A Piece of Monologue: Literature, Philosophy and the Arts: Religion

25.2.15

The Silence And Awe Of Arvo Pärt

An interview broadcast by NPR

Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt is one of the few living composers to find popularity beyond the borders of classical music. R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and Bjork are big fans. Although the 78-year-old musician usually shies away from acclaim and the media, he is currently attending a festival of his music in New York and Washington, and he made time to talk about his music, bike riding and bells.

Pärt is a major composer, and I was a little nervous meeting him. So I brought along a bell for good luck. I set it on the table between us and gave it a little tinkle. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's music is celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a performance of his choral work Kanon Pokajanen at the Temple of Dendur.

"Oh, this is a good beginning, thank you," he said in his heavily accented English.

Pärt likes bells, literally and figuratively in his music. He also likes space and silence. Fans tend to use words like "timeless" to describe his contemplative music. But for Pärt, time has deep meaning. In conversation, as in his music, he takes his time to unclutter his thoughts. They come out like poems.

"Time for us, is like the time of our own lives," he says. "It is temporary. What is timeless is the time of eternal life. That is eternal. These are all high words, and so, like the sun, we cannot really look at them directly, but my intuition tells me that the human soul is connected to both of them — time and eternity." [Read More]

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28.7.14

Spirit in Sound and Space: A Conversation Inspired by Arvo Pärt

An event held at the Museum of Metropolitan Art

From the Museum of Metropolitan Art:

New York's celebration of Arvo Pärt offers an opportunity to explore the spiritual content of his music, and to discover how the spaces in which music is performed can amplify its emotional power. In this program, neuroscientist Robert Zatorre explains how music can engage the reward system deep in our brains—the same system that responds to food and sex. Architect Steven Holl describes making spaces for music, and shows how music influences his work. Theologian Peter Bouteneff talks about the thread of spirituality that weaves throughout Pärt's masterpieces.

The Spark series explores vital ideas and issues through the lens of the Met's collections. Each cabaret-style program gathers artists, thought leaders, and performers from theater, film, politics, literature, science, and pop culture to engage in wide-ranging, fresh conversations and performances.

Spark is hosted by Julie Burstein, author and Peabody Award–winning creator of public radio's Studio 360.

Recorded June 11, 2014

Speakers

Robert Zatorre, neuroscientist, Montreal Neurological Institute
Steven Holl, architect
Peter Bouteneff, musician and Professor of Theology, St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary

Credits

This event is a collaboration between The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Arvo Pärt Project at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. [Read More]

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27.6.14

Sonny Rollins on Philosophy, Yoga and Buddhism

Legendary jazz innovator talks to NPR

Sonny Rollins in 1957

From NPR:

There's a track on Road Shows, Vol. 3 called "Patanjali," and that's the name of the great Hindu philosopher of yoga. You studied Indian philosophy and yoga in India, right?

Yes I did, and I'm still studying Indian philosophy.

I can see how yoga, with its emphasis on breathing, could be useful even on a technical level for a saxophonist. What has yoga brought to your playing?

Well, it's the concentration level. A lot of people think of yoga as the exercises — hatha yoga — which is only one form. There are other forms of yoga, and they are more contemplative, introspective, meditational. The thing is this: When I play, what I try to do is to reach my subconscious level. I don't want to overtly think about anything, because you can't think and play at the same time — believe me, I've tried it (laughs). It goes by too fast. So when you're into yoga and when you're into improvisation, you want to reach that other level.

When you went to India — this was in the late '60s — it was at a time when you famously took sort of a sabbatical from playing and recording. What was it that triggered you to reach out in these other directions in that way?

I was into many things. I was into Rosicrucianism, I studied Buddhism, Kabbalah, even — I was really into those philosophies of life, as were some of my compatriots. We were trying to find a way to express life through our improvisations. The music has got to mean something. Jazz improvisation is supposed to be the highest form of communication, and getting that to the people is our job as musicians.

I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.

It's hard to think of anything that you haven't accomplished, in terms of music. Is there something else out there that you still want to do?

