On the Thomas Pynchon Trail

Boris Kachka on the life and work of an American writer

Pynchon, age 16 (left), and an artist's rendering of how he may look today (right)

From Boris Kachka (Vulture):

Let’s get a few things straight. First of all, it’s pronounced “Pynch-ON.” Second, the great and bewildering and, yes, very private novelist is not exactly a recluse. In select company, he’s intensely social and charismatic, and, in spite of those famously shaming Bugs Bunny teeth, he was rarely without a girlfriend for the 30 years he spent wandering and couch-surfing before getting married in 1990. Today, he’s a yuppie—self-confessed, if you read his new novel, Bleeding Edge, as a key to the present life of a man whose travels led one critic to reflect: “Salinger hides; Pynchon runs.” Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a “classicist”; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Cover Art: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery

First Trailer: J.D. Salinger Documentary

Weinstein Company releases Shane Salerno's new documentary

From Youtube (via Jennifer Dawn Whitney): ‘Salinger features interviews with 150 subjects including Salinger's friends, colleagues and members of his inner circle who have never spoken on the record before as well as film footage, photographs and other material that has never been seen. Additionally, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, John Cusack, Danny DeVito, John Guare, Martin Sheen, David Milch, Robert Towne, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow, Gore Vidal and Pulitzer Prize winners A. Scott Berg and Elizabeth Frank talk about Salinger's influence on their lives, their work and the broader culture. The film is the first work to get beyond the Catcher in the Rye author's meticulously built up wall: his childhood, painstaking work methods, marriages, private world and the secrets he left behind after his death in 2010. / In select theaters September 6th.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Salinger: A New Documentary
• J. D. Salinger: A Life
• J. D. Salinger 1919 - 2010
• $50,000 Letter from J. D. Salinger
• Woody Allen's Favourite Books
• Samuel Beckett's Reading List 1941-1956

Salinger: A New Documentary

A new documentary, nine years in the making

J. D. Salinger

From Paul Harris (The Guardian):

JD Salinger, the elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, was one of America's most famous recluses and guarded his private life with fanatical dedication. Yet even he might have been impressed by the immense efforts being undertaken to keep details secret of a new documentary that has been made about his life and works.

Called simply Salinger, the film is the brainchild of Shane Salerno, who has spent nine years writing, producing and directing the project, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money. The move is a major shift in career for Salerno, best known as a writer of mainstream blockbusters such as Alien vs Predator: Requiem and Armageddon. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• J. D. Salinger: A Life
• J. D. Salinger 1919 - 2010
• $50,000 Letter from J. D. Salinger
• Woody Allen's Favourite Books
• Samuel Beckett's Reading List 1941-1956

Charlotte Mandell on Translating Blanchot

A 2005 interview by Ready Steady Book

Photograph: E. E. Pridgeon

Mark Thwaite of Ready Steady Book talks to Charlotte Mandell about translating the French writer and theorist Maurice Blanchot:

I first came across your name as a translator of the work of Maurice Blanchot. What first got you interested in Blanchot?

Fate. My friend Pierre Joris, who translated Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, was asked by Helen Tartar (then editor-in-chief at Stanford University Press) to translate La part du feu. He didn’t have the time, so he recommended me. I sent in a sample chapter – I was only 24 then and the only book-length work I’d translated was a book of poems, Le feu l’ombre, by the French poet Jean-Paul Auxeméry. Helen liked the straightforwardness of my translation, the fact that it didn’t use any acadamese – I tried to translate Blanchot as simply and as honestly as I could.

Do you find the close reading required to translate a work has helped you to understand Blanchot more clearly than you would otherwise have done?

Definitely, yes. I feel I’ve never really “read” a work until I’ve translated it. I also make it a rule never to read too far ahead in the book I’m translating – that way everything is fresh and new, and I can’t form any preconceived notions about what will come next. I figure the author never had the luxury of reading his book beforehand, so why should I? (In the case of Blanchot it’s a little different – I’d already read many of his books in French when I was a student in Paris.)

Do you think "the common reader" can get much out of Blanchot or should he be left to academics?

