleb was telling me about this producer over at Fox who was ready to do a series of low-budget horror films. This guy was a sort of friend of his, and he wanted my permission to show him Gardenback.

Frank Daniel—who was the dean of the Czechoslovakian film school—was by far the best teacher I ever had. Just a great, great teacher. Unbelievable! I never really liked teachers, but I liked Frank because he wasn’t a teacher, in a way. He just talked. And he loved cinema, and he knew everything about it. Frank was always trying to talk to me about Gardenback, but I wasn’t, you know, talking. So one day, Caleb and Frank and I went to see this guy at Fox. And this guy said, “Look, I want to give you fifty thousand dollars to make this movie. Caleb will shoot it, and it’ll be a labor of love—you’ll get everybody in there to do stuff for nothing.” But he said, “It’s only forty-five pages. You gotta make it 115 or 110 pages—it’s gotta be a feature script.” And this, like, hurt my head! “What does he mean?”

So Frank tried to explain to me. He said things like, “You have to have these scenes between the people. And they have to talk. You should think about some dialogue.” And I still didn’t know what he was really on about. “What are they gonna say?” I said. And so [laughs] we started having these weekly meetings that were like an experiment, because I really didn’t know what they were getting at. And I was curious to see what they were going to say to me. Eventually, a script got written. Gil Dennis was a writer and would come into the meetings. And Toni Vellani [codirector of the Center] would sit in on these meetings too. So they would all talk to me, and I’d go home and try to write these things.

What I wrote was pretty much worthless, but something happened inside me about structure, about scenes. And I don’t even know what it was, but it sort of percolated down and became part of me. But the script was pretty much worthless. I knew I’d just watered it down. It was way more normal to me. The bits I liked were there, but they were interspersed with all this other stuff. And now it was the end of the first year, and there I was with this thing.

On the first day of the second year, the old fellows came in and met the new fellows. And at the end of this meeting, they assigned different groups to different places to kick off the new year. And I was assigned to a first-year group. In my mind, this was a humiliating thing, and I didn’t understand it. So I got really, really upset. All this frustration came out, and I stormed up to Frank Daniel, and I screamed at him. I just barged in and told him, “I’m outta here. I quit.” I went and told Alan [Splet]. I said, “I’m outta here!” He says, “I’m going with you,” because he was fed up too, and we both stormed out of the place. We went down to Hamburger Hamlet and just sat there drinking coffee. It was over.

I finally went home, and Peggy [Lynch’s wife] said, “What the hell’s going on? They’ve been calling every ten minutes!” And I said, “I quit.” And she said, “Well, they want to see you.” So I calmed down, and the next day I went up, just basically to hear what they had to say. And Frank said, “We must be doing something wrong, because you’re one of our favorite people and you’re upset. What do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, I sure don’t wanna do this piece a shit Gardenback now—it’s wrecked!” And he said, “What do you want to do?” And I said, “I want to do Eraserhead.” And he said, “Okay, do Eraserhead then.”

So you already had the idea ready to go?

I had this twenty-one-page script. And they said, “It’s twenty-one pages,” and Toni or somebody said, “It’s a twenty-one-minute film.” And I said, “Well . . . er . . . I think it’s going to be longer than that.” So they elected it to be a forty-two-minute film. But the beautiful thing—because they were now feeling a little bit guilty—was that I was able to go to the equipment shed. My friend David Khasky was in charge of all the cameras and cables, lights, everything. And I had this Volkswagen with a four-by-eight wooden rack that held tons of stuff. Well, it was packed four or five feet tall with cables and lights. And the car was packed with camera equipment. And I’d drive down to these stables owned by the school, unload, and drive back up and get more.

The stables were down at the bottom of the mansion down Doheny Road. It was a little mansion in and of itself. It had a greenhouse and a garden shed, all made of brick, with these shingle roofs. But it was all getting old and funny. It had garages and a hayloft, a big L-shaped room above the garages. It had a maid’s quarters and places above for different people who worked for Doheny, kitchens, bathrooms, like a little hotel, with a lot of other stuff around. And I got four or five rooms and the hayloft and a couple of garages.

You just laid claim to them?

Yeah. No one wanted them anyway. They were empty. So we had a camera room, a greenroom, an editing room, rooms for sets, a food room, and a bathroom. We just sort of had the run of the place. I had those stables for many years.

They knew you were there, but they just left you alone?

Yes. They didn’t know I was living there—I got divorced in my second year, and I started living there. I also stayed at Jack Nance and Catherine Coulson’s house sometimes. And Al stayed at the stables a lot. That’s another thing I had: since Al was head of the sound department, I had access to the entire mixing room, the Nagras, microphones and cables, and all the rest. And the soundman. I had everything going for me. I was doing the thing I wanted to do most of all, making films. And I practically had my own little studio.

