Wes Anderson on Stefan Zweig

American filmmaker discusses the influence of Zweig on The Grand Budapest Hotel

A still from The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014)

A still from The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014)

A still from The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014)

A still from The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014)

A still from The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014)

From George Prochnik (The Telegraph):

George Prochnik: I thought your film did a beautiful job of transposing Stefan Zweig’s actual life into the dream life of his stories, and the stories into the fabric of his actual life. You showed how his own experiences had a fairy-tale dimension, confectionary and black by turns. I wondered if you could say anything about these qualities and how Zweig became an inspiration for you.

Wes Anderson: I had never heard of Zweig — or, if I had, only in the vaguest ways — until maybe six or seven years ago, something like that, when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity. I loved this first book, and immediately there were dozens more in front of me that hadn’t been there before. They were all suddenly back in print. I also read the The Post Office Girl, which had been only published for the first time recently. The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that were sort of stolen from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to represent Zweig himself — our “Author” character, played by Tom Wilkinson, and the theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law. But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph Fiennes, is modelled significantly on Zweig as well.

One thing that struck me, after I had read a few of Zweig’s books, is that what I began to learn about him personally was quite different from what I felt I understood about him from his voice as a writer. So much of his work is written from the point of view of someone who’s quite innocent and is entering into kind of darker territories, and I always felt that Zweig himself was a more reserved person who was exploring things in his work that he was drawn to but that weren’t his own experiences. In fact, the truth seems to be completely the opposite. He seems to be somebody who more or less tried everything along the way.

Prochnik: Zweig’s stories are always nesting stories within stories and confessional revelations of deep secrets within secrets. The way that your film seems to work on that grid of multiple overlapping and proliferating story lines was very striking.

Anderson: We see this over and over again in Zweig’s short stories. It’s a device that maybe is a bit old-fashioned — I feel it's the kind of thing we might expect to find in something by Conrad or Melville — where somebody meets an interesting, mysterious person and there’s a bit of a scene that unfolds with them before they eventually settle down to tell their whole tale, which then becomes the larger book or story we’re reading. I love that in Zweig — you describe it as confessional, and they do have that feeling, and they’re usually secret. One of his novellas is even called "Burning Secret". Anyway, that sort of technique is such an effective way to set the stage, to set a mood. It creates this kind of a “gather around” feeling. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Plunkett Lake Press: Stefan Zweig
• Gisèle Freund: Writer Portraits
• Robert Walser, The Walk
• Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka
• Robert Walser, Selected Stories

Joseph Conrad and Contemporary Terrorism

Matthew Feldman on The Secret Agent

Photograph: Joseph Conrad

From Matthew Feldman (Fair Observer):

The modernist author Joseph Conrad "can be read," British philosopher John Gray provocatively argued, "as the first great political novelist of the twenty-first century."

The case set out for this agonistic view in his 2002 "Joseph Conrad: Our Contemporary" departs from Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent, which is based upon an "actual terrorist attempt on the Royal Observatory in 1894, when a French anarchist accidentally blew himself up in Greenwich Park before reaching his target." This is given a "darkly ironic vision" by Conrad, "whereby the symbols of trade and new technology have come under terrorist attack."

Whether or not one agrees with Gray, The Secret Agent surely merits revisiting in the 21st century. In fact, in the three years following the September 11 attacks and their unparalleled murderousness in non-state sponsored, or asymmetric, terrorism — notes Peter Lancelot Mallios, in the revealing collection Conrad in the 21st Century — The Secret Agent was "referenced over a hundred times in newspapers, magazines, and online journalistic resources across the world." [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Penguin Classics: Joseph Conrad
• Greenwich Degree Zero
• Apocalypse Now Storyboards
• Revisiting the Heart of Darkness
• Heart of Darkness: Graphic Novel

Will Self on Nick Papadimitriou

British writer and critic on Papadimitriou and his work

Photograph: Nick Papadimitriou. Source.