I think there's always something to do. There are things that I've thought about — nature recordings, listening to new people coming up and being able to relate to them. Music is an open sky; it's vast. I wouldn't be so foolish as to ever feel that there isn't more music to be done, because it is out there. And I want to do it. [Read More]

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2.4.14

David Jones: Christian Modernist?

Oxford · 10-13 September 2014

David Jones: Christian Modernist?

‘Modernism’ in literature and the arts is associated with cultural and political rebellion, ‘making it new’ through formal experimentation, and a widespread drive towards a regenerated New Era of human history. For many modernists, Christianity stood for a bygone era to be overcome; the reactionary, dead hand of the past.

Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.

This conference will examine the paradox of Jones the ‘Christian modernist’. Does the very concept of cultural ‘modernism’ perhaps need reassessment when confronted with his example? How is his experimental art, poetry and cultural theory relevant to theology? How does his work relate to the theological controversies of his day, especially the ‘modernist crisis’ within the Catholic church and beyond? How does the influence of other modernist art, theory and literature interact with Christian influences (whether theological or artistic) in his work? What was Jones’s influence upon other thinkers and creative artists, both those who shared his religious views, and those who did not? And is his complex vision of human beings as makers and artists who participate in divine creativity through their sign-making – while also hiding this from themselves – still relevant today? Or should it rather be analysed as a product of its time, an unfortunate idealisation that at one point even led Jones to affirm a limited sympathy for the ‘fascist and Nazi revolutions’?

It is the aim of this conference to confront the paradoxes and pleasures of reading and studying Jones head-on, in order to refine and extend our critical vocabulary to encompass an artist, poet and thinker who continues to challenge our preconceptions. Finally, perspectives that challenge the fruitfulness of the whole idea of Jones as ‘Christian modernist’ are also welcome. Are there reasons for steering clear of both terms? Is Jones’s work perhaps better seen as transcending or collapsing such categories?

Contributions are welcome not only from Jones specialists, but also from across modernist studies, theology, religious studies, philosophy, art history, intellectual and political history, aesthetics, poetics, and genetic manuscript studies.

Papers should be timed at 20 minutes, with 10 minutes for discussion.

The deadline for registration is 15 June 2014. Registration after this date is not guaranteed and will raise the registration fee by GBP 50. Please register as soon as possible: we need at least 50 resident participants to run this conference.[Read More]

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10.3.14

Caspar David Friedrich's Winter Landscape

On the meditative power of mystery and ambiguity

Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape (1811?)

On a recent trip to London, I came across Caspar David Friedrich's painting Winter Landscape at the National Gallery. I was struck most of all by the disparity between the painting's small frame (32.5 x 45 cm) and the immensity of its subject matter. Dwarfed by many of the works around it, Friedrich's meticulous piece suggested the meditative power of a small and humble scene.

The work depicts a desolate landscape where a cluster of trees, dusted with snow, remain green in the depths of winter. Among the trees is a wooden sculpture of the crucifixion, and, if we look closely, a man can be seen praying before it. Clues in the foreground lead us towards him, crutches he has abandoned, either in haste or humility. He is the only human being in the painting, and we can assume that he is some kind of traveller wandering through a wilderness.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the painting is the vague symmetry that exists between the trees that tower over the human form, and a tall cathedral structure that is appearing out of the mist. The caption at the National Gallery suggests that the cathedral could symbolise the afterlife, a state of peace and calm that awaits the devout traveller. What interests me more is the unstable status of the cathedral itself. For example, can we assume that the traveller held the building as his final destination? His path, marked by the crutches, certainly suggest that direction. Or, is the cathedral a figment of the traveller's imagination? Maybe it is a figment of our imagination as viewers? Its status remains uncertain. The cathedral remains shrouded, hovering in the distance, neither fully present nor completely absent.

Let us assume, for a moment, that the cathedral is imagined. If this is the case, then the traveller remains far from his destination, even lost. The title, Winter Landscape, becomes an apt description of the traveller's hopeless situation. As a result, the trees become the only sign of life or rejuvenation among the rocks, ice and snow. In this reading, the traveller's meditative state conjures a mystical sense that sanctuary remains close at hand. He is at home anywhere, when at prayer, no matter how remote or isolated his location.