Did you get a grant to go to the Center, or did your parents have to pay?

You have to get there, and you have to take care of yourself. My father lent me money—me and Peggy and Jennifer [Lynch’s daughter]—and Peggy’s parents helped out too.

So how were you taking care of yourself during that time?

I can’t remember what year it was in Eraserhead, but I got this paper route, and I delivered the Wall Street Journal. That’s how I supported myself. We only shot at night, and my route was at night. So at a certain point, I’d have to stop the shoot and go do the route. But I had the route down so fast that I was only gone about an hour and eight minutes. Sometimes it would be fifty-nine minutes, but I was going flat out to make the hour.

Why were you only shooting at night?

Well, you know, because it was dark! And the park department was up there during the day, so it was noisy and there were people around. At night, no one was there. And it was a nighttime film. The mood was perfect, and that is critical.

Did you now regard yourself primarily as a filmmaker?

I didn’t really think about it; I was making this film. But I always felt there were these filmmakers out there, and I wasn’t part of that. I was separate from that. I never really considered myself in the system at all. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Filmmakers: David Lynch
• Eraserhead: Original Soundtrack Recording (Deluxe Edition)
• David Lynch: Behind the Scenes on Eraserhead
• David Lynch: Eraserhead Interview (1979)
• David Lynch on Film vs. Television
• David Lynch on Meditation

Robert Walser, Berlin Stories

A recent publication from the NYRB

Robert Walser, Berlin Stories

From Nicholas Lezard (The Guardian):

Those of you compelled to take public transport might find some wisdom in this piece of advice on what to do if the journey goes past the half-hour mark, and is getting tedious: "You look straight ahead. To show by one's ways and gestures that one is finding things a bit tedious fills a person with quite peculiar pleasure. Now you return to studying the face of the conductor on duty, and now you content yourself once more with merely, vacantly staring straight ahead. Isn't that nice? One thing and then another? I must confess: I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead."

You may wonder: is the writer of these words perhaps having us on? On the contrary: this is what he's like, pretty much all the time. I think it was Herman Hesse who said that if you can stomach Robert Walser's prose, you can't help but fall in love with it, and I fell in love with it pretty quickly. He's guileless but not stupid, an admiring observer of the inconsequential. "We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary," he once wrote, "we already see so much." Susan Sontag, in a brief but very worthwhile introduction to a collection of his stories published 30-odd years ago, noticed how easy it was to come up with points of comparison: "a Paul Klee in prose ... a cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett ... the missing link between Kleist and Kafka". In fact, as she points out, it was Kafka who was first compared to Walser, rather than the other way round (this is the humorous Kafka, who has disappeared in the contemporary imagination, to be replaced by the Kafka of bad dreams). [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Small Voice of Robert Walser
• Traces of Robert Walser
• Robert Walser, A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories
• W. G. Sebald on Robert Walser
• J. M. Coetzee on Robert Walser

Metamorphoses: The Third International Flann O’Brien Conference

Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015

Prague

Metamorphoses: The III International Flann O’Brien Conference
Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015

Keynote Speakers
Joseph Brooker (Birkbeck, University of London)
Catherine Flynn (University of California, Berkeley)
Brian Ó Conchubhair (University of Notre Dame)

Guest Writer
Kevin Barry (City of Bohane; winner of the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award)

Written at a time of profound transformation in post-independence Ireland and war-torn Europe, and displaying an acute awareness of the epochal changes bearing on modern notions of literature and the self, Flann O’Brien’s oeuvre offers a sustained engagement with the representation of cultural, political, and personal metamorphosis. This is a body of writing in which the human always bears the potential to be radically remade in the forms of horses, bicycles, and trains; in which genre, language, and literary form are constantly reorganised and refashioned; in which a programme of pseudonymity presents the comic writer as a master of disguise and identity as a matter of constant flux.

At Metamorphoses: The III International Flann O’Brien Conference (Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015), the organisers propose to build on the current sea change in O’Brien studies to foster a scholarly and critical debate dedicated to these themes of metamorphosis in the writer’s work. At stake will be the ways in which O’Brien’s English and Irish language novels, short stories, column-writing, non-fiction, teleplays, and theatrical work:

• Test the limits and possibilities of identity, hybridity, & concepts of post-humanity;
• Engage and transform cultural, political, & economic upheaval at home and abroad;
• Process radical paradigm shifts in the sciences, from Darwinian evolution theory to the “Mollycule Theory” of quantum physics;
• Explore (anti-)modernist reconstructions of myth, whether Irish or Ovidian;
• Attend to linguistic, generic, and formal mutations, as well as the resonances between metamorphosis, metaphor, and metafiction;
• Present shifting views of himself, his own writing, and the figure of the Author;
• Are transformed in the acts of reception, rewriting, translation, & adaptation;
• Are opened up for new readings by genetic analyses of the vast and critically under-analysed collections of his works in progress (correspondence, manuscripts, drafts) housed at Boston College, Southern Illinois University, & University of Texas at Austin;
• Are amenable to new comparative readings with Prague’s sons Franz Kafka and Karel Čapek, as well as other modernist writers and movements of transformation, from Jarry & Joyce, Borges & Beckett, to the Absurdists, Futurists, & Surrealists.

