Rediscovering Raymond Williams

Geoff Dyer on 'one of the left's great thinkers'

Raymond Williams

From Geoff Dyer (New Statesman):

“I come from Pandy . . .” The first words spoken by Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (1979) may not have quite the rolling loquacity of the opening line of Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March – “I am an American, Chicago born . . .” – but in their brisk way they bespeak a similar confidence.

Bellow’s narrator immediately situates his experience in the heart of America; Williams announced one of his main concerns in the title of his first novel, Border Country (1960). Borders – how they are constructed and recognised, how they impede and are crossed – are central to his thought. In contrast to March’s unequivocal belief (“I am an American”), Williams, whose work concentrated on the English literary and cultural tradition, came to identify himself as “a Welsh European”, emphasising what lay either side of a presumed centre, both locally and within an international context.

“It happened that in a predominantly urban and industrial Britain I was born in a remote village, in a very old settled countryside, on the border between England and Wales.” This is the account Williams gives of his origins in The Country and the City (1973), the simple facts of the matter beginning to unfurl and expand in the recognisable style of his analytical writing: an authority that draws power from a suggested hesitancy; the unhurried accumulation of material and argument; a continual elaboration and deepening of meaning. While Williams was proudly conscious of the convolutions of his own method and mode – “all my usual famous qualifying and complicating, my insistence on depths and ambiguities” – a former student, Terry Eagleton, remembers his lecturing style as that of “somebody who was talking in a human voice”.

Eagleton was struck also by the way that although Williams’s background might, by Cambridge standards, have been regarded as humble, it was also sufficiently “privileged” to give him “a sort of stability, a rootedness and self-assurance, and almost magisterial authority”. It gave him the confidence, while still an undergraduate – albeit an undergraduate who had served in the war – to stand up and insist, after a talk in which L C Knights claimed that a corrupt and mechanical civilisation could no longer understand neighbourliness, that he knew “perfectly well, from Wales, what neighbour meant”.

Confidence counts for little unless it is allied with determination. Combining this with an Orwellian sense “of the enormous injustice” of the world, Williams had the resources to develop his early critical and theoretical project – one that stressed the importance of shared experience and common meanings – in comparative isolation. In the process of becoming articulate in the language of a new and expansive kind of cultural history he also, in Raphael Samuel’s words, “constructed a conceptual vocabulary of his own”. The vocabulary was the cerebral expression of a temperament shaped by a particular geography and history. In Border Country Harry Price is “waiting for terms he could feel”. You could almost say he is waiting for the author to coin his most famous term, “structure of feeling”. Where Williams came from was inextricably linked with what he came to say.

If Orwell’s sense of the injustice of the world was fed by a disposition to dwell on its misery, then the “privileged” background of the signalman’s son made the idea of defeat almost entirely alien. It also meant, according to his critics, that the political positions of his later years, with Thatcherism in full swing and the miners having suffered a catastrophic defeat, were nostalgic, even sentimental. Either way, the key thing is that his writing always carried an enormous freight of autobiography. “I learned the saturating power of the structures of feeling of a given society as much from my own mind and my own experience as from observing the lives of others,” Williams wrote.

This double combination – complexity of thought and clarity of expression, with a depth and intensity of personal feeling – made Williams an inspirational figure for the generation of students who came of age in 1968 and looked to him for political and moral as well as intellectual guidance. A representative of the next generation (ten in 1968), I set eyes on him precisely twice.

The first time was when he came to give a lecture at Oxford, where I was an undergraduate, in about 1978. Our tutor encouraged us to go, so we went. I had no idea who Williams was or what he was droning on about. Then, in the mid-1980s, I went to see him in conversation with Michael Ignatieff at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. I’m guessing that the occasion was the publication of his novel Loyalties – though if it was, how come I didn’t get my copy signed? I can only assume I was too intimidated because by then the old bloke who’d waffled on at Oxford had entirely reshaped my sense of life and literature and the way they were related. [Read More]

Dan Gunn on Finding Time for Literature

Writers and translator Lydia Davis talks to Dann Gunn about Beckett and The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Photograph: Dan Gunn

From Music & Literature:

A very orderly Greek friend visited me recently, and on stepping into my office and seeing the state of my desk, cried out “Dan! What is that?” He was genuinely shocked, perturbed even, at the sight of the books, papers, unopened envelopes, and assorted debris that flows from several piles over my desk, threatening at any moment to spill off the edges (as it regularly does) and onto the floor. My response was not, I hope, unduly defensive: “It’s a sign that I’m being productive.” Indeed, my desk is clear and tidy only ever for a brief moment after some task has just been completed (or at moments when I remember some unopened bill that needs to be paid). I do like to observe something organized emerging from the apparent chaos; and when that chaos threatens to become a liability, I turn to photos of the studios of artists I admire, of Francis Bacon or Alberto Giacometti, and protest: Now their mess really was a mess.