Reading Blanchot is a little like watching someone think. You have to have patience, since his essays move by nuance and suggestion, and come to focus slowly. English readers – Americans especially – are used to being fed information; in the case of an essay, they’re used to the conventional statement-exposition-conclusion format. The nice thing about Blanchot (and the thing a lot of people find exasperating about him) is that he doesn’t follow that formula, or any formula for that matter. Often no conclusion is reached. The subject is examined, and questioned, and looked at from different angles, but never really resolved. I like that a lot – it’s sort of like reading poetry. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Fynsk on Maurice Blanchot
• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot

'I dreamt of being Blanchot'

Michel Foucault. Photo: Randolph Badler.

An excerpt from James Miller's biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault:

Music and the analysis of folklore were not the only areas of formalist ferment that interested Foucault in these years. Between 1953 and 1956, he also followed closely the book reviews published each month in the Nouvelle Revue Français by Maurice Blanchot—a critic preoccupied, like both Barraqué and Foucault, with the relationship between the formal unities of an artwork and the anguish of the artist haunted by death.

In the 1950s, Maurice Blanchot was one of France's most famous invisible men. A working critic whose stature in his own country warrants comparison with Edmund Wilson's in America, Blanchot eschewed any direct contact with his public. Like J. D. Salinger, he generated a mystique and sustained a kind of cult following by making a fetish of anonymity. He permitted no photographs of himself to circulate. He never lectured or read his work in public. He granted no interviews, though he did make a habit of "interviewing" himself.

Foucault found Blanchot's mystique irresistible. "At that time, I dreamt of being Blanchot," he confided to one friend years later. A close student of Blanchot's critical theories, he also studied his rhetoric, using the device of "interviewing" himself in his book Raymond Roussel and also at the end of The Archeology of Knowledge. In a touching homage to the faceless author, he even turned down an invitation to meet Blanchot over dinner, remarking to Daniel Defert that he knew the writing—and had no need to know the writer.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self
• Dianna Taylor, Michel Foucault: Key Concepts
• Michel Foucault on Beckett's Waiting for Godot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Maurice Blanchot and the Limit of Disaster

Mark Kermode on Unfilmable Novels

A list from the Kermode Uncut Blog

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Mark Kermode's Top 5 David Cronenberg films
• Mr. Movies: Mark Kermode talks to Mark Lawson

Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho

Video interview conducted in 2011

American novelist Bret Easton Ellis discusses the legacy of his most controversial novel. The interviewer is a little on the aggressive side, but Ellis' responses are interesting nonetheless.

Blanchot and Beckett's Letters

On the second volume of Samuel Beckett's Letters, 1941-1956

Stephen Mitchelmore draws connections between Beckett's writing and its wider French intellectual context: 'Soon Beckett’s stipulation that only letters with a bearing on his work can be published will be repeated as often as Kafka’s request to Max Brod. The difference is that we may regret Beckett’s executors were not so disloyal. What ever the riches the letters contain, we will always wonder about those bearing on the life. However, the latest volume stresses the unavoidable and indeed necessary nature of such wonder.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett's Reading List 1941-1956

Online blog compiles a list of the texts Beckett found interesting

Beckett on Camus' (pictured) novel, The Stranger: 'Try and read it, I think it is important'

This Side of the Pond, the blog of Cambridge University Press in North America, has compiled a list of Samuel Beckett's reading material from the latest edition of the Letters (1941-1956):

Andromaque by Jean Racine: “I read Andromaque again with greater admiration than ever and I think more understanding, at least more understanding of the chances of the theatre today.”

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: “It is lively stuff.”

The Castle by Franz Kafka: “I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then.”

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

Crooked House by Agatha Christie: “very tired Christie”

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places.”

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”

Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux

Mosquitoes by William Faulkner: “with a preface by Queneau that would make an ostrich puke”

Repeat Performance by William O’Farrell: “Excellent, once past the beginning.”

The Stranger by Albert Camus: “Try and read it, I think it is important.”

The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”

The 628-E8 by Octave Mirbeau: “Damned good piece of work.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• The Irish Times publishes Beckett Letters
• Second volume of Beckett Letters published

20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?