Abstracts: If you would like to propose a paper (not exceeding 20 minutes), or panel (maximum 3 speakers) please submit your title and an abstract of 250 words accompanied by a short biographical sketch to viennacis.anglistik@univie.ac.at by 1 March 2015.

Find Flann O'Brien on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Reading Brian O'Nolan's Libraries
• Flann O'Brien & Modernism
• http://www.apieceofmonologue.com/2011/08/flann-obrien-beckett-joyce-irish.html
• Re Joyce
• Reading Finnegans Wake

The Life and Influence of Walter Benjamin

On the tragic life and enduring influence of the German literary critic

Walter Benjamin

From Ian Penman (City Journal):

Nearly 75 years ago, at the outset of World War Two, stranded between official borderlines, right on the edge of things, the German Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin slipped out of life. His passing barely registered beyond a small circle of friends and fellow travelers—habitués, like himself, of severe literary journals, fringe politics, esoteric philosophies. Like that of Benjamin’s own literary heroes, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, his posthumous career was to prove far more lively. These days, anyone tilling the stony fields of literary or political theory would soon find himself persona non grata if he didn’t pay due obeisance to Benjamin—at least, the version of him now favored: the presiding angel over all that is left-leaning, interdisciplinary, and media-studious.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, though, Benjamin’s work fell into relative obscurity. At the time, only a tiny portion of his rich and varied writing had been translated from German into English or French. What was available was hard to label and difficult to promote. Benjamin was more renowned for what most of us (i.e., those of us not fluent in German) could not read rather than for what we could. Introductory essays by Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and his friend Gershom Scholem filled in some of the background, but back when I first encountered his work, there was little to choose from.

A lifetime on, and things look very different. From out of privation, we now have: four hefty volumes of Benjamin’s Selected Writings and his huge, genre-defying Arcades Project; Momme Brodersen’s exemplary Walter Benjamin: A Biography; countless secondary studies and various memoirs; a gorgeous mocked-up Archive, which reproduces texts, notebooks, and other scraps in eye-straining detail; and two novels dedicated to his shade (Benjamin’s Crossing, by Jay Parini; and The Angel of History, by Bruno Arapaia). Most recently, Howard Eiland and Michael E. Jennings have given us the sturdy Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, published by Harvard University Press. If the lion’s share of previously untranslated work finally appeared in the last decade, there still isn’t anything like a helpful “Best of Benjamin.” (Arendt’s 1955 selection, Illuminations, remains the best place to begin.) One reason may be that new readers who come to Benjamin end up recasting him in their own image.

Benjamin lived and worked just on the cusp of the current epoch of inescapable popular culture and omnipresent media. “Criticism,” he observed, “is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt a standpoint. Now things press too urgently on human society.” This could have been written yesterday; it was published in 1928. The deeply cultured Benjamin found himself observing the slow breakdown of the very same high culture on which he depended for his daily bread. Yet he was also a fan of Hollywood films, detective fiction, and other dreamy, mainstream forms. It was one of destiny’s less congenial jokes that she took Benjamin and left us his friend Theodor Adorno, a man uniquely ill-disposed to figuring out anything of value in popular culture.

As an unashamed intellectual, Benjamin spent large portions of his life reading, writing, editing, and researching. But he was also a devoted traveler (he believed in foreign jaunts as a cure-all for most writerly ills); something of a ladies’ man; a loyal aficionado of plush casinos; and an enthusiastic dabbler in drugs. He was, in short, a logjam of contradictions: part Jewish mystic, part Marxist firebrand; skeptical priest, polite libertine. A line that Jean Cocteau devised for Orson Welles could equally apply to Benjamin: “an active loafer, a wise madman, a solitude surrounded by humanity.” [Read More]

Find Walter Benjamin on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• A to Z of Theory: Walter Benjamin
• Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait
• Walter Benjamin's Paris Address Book
• Walter Benjamin, Early Writings 1910-1917
• Walter Benjamin's Library Card

Franz Kafka and Asceticism

Excerpts from two volumes of Reiner Stach's Kafka

From Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years (translated by Shelley Frisch):

Asceticism was a magic word for Kafka, an intricate complex of images, cultural paradigms, idiosyncrasies, fears, and psychological techniques that he incorporated into his thought that feelings and gradually made a focal point of his identity. He was entirely justified in asserting that he had ‘a fabulous innate capacity for asceticism’. It is remarkable how tenaciously he clung to the rule of self-abjuration once his period of dawdling came to an end. The way he steadfastly denied himself warmth, meat, drugs, and medicine clearly refutes his alleged weakness of will. He reduced his good intake, toughened his body, and simplified his habits. [...]

