Alba Arikha on her godfather, Samuel Beckett

'I remember his silences as much as his words.'

Alba Arikha.

Jessica Salter (The Telegraph) speaks to Alba Arikha:

My family had been friends with Sam since my father met him, in 1956. I was named after his poem Alba, and he was sort of my godfather (I’m Jewish so I wasn’t baptised). When I was born he bought me the most elegant pram and the largest teddy bear in Paris, according to my mother. He also gave me a spoon that he had as a child, which my father painted – a lone spoon on a white napkin.

Sam would often come for dinner at our house. He would arrive exactly on time, waiting at the door until it was time to ring the bell. He was very tall, with very blue eyes, and he would pick my sister and me up. My sister, who is three years younger than me, played chess with him, and I played the piano with him; he loved playing the piano. At dinner the conversation was mainly the adults quoting poetry – Sam would quote Keats and my mother would cry – or my father and Sam listening to music. We children were never allowed to talk. Sometimes Sam would just stop talking, which was odd. I remember his silences as much as his words. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Working with Samuel Beckett
• Paul Auster on meeting Samuel Beckett
• Barney Rosset on Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter on meeting Samuel Beckett

Contra Mundum Press awarded grant

Petőfi Literary Museum awards independent publishing house

From Contra Mundum Press:

Contra Mundum Press is honored to announce that within our very first year as a publishing house we have received a grant. Just last week the Petőfi Literary Museum awarded us a grant for our forthcoming translation (September 2012) of Miklós Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova, the first book of Szentkuthy’s epic multi-volume work St. Orpheus Breviary. Read the news on Hungarian Literature Online [Read more]

Originally published in 1939, as Csaba Sík noted, the seven volumes of the St. Orpheus Breviary “represent the greatest enterprise in scope, in worth? – undertaken in the Hungarian novel.” Justifiably, Szentkuthy has been compared to Proust, Musil, and Joyce, and has already been translated into French, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, and Spanish. Our translation was done by Tim Wilkinson (known for his translations of Imre Kertész and others) and will feature an original cover designed by Hungarian artist István Orosz.

As the first ever translation of Szentkuthy into English, this should prove to be a momentous if not even historic publication for the Anglophone world. Over the next decade, CMP hopes to publish a tr. of the entirety of Szentkuthy’s Breviary and many other works, including his monumental Prae. News will follow about possible book events this coming fall in NYC, if not elsewhere...

Forthcoming next from CMP is a new edition of W.J. Bate’s long out of print canonical study on Keats, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats, featuring an introduction by the distinguished Italian poet, playwright, and critic Maura Del Serra.

Other forthcoming publications include Richard Foreman’s Plays with Films, Elio Petri’s Writings on Cinema and Life (the first ever translation into English), and Nietzsche’s Greek Music Drama (another first ever translation into English).

Our most recent publication was Rainer J. Hanshe’s controversial novel, The Abdication, which Stuart Kendall called “a book both experimental and assured, a comedy of high seriousness and gospel of the flesh that our winded civilization has needed for 2,000 years.”

Website: Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press
• Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes
• Ghérasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey

Contra Mundum Press

A new publishing venture

Announcing the launch of a new publisher: Contra Mundum Press. Their first publication, due in October 2011, will be Gilgamesh in a new translation by Stuart Kendall, who has also translated Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard and others. Aside from his many translations of Bataille, Kendall’s most recent book is Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (Continuum). Their next publication, due in December 2011, will be Paul Bishop’s translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Greek Music Drama, translated into English for the first time (link via Superfluities Redux):

Contra Mundum Press is a new publishing venture dedicated to the value and the indispensable importance of the individual voice. Through the publication of new texts by distinctive contemporary thinkers from all fields of the life of the mind as well as out-of-print titles from innovators of the past, Contra Mundum Press has been organized to demonstrate that the foundation of thought, and of the freedom and the efficacy of thinking, is not in the mash-up of the mob or the eviscerated diversion of social media but in the personal vision, and in the courage required to create it and to put it forth. [Read More]

contramundum.net

Forthcoming Titles

• Gilgamesh. Translated with an introduction by Stuart Kendall 
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Greek Music Drama. Translated with an introduction by Paul Bishop 
• W. J. Bate, Negative Capability: On the Intuitive Approach in Keats 
• Richard Foreman, Plays with Films: Zomboid!, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!, and Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land. Introduction by George Hunka. 
• Georg Trakl, Poems. Translated by Mark Daniel Cohen
• Louis Auguste Blanqui, Eternity for the Stars. Translated with an introduction by Frank Chouraqui