While I do not consider myself religious in any traditional or conventional sense, I remain fascinated by the role that religion plays in the development of literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Friedrich's Winter Landscape certainly draws upon religious themes, but I think it can be appreciated regardless of one's theological attitudes. It prompts us to ask broader questions about the human condition. What is our place in the world? To what degree are we all, in some way, solitary creatures? What role does prayer, meditation or deep reflection play in a meaningful life? How do we create meaning? What is the role and importance of faith in ideas or beliefs?

While the painting might have been intended to perform a didactic function, where there is a clear lesson to be learned, I think it's strength lies in its mystery and ambiguity: those aspects of the painting's narrative that remain inscrutable, no matter how hard we look.

In researching the painting, I discovered that it is the only example of Friedrich's work that is publicly available in London, and that it is one of two copies that exist in the world. London's National Gallery, naturally curious, wanted to find out if their copy was the original:

Discovered in a private collection in 1982, Friedrich’s moody Winter Landscape was acquired by the National Gallery five years later. The painting appeared identical in nearly every respect to a version that had been in the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund since 1940. Yet only one version of the composition was recorded in 19th-century documents, so which painting was the original?

Identical or not?

Although the two paintings appear at first glance to be identical, there are minute details in the London painting that do not appear in the Dortmund picture. The most noticeable are the gateway in front of the church and the blades of grass poking through the melting snow in the foreground.

The distant church is rendered with exceptional clarity and detail in the London painting, comparable to similar structures in other works by Friedrich. The same feature in the Dortmund version is little more than a hazy silhouette, with no discernable architectural features. While the Dortmund painting is rendered with a broad, spontaneous touch, the precise, controlled handling of the Gallery’s work in fact relates more closely to Friedrich’s early style of painting. [Read More]

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9.3.14

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Religious Belief

A short video documentary produced by the BBC

[Source]

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23.2.14

Kierkegaard on Suffering and Anxiety

Clare Carlisle outlines the religious philosopher's attitudes and opinions

Photograph: Jonathan Irish

From Clare Carlisle (The Guardian):

Kierkegaard experienced much suffering in his relatively short life. By the age of 25 he had lost both his parents, and five of his six siblings. In addition to this, his sensitive temperament, his tendencies to melancholy and anxiety, and his difficult relationships to his father and his one-time fiancée Regine gave him an intimate understanding of various kinds of psychological pain. Rather than avoiding or denying suffering, Kierkegaard was unusually willing to confront it and investigate it. His sensitivity to suffering extended to others: one of his friends remembered that "he gave consolation not by covering up sorrow, but by first making one genuinely aware of it, by bringing it to complete clarity".

This approach characterises Kierkegaard's philosophical work as well as his personal life. In his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, he writes that "Every human being must learn to be anxious in order that he might not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate." He expresses a similar attitude to despair in his later work The Sickness Unto Death. So, what is the "right way" to suffer, and how can this be learned? [Read More]

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27.1.14

Meeting Arvo Pärt

Tom Service interviews the experimental Estonian composer

Arvo Pärt. Photograph: Roberto Masotti

From Tom Service (The Guardian):

[...] I'm in a hotel in Tallinn, a city that's full of Russian tourists making the most of their Christmas and new year in the beautiful Estonian capital. I've been here to interview Arvo Pärt, the famous Estonian composer, and someone who has a reputation as a shy recluse; a seeming paradox given that his music is celebrated all over the world.

He talked to me in the building that houses his archive – a half-hour drive through the snow, forest and flatness of the landscape outside Tallinn, a journey that felt like a pilgrimage to a mythical musical hideaway – and I found Pärt to be the exact opposite of the forbidding, taciturn figure that looms out of some of his photos. There was laughter, humour and generosity in the way he spoke about his compositional and existential struggles, and even his religious feelings. [...] [H]ere are a couple of things Pärt revealed about his music, especially from around the time of his consolidation of the technique of "tintinnabulation", which has defined his music from the mid-1970s to this day.