Asceticism is not austerity for its own sake; it is a process of self-regulation and self-formation based on the utopian notion of attaining complete control over one’s body, self, and life. All Kafka’s interests, habits, and penchants were modified accordingly. A diet of nuts and fruits, a flawless method of chewing, devotion to calisthenics, and long walks. He cultivated and shaped his body. He gained awareness of his body as well. He felt a growing aversion to and even loathing for everything that threatened to undermine his new sense of autonomy, especially doctors who treated his body as though they were plumbers, and medicines that had unanticipated side effects. He contended that it was degrading to battle insomnia with valerian: his insomnia was not caused by a lack of valerian.

From Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years (translated by Shelley Frisch):

His ascetic self-design was a decisive psychological achievement; it turned the inconspicuous Jew from Prague into a unique phenomenon. In the years leading to 1914, Kafka brought his self-invention to a state of perfection. First, he lived it in practice, and only then did he reflect on it and put it into words. It achieved a comprehensive psychic integration, which enables him to subject all the facets of his life to one idea and thus to give shape to his existence.

From Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years (translated by Shelley Frisch):

But wanting a pure life, he denied himself any leeway, any opportunity for momentary relief.

From Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years (translated by Shelley Frisch):

He had modest needs, was indifferent to money, and tended not to be attuned to the trouble that lay ahead.

From Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight (translated by Shelley Frisch):

Kafka was quite familiar with this logic; his notion of truthfulness was essentially purist and, to the chagrin of those around him, did not allow for compromises, whether the issue was eating a roast, buying furniture, or working on a journal. On the other hand, he conceded everything possible when it came to mere opinions or philosophical views. He did not proselytize, and he wanted to persuade only people who were close to him and whose lack of understanding upset him.

Max Brod (left) and Franz Kafka (right) on holiday

From Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight (translated by Shelley Frisch):

Kafka, who ate very little anyway, had an easier time than most with the dwindling daily rations. He did not care for meat or cake, and the now-pathetic menus in restaurants and coffeehouses made no difference to him. He told his concerned sister Ottla that at Alchimistengasse he had more every evening than he could eat, and even the looming absence of coal (heating at night was already forbidden) could not stop him from staying in his new sanctuary for as long as possible. When Brod visited him there and Kafka read a text to him—there was no something to read aloud again—Brod was amazed at this ‘monastic cell of a real writer,’ and had the impression that Kafka was suffering less than he from the horrors of the third winter of the war. He was probably right. Kafka might have replied that this was the age of the ascetics. A dark time, an icy time, time to write.

From Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight (translated by Shelley Frisch):

It even seems as though this long fallow period inched him closer to his ascetic narrative ideal. In both language and plot framework [of The Castle], he now avoided anything that could be perceived as mere grandstanding.

From Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight (translated by Shelley Frisch):

[Dora Diamant] even admired the way Kafka paid close attention to unremarkable, ordinary things, which reminded her of the ‘sanctification’ of life that Hasidism preached and she had internalized. Nothing escaped his attention. The simplest things made him happy, and even when he was provoked into offering resistance and criticism, he was never disrespectful.

From Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight (translated by Shelley Frisch):

Brod also visited Kafka’s home several times and was not surprised to find his room as bare and almost as impersonal as his earlier one in Prague, not to mention the uncomfortable cold.

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka: 'A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us'
• Samuel Beckett and Quietism
• A Day in the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer
• Spinoza's Guide to Living Well

Brian Evenson on Samuel Beckett's Molloy

An interview with Electric Literature

Samuel Beckett

From Electric Literature:

Colin Winnette: What motivated this recommendation?

Brian Evenson: It’s a book I’m very fond of, and I tend to think contemporary American fiction would be more interesting if more writers knew Molloy.I tend to think contemporary American fiction would be more interesting if more writers knew Molloy.

I think it’s also a very funny book (though weird humor sometimes) and has some amazing sentences.

CW: How did you first encounter this book? What was your initial reaction, if you can remember?

BE: At the end of my senior year in high school, we had to read Edward Albee’s play Zoo Story for class. In the note in the textbook for that play, it said that if you’d liked Albee you’d probably also like Samuel Beckett. There was a little used bookstore in an industrial area in Provo, Utah and I ended up picking up Beckett’s Endgame there for a dollar. I loved it—still my favorite Beckett play—and that ended up leading me to Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable). I like all three of those books, but Molloy was the one that really blew me away. I was at once intrigued by it and felt like I was missing a lot. I also think that the fact that the first section is just two paragraphs (one a couple of pages long and one about 80 pages long) kept me going: I didn’t feel like I could stop reading until I’d reached the end of a paragraph, and that made for a very strange, anxious experience. I also think its ability to juxtapose two narratives and still work as a whole is really admirable. It was really different than anything else I’d ever read, which may be what kept me going, but I think also when the narrative switches from Molloy to Moran that did something for me and I wanted to keep reading to see how the two narratives would or wouldn’t come together.

