Design Observer on Paris, Texas

Enrique Ramirez on Wim Wenders' 1984 classic

A still from Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984)

A still from Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) 

A still from Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) 

A still from Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984)

A still from Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984)

A still from Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984)

A still from Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984)

A still from Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984)

Enrique Ramirez (Design Observer):

In my experience no other American city seems so like a mirage. Despite its appearance in dozens of major films, it’s hard to remember what the fourth largest city in the U.S.A. actually looks like. Houston is not a place ingrained in cinematic memory. There is no equivalent here of the grainy montage that opens Woody Allen’s Manhattan or the majestic 70mm shot of the Golden Gate Bridge that pins Vertigo to San Francisco. There are no obvious landmarks like the concrete aqueduct of the Los Angeles River, which appears in countless films. Even in the Texas screen canon, Houston is easily outshined by the mid-’50s Hollywood epic Giant, with its desert-sublime images of the plains around Marfa, or by the indie classic Slacker, with its closely observed scenes of Austin, or even by the soap opera Dallas, with its aerial views of downtown towers and looping freeways.

So maybe it’s not surprising that the film that best captures Houston — its elusive anonymity, its persistent newness — doesn’t even reach the city until two-thirds of the way through. Paris, Texas, directed by Wim Wenders and released in 1984, opens on a solitary figure walking amid sun-drenched canyons and wind-blasted calderas. We learn that this man is Travis Henderson (he’s played by Harry Dean Stanton) and that four years ago he left his wife and young son and has been wandering in the wilderness ever since. We don’t know why he left. All we know is that he is out of touch, out of place, maybe out of time. Soon Travis collapses in a rundown café near the old mining town of Terlingua, Texas. He is then rescued by his brother, Walt, a billboard salesman (played by Dean Stockwell), who brings him home to Los Angeles, where Travis is reunited with his young son, Hunter. Hoping to make amends for his absence, he decides to drive the boy back to Texas — to Houston — to reunite with his mother, Jane. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Blue Velvet Project
• Shooting Locations: Samuel Beckett's Film
• Woody Allen: Films Outside New York
• Paris, Texas

The Talks: Woody Allen

'The whole thing is tragic'

Woody Allen

From The Talks (link via 3:AM Magazine):

Mr. Allen, do you truly believe that happiness in life is impossible?

This is my perspective and has always been my perspective on life. I have a very grim, pessimistic view of it. I always have since I was a little boy; it hasn’t gotten worse with age or anything. I do feel that’s it’s a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself.

I think it’s safe to say that most people would disagree.

But I am not the first person to say this or even the most articulate person. It was said by Nietzsche, it was said by Freud, it was said by Eugene O’Neill. One must have one’s delusions to live. If you look at life too honestly and clearly, life becomes unbearable because it’s a pretty grim enterprise, you will admit. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Woody Allen Interview, 1979
• Woody Allen: 'What would Socrates do?'
• Celebrity Bookshelves
• Woody Allen: Films Outside New York
• Woody Allen's Favourite Books

David Denby on Fyodor Dostoyevsky

'Can Dostoevsky still kick you in the gut?'

Source

David Denby writes about Fyodor Dostoyevsky for The New Yorker blog Page Turner:

Many people would say that Dostoevsky’s short novel “Notes from Underground” marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. (Other candidates: Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew,” written in the seventeen-sixties but not widely read until the eighteen-twenties, and, of course, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” from 1856.) Certainly, Nietzsche’s writings, Freud’s theory of neurosis, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Bellow’s “Herzog,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” perhaps Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” and half of Woody Allen’s work wouldn’t have been the same without the existence of this ornery, unstable, unmanageable text—the fictional confession of a spiteful modern Hamlet, an inhabitant of St. Petersburg, “that most abstract and pre-meditated city,” and a man unable to act and also unable to stop humiliating himself and embarrassing others. A self-regarding, truculent, miserable, paralyzed man. As I began reading “Notes” again recently (in Andrew R. MacAndrew’s translation for Signet Classics), I wondered if it had been overwhelmed by the books and movies that it has influenced. I wondered if “Notes” would seem like a dim echo, whether it still had the shock value that I remember from long ago. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time
• Life of a Dostoyevsky Translator
• Diurnal vs. Nocturnal Writers: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?

Woody Allen Interview, 1979

Woody Allen interviewed by a French journalist in his New York apartment

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Woody Allen: 'What would Socrates do?'
• Celebrity Bookshelves
• Woody Allen: Films Outside New York
• Woody Allen's Favourite Books

Woody Allen: 'What would Socrates do?'