In one of the rooms in the house, there was a row of plant pots. It turns out they were more than mere decoration: they were painted by Pärt in 1977, because working with riotously festive colours was one of the ways he got through the hard years of writer's block. "You have to do something to keep your creativity going," he told me. But the real epiphany that set Pärt on his course of what sounded like a radical simplicity in the mid-70s, producing works such as Tabula Rasa, Fratres, and Passio, which poured out of him later that decade, was an encounter with a street cleaner outside his house in Tallinn. Searching for a solution that would connect his emotional, musical and spiritual lives together, Pärt, at a loss for inspiration, went outside into the snow one morning and asked the cleaner: "What should a composer do?" "Well, he should love every note," was the reply. "No professor had ever told me something like that," Pärt said, and this single sentence crystallised his thinking. He realised that to really love every note, to really understand the connections between even a tiny handful of musical pitches, could be the source of lifetime of composition and contemplation. [Read More]

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12.12.13

The Life and Writings of Giacomo Leopardi

A review from Open Letters Monthly

Giacomo Leopardi

From Luciano Mangiafico (Open letters Monthly):

Hard to imagine a bleaker prospect for the future: you are a writer of genius, but you are trapped in a small village in the retrograde 19th century Papal States. You are unable to leave the household that is run by a cold, fanatically religious mother and a father who, having been through the turbulence of the Napoleonic period, is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. As the son of a nobleman, it was not proper for you to attend public schools, so priests privately tutored you until you knew more than they did. You then read systematically through your father’s library, learning several classical and modern languages, and ruining both your eyesight and your already fragile health in the process. You are a hunchback, suffered from many real and imaginary maladies, were derided for your scholarly pretensions, and your hope of finding a soul of the opposite sex who would reciprocate your love was virtually nonexistent.

You were cut off by distance from the centers of European intellectual life, such as Paris and Weimar, your only means of communications was letters, and yet and yet…despite all odds, you became one of greatest Italian poets and philosophers, a living link between Rousseau and Nietzsche. [Read More]

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9.11.13

Karen Stuke, After Sebald's Austerlitz

Art installation explores the novel's relationship to time, place and photography

Antwerp Station, Belgium. Photograph: Karen Stuke

St. Clemens Hospital, London. Photograph: Karen Stuke

Jewish Cemetery, Alderny Road, London. Photograph: Karen Stuke

Wilsonovo nádraží, Prague. Photograph: Karen Stuke

Journey. Photograph: Karen Stuke

Liverpool Street Station, London. Photograph: Karen Stuke

Journey. Photograph: Karen Stuke

Home in Prague. Photograph: Karen Stuke

Installation view, The Wapping Project, London, 2013

From the website of artist Karen Stuke:

The installation, which includes monumental pinhole camera photographs taken in the book’s key locations, a metaphorical railway line and Jewish actors reading the novel is created by Stuke in collaboration with The Wapping Project’s curator Jules Wright. The commissioning of a German artist to respond to a work which deals with the Nazi oppression of Jews is not lost on Karen Stuke for whom the process has been often difficult and painful.

Austerlitz is one of literature’s most haunting meditation on time, loss and retrieval. It tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who, aged 5, was sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents in Wales. As he rediscovers his past, Austerlitz embarks on a journey through time and space, from mid-20th century mitte-Europa to contemporary England.

Stuke, an accomplished photographer in the use of the pin-hole camera, followed this journey. At the crossroad between fact and fiction, she found when they existed, the places of Austerlitz’s story: the Prague exhibition halls from which his mother was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the railway journey followed by the Kindertransport, his house in Mile End…

The resulting photographs, all taken with her handcrafted pin-hole camera, are the work of light, time and memory. Elusive images created by aggregated traces of light, they evoke fuzzy memories, and justly lend themselves to both, the layers and recesses of Austerlitz’ mind, and Sebalds’ narrative. Pursuing her interest in bringing together visual art and performance, Stuke has also devised, in collaboration with Jules Wright, a large-scale installation that brings key elements from the book into a reality where the visitor is an active viewer and listener, delving into the darkest corners of Austerlitz’s memory, and of Europe’s recent history. [Read More]

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1.11.13

Alba Arikha on her godfather, Samuel Beckett

'I remember his silences as much as his words.'

Alba Arikha.