Online gallery includes classic novels by Salinger, Heller, Lee and Ellison

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. Design: David Pelham

Flavorwire lists its top 20 book cover designs (link via Susan Tomaselli) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Book Cover Club
• Book Cover Archive
• The Great Gatsby: Re-Covered
• Peter Mendelsund's Book Designs
• Peter Mendelsund on Franz Kafka
• Will Self Paperbacks get a new look

Top Ten Novels about Solitude

'This is the age of loneliness'

Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins star in a film adaptation of The Remains of the Day (1993)

Beginning with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Teju Cole suggests that solitude is a theme that has intensified in our time. 'This is the age of loneliness', he writes, listing famous literary examples of the condition: Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, Camus' The Outsider, Knut Hamsun's Hunger and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. On The Guardian website, he lists his top ten favourite examples:

1. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
2. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
3. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
4. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
5. Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
6. Gerald Murnane, The Plains
7. Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August
8. Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
9. Colm Tóibín, The Master
10. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

[Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Lydia Davis on very short stories

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

Essential Jewish Literature

Jason Diamond lists the Top 50 Jewish works of the last 100 years

American-Jewish novelist Philip Roth

Jason Diamond, who writes for Jewcy, has compiled a list of the greatest Jewish literature of the last 100 years. Some wonderful choices are included, from Paul Auster's postmodern New York Trilogy to Joseph Heller's WWII satire, Catch 22, with Kafka, Proust and Salinger dominating the top spots. While the list does not claim to be definitive, it does offer a fascinating glimpse into a rich cultural history, and a formidable literary heritage. But Diamond's selection is perhaps most distinctive for its variety. The top ten are all distinctive testaments to modern Jewish identity, but they are also valuable as diverse and imaginative documents of twentieth century life (link via Tablet Magazine):

1. The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
2. In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust
3. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth
4. Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller
5. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger
6. The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
7. Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
8. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971) by Cynthia Ozick
9. A Contract With God (1978) by Will Eisner
10. Call it Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth

Source: Jason Diamond, 'The 50 Most Essential Works Of Jewish Fiction Of The Last 100 Years', Jewcy, 9 February 2011

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Franz Kafka, The Sons (Schocken).
Design: Peter Mendelsund.

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: This week's Ends and Odds over at Samuel Beckett: Debts & Legacies
Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf
Stanley Fish: Adam Haslett reviews critic's new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One
William Burroughs' Home Movies: Features Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and others
Phillip Pullman: Call to defend libraries resounds around web
James Joyce reads Finnegans Wake
James Joyce: Ulysses, illustrated with historical documents and photographs
James Joyce: Frank Callanan on the political attitudes of Ireland's high modernist
J. D. Salinger's Private Passions
Can Literature be Philosophical? James Ryerson on the philosophical novel
Writers Obsessed with Writers
Margaret Atwood: A new collection of scholarly articles exploring Atwood's work
Joseph Conrad: Phil Mongredien on Joseph Conrad's classic novel of postcolonial corruption
W. G. Sebald: W. G. Sebald turned a walk through Suffolk into an extraordinary book. As a film inspired by the work is premiered, Stuart Jeffries retraces his steps

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Susie Orbach: Orbach talks about bodies (podcast)
Continental Philosophy Bulletin Board: A crisp new design
Roland Barthes: Lori Soderlind reviews Barthes' Mourning Diary in the New York Times

Film:

Werner Herzog: In Conversation, New York, March 23rd, 2011

Art, Design & Photography

Franz Kafka: Peter Mendelsund shares his passion for Kafka, and some forthcoming designs to be released by Schocken
Joyce Carol Oates: Story of photographer Jane Yarborough Creech, whose work is featured on recent Oates memoir
Joris Karl Huysmans: À Rebours illustrated

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

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.

J. D. Salinger: A Life

David L. Ulin reviews Slawenski's biography of the reclusive American author

Kenneth Slawenski, J. D. Salinger: A Life

Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin passes verdict on a recent biography of J. D. Salinger. Kenneth Slawenski's ambitious volume, J. D. Salinger: A Life, attempts to uncover and explain the reclusive American author with recourse to archive materials and unpublished writings. But while Slawenski's analysis of little-known material offers new insight on Salinger's work, Ulin remains critical of the biography as a whole:

A year after his death on Jan. 27, 2010, it's tough to know how to assess J.D. Salinger; there are too many loose ends. How can we miss a writer who removed himself from the public conversation nearly half a century before he died? At the same time, nothing in the last 12 months has suggested any loosening of the grip he maintained on his writing while he was alive. Whatever Salinger may have produced since his last published piece, the novella "Hapworth 16, 1924," appeared in the New Yorker in 1965 remains out of reach.