Woody Allen attempts syllogistic logic

A brief clip from Love and Death, courtesy of Biblioklept.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Celebrity Bookshelves
• Woody Allen: Films Outside New York
• Woody Allen's Favourite Books

Seriously Funny: New Woody Allen Documentary

American filmmaker discusses his life and career

The Tablet reports that PBS are to broadcast a documentary on the 'notoriously private' filmmaker Woody Allen, this November. The documentary is entitled Seriously Funny: The Comic Art of Woody Allen, and will be shown in two parts. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Woody Allen's Favourite Books

Woody Allen: Films Outside New York

Online gallery of Allen films made beyond Allen's beloved Manhattan

Still from Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979)

The New York Times posts an online photo gallery of films Woody Allen has made outside Manhattan. Inspired by his latest film, Midnight in Paris (2011), the slideshow includes stills from the recent You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (set in London, 2010), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Spain, 2008).

View the gallery: 'Allen Abroad', New York Times, 8 May 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Woody Allen's Favourite Books
• Celebrity Bookshelves

Woody Allen's Favourite Books

American film director traces his top literary influences

Woody Allen

Woody Allen speaks to The Browser about his literary influences and inspirations:

• J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues
• S. J. Perelman, The World of S. J. Perelman
• Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner
• Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan: A Biography

Allen on literature and love:

When it comes to romance, when it comes to love, everyone is in the same boat. The issues that Euripides and Sophocles and Shakespeare and Chekhov and Strindberg struggled with are the same unsolvable problems that each generation deals with and finds its own way of complaining about. I describe them in a certain way and entertained with them in my movies. Other people did it, in their day, using their own icons and idioms.

I may have different cosmetics, but in the end we’re all writing about the same thing. This is the reason why I’ve never done political films. Because the enduring problems of life are not political; they’re existential, they’re psychological, and there are no answers to them – certainly no satisfying answers. [Read more]

Read more: Eve Gerber, 'Woody Allen on Inspiration' in The Browser, 5 May 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Celebrity Bookshelves

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Bob Dylan. Photograph: Daniel Kramer.

Literature:

London Review of Books: Winter Lecture s 2011: Includes Judith Butler on Franz Kafka, T. J. Clark on Picasso's Guernica and Elif Batuman on Cervantes and Balzac.
Joycean Literature: Fiction and Poetry 1910-2010: An academic conference to be held at the University of London, June 2011
James Joyce & Samuel Beckett: Top 10 Literary Mentorships
Joyce Carol Oates: New short story collection, Give Me Your Heart
Thomas Bernhard: German television documentary, spanning 1967-88
Beat Generation: Neal Cassady's wife, Carolyn, is interviewed by The Guardian on life with the Beats
J. D. Salinger: David L. Ulin reviews Jeffrey Slawenski's J. D. Salinger: A Life
Jorge Luis Borges: Martin Schifino reviews five new anthologies of the Borges' work
Jorge Luis Borges: The Riddle of Poetry, a lecture delivered at Harvard University 1967.
H. P. Lovecraft: GalleyCat presents a free documentary
Edgar Allan Poe: For the second time in two years, the mysterious 'Poe Toaster' fails to appear at the writer's gravesite

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Roland Barthes: Columbia University Press publishes The Preparation of the Novel
Roland Barthes: Mairéad Hanrahan reviews Barthes' The Preparation of the Novel in the Times Literary Supplement
Roland Barthes: University of York launches a new reading group based around Barthes' The Neutral
Susan Sontag: Varia celebrates the birthday of the renowned cultural critic
Friedrich Nietzsche: Slate on why Nietzsche is so often misunderstood by angry young men
Jacques Derrida speaks about 'Forgiveness'

Film:

65 Things You Didn't Know About David Lynch

Art & Design

Ezra Stoller: Exploring Mad Men era New York through the photography of Ezra Stoller

Theatre

Thomas Bernhard: A translation of Elisabeth II
Frankenstein: The Guardian on Danny Boyle's new production at the National
Theatre and Performance: An online preview

Music

Bob Dylan: American musician signs six-book deal, which will include two further volumes in the Chronicles series
Patti Smith appears on Charlie Rose
Joy Division: Recordings from two Dutch concerts

Etc.

Woody Allen: 'Money Can Buy Happiness-As If', in the New Yorker
Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Celebrity Bookshelves

Bookshelves of Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Frank Sinatra and more

Woody Allen's Bookshelves

Diane Keaton's Bookshelves

Flavorwire has published photographs of celebrity libraries, including those of Annie Hall co-stars Woody Allen and Diane Keaton (I guess they finally worked out which books were theirs). There are also photographs from the homes of Frank Sinatra, Joan Rivers, Michael Jackson, Greta Garbo, Kelsey Grammer and Oprah Winfrey. Some beautiful collections - it's just a shame we can't read the titles!