Jessica Salter (The Telegraph) speaks to Alba Arikha:

My family had been friends with Sam since my father met him, in 1956. I was named after his poem Alba, and he was sort of my godfather (I’m Jewish so I wasn’t baptised). When I was born he bought me the most elegant pram and the largest teddy bear in Paris, according to my mother. He also gave me a spoon that he had as a child, which my father painted – a lone spoon on a white napkin.

Sam would often come for dinner at our house. He would arrive exactly on time, waiting at the door until it was time to ring the bell. He was very tall, with very blue eyes, and he would pick my sister and me up. My sister, who is three years younger than me, played chess with him, and I played the piano with him; he loved playing the piano. At dinner the conversation was mainly the adults quoting poetry – Sam would quote Keats and my mother would cry – or my father and Sam listening to music. We children were never allowed to talk. Sometimes Sam would just stop talking, which was odd. I remember his silences as much as his words. [Read More]

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18.8.13

On the Disappearance of Used Bookstores

Charles Simic reflects on the loss of rare and unusual books

The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles

From Charles Simic (NYR):

Used-book stores are disappearing in our day at an even greater rate than regular book stores. Until ten years ago or so, there used to be a good number of them in every city and even in some smaller towns, catering to a clientele of book lovers who paid them a visit in search of some rare or out-of-print book, or merely to pass the time poking around. Even in their heyday, how their owners made a living was always a puzzle to me, since typically their infrequent customers bought nothing, or very little, and when they did, their purchase didn’t amount to more than a few dollars. Years ago, in a store in New York that specialized in Alchemy, Eastern Religions, Theosophy, Mysticism, Magic, and Witchcraft, I remember coming across a book called How to Become Invisible that I realized would make a perfect birthday present for a friend who was on the run from a collection agency trying to repossess his car. It cost fifteen cents, which struck me as a pretty steep price considering the quality of the contents.

What made these stores, stocked with unwanted libraries of dead people, attractive to someone like me is that they were more indiscriminate and chaotic than public libraries and thus made browsing more of an adventure. Among the crowded shelves, one’s interest was aroused by the title or the appearance of a book. Then came the suspense of opening it, checking out the table of contents, and if it proved interesting, thumbing the pages, reading a bit here and there and looking for underlined passages and notes in the margins. [Read More]

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6.8.13

Kafka's Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant

2003 biography of Kafka's partner, by Kathi Diamant

From The Observer:

The women in Franz Kafka's life were many and adoring but Kafka found it hard to sustain affairs. One of his sweethearts, the Berlin businesswoman Felice Bauer, announced: 'My Franz was a saint', yet he jilted her twice. Margarethe Bloch was another who fell for the Czech author. Bloch claimed to have borne his child though Kafka's distaste for the physical world apparently inhibited sex. Fleeing anti-semitic Germany, Fraulein Bloch was arrested outside Rome in April 1944 and deported to Auschwitz.

Kafka's work, with its nightmarish presumption of guilt, foreshadowed the Hitlerite terror. He was born to a Jewish family in Prague, and all three of his sisters were murdered by the Nazis, victims of the grotesque bureaucracy foretold by their brother two decades earlier in The Trial. 'Maybe Kafka laughed with his friends in the beer hall,' Primo Levi despaired on translating that novel into Italian, 'but he did not laugh when he wrote.' As a writer, Kafka chose to live alone and in the prophetic dark. [Read More]

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Writers: Franz Kafka

17.7.13

Samuel Beckett Series 3: The “dramaticules”

Announcing the third volume of the series

A 2005 production of Samuel Beckett's Footfalls, La Mama Theatre (Source)

If the “great plays” are a regular part of the theatrical repertoire, Beckett’s late plays remain little known by non specialists. Thus, this third volume of our Series seeks to highlight the extreme poetic richness of these mature works, and that we can call – following their author – “dramaticules”. After a reflection on the specificity of this corpus and the questions of genre it raises, this volume examines the problematics of presence/absence, before studying the central place of the voice. Two further texts deal respectively with the presence of Dante in Beckett’s work, and the translation of his plays into Hebrew.