So while Kenneth Slawenski's "J.D.Salinger: A Life" is the first comprehensive biography of the reclusive author, it does little to resolve the issue of Salinger's legacy. Instead, it is more an extended letter from a fan. Since 2004, Slawenski has been the proprietor of DeadCaulfields.com, a website devoted to all things Salinger, and he's been working on this project for longer than that. Originally published last March in England under the title "J.D. Salinger: A Life Raised High," his is a book that blends workman-like doggedness with a fair amount of critical overstatement while still managing to frame its subject's life. [Read more]

David L. Ulin, 'Book review: 'J.D. Salinger: A Life' by Kenneth Slawenski'

Los Angeles Times, 23 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• J. D. Salinger 1919-2010
• Writers' Autographs

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

David Lynch

Literature:

J. G. Ballard: William Boyd reads 'My dream of flying to Wake Island'
Books on the frontline defence of UK student protests
Christopher Isherwood: New York Times discovers Isherwood's encounter with Mick Jagger in the second volume of his Diaries
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Dostoyevsky's death mask
Will Self: Lengthy interview on the Sky Arts programme, In Confidence
J. D. Salinger: The New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross reflects on a long-standing friendship with the American author
Leo Tolstoy: Anatoly Naiman of the Moscow News reflects on 'the Tolstoy we have lost'
Mathias Énard: Stephen Mitchelmore reviews Zone
Saul Bellow: Saul Bellow reads from Humboldt's Gift (1988)
New Yorker compiles a year's reading
Philip Larkin: Unknown poem discovered in shoe box
Maud Newton launches a pop culture TUMBLR blog

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

FWSA Book Prize 2011
Yale University on iTunes U: A selection of downloadable podcasts
Maurice Blanchot: Jacky Wang on Blanchot and inventing language in an unfamiliar tongue
Erik Morse: On the cultural motif of the haunted house

Film:

David Lynch: Director, artist and musician David Lynch answers questions on Twitter
Ridley Scott: According to sources, Alien prequel to proceed under the title 'Paradise'
Alfred Hitchcock: Roundtable discussion: 'Finding equilibrium in Hitchcock's Vertigo'
Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, a documentary film by Ferry Radax, now available on DVD
The Art of Film Title Design

Television

David Lynch: John Coulthart revisits landmark television series, Twin Peaks

Art & Design

Miles Davis: Richard Williams reviews a recent collection of paintings by the American jazz trumpeter

Theatre

William Shakespeare: Alan A. Stone on King Lear and Humanity

Music

David Lynch: The Guardian's Jason Solomon interviews filmmaker David Lynch about his recent foray into pop music
David Lynch: Dazed Digital interviews David Lynch
Stephen Morris: Joy Division and New Order drummer selects his favourite albums

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

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Terrence Malick, Days of Heaven (1978)

Literature:

Thomas Bernhard: Phillip Lopate reviews new translation of Bernhard's My Prizes: An Accounting
Samuel Beckett: This week's Odds and Ends at the Debts and Legacies website
Samuel Beckett: Ludovic Janvier's poem, 'With Sam' translated by Raymond Federman in the Evergreen Review
Paul Auster: An interview in The Telegraph
The Art of Penguin Books' Science Fiction
Leo Tolstoy: On the 100th Anniversary of the Russian novelist's death, The Independent meets with some of his descendants
Leo Tolstoy: The Guardian visits Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana estate, where War and Peace and Anna Karenina were written
Leo Tolstoy: Rowan Williams on Leo Tolstoy
The Case for Books: On the rise of electronic literature, and Robert Darnton's critical study
Patti Smith wins National Book Award
Angela Morgan Cutler: New novel, The Letter, explores themes of violence, language and identity
10 Contemporary Books that Challenged White, Male Literary Dominance
Joyce Carol Oates on J. D. Salinger
Ron Silliman's Blog: One of the best regularly-updated literary blogs on the web
Cardiff Book History: A regularly-updated resource

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Slavoj Žižek: In a television interview, Riz Khan asks the critical theorist whether we are living in the end times
Maurice Blanchot and Simone Weil's notion of sacred language