Source: Judy Berman, 'Celebs, They're Geeks Like Us: Libraries of the Rich and Famous', Flavorwire, 11 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Bookshelf Porn?
• Samuel Beckett's Bookshelf
• Jacques Derrida's Bookshelves
• Writers' Room: Siri Husvedt

Sigmund Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher

Alfred I. Tauber's new study contextualizes psychoanalysis within the history of Western philosophy

Leslie Chamberlain of the New Statesman reviews Alfred I. Tauber's Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher:

Alfred I Tauber's judgement, with which I wholeheartedly concur, is that Freud is the great architect of 20th-century moral sensibility. Tauber, a leading professor of philosophy and medicine in Boston, wants to rescue Freud from the narrow-minded scientism of the past few decades, "because he tapped in to the deepest sources of western identity and re-expressed its key tenets in terms that we might effectively apply to ourselves". Tauber's humanising mission could not come soon enough.

Freud's star began to wane in the 1970s when an emphasis on his poor science undermined the credibility of psychoanalysis. The almost graceful irony of the famed New Yorker jokes and the early Woody Allen films was eclipsed by a clunking rejection of Freud as a purveyor of nonsense, a fraud even.

Typically of a fuming new breed of academic thinker, Frederick C Crews, in his 1995 book The Memory Wars, blamed Freud for a corrupt therapeutic industry that persuaded adult patients to "remember" that they had been sexually abused by their parents. When the history of late-20th-century opposition to Freud is written, it will feature men like Crews, a former Freudian who felt betrayed and wanted science to compensate him. It will link also to the rise of neuroscience, to philosophers wanting to be cognitive scientists; and it will stress the perennial sexual anxiety generated by Freud's theory of the unconscious, which makes so many commentators angry. It may also stress that Freud was middle-class and from fin-de-siècle Vienna, and that he conditionally defended a bourgeois world.

Tauber, however, sees him as a "reluctant philosopher" who updated for the 20th century the Enlightenment ideal of self-knowledge as the key to a happier life and better social relations. A timeless figure, in short. [Read more]

Leslie Chamberlain, 'Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher By Alfred Tauber'

New Statesman, 06 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Freud and Global Economic Collapse
• Ballard: 'Freud was a born storyteller'
• Freud and Yeats on Wikipedia
• Freud and Love
• Open Yale Courses: Theories of Literature

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Don DeLillo, The Names

Literature:

Franz Kafka: Times Flow Stemmed re-reads Kafka's The Castle
Will Self: Caricature by Nicola Jennings
Will Self: Excellent 25min documentary, Obsessed with Walking, follows Self's trip to Los Angeles while researching Walking to Hollywood
William S. Burroughs: Interviewed by David Bowie in 1974
A Literary Map of Manhattan
Gabriel Josipovici: The Independent newspaper reviews What Ever Happened to Modernism?
The UBUWEB Anthology of Conceptual Writing
Don DeLillo: Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
Don DeLillo: On researching Libra
James Joyce: Saul Bellow on Ulysses
Literary Sisters: Cathy Cassidy's Top 10 stories about sisters
Philip Roth: 'Don't judge it. Just write it.'
Dorothy Parker and the Marriott Circle
The Paris Review: Interviews with authors now freely available online
J. G. Ballard: 1984 interview by The Paris Review
Barney Rosset: The Paris Review's 1997 interview with Grove publisher on Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs and the Beat Generation
Zadie Smith takes over book column for Harpers
John Milton: Paradise Lost to be adapted as an action film
Lydia Davis: On what makes a good literary translation

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Verso Books: A new website from the political and philosophical publishers

Film & Television:

Werner Herzog and Errol Morris on reading
BBC Plans 2011 Shakespeare Season
Jean-Luc Godard: French film director stands out in support of convicted video pirate
Woody Allen: The New York Times interviews Allen on life, death and Dostoyevsky

Theatre:

Thomas Bernhard: Director Adam Seelig discusses his New York production of Ritter, Dene, Voss

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

Disjecta: This week's links

This week, Margaret Atwood boycotts the boycott, Mrs Dalloway celebrates her 85th birthday and Woody Allen reflects on ageing and death. A free academic has also been launched online, exploring Samuel Beckett's work in English and French. Alain de Botton has commissioned a series of modernist buildings to be used as British holiday homes. And graphic designer Roi Driscoll has contributed a desktop wallpaper to One Down, One Up, inspired by Miles Davis and Haruki Murakami. Enjoy!

