Teju Cole talks to 3:AM Magazine

An interview by Max Liu

Teju Cole

Max Liu interviews the author of Open City, Teju Cole, for 3:AM Magazine:

Increasingly, novels are praised for how much of the culture they manage to include. Open City is entirely contemporary and worldly and it includes a great deal. What are the possibilities and pitfalls of literary inclusiveness?

In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don’t mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects – maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books – and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don’t think it’s as simple as literary inclusiveness. That phrase, in fact, brings to mind David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Dave Eggers. They are keen to include and, in fact, itemize the present in all its gaudy multiplicity. My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There’s an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there’s enough of the present included to lull the reader. So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn’t use a smartphone, and he doesn’t discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail. [Read More]

Angela Morgan Cutler, The Letter

A novel exploring connections between language, identity and violence

Angela Morgan Cutler, The Letter

Angela Morgan Cutler's new novel, The Letter, is due for release by Two Ravens Press later this month. Cutler's novel, which in turn recalls both Michael Haneke's Hidden (Caché) and the work of Hélène Cixous, concerns a family compelled to respond to an anonymous threat: 'The Letter is a response that can never be sent to a written threat for which there is no return address. And yet, the narrator’s reply to the unknown author of the threat remains as a powerful trace of the experience, and a testament to so many stories left untold.' The Letter follows Cutler's debut novel, Auschwitz.

Useful links:

• Angela Morgan Cutler: official website
• Two Ravens Press

Michael Haneke: cinema's serious man

The Guardian newspaper's Jonathan Jones on Austrian filmmaker, Michael Haneke

Haneke has put European cinema back into the premier league (I won't say singlehandedly, because frankly the Eurozone seems to be teeming with gifted directors in a way that it hasn't been since the 1970s), but while others are promising, he is unquestionably in the same class as Antonioni, Fassbinder, or Godard. His films are classics: they are perfect and they are profound.

I wrote about Haneke briefly a few weeks ago, but what I want to do here is urge anyone who hasn't seen his film Code Unknown (2000) to do so immediately. Well, perhaps not immediately. You might want to wait until you feel up to a disturbing, unresolved, anxiety-inducing, guilt-ridden confrontation with the moral emptiness of the globalised world, or the impossibility of communication, or the imperative to act in a world where action is probably a mistake.

But it's such an intellectually and aesthetically rewarding film; it's like waking up to find the golden age of cinema has come back, but in modern clothes. It is one of those films, such as Short Cuts and Magnolia, that capture the feel of contemporary life in a series of interweaving stories. But it is the best of such films that I have ever seen. Haneke has taught at film school, and often in his films you have the sense of a subversive masterclass. In this film he is deconstructing all those cool, fragmentary art movies, and showing how it should be done. [Read the article]

Jonathan Jones, 'Michael Haneke: cinema's serious man'

guardian.co.uk, 18 February 2010

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Kafka's influence on Michael Haneke

Disjecta: This week's links

Dan O'Bannon 1946-2009
Image: The theatrical poster for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979)

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: HTML Giant on 'A Return to Beckett'
Will Self: The New Yorker reviews Liver
Will Self: Upcoming January 2010 lecture on W. G. Sebald
George Steiner: Maya Jaggi interview with Steiner, first published in 2001
Patricia Highsmith: Jeanette Winterson on Highsmith in The New York Times

Music:

Jazz: A new website, One Down, One Up.
Jazz: Blue Note at 70: Behind the Label.
Jazz: US House of Representatives honours Miles Davis' Kind of Blue
Jazz: My Top Five at 3:AM Magazine
Jazz: Critic Gary Giddins on 101 Ways to Get Into Jazz

Film:

Grace Kelly: Hitchcock star included among Philip French's Screen Legends
Michael Haneke: BFI Live: Michael Haneke in conversation
Dan O'Bannon 1946-2009: The Guardian on the late Alien screenwriter
Dan O'Bannon 1946-2009: Feuilleton pays tribute

Television:

The Simpsons: A perceptive critique of the successful animated series on its twentieth anniversary
Orson Welles: Revolutionary ideas for television to be realized?
William Shakespeare: David Tennant's performance in Hamlet to air in the UK on Boxing Day

Etc.