Llewellyn BROWN (dir.) : Samuel Beckett 3 : “Les ‘dramaticules’”, Caen, Lettres modernes Minard, collection « La Revue des Lettres modernes », Série Samuel Beckett, 2013. 335 pages. EAN13 : 9782256911736

Samuel Beckett Series 2: Essays

Bousquet, Mireille
Beckett’s That Time / Cette fois: Production of a ‘Time Factory’
That Time is a short monologue characterized by an almost complete lack of dramatization. It perfectly expresses the process of ‘minorization’ which is at work in most of Beckett’s œuvre, with a writing that operates through indeterminacy. The ‘minor’ is not so much a question of aesthetics as that of ethics, as it signals the invention of value in the work of art. We will consider especially the place of that, a deictic that inscribes the work in the ‘here and now’ of speech.

Brown, Llewellyn
Samuel Beckett’s ‘Dramaticules’ : a ‘Genre’ and a Form
The neologism ‘dramaticule’ refers to a corpus whose contours are ill-defined. The minimalism of these texts seems to testify to a will to espouse a universal and rigorous logic. In this respect, the ‘dramaticules’ can retrospectively shed light on certain passages of Shakespeare. This logic is related to the scission that Beckett creates between the character and his speech, between the story and the space on stage. But we can also identify moments of rupture, when the character gives voice to his subjectivity in a moment of fading.

Brown, Llewellyn
Samuel Beckett’s Rockaby / Berceuse : a ‘Performance Poem’
Adopting a versified form, Rockaby / Berceuse traces a story whose progression manifests a rhythmic structure based on the ‘ritornello’. This composition is intended to help the feminine figure to accept death. By contrast, the astounding final ejaculation — ‘fuck life’ — expresses a depersonalised subjectivity, where the woman defies the Other. The device of the voice over calms her anxiety. This text is also a visual poem, by means of which the woman creates for herself an existence.

Ferrini, Jean-Pierre
Beckett, a Reader of Dante
Beckett’s references to Dante are frequent, before Murphy, becoming rarer after, without losing their importance. By removing the theological dimension, Beckett reveals Dante’s pure poetic speech. Belacqua — a central character in Dante — embodies the notion of waiting, for Beckett, and is recognisable by his uterine posture. After How It Is, where he falls over into the mud, we find, in The Lost Ones, a vanquished Belacqua. Finally, Company puts an end to his presence.

Godeau, Florence
Phantom Text(s) and Ghostliness in Not I (Pas moi), Rockaby (Berceuse) and Footfalls (Pas)
This article analyses the construction of ghostly figures and voices, the spatial composition and the motif of repetition, apt to express ‘haunting’ and, finally, the work on silence, in Not I / Pas moi, Rockaby / Berceuse and Footfalls / Pas. These short plays not only evoke ghostly figures but represent a process of spectralisation that affects the staging and the text, and invite us to explore the dark recesses of minuscule ‘interior lives’, incarcerated in the present and haunted by the past.

Hersant, Céline
Two Experiences of Beckettian Space : Cognitive Frameworks, Sensorial Topographies
The volume Catastrophe et autres dramaticules stages two experiences, two opposing and yet complimentary representations of the expressive qualities of theatrical space. On the one hand, Beckett defines and characterises the stage as a physical and cognitive space where bodies are caught up in a sort of mechanical ballet, kinetics composed of phases of inertia or circulation. Alongside these traversed spaces and this physis of bodies on the stage, Beckett also stages, in his later short plays, another experience of space: a metaphysical one. The theatrical device loses its concrete basis to appear as a mental and memorial space.

Lemonnier-Texier, Delphine
Vestiges of the Tragic Monologue in A Piece of Monologue / Solo : Spectropoetics of ‘Je(u)’
The comparative study of A Piece of Monologue and of its French adaptation Solo reveals the loss, in the latter, of a series of pervasive allusions to the form and themes of Shakespearian tragic monologue, despite the fact that there is no more I in A Piece of Monologue than in Not I. The skull-sized globe, the recurrence of funerals, the macabre images and the very structure of the monologue are so many reminders of the spectral presence of tragic loci in Beckett’s text.