Literature:

Margaret Atwood: Boycotter of Boycotts
Samuel Beckett: A new online and bilingual academic journal, Limit(e) Beckett
Samuel Beckett: What do Nick Clegg and Beckett have in common?
Samuel Beckett: Review of Conversations between Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde
Philip K. Dick: Film trailer for The Adjustment Bureau, based on a Dick short story
Don DeLillo: News on another film adaptation, this time David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis
Anthony Burgess: Celebrating the anniversary of A Clockwork Orange's publication
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway celebrates 85th anniversary
James Joyce: Copy of Finnegans Wake goes on auction
Happy 50th Anniversary, Ambit Magazine
Wiki-Books: Creating customized books from Wikipedia
Is poetry still relevant?: From an anxiety of influence to an anxiety of relevance
Waterstones Bookstore Rebrand

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jacques Lacan: Video lectures and discussion from Lacan.com
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne: A Philosopher of Life, Part 1
Cyborg Theory, Cyborg Practice

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: Sir Ian McKellen mistaken for homeless man outside Godot

Film:

Woody Allen: Allen cheerfully reflects on the trauma of ageing and death
David Lynch: New commercial for Dior's Lady Blue Shanghai, starring Marion Cotillard

Music:

Jazz: The Dave Brubeck Quartet performs 'Take Five' in London, 1964
Jazz: Roi Driscoll's exclusive desktop wallpaper, designed for One Down, One Up
Joy Division: Peter Saville's design for Unknown Pleasures as audio visualizer

Art:

Architecture: Alain de Botton commissions modernist holiday homes
Avigdor Arikha: The Guardian profiles artist and friend of Samuel Beckett
J. G. Ballard: Simon O'Carrigan's digital montage, The Drowned World
Dear Diary Exhibition

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

Disjecta: This week's links

It's been very quiet here at A Piece of Monologue over the past few weeks. This is in part due to a heavy workload, and a series of personal commitments. Things should resume their regular pace in the next week or so, but in the meantime Twitter has been a'twitter with all sorts of literary news. Samuel Beckett has popped up time and again in the media, primarily in relation to Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg's note of admiration. You can read more on the literary tastes of the potential UK leadership candidates below, along with news on the upcoming Shakespeare & Company literary festival, and a quiz on the 'bad days of literature'. Enjoy!

Literature:

James Joyce: A timeline
W. G. Sebald: Gabriel Josipovici on The Emigrants
Maurice Blanchot: The Madness of the Day
Don DeLillo: DeLillo and déjà vu
Jorge Luis Borges: On the transformative power of art
Harper Lee: A Teacher's Resource on To Kill A Mockingbird
Samuel Beckett: Jacques Roubaud on his father's friendship with Beckett
Samuel Beckett: Boyd Tonkin on Beckett's lessons for political leaders
Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee: Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg on literary heroes
J. M. Coetzee: On censorship
Literary Tastes of the UK Leadership candidates
William Burroughs Shooting William Shakespeare
Philip K. Dick: Bookslut on the legacy of quintessential paranoid sci-fi writer
Faber & Faber: Win a tour of the archive
Jeff Garlin's Book Club
Shakespeare & Company festival, Paris: Will Self among those who will appear
Shakespeare & Company: The Letters of Sylvia Beach
Quiz: Bad days in literature
Brönte Sisters Power Dolls

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Friedrich Nietzsche: Francis Fukuyama puts Nietzsche into historical context
Woody Allen: Is Woody Allen reading too much Schopenhauer?
E. M. Cioran: New translated section of Book of Delusions published

Film:

Woody Allen: Will the Real Avatar Please Stand Up (New Yorker)
Woody Allen: Is Woody Allen reading too much Schopenhauer?
Fritz Lang: More information on the restored Metropolis

Music:

Jazz: Miles Davis and Gil Evans performing in 1959
Classical: Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony premiered 186 years ago this month
Bob Dylan: On fame and celebrity

Art:

Gothic Alphabets

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

Will Self on Sebald and the Holocaust

A public lecture

Will Self's lecture on W. G. Sebald's writing on the Holocaust has been published by the TLS:

"I have been asked if I was aware of the moral implications of what I was doing. As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years I thought he worked for the phone company. When I did finally find out what a monster he was, it was too late to do anything as I had already made a down payment on some furniture. Once, towards the end of the war I did contemplate loosening the Führer’s neck napkin and allowing a few tiny hairs to get down his back, but at the last minute my nerve failed me."