Theatre:

William Shakespeare: Graduate Conference in Florence, April 2011
William Shakespeare: Medieval Shakespeare: The Cultural Politics of Periodisation, March 2011

Film

Terrence Malick: Tim Dirks reviews Malick's Days of Heaven
Taxi Driver: Photographer Steve Schapiro discusses working on the set of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese: Scorsese's Public Speaking, an HBO documentary on New York writer Fran Lebowitz
William S. Burroughs: New York Times reviews new documentary, William S. Burroughs: The Man Within
William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin: Documentary, 'Destroy All Rational Thought'

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

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Thomas de Quincey's The Confessions of an English Opium Eater,
illustrated by Laurence W. Chaves

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: International Conference at the University of York: Speakers include Simon Critchley, Beckett's official photographer John Minihan, Booker Prize winner John Banville, Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee
Thomas de Quincey: Laurence W. Chaves' illustrations for Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Don DeLillo: American writer Don DeLillo grants rare interview to The Observer's Robert McCrum
Philip Roth: Jonathan Franzen is 'tired of being angry at Roth', and offers a glimpse into his recent reading list
Thomas Bernhard: Excerpt from an English translation of Bernhard's prose work, Walking
Gabriel Josipovici: Author of What Ever Happened to Modernism? addresses journalistic approaches to his work in the TLS
Primo Levi: New Humanist explores the importance of listening in the work of Levi, Benjamin and others
What books will spark conversation with strangers?
Thomas Pynchon: Online comic strip portrays the reclusive American author
William S. Burroughs: Experimental audio recordings of Burroughs's cut-up technique available online
J. D. Salinger: Will Self discusses the literary legacy of author J. D. Salinger on BBC's Newsnight
Blonde Bookworm: New book reveals Marilyn Monroe's interest in James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and others

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jacques Derrida: On Simon Morgham Wortham's The Derrida Dictionary

Theatre

Samuel Beckett: Photographs from Sean Mathias' production of Waiting for Godot in Khayelitsha, South Africa
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: 12 hour theatrical production of Dostoyevsky's The Demons

Film & Television:

David Lynch: Rare photographs from the production of David Lynch and Mark Frost's television series, Twin Peaks, over at Industrial Symphony

Art, Design & Photography:

William Blake: An exhibition of painted etchings at the Tate Gallery

Etc.

Illustrated Guide to PhD

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

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

There Will Be Blood, shown as part of the Rolling Roadshow film festival

Literature:

Penguin Books celebrates 75 years
J. D. Salinger: A rare photograph of the reclusive American author, erm, putting on his socks
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Quoted on politics and personal vanity
Oxfam Used Books: Summer Sale begins
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: A collection of their correspondence is published
Gabriel Josipovici: Criticism of British novelists, including Ian McEwan and Martin Amis
Gabriel Josipovici: New book, What Ever Happened to Modernism?
Jorge Luis Borges: Interview with Borges translator Suzanne Jill Levine on the writer's influence on Latin American fiction
Arthur Koestler: TLS reviews Michael Scammel's new biography
Virginia Woolf: James Wood on Virginia Woolf and the anxiety of influence
Jeanette Winterson: Lauren Elkin on how Winterson makes fiction
Christopher Hitchens on J. D. Salinger
Electric Literature: Issue 4 is out now

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jean-Paul Sartre: Routledge Critical Thinkers series
Jacques Derrida: Josh Cohen summarizes some of the central ideas of the late French philosopher

Theatre

Samuel Beckett: Michael Gambon's performance in Krapp's Last Tape moves from Dublin to London this September
William Shakespeare: Al Pacino's performance as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice moves to Broadway

Film & Television:

UK Film Council Axed
Samuel Beckett: Billie Whitelaw introduces a filmed performance of her role in Beckett's Not I
Rolling Roadshow Film Festival: Includes There Will Be Blood, The Blues Brothers, Rocky, RoboCop and more
Designing Mad Men
Mad Men Summer Reading List
Inception: Hans Zimmer discusses hidden patterns in his score for Christopher Nolan's recent blockbuster, Inception

Art & Design:

American Photography in Colour, 1939-1943
Otto Dix Exhibition

Etc.

Stewart Lee: An extract from the stand-up comedian's new book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate

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