Contact

Contra Mundum Press
P.O. Box 1326
New York, NY
10276

Email: info (at) contramundum.net

Website

• Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes

Will Self on Literature and Visual Arts

British writer explores the connections

Tate Etc. features an edited version of the Will Self's Monique Beudert Memorial Lecture given in 2006. The article 'tracks the ever-changing relationship between the literary and visual arts from John Keats to J G Ballard' (via Will Self):

[...] It's true that many famous and renowned writers have flicked their wrists at art criticism, including Thomas De Quincey and Oscar Wilde. However, it's moot whether they added anything to the field, and they certainly failed to generate anything with the impact of their thinking on questions on general aesthetics. De Quincey, of course, is best remembered for adducing Piranesi's minatory etchings of I Carceri (The Prisons, 1745) to the hypnagogia of his own opium reveries, and beyond that for his seminal essay Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.

Note, please, that this was not called Art as a Kind of Killing. J G Ballard took De Quincey's trope and twisted it a full revolution further to come up with The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as Downhill Motor Race, thus neatly excising aesthetics from the parallel altogether. Ballard, who I'm happy to acknowledge as a powerful literary influence, has often described what he does in fictional terms as analogous to the work of Surrealist painters: a juxtaposition of irreconcilable opposites, the mashing together of the unconscious, the preconscious and any so-called commonsensical view of the world to create a form of hyper-reality. William Burroughs - whose own cut-up method was hijacked from the Dadaist Tristan Tzara - wrote in a preface to Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) that he viewed Ballard's text as a literary concomitant of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Now, while this may be true at a theoretical level - both Ballard and Warhol are interested in the commodification of women's bodies in the emergent mass media of the post-war period - the effect of reading Ballard is not in any meaningful sense to "see" Pop Art, or even Surrealist dreamscapes.

On the contrary, like De Quincey, Ballard is, I would argue, concerned with widening the province of what can be considered as beautiful. For Vaughan, the protagonist of Ballard's novel Crash (1973), the arcs described by ejaculated semen across the instrument panels of crashed cars have as much right to be perceived in an aesthetic sense as any more conventional gushing of pigment. It is not, therefore, merely accidental that three years prior to the novel's publication, Ballard felt driven to mount an exhibition of car wrecks in a London art gallery. He completes the list of literary-visual aesthetic theoreticians by fully supplanting - rather than supervening - Thomas Aquinas's formulation of the good and the beautiful with the tautology: "The beautiful is whatever can be considered as... beautiful." [Read the article]

Will Self, 'Art for fiction's sake'

Tate Etc., Issue 8, Autumn 2006

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Mortality in Will Self's fiction
• Will Self, 'My hero, J. G. Ballard'
• Will Self on Bob Dylan
• Will Self on Burroughs and Junky
• My Other Life: Will Self
• Will Self on Werner Herzog

J. G. Ballard's Top Ten Writers

British author lists his favourite authors, poets and dramatists

In a BBC survey at the turn of this century, J. G. Ballard listed his top ten writers of the last millenium. It's interesting to note how many of the selected are associated with twentieth-century satire and dystopian writing - authors who held a powerful influence over Ballard's own work:

1. William Shakespeare
The universal writer and poet.

2. Miguel Cervantes
Don Quixote is the first great anti-hero.

3. Jonathan Swift
The most intelligent writer who ever lived.

4. Herman Melville
Moby Dick is the greatest ocean of a novel the human imagination has ever sailed.

5. John Keats
The sweetest literary poet of all.

6. Franz Kafka
The greatest prophet of the terrifying bureaucracies of the 20th century.

7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He is the great psychologist of the modern novel.

8. Joseph Heller
Catch 22 is the last classic novel written this century.

9. George Orwell
1984 is the prophetic novel of our time.

10. Aldous Huxley
Brave New World is a guide book to the next millennium.

'Who was the greatest writer of the last 1000 years?'

BBC | Your Millenium

More on J. G. Ballard at A Piece of Monologue:

• Artforum on J. G. Ballard
• J. G. Ballard, 'Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton'
• J. G. Ballard 1930-2009