The Guardian: We Made This on the new Guardian iPhone application
Will Self: On Christmas dinner

Disjecta: This week's links

(Herbert Bayer’s design for a cinema. 1924–25. Image via Design Observer)

Literature:

Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov
William S. Burroughs: Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer
Paul Auster: The Rumpus interview with Paul Auster
Will Self: Will Self's introduction to Zamyatin’s cult classic novel, We
James Joyce: Philip French on the 1967 film adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Martin Heidegger: Nomadics has déjà on the recent Heidegger and Nazism debate.
Assuming Gender: Call for papers for the Spring 2010 issue of new academic journal.
Slavoj Žižek: Žižek discusses his new book, First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (via PhilosophyBites)

Film:

Stanley Kubrick: Brian Eno on Barry Lyndon (via Ballardian)
Stanley Kubrick: Anthony Burgess and Malcolm McDowell on A Clockwork Orange (via Ballardian)
Stanley Kubrick: Steven Spielberg on Stanley Kubrick, speaking in 1999
Woody Allen: Roger Ebert reviews the new Woody Allen film, Whatever Works
Woody Allen: French auteur director Jean-Luc Godard speaks to Woody Allen
Michael Haneke: Sight and Sound reviews The White Ribbon.

Music:

David Bowie: Marc Spitz's new David Bowie biography
Kraftwerk: Amazon offer a comprehensive image of the new Kraftwerk Catalogue box-set.
Velvet Underground: Velvet Underground to reunite in New York.
Jazz: All About Jazz on the year 1959: The Year Classic Jazz Albums Were Born
Jazz: Sonny Rollins headlines this year's London Jazz Festival

Art & Design:

Architecture: Bauhaus at MoMA (via 3:AM Magazine)
Photography: Thomas Struth's Streets of New York
Brian Eno: Brian Eno and Steven Johnson on environments that foster innovation (via Jessa Crispin)
Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty (via 3:AM Magazine)
Leonardo da Vinci: The secret behind Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile (via boa_arts)

Disjecta: This week's links

(Image from The Folio Society: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy)

This week introduces Disjecta, a new weekly feature of A Piece of Monologue. It aims to digest news across philosophy and the arts into manageable bitesize portions. And yes, this format is a blatant steal from 3:AM Magazine's superb Missing Links column.

Literature:

Philip Roth: Elaine Blair on Philip Roth's The Humbling
Philip Roth: Alex Clark on Philip Roth's The Humbling
Paul Auster: Joanna Briscoe on Paul Auster's Invisible
Paul Auster: Folio Society publish Paul Auster's New York Trilogy

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Slavoj Žižek: 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Martin Heidegger: New York Times on Emmanuel Faye's book on Heidegger and Nazism
Martin Heidegger: Brian Leiter on the Heidegger and Nazism Question
Walter Benjamin: Terry Eagleton on Walter Benjamin and Barack Obama
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein's eating habits (via Leiter Reports)

Film:

Woody Allen: Trailer for Woody Allen's Whatever Works
Alfred Hitchcock: Alfred Hitchcock Cameos
Alfred Hitchcock: Polish and Czech Hitchcock Posters (via roundmyskull)
Michael Haneke: Philip French on Haneke's The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke: Ryan Gilbey on Haneke's The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke: Time Out reviews Haneke's The White Ribbon

Music:

Jazz: Telegraph on the 100 Best Jazz Recordings
Bob Dylan: Will Self on Bob Dylan
Kraftwerk: The Quietus on Kraftwerk reissues

Etc.:

Will Self: On Starbucks coffee

BFI Michael Haneke Season

A selection of films spanning the director's entire career

Austrian director Michael Haneke, who recently won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival, is being celebrated by the BFI with a season of films. It's a representative collection, ranging from his shocking early work, Benny's Video, to the globally successful Hidden (Caché) and his latest feature, The White Ribbon. The BFI Michael Haneke season kicks off tomorrow, and runs until 17 December.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the screenings include both versions of Funny Games directed by Haneke: the original German theatrical release, and its shot-for-shot American remake. While Haneke's The Castle is also scheduled to be shown on two dates in mid-November, 'remarkable and rewarding for its extreme fidelity to Kafka's novel'. The jewel in the season's crown is an interview with Haneke himself on 22 November, which is open to the public (although, perhaps not surprisingly, this event is already fully-booked).