CW: What’s your sense of how the Moran section (part II) interacts with the Molloy section (part I)? What’s revealed/complicated?

BE: Well, it’s a discontinuous juxtaposition, one that seems like it’s structured so that the second part will resolve the first part. There are all sorts of gestures made towards that in things said in the Moran section, but as it progresses you begin to realize it’s not going to actually sew up or resolve anything, at least not completely. Instead, it’s almost as if Moran is going through a kind of “Becoming-Molloy” (though that too is discontinuous and not completely parallel). Very little is accomplished by Moran (apart from a death he’s not sure he understands); he returns to where he started from, but that place has fallen apart in his absence just as he too has fallen apart in being absent. And of course the way it ends calls into question everything about the narrative itself and about narrative in general.

CW: Was the connection to Albee profitable (other than motivating you to discover Beckett)?

BE: Not really. I liked Zoo Story and I like the other Albee plays I’ve read or seen, but I feel that Beckett’s a different sort of animal than Albee. But sure, they’re animals that are pretty close evolutionarily even if they’re not the same. I think whoever wrote the notes for the anthology had read Martin Esslin’s The Theater of the Absurd and saw both Beckett and Albee as being part of that tradition. And in any case, I owe Albee a debt for not only changing my idea of what drama could be when I was in high school but also for leading me indirectly to Beckett.

CW: Will you talk a little about Beckett’s apparent obsession with decay, with aging, rot, even mental/psychological decay? Molloy isn’t the only Beckett work that leads you in one direction, only to lose its narrative “trajectory” to decay and stagnance.

BE: I think it’s more than apparent. It has something to do with Beckett’s philosophical notion that we move from the cradle to the grave, that that’s the only direction that anything moves, at least anything organic. As he suggests in Waiting for Godot: We “give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” We are left each day with a little less–though moments in his work ironize this or call it into question. Beckett’s about the night, but he’s also about the brief gleam. Beckett’s about the night, but he’s also about the brief gleam.

CW: How might writers knowing about Molloy make contemporary American fiction more interesting?

BE: I guess what I think—and I’ve talked about this elsewhere—is that there are two very different strands of innovation in American fiction. One can be traced, roughly, back to Joyce (Ulysses in particular) and involves a kind of excessive maximalism and lots of pyrotechnics. David Foster Wallace, for instance (who I admire a lot). There’s a great deal to be admired in that strand, and a lot to be learned from it, but at the same time I feel sometimes like those writers seem like they want to cram the whole world into a paper bag. It’s impressive, in a way, to watch that cramming take place, but what you have in the end often strikes me as being a little too proud of itself, wanting a little too much attention for being virtuosic. The other strand for me is traced back to Beckett and Kafka, who manage to do amazing things with language but also aren’t really interested in being impressive. Those works don’t say “Look at me”; instead they get down to the very serious business of figuring something out, of following and pursuing a line, and then don’t mind cutting out the noise of other things that don’t feel relevant. They’re modest in one way, incisive and deadly in another. I tend to think if more American writers ended up reading Beckett, and Molloy in particular, it’d shift the American sense of what experiment is. I can see it in contemporary French literature–Beckett has had a very positive effect. And then of course there are the non-innovative/non-experimental realms of literature. I think realist writers in particular should be confronted with Molloy’s lack of tidiness. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• On Samuel Beckett's Molloy
• Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui: The Trilogy
• Working with Beckett's Manuscripts
• Peter Gay on Beckett and Modernism

The Drawings of Franz Kafka

Philip Hartigan discusses Kafka's personal sketches

From Open Culture:

UK-born, Chicago-based artist Philip Hartigan has posted a brief video piece about Franz Kafka’s drawings. Kafka, of course, wrote a body of work, mostly never published during his lifetime, that captured the absurdity and the loneliness of the newly emerging modern world: In The Metamorphosis, Gregor transforms overnight into a giant cockroach; in The Trial, Josef K. is charged with an undefined crime by a maddeningly inaccessible court. In story after story, Kafka showed his protagonists getting crushed between the pincers of a faceless bureaucratic authority on the one hand and a deep sense of shame and guilt on the other. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka: 'Words are Clumsy Mountaineers'
• The Guardian's Top Ten Absurd Classics
• Kafka: 'Stay at your table and listen'
• 'At last I understand Kafka'

An Interview with Music & Literature

Michael Barron talks to Daniel Medin and Taylor Davis-Van Atta

Music & Literature, No. 4

From New Directions:

Michael Barron: What prompted the inception of Music & Literature? Could you describe the process from idea to publication?