Following Freud – himself driven into exile by the Nazis – there are some things too serious not to joke about, and this applies to Hitler, to the regime he initiated, and even to the murders – through war, mass shootings, extermination camps and forced marches – that that regime carried out: mass murders the true extent of which will never now be established with complete accuracy. Twenty million, thirty? What can such figures tell us about the reality of a single individual crushed beneath the Nazi juggernaut?

I should qualify the above: some things are too serious for some people not to joke about them. I cannot decide whether or not W. G. Sebald would permit himself even the wryest of smiles in response to Woody Allen’s parody of Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, which I quote from above. After all, it isn’t the Holocaust that “The Schmeed Memoirs” seeks to extract humour from; rather, Allen is savagely mocking Speer’s claim that at the time it was taking place, he personally knew nothing of the murder of millions of Jews. By transforming Hitler’s erstwhile architect – who subsequently became his Minister for War Production – into a self-deluding barber, Allen performs the essential task of the satirist: to expose the lie of power for what it was, is, and always will be, and to strip away the protective clothing – of idealism, of denial, of retrospective justification – from the perpetrators of genocide.

Ours is an era intoxicated by its capacity to reproduce history technologically, in an instantaneous digitization of all that has happened. But far from tempering our ability to politicize history, this seems to spur both individuals and regimes on to still greater tendentiousness. Among modern philosophers Baudrillard understood this development the best, and foresaw the deployment of symbolic events alongside the more conventional weaponry of international conflict. Sebald understood it as well: in The Rings of Saturn his fictive alter ego observes the Waterloo Panorama, a 360-degree representation of the battle warped round “an immense domed rotunda”, and muses: “This then . . . is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was”. To counter this synoptic view – which, again and again throughout his work, Sebald links to dangerous idealisms and utopian fantasies – the writer offered us subjective experience. This was not, however, reportage that relies for its authority on witness; Sebald, as he wrote with reference to the Allied bombing of Hamburg in his essay “Air War and Literature”, mistrusted seeming clarity in the retelling of events that had violently deranged the senses. Rather, his was a forensic phenomenology that took into account the very lacunae, the repressions and the partial amnesias that are the reality of lived life. [Read More]

Will Self, 'Will Self's 2010 Sebald lecture

Times Literary Supplement, 26 January 2010

Listen to an audio recording of Self's lecture.

Disjecta: This week's links

(Image: Woody Allen stands in front of the New Yorker building)

This week has seen a proliferation of William Burroughs on the web, including two wonderful documentaries. In other news, The Guardian reviews Joyce Carol Oates' latest novel, A Fair Maiden, and plans have been made to restore George Orwell's Indian birthplace. Woody Allen contributes a short, humorous piece to the New Yorker magazine, Radio On director Chris Petit announces his new road movie, Content, and Paul Morley interviews music producer Brian Eno.

Literature:

William S. Burroughs: The BBC Arena documentary
William S. Burroughs: Documentary on Burroughs' life and work
William S. Burroughs: Polina Mackay on The Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs: Sound recording, The Doctor is on the Market
Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man documentary
J. G. Ballard: Hitchens on Ballard
Martin Amis: The Guardian book club reviews Time's Arrow
Will Self: Sebald, the Nobel prize and pets
Mervyn Peake: Book cover designs
Joyce Carol Oates: A review her new novel, A Fair Maiden
George Orwell: Orwell's birthplace in India to be restored
Reading: Natasha Tripney on the unvanquishable book pile
Humanities: Increasingly 'commercialized' university culture

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Slavoj Žižek: Žižek speaks at the London Society of the Arts
Harold Bloom: Hospitalized
Walter Benjamin: Radio broadcasts for children
Timothy Clark: Robert Eagleston on The Poetics of Singularity
Most Cited Authors, Critics and Philosophers in the Humanities
101 Great Philosophers: The Guardian reviews Madsen Pirie's new book

Music:

Brian Eno: Paul Morley interviews the unique producer

Film:

Woody Allen: A piece in the New Yorker's 'Shouts & Murmurs' column
Werner Herzog: Guernica on the reissued journal Walking on Ice
Werner Herzog: Mark Kermode's memoir recalls Herzog's gunshot wound
Eric Rohmer 1920-2010
Chris Petit: Petit presents his new documentary, Content

Television:

Treme: New Orleans drama from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Art:

Damien Hirst: Art critic Jonathan Jones is 'finished' with Damien Hirst

Theatre:

Thomas Bernhard: Heldenplatz at London's Arcola Theatre this month

Etc.:

Elsie de Wolfe: Profile of the interior designer at Critical Cookie


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

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