Writing in Granta, Will Self describes his friendship with Nick Papadimitriou, and his opinion of his work (the article includes an extract from Papadimitriou's recent novel, Scarp): 'I first met Nicholas Papadimitriou in the mid-1980s. We were both lost young men at that time - now we’re lost middle aged men. Nick lived in Child's Hill, North London, where he still does to this day - I was based in Barnsbury, near Islington, and latterly Shepherd’s Bush. We crossed and recrossed London frequently on purposeless walks that we would’ve called derives in the manner of the French Situationists - if we’d ever heard of such things. I also had a Hillman Hunter car, complete with veneered dashboard, and in this we drove to the city’s outer limits - we were both obsessed by these liminal zones, where the city declined into a series of disjointed entrepots of urbanity. We dubbed them ‘interzones’ after the William Burroughs fiction of the same name. I remember visits to the marshes where Belmarsh Prison now lowers, to Thamesmead and to the Ultima Thule of the Isle of Grain – the haunt of Magwitch and Marlow’s shades, of Dickens and Conrad, those great proto-psychogeographers. Nick was a man of passions, of poetry and of certainties: the ground beneath his feet. Already he disdained the Moloch of the man-machine matrix and went his own way, weaving along, a figure emerging from the interwar period, clothed in Symbolist verse, wreathed in tobacco smoke.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• BBC Newsnight meets Nick Papadimitriou
• Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp
• Documentary: London Perambulator (2009)
• Will Self: Walking out of London
• Richard Long: Walking Artist

Penguin Classics: Joseph Conrad

A selection of Phil Hale's stunning covers for Penguin's modern repackaging of Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary
Illustration: Phil Hale

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Illustration: Phil Hale

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
Illustration: Phil Hale 

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
Illustration: Phil Hale

Joseph Conrad, Typhoon and Other Stories
Illustration: Phil Hale

The following is from a 2007 posting at Caustic Cover Critic: 'It was pleasantly surprising to me, then, to see that [Phil] Hale has been commissioned to produce new cover images for six of Penguin Classics' new editions of Joseph Conrad. Conrad is one of my favourites; he writes wonderfully, and (as with the great Nabokov) English was his third language. Interestingly, in his autobiography, Conrad says that it wasn't until he knew English that he felt he could be a writer. A love affair with the language itself led to his career change.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher King on Book Cover Design
• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• The Book Cover Club
• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Book Cover Archive
• Judging a book...
• The Great Gatsby: Re-Covered
• Peter Mendelsund in Design Bureau

Will Self interviewed in The Paris Review

On walking, psychogeography, David Lynch and Jonathan Swift

In an interview with The Paris Review, Will Self discusses the genesis of his latest book, Walking to Hollywood (link via will-self.com):

Why did you start these walking tours?

Will Self: I think it was to do with stuff in my own life—with not drinking and consciously wanting to exercise more. My father was an academic who specialized in urban and regional development, so I grew up with somebody who talked about cities. Back in 1999, I was writing a column for the British Airways flight magazine and conceived of this incredibly environmentally incorrect idea that I would fly somewhere in Britain every morning from Heathrow, or one of the London airports, then take a long country walk, then fly back in the same day, and write about that. In the last one, even with my malformed environmental consciousness, I began thinking, “This is wrong, it’s not right on all sorts of levels!” So instead, I decided to walk to Heathrow. It occurred to me when I set out to do it that this was an adventure—it really was terra incognita, probably nobody had done it since the pre-industrial era. There was something profoundly strange about this. After that, it occurred to me that I didn’t know anybody who had walked from Central London to the countryside, and I began to conceive of these ex-urban walks as a way of curing myself of the sense of dislocation that had come over me in my adult life. I’d ended up not knowing where I was in a very profound sense.[Read More]

Jonathan Gharraie, 'Will Self on ‘Walking to Hollywood’'

The Paris Review, 21 June 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self

Author Insults

'Nothing but obscenities'

Oscar Wilde

Flavorwire have compiled a list of the '30 harshest author-on-author insults in history'. Here are just a few:

Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri:
“A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”

Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky:
“Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.”

Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley:
“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence:
“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”

Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad:
“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”

Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling:
“Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”

William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway:
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope:
“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”

Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac:
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce:
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

[Read More]

Apocalypse Now Storyboards

The Guardian publishes storyboard images from Coppola's Vietnam war epic

Image: Zoetrope Studios

Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam war epic, Apocalypse Now!, loosely based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is being re-released this month in a restored digital print (27 May). It's to be followed by a Blu-ray release on 13 June. In celebration, The Guardian's Guide supplement has published the original storyboards of one of the film's most memorable scenes.

See the Gallery: 'The Apocalypse Now Storyboards', The Guide, The Guardian, 22 May 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Revisiting the Heart of Darkness
• Heart of Darkness: Graphic Novel

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.