Daniel Medin: Roberto Bolaño described his dream reader as the sort of person who engages with the complete works of an author. There’s an impulse behind this project similar to the drive to read every word by a writer like Dickinson, Kafka or—to choose a more recent example—Bolaño. Among the greatest delights of assembling each issue is the nature of the labor required: total submersion in the cosmos of a superlative artist. To my knowledge, no other journal comes close to satisfying this thirst for depth and sustained attention. In a publishing climate where commercial “viability” determines content, there’s a genuine need for such unapologetic focus. Despite its own host of challenges, being a not-for-profit assures us greater freedom of inclusion than most other editors enjoy. Quality and relevance determine the content, not word count or precedent.

Taylor Davis-Van Atta: And to plunge into the life’s work of Bolaño or Kafka—or Arvo Pärt, Max Neumann, Pina Bausch, Kaija Saariaho, Ingmar Bergman, among countless others—is a project without end. The works produced by these artists are inexhaustible, and deserve a class of accessible, smart, and enjoyable literature that meaningfully engages with them—and that provides the opportunity to discover what we haven’t encountered before. This is the base need we’re trying to address with the Music & Literature project.

In this sense, M&L began as an act of frustration, an impulse against a culture that’s too vast, diffuse, commercially-obsessed, and fleeting in its tastes to be taken seriously. In short, I wanted to publish the work that I myself wanted to read: work that spans disciplines and art forms, that pays no attention to national borders, that encourages contributions from a wide array of cultures and languages, and—above all—that aspires to the heights of the art it’s discussing.

M&L is an arts magazine, at once broadly defined and intensely focused. What has changed since its inception is our expansion into multiple venues; we now publish reviews and features online in complement to our print issues, and we’ve recently launched an ambitious events program that will take place year-round and around the world—with all of these activities concerted and aimed at serving a single mission. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• That Other Word: Episode 12
• Praise for The Cahiers Series
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside
• Roberto Bolaño on Literature, Kafka and the Abyss
• László Krasznahorkai: Similar Writers

Take the Kafka Quiz

Trivia test hosted by The Guardian

Romy Schneider and Anthony Perkins in Orson Welles' adaptation of The Trial

From The Guardian: ‘It's 90 years since the death of the enigmatic modern master. So it's an appropriate time for you to give us some answers’ [Read More]

Find on Franz Kafka Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka: 'Words are Clumsy Mountaineers'
• The Guardian's Top Ten Absurd Classics
• Kafka: 'Stay at your table and listen'
• 'At last I understand Kafka'

Lydia Davis on Literary Influence

From an interview in The Quarterly Conversation

Lydia Davis

From an interview between Dan Gunn and the writer and translator Lydia Davis, published in The Quarterly Conversation:

Dan Gunn: Proust’s narrator deduces that, to convey the priority of sense-impressions over pre-formulated conclusions, he needs to write à la Dostoevsky. When I read your work I am, in fact, made to think less of Dostoevsky than of Kafka, and of the way in which the familiar becomes strange in his work—his story “Hands” for example, where his narrator’s two hands appear suddenly to be alien and potentially at war with one another. If one may provisionally call such writing “phenomenal,” do you feel that part of your own work which is “phenomenal” to be working within a tradition? Or is it rather something that you developed privately and intuitively?

Lydia Davis: I think influence is a complicated thing. I am influenced by a kind of writing because I am drawn to it, open to it. I am drawn to it because there is already an affinity between my own sensibility and sense of formal structure and those of the author I am reading or studying. I would not be influenced by a writer alien to me. I really see an ongoing process that starts in earliest childhood. The very first picture books and nursery rhymes have their effect, as do songs and the lyrics of songs. My sensibility as a child is affected by these and then my changing sensibility and sense of structure show in my writings, even the stories written as assignments in grade school. And of course the influences of interactions with family and friends and teachers continue to have their effect.

I certainly read Kafka very closely and constantly for a few years—though I was reading many others at the same time, of course, like Hawthorne, Melville, Evelyn Waugh, R.L. Stevenson, Malamud, Dickens, Mary McCarthy, Poe, Emily Dickinson, James, and slews of mysteries. Something drew me to Kafka’s work, and in turn I’m sure I absorbed something of his sensibility and style. Clearly something drew me to Kafka more than to James, for instance—the spareness, the humility (whether assumed or real, or a combination), the bizarre imagination. He was interested in the possibility of two hands suddenly alien to each other; James’s interests lay elsewhere. For years I found James hard to read; I found that his prose left me no breathing room. Now I admire him. But the affinity still is not there. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Ricks on Lydia Davis
• Lydia Davis Wins Booker International Prize 2013
• Lydia Davis on Madame Bovary and Vladimir Nabokov
• Lydia Davis on Translating Madame Bovary
• Editing Beckett's Letters: An Interview with Dan Gunn

Kafka Translated: How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka

A new study by Michelle Woods

Michelle Woods, Kafka Translated: How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka

From Bloomsbury:

Kafka Translated is the first book to look at the issue of translation and Kafka's work. What effect do the translations have on how we read Kafka? Are our interpretations of Kafka influenced by the translators' interpretations? In what ways has Kafka been 'translated' into Anglo-American culture by popular culture and by academics?

