A Piece of Monologue: Literature, Philosophy and the Arts: Oscar Wilde

6.12.13

Cork Opera House Graffiti Project

A number of prominent Irish writers represented

Video made with Dusto and Psychonautes for the launch of Cork Opera House Summer Season at Half Moon Theatre on 30 April 2013 (thanks to Katie Garner for the link).

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

3.11.12

Carol Ann Duffy on Sylvia Plath

Duffy recalls her first encounter with Plath's work

Sylvia Plath Poems chosen by Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy (The Guardian): 'Poets are ultimately celebrators, of life and of poetry itself. A vocational poet like Plath gives life back to us in glittering language – life with great suffering, yes, but also with melons, spinach, figs, children and countryside, moles, bees, snakes, tulips, kitchens and friendships. There can be a chilling detachment about Plath's poetic personality – like Yeats, she casts "a cold eye / On life, on death" – but she also deploys a comic playfulness, a great appetite for sensuous experience, a delight in the slant rhymes and music of her verse, bravado, brio, a tangible joy in the unflowering of her genius.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

10.10.12

Will Self on Himself

'He’s quite antagonistic, he’s completely up himself and he uses all these long words'

Will Self

Jimi Famurewa (ShortList) talks to Will Self (link via 3:AM Magazine):

“He’s quite antagonistic, he’s completely up himself and he uses all these long words,” says Will Self when tentatively asked what people think of him. As descriptions of his own public persona go, it’s one most would struggle to argue with. “That’s fine, it doesn’t bother me,” he says with a smile. “They can think what they want.”

That conspiratorial smirk nods to the fact that – from the moment he arrives at the appointed Soho café, wheeling a folding bicycle and trying to procure a chair outside – Will Self isn’t what you expect. The intellectually imposing writer and professional curmudgeon we’ve heard about mostly fails to materialise during ShortList’s hour-long interview. He’s funny, friendly and, whisper it, quite nice.

“People can’t assimilate that,” explains the 50-year-old, cramming a roll-up into a plastic cigarette holder. “The idea of light comedy and heavy literature bamboozles [them] because they want you to be one thing or another. It annoys people. But that’s all right.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

18.8.12

Simon Critchley on Religion and Philosophy

An interview with Religious Dispatches

Simon Critchley

Beatrice Marovich (Religious Dispatches) interviews Simon Critchley about his recent work, The Faith of the Faithless: 'What can an atheist do with theology? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The philosopher Simon Critchley is clear about the fact that, while he doesn’t believe in any gods, neither does he find it necessary to give up on theology.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

31.12.11

Christopher Hitchens on James Joyce's Ulysses

Written for the 100th Bloomsday in 2004

In a June 1994 article for Vanity Fair, the late Christopher Hitchens reflects on James Joyce's classic modernist novel, Ulysses, in celebration of its centenary (link via Times Flow Stemmed): 'A surly English overseer is standing at the entrance to a construction site in London. It’s a filthy, wet day. He sees approaching him a shabby figure, with clay pipe clenched in mouth and a battered raincoat, and scowlingly thinks, Another effing Mick on the scrounge. The Irishman shambles up to him and asks if there’s any casual job going. “You don’t look to me,” says the supervisor, “as if you know the difference between a girder and a joist.” “I do, too,” says the Irishman indignantly. “The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses.”' [Read More]

20.12.11

Glass Wall erected around Oscar Wilde's Tomb

New attempts to protect Wilde's burial place from lipstick marks and written inscriptions

Photograph: Tomas van Houtryve for The New York Times

From The New York Times website: 'Recently, descendants of Wilde, the Irish dramatist and wit who died here in 1900, decided to have his immense gravestone cleansed of a vast accumulation of lipstick markings from kisses left by admirers, who for years have been defacing, and some say eroding, the memorial in hilly Père Lachaise Cemetery here. But the decision meant not only cleaning the stone, a flying nude angel by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who was inspired by the British Museum’s Assyrian figures, but also erecting a seven-foot plate glass wall to keep ardent admirers at a distance.' [Read More]

21.6.11

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]

29.4.11

Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing

An eclectic collection of essays from Yahia Lababidi

Yahia Lababidi, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing

Egyptian writer Yahia Lababidi has just released a collection of essays on a diverse range of topics, disrupting traditional categories of popular culture, literature and philosophy. Among the topics under discussion are Susan Sontag, Oscar Wilde, Silence, Michael Jackson, Morrissey, Leonard Cohen, and Islamic faith. And there is much more besides. Here is a brief excerpt from the preface:

Essai is French for “trial.” In his collected Essais, published in 1580, Michel de Montaigne admirably set out to interrogate and discover himself and, in the process, minted a new literary form: the essay. “I cannot give an account of my life by my actions… I do so by my thoughts,” he stated in his celebrated essay, On Vanity (though he may as well have been declaring the intent of his entire project). In “How Beautiful It Is…” a more recent practitioner of this literary art, Daniel Mendelsohn, offers us another useful etymology: namely that ‘the word critic is indirectly derived from the Classical Greek word krino, “to judge.” Mendelsohn then goes on to introduce his work thus: “This book is a collection of judgments: which is to say, a collection of essays by a critic.” [...] These are my trials, where I am simultaneously scratching my head and my pen across paper, to determine what I think about a given subject.

Publisher's website: The Humanities: Yahia Lababidi, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing

28.4.11

New edition of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

An uncensored version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray published by Harvard University Press

Oscar Wilde. Photograph: Corbis

Read the article: Alison Flood, 'Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray published', guardian.co.uk, 27 April 2011

6.1.10

Will Self on Literature and Visual Arts

British writer explores the connections

Will Self's office as photographed by Nigel Shafran (2006) © Nigel Shafran

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

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

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

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

Will Self, 'Art for fiction's sake'
Tate Etc., Issue 8, Autumn 2006

More at A Piece of Monologue:

14.9.09

Writers' Autographs

An online signature gallery of some of the world's best known writers

Photograph by Ralph Gibson. Series: Ex Libris. 2001

I have a long-standing fascination with handwriting and typography. The shape of letters and the visual appearance of sentences can contribute just as much meaning to a reader as the words themselves; a fact that the advertising industry is quick to capitalize on.

Writers' signatures hold a particular grip on me, not least for the romantic idea that they bring us closer to the personality of the writers themselves. If we feel close to an author's work, there are times when the printed word can feel like a barrier between us and the original manuscript. A signature offers a stamp of the writer's character and humanity; and in this sense, a signed book can feel like a personal validation of the work.

I've compiled a number of autographs here that, for one reason or another, have caught my attention. Enjoy!