Revisiting the Heart of Darkness

Phil Mongredien on Joseph Conrad's classic novel of postcolonial corruption

Marlon Brando plays Kurtz in Apocalypse Now! Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Published in The Observer on Sunday, Phil Mongredien revisits the dark and troubling landscape of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a short novel famously adapted in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now!. For Mongredien, Conrad's text offers 'as powerful a condemnation of imperialism as has ever been written, and still a deeply unsettling read more than a century on'. [Read more]

Source: Phil Mongredien, 'Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – review', The Observer, 23 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Heart of Darkness: Graphic Novel
• Philip Roth on Literature and Teaching

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Thomas Bernhard

Literature:

British Library Online Manuscript Gallery
Is Modernism Boring? Why James Joyce and Virginia Woolf shouldn't be gathering dust on your shelf
Thomas Bernhard: On Perfection and Failure
Thomas Bernhard: Memorable quotations from novels and interviews
Thomas Bernhard: From Wittgenstein's Nephew
Gabriel Josipovici on Thomas Bernhard
James Joyce: Death and Wake
Roberto Bolaño on Literature and Exile
Franz Kafka: An animated adaptation of 'A Country Doctor'
Franz Kafka: John Banville on Kafka, Felice Bauer and Elias Canetti
Franz Kafka: A new illustrated edition of The Trial from the Folio Society, with an introduction by John Banville
New York Writers: City Journal on NYC's rich literary heritage
New Look Spike Magazine
Celebrity Bookshelves: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Greta Garbo, Kelsey Grammer and more
William S. Burroughs: 1983 BBC Documentary presented by Alan Yentob, and featuring interviews with major Beat Generation figures
William Shakespeare: Alistair Fowler reviews Don Paterson's Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary
Joyce Carol Oates on Charles Baxter
Dante Alighieri: How Galileo was influenced by Dante's Divine Comedy
Joseph Conrad: On science fiction novel, The Inheritors

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

J. G. Ballard: Ballardian's very on Simon Sellars to release Applied Ballardianism: the philosophy of J. G. Ballard in 2012
Harper Collins Philosophy Catalogue: New and forthcoming 2011
Time and Space in Contemporary Women's Writing: September 2011
Philosophy of Time Society Forum: Call for Papers
Philosophy Bites: Review of David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton's recent book
Emmanuel Levinas: Joshua Shaw reviews Michaël de Saint Cheron's Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994
Michel Foucault: Foucault Studies 10: Foucault and Agamben
Sigmund Freud: Review of Alfred I. Tauber's new book, The Reluctant Philosopher
Slavoj Žižek: Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks

Film:

Orson Welles: Welles directs and stars in The Stranger (1946), now freely available to watch online

Art & Design

Sigmund Freud: The Freud Museum celebrates the New Yorker's psychoanalytic comic strip, On the Couch
Top 10 Typefaces Used by Book Design Winners
Samuel Beckett: Among Ronald Searle's Eye-View series for Punch (1961-2)

Theatre

William Shakespeare: Roundtable Discussion: 'The Imagination of Hamlet': Robert Brustein, Christian Camargo, Paul Fry (moderator), Laura Levine, Eugene Mahon, Susanne Wofford

Music

Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan: Oates explained why she dedicated 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' to the American songwriter
Björk Covers Joy Division
Library of Congress Receives Record Donation: Including Fats Waller, Bing Cosby and Louis Armstrong

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

Philip Roth on Literature and Teaching

Roth talks to Esquire about Turgenev, Conrad, and his memories of teaching

Philip Roth. Photograph: Steve Pyke.

In an interview to promote his latest novel, Nemesis, Philip Roth shares what he's reading with Scott Raab, alongside his memories of teaching at the University of Pennsylvania:

Roth's talking about his reading these days, revisiting a revered Russian master of the nineteenth century, Ivan Turgenev.

"Fathers and Sons is a great book — there's a new translation of it. I think it's called Fathers and Children now, and the translation is wonderful. And there are several long short stories that are pearls. One is called 'The Torrents of Spring' or 'Spring Torrents,' which is a masterpiece, and the other — which is beyond masterpiece — is called 'First Love.' Read those two things."