Michelle Woods investigates issues central to the burgeoning field of translation studies: the notion of cultural untranslatability; the centrality of female translators in literary history; and the under-representation of the influence of the translator as interpreter of literary texts. She specifically focuses on the role of two of Kafka's first translators, Milena Jesenská and Willa Muir, as well as two contemporary translators, Mark Harman and Michael Hofmann, and how their work might allow us to reassess reading Kafka. From here Woods opens up the whole process of translation and re-examines accepted and prevailing interpretations of Kafka's work. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Cover Design: Franz Kafka's Complete Works (German)
• Kafka's Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant
• Kafka: The Years of Insight
• Shelley Frisch on Translation and Kafka

Beckett and Animals

A new collection of essays edited by Mary Bryden

Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden

Beckett and Animals
Edited by Mary Bryden
University of Reading

20% discount if ordered before 28 February 2014
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The animals that appear in Samuel Beckett's work are diverse and unpredictable. They serve as victim and persecutor, companion and adversary, disconcerting observers and objects oblivious to the human gaze. Bringing together an international array of Beckett specialists, this is the first full-length study to explore the significance of the animals that populate Beckett's prose, drama and poetry. Essays theorise a broad spectrum of animal manifestations while focusing on the roles that distinct animal forms play within Beckett's work, including horses, sheep, cats, dogs, bees, insects and others. Contributors situate close readings within a larger literary and cultural context, drawing on thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Deleuze, Foucault and Agamben, and on authors such as Flaubert, Kafka and Coetzee. The result is an incisive and provocative collection that traverses disciplinary boundaries, revealing how Beckett's creatures challenge conventional notions of species identity and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

Hardback £55.00 Discount price £44.00

Contents

List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations
Introduction, by Mary Bryden

Part I: Animality

1. Shane Weller, ‘Forms of Weakness: Animalisation in Kafka and Beckett’;
2. Yoshiki Tajiri, ‘Beckett, Coetzee, and Animals’;
3. Mary Bryden, ‘The Beckettian Bestiary’;
4. David Wheatley, ‘”Quite Exceptionally Anthropoid”: Species Anxiety and Metamorphosis in Beckett's Humans and Other Animals’;
5. Naoya Mori, ‘”An Animal Inside”: Beckett/Leibniz’s Stone, Animal, Human and the Unborn’;
6. Ulrika Maude, ‘Pavlov's Dogs and Other Animals in Samuel Beckett’;
7. Yoshiyuki Inoue, ‘Little Animals in the Brain: Beckett's “porteurs de la mémoire”’.

Part II: The Specificity of Animals

8. Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘”Think, Pig!”: Beckett's Animal Philosophies’;
9. Linda Ben-Zvi, ‘Beckett's “Necessary” Cat(s)’;
10. Steven Connor, ‘Making Flies Mean Something’;
11. Joseph Anderton, ‘”Hooves!”: The Equine Presence in Beckett’;
12. Angela Moorjani, ‘The Dancing Bees in Samuel Beckett's Molloy: The Rapture of Unknowing’;
13. Chris Ackerley, ‘”Despised for Their Obviousness”: Samuel Beckett's Dogs’;
14. Julie Campbell, ‘Beckett and Sheep’;
15. Maximilian de Gaynesford, ‘”Eyes in Each Other's Eyes”: Beckett, Kleist, and the Fencing Bear’;
16. Brigitte Le Juez, ‘Words Without Acts: Beckett's Parrots’.

Index

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Who is Beckett's Godot?
• A Companion to Samuel Beckett
• University of Reading: Beckett Conference 2009

Famous Writers’ Sleeping Habits

A visualisation of rising times set against literary productivity

Click for source

From Brain Pickings (thanks to Michael John Goodman for the link):

Over the years, in my endless fascination with daily routines, I found myself especially intrigued by successful writers’ sleep habits — after all, it’s been argued that “sleep is the best (and easiest) creative aphrodisiac” and science tells us that it impacts everything from our moods to our brain development to our every waking moment. I found myself wondering whether there might be a correlation between sleep habits and literary productivity. The challenge, of course, is that data on each of these variables is hard to find, hard to quantify, or both. So I turned to Italian information designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who make masterful visualizations of cultural phenomena seemingly impossible to quantify — and, together, we set out to explore whether it might be possible to visualize such a correlation.