Geoff Andrew summarizes Haneke's relevance in his introduction on the BFI website:

[...] Haneke is now widely regarded as one of the world's most important auteurs. He's not only won a host of major awards - his many Cannes prizes culminating this year in the Palme d'or for The White Ribbon - but he's seen several films (most notably The Piano Teacher and Hidden) attain 'crossover' box-office success. These achievements have not been the result of any compromise, artistic or philosophical; indeed, Haneke's artistry has with the passing of time become even more rigorous in its precision, subtle in its complexity, and significant in its relevance to today's world. [Read More]

Geoff Andrew on Michael Haneke

The following setlist has been taken from the BFI website:

British Film Institute
November-December: Michael Haneke

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
Fri 20 Nov 18:20
Mon 23 Nov 20:30
Haneke paints a mordant and painfully plausible fresco of contemporary urban life.

Benny's Video
Fri 13 Nov 20:45
Haneke explores simplistic ideas about the relationship between images and violence.

The Castle
Fri 20 Nov 20:30
Tue 24 Nov 18:00
Remarkable and rewarding for its extreme fidelity to Kafka's novel about a land surveyor.

Code Unknown
Sun 15 Nov 15:40
Haneke's masterly film raises profound questions about contemporary urban existence.

Funny Games
Mon 16 Nov 20:45
Sat 21 Nov 18:10
A masterly and unsettling variation on the murder thriller.

Funny Games US
Sun 29 Nov 20:30
Mon 30 Nov 18:30
A shot-for-shot English-language remake of the dark masterpiece Haneke made a decade earlier.

Hidden
Sun 22 Nov 20:30
Sun 29 Nov 18:20
A taut, tense thriller exploring social and individual guilt and paranoia.

Michael Haneke in Conversation
Sun 22 Nov 18:30
The director will be discussing his Palme d'Or winning film The White Ribbon and his career to date.

The Piano Teacher
Sat 14 Nov 20:30
Sun 22 Nov 17:50
Haneke's brilliant, almost Bergman-esque adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel.

The Seventh Continent
Sat 21 Nov 15:50
Thu 26 Nov 18:00
The first part of Haneke's trilogy about the 'emotional glaciation' of Austria charts.

Time of the Wolf
Sun 15 Nov 18:00
Sat 28 Nov 20:30
An uncommonly realistic variation on the apocalyptic movie, set somewhere in Europe.

The White Ribbon
13 - 30 November
1 - 17 December
Haneke's Cannes Palme d'or-winner explores how a community is shaken by a series of events.

For booking or further information: BFI website: Michael Haneke Season

More on A Piece of Monologue:

• Kafka's influence on Michael Haneke

Kafka's influence on Michael Haneke

The role Franz Kafka plays in the troubling films of Austrian director

Having recently seen Michael Haneke's Das Schloß [The Castle] (1997), film critic Peter Bradshaw sketches the influence of writer Franz Kafka in the Austrian director's work:

Kafkaesque is a word which has come to mean the individual's helplessness in the face of an incompetent or malign state apparatus. Haneke's film brings out the dimension of human pain: the pain of not knowing, not knowing what is going on, not knowing what you are supposed to be doing, or if something is your fault. The advances of the 20th century and beyond – rationalism, progress, science – are supposed to make things clearer and give us the answer in the end. But what if they don't? What if they can't eradicate human evil and what if all they do is intensify our agony at our ignorance and irrelevance? These are the ideas being gestured at in Haneke's films, and probably can't be appreciated without understanding this director's relationship with The Castle. At any rate, it's sent me back to Kafka's work. [Read More]

Peter Bradshaw, 'What Michael Haneke owes to Kafka'

The Guardian, 5 November 2009