Roth chortles with something like delight. He stopped teaching twenty or so years ago but still seems as if he'd fit in on any campus in any decade. It's not only his outfit — tan slacks, blue-and-white-checked shirt with the sleeves rolled loosely up his skinny forearms, brown walking shoes — but also his easy passion for those writers who've nourished his soul.

I mention Joseph Conrad, whose clinical eye, deceptive clarity, and long, loping rhythms remind me of Roth's own.

"He's a pure powerhouse. I recently read a biography of him that's kind of interesting, too, an English biography. There's also Conrad's great short novel, which I hadn't reread since I was in my twenties, The Nigger of the Narcissus. It's an absolute masterpiece. Beyond belief. And about race, it's brilliant. So brilliant. Conrad is rich. He's very rich."

Again with the chortle. To feast so deeply upon words, it says, is luscious beyond words, a way of being in the world while being free of the world's whims, and a way of knowing humanity free of the mess of humans. It is rich, very rich — a schoolboy's love rather than a scholar's.

"I've enjoyed teaching — not teaching writing. I taught literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and I liked that very much. It was a great way of getting out of the house, of not being stuck alone in my room all day, and, as I have Lonoff say in The Ghost Writer, I got to use a public urinal — that was a breakthrough — and also I got to read a lot. That was the best of it — I got to read and think about books and study books. My education comes from teaching, really." [Read more]

Scott Raab, 'Philip Roth Goes Home Again'

Esquire, 7 October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• Philip Roth's Reading Habits
• Philip Roth compares life to a Beckett play
• Philip Roth talks about new novel, Nemesis
• Philip Roth's Nemeses: Short Novels

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Philip Roth. Photograph: Steve Pyke.

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956 will be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2011
Samuel Beckett: Lois Overbeck to speak at the Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive conference in York, June 2011
James Joyce: This week, Frank DeLaney's podcast readings of Ulysses find Stephen discussing Shakespeare's Hamlet
Joseph Conrad: 3:AM Magazine reviews graphic novel adaptation of Heart of Darkness
Philip Roth: Elaine Showalter compares Roth's new novel, Nemesis, with Albert Camus' The Plague
Philip Roth: Nemesis gets The Complete Review treatment
Tom McCarthy: Jen Craig reads C, and asks whether McCarthy really is a modernist writer
Paul Celan: Translating Celan Conference, London, 23 November 2010
William S. Burroughs: Oliver Harris on re-editing the first trilogy (Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters)
Harvard University Press: Spring Catalogue 2011
HTML Giant launches literary magazine club
Indie Literary Sites start coming of age
Spike Magazine: The Book (Free PDF download)

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

History of Philosophy Podcast: Based at King's College, London
Socrates - a man for our times

Film:

Werner Herzog: A selection of documentaries to be shown at DocNYC.
Werner Herzog: The Guardian's Jonathan Jones on Herzog as performance artist
Blade Runner: The Guardian profiles Ridley Scott's science fiction masterpiece as part of its ongoing film season

Etc.

Melvyn Bragg: Discussions from radio programme In Our Time published in a new collection

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

Heart of Darkness: Graphic Novel

Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz adapt Conrad's iconic text

Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz's Heart of Darkness.
Source: The Guardian

Sam Jones of The Guardian website reports that Catherine Anyango, artist, and David Zane Mairowitz, author of Introducing Kafka, have collaborated on a graphic adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

In the 108 years since it was published, Joseph Conrad's colonial fable Heart of Darkness has infected TS Eliot, been excoriated for racism by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and transplanted to Vietnam by Francis Ford Coppola.

Now the book has been reinterpreted as a graphic novel in whose monochrome pages Conrad's exploration of power, greed and madness plays out as disturbingly as ever.

Catherine Anyango, whose drawings are peppered with David Zane Mairowitz's adaptation of the text, had her doubts about tackling the Polish-born novelist's most famous work.

Those reservations had more to do with the original medium than the enduring controversy over Conrad's views or the familiarity of Heart of Darkness.

"I wasn't sure initially if it was a good subject for a graphic novel as the writing is so dense and the style of it is partly what attracts me to the book," she said.

"As I knew we couldn't keep most of the text in, I tried to make the drawings very rich in detail and texture so that immersive feeling you get, especially when he describes the river and the jungle, was carried across." [Read the article]

Sam Jones, 'Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness published as a graphic novel'

guardian.co.uk, 31 August 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Introducing... Franz Kafka