First, I handed them my notes on writers’ wake-up times, amassed over years of reading biographies, interviews, journals, and other materials. Many came from two books — Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors by Celia Blue Johnson — as well as from the Paris Review interviews and various collections of diaries and letters.

We ended up with a roster of thirty-seven writers for whom wake-up times were available — this became the base data set, around which we set out to quantify, then visualize, the literary productivity of each author. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Homes of German Philosophers
• Nietzsche's Daily Habits
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Odd Type Writers
• Marcel Proust's Obituary

Orson Welles on the Making of The Trial

Q&A Session recorded at the University of Southern California, 1981

From youtube.com:

A rare Q&A session with Orson Welles, which Welles had originally intended to be part of a film essay on the making of The Trial (1962) similar to 'Filming Othello', but never got around to editing or finishing it. The raw footage was recovered from his estate and put together after his death in this uncut question-and-answer session. There are frequent breaks in the video due to the film cartridge running out every 10 minutes during the shoot and other technical difficulties, being that he shot it on no budget. The cartridge also runs out at the end of the video, giving it a feeling of incompleteness. Only one side of the speaker functions. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• The Complete Citizen Kane Documentary
• Top 11 Existentialist Novels?
• Orson Welles' The Stranger (1946)
• Orson Welles' adaptation of Kafka's The Trial

50 Tough Books for Extreme Readers

Why read a 'difficult' book?

Alexander Deineka, 'Young Woman Reading' (1934)

Emily Temple (Flavorwire) has compiled a list of '50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers'. Their toughness varies from the sheer bulk of the volume (eg. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Stein's The Making of Americans), to their stylistic virtuosity (Finnegans Wake, anyone?). But despite their daunting reputations, there can be something special about reading a 'difficult' book.

Such novels can prompt a unique kind of reader interaction, making us rethink the way we look at the world around us. These are often the sort of books that aim to elevate the everyday, or shed light on issues that society tends to overlook. What we find 'tough' or 'challenging' is often simply unfamiliar, or different to what we might usually expect. What turns our noses to the air in a modernist novel is often its attempt to capture life as it really is: a character speaking in a local dialect, or the disjointed structure of a daydream. In these and other cases, what is difficult is not the book itself, but our decision as readers to go with it.

There are books that we consume, and sometimes there are books that consume us - novels, poems and plays which perpetually pull us back to them. As the filmmaker David Cronenberg once said of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, 'You find your favorite parts, like the I Ching. You look in it when you need it, and you find something there.' Temple has charted a wonderful selection of just this kind of book. Here are just a few of them:

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes (Amazon: US | UK)
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (Amazon: US | UK)
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (Amazon: US | UK)
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (Amazon: US | UK)
J R, William Gaddis (Amazon: US | UK)
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (Amazon: US | UK)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (Amazon: US | UK)
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (Amazon: US | UK)
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (Amazon: US | UK)
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (Amazon: US | UK)
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein (Amazon: US | UK)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (Amazon: US | UK)
2666, Roberto Bolaño (Amazon: US | UK)
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (Amazon: US | UK)
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (Amazon: US | UK)
Underworld, Don DeLillo (Amazon: US | UK)
The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson (Amazon: US | UK)
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis (Amazon: US | UK)
The Tunnel, William Gass (Amazon: US | UK)
Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (Amazon: US | UK)
The Castle, Franz Kafka (Amazon: US | UK)
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Amazon: US | UK)

[Read the Full List]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Man Ray: Photographs of Virginia Woolf
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema

A new title from Edinburgh University Press

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From Edinburgh University Press: Places the performative gesture at the point of intersection between literature, theatre and cinema

This study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema. Deploying a new theoretical term, ‘the speech-gesture complex’, Anthony Paraskeva identifies a relationship between speech and gesture which is neither exclusively literary nor performative and which, he argues, is fundamental to the aesthetics and politics of modernist authors. In discussions of works by Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett, Paraskeva shows how this relationship is closely informed by their attention to the performed gestures of actors in theatre and cinema.

Key Features

• Provides new close readings of major and neglected work by Kafka, Joyce, James, Lewis, Nabokov and Beckett, revealing their complex relations with both theatre and cinema
• Establishes a new critical-theoretical category, and highlights an unexplored dialogue between Ibsen, Benjamin, Adorno, Griffith, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Brecht, Artaud, Lang, Meyerhold, Duse and Garbo
• Analyses central and neglected modernist texts alongside stage productions, styles of acting, film history and performance theory [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Lynch on Surrealist Cinema
• James Joyce and Walter Benjamin
• Sold: Samuel Beckett's Murphy Manuscripts
• Travels in Nihilon: Critchley on Beckett and Adorno