Levy, Shimon
Translating Beckett into Hebrew : Navigating Following the Map of the Dead Sea
Presenting Beckett to an Israeli public — on stage and in translation — raises the question of Biblical culture, which is not the same for Jews and Christians. It is necessary to translate, for the text to be understood, but also to recreate it; the role of innovation becomes important in the case of untranslatable expressions. If other translations exist, some are too explicitly Biblical. The work of translating is extremely demanding, but also enriching from the intellectual and human points of view.

Protin, Matthieu
The Paradox of the ‘Ambiguous’ ‘Dramaticules’ : From the Dramatic to the Theatrical
The ‘dramaticules’ are rarely staged. This fact can be accounted for by the shift from dialogue to narrative. Performing a play without the usual form of dramatic exchange seems to increase the difficulty of staging the ‘dramaticules’, analysed by Stanley Gontarski as “textually androgynous”. This androgyny is less important than it seems at first: what can be seen as a loss of theatricality is in fact a sort of transfer, from speech to the stage directions, which turns out to be a paradigm shift in Beckett theatrical writing.

Ravez, Stéphanie
When Beckett Films… in a Play: A Reading of Solo
In Solo, of which this paper offers a detailed reading, Beckett superimposes the aesthetic paradigms of theatre, photography and film, and as he usually does, creates a continual tension between the said and the seen. Beyond the specular issues specific to Beckettian theatre, we analyse how photography and film reflect and even ward off — in the case of cinema — the work of death inside the play. Solo offers cinema as an escape from time and death against the finite presence of theatrical images.

Sinoimeri, Lea
For a Poetics of Listening in Pas moi, Pas and Berceuse: The Passion of Speech
This article explores Beckett’s poetics of listening in the French versions of Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby. It argues that these plays restore an archaic trait of classical tragedy, intended as pure evocation and pathetic performance of the actor. Opposing the liminality of listening to the dramatic action, the ‘dramaticules’ become an aural theatre, endlessly suspended between transmission and reception. These plays explore thus innovative, fluid and non-mimetic roles for the actors and the audience.

Contact

For more information about the publication, published in French, you can get in touch with Llewellyn Brown at lbrown@free.fr.

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18.6.13

Port Magazine interviews Paul Thomas Anderson

Interview conducted by Lynn Hirschberg

Paul Thomas Anderson. Photograph: Stefan Ruiz. Handwriting: Daniel Day-Lewis.

From Lynn Hirschberg (Port Magazine) talks to American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson:

Anderson, who is tall and boyish, was wearing faded jeans and a matching work shirt. He perpetually has the sleepy look of the recently awakened, but his bedhead-ness is a disarming ruse: Anderson is, actually, a brilliant and sharp judge of human nature. He has an enduring fascination with lost souls – especially men – who attempt to find their way with the help of a determined mentor. The complex nature of those tangled relationships, which Anderson sets against defining periods of American history, provide the world of his six movies. They include Sydney in 1984, the story of a gambler and his hapless protégé; the now classic Boogie Nights in 1997, which was set in the world of 70s porn; and There Will Be Blood in 2007, in which Daniel Day-Lewis brilliantly portrayed a ruthless man searching for an oil fortune in turn-of-the-century California.

In 2012, Anderson wrote and directed The Master, a film inspired by L Ron Hubbard and the evolution of Scientology. The Master, which was the most fascinating and controversial movie of 2012, has divided audiences, mostly due to Anderson’s stubborn unwillingness to create “likeable” characters and a happy ending. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell, an emotionally damaged WWII war veteran, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a self-devised cult. It is both enticing and challenging: shot in 70mm, a dying form of lush cinematic glory, the movie asks an audience to identify with a rage-filled, deeply unhappy, alcohol addicted protagonist. Phoenix, who is mesmerising in the film, is twitchy and emaciated – his face locked in a kind of lopsided rictus that was, reportedly, inspired by a documentary he watched on the lives of apes. Hoffman, meanwhile, is charismatic and subtly diabolical – his cult leader may be making up his religion as he goes along, but he is seductive and captivating. [Read More]

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11.6.13

Cover Art: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

Striking cover art and dust jacket synopsis available from Amazon

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

Synopsis from Amazon:

“Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?”

Bleeding Edge will be published on 17 September 2013 [Read More]

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