When I was seventeen, I chose to leave Edinburgh, where I was raised, for the University of Sussex, not least because I had read a book by Gabriel Josipovici entitled The World and the Book; it said on the cover that he was teaching there. What I admired (and still admire) about this wonderful critical work was that it dealt openly and freely with different periods and authors, from different cultures and languages, from Dante to Proust to Saul Bellow. Also mentioned on the cover was that Gabriel Josipovici wrote fiction as well as criticism. In some quiet place within me I seized hold of this as a model: a critic who also writes fiction; a novelist who also writes criticism. I had eight fantastic years at Sussex, taught in an ideal setting by the best teachers imaginable. As it happens, on my very first day I was introduced to my “personal tutor” (what in America would be called my “academic advisor”): Gabriel Josipovici. We quickly got to know each other and have remained friends ever since. The Sussex of those days confirmed for me that one did not have to be (only) a specialist, that one could draw inspiration from many sources, refusing to be boxed in to a single discipline or period or language. I still find that the criticism emerging from this openness suits me best. I have recently been rereading with delight Tony Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker—a book by a former Sussex professor that emerges out of precisely what I’d call the “Sussex spirit.”

By multiplying my directions and intellectual investments—this is as true for me of sporting activity (of which I have done a lot)—I tend not to disperse but rather to gain energy. I avoid what I most dread, being bored. I spent a lot of time as a child being bored in classes in which I had absolutely no interest or flair; I vowed to attempt to lead a life in which I would never be bored again. I can honestly say that I’ve virtually achieved that, but only because I’m constantly varying the sort of word-activity I’m doing. Another relevant analogy might be language-learning. There are ways in which learning a new language can interfere with the language(s) one already knows, but in general I’ve found—and I’m surely not the only one—that learning a new language, even if it requires time and energy, pays back doubly, opening a space in the head/brain/sprit that feels and feeds very much like freedom. I am currently learning Bulgarian, and doing this somehow makes the other languages I know vibrate and hum in echo, as if the words of the new language were watering the words grown dry in the languages less practised.

Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, and several of the activities in which I’m involved, such as editing the Cahiers Series or the Letters of Samuel Beckett, are seriously time-consuming. But more important than the time spent is concentration available; and I can only really concentrate when I am excited by what I am doing. Perhaps I am lucky too, in that before I was reading Gabriel Josipovici, my childhood provided earlier models: my mother was always a voracious reader, and though she worked full time (my father having died when I was six years old) and had to raise me and my two older brothers, she would go to the municipal library every week and take out four or five novels; novels which I would then watch her consume. (She is now eighty-six years old, but retains that capacity for concentration that allows her to read a novel in a day.) And though in some ways I loathed my schooling, which was unnecessarily severe, punitive, and even sadistic (I was of the last generation to suffer the full rigours of the British “public school” system, in which being beaten was an everyday reality), it’s blindingly obvious to me, especially since I myself am a teacher, that I learned how to learn at a very young age. The school I attended was intensely academic, and it regularly strikes me how my students are struggling to learn patterns (such as grammar or essay structure) in their early twenties that were being driven into me when I was barely ten years old.

I still haven’t really answered your question, however, about how I allot the time to my various projects. I’m not sure I can do so adequately since this is rather instinctual. Teaching has to come first, since I find it humiliating to teach a class for which I don’t feel thoroughly prepared or to hand back a student’s essay that I have not marked up as completely as I judge to be helpful. (And could it perhaps be that I feel the need, in some barely reachable part of myself, to prove to the ghosts of my own schoolmasters that it is possible to teach in a demanding and informative way without becoming punitive or worse?) After teaching, the other activities somehow find their space and time—though not always simply I must admit. One example: two years ago I was asked by the TLS to review the first two volumes of Marguerite Duras’s Oeuvres complètes which had just come out in the Pléiade edition. I confidently took this on, only to lug these two volumes around with me wherever I went for the following two years, failing completely to get on with the reading, not to speak of the review. I was lucky enough to have an indulgent editor who ceded to my request made earlier this year, to add the final two volumes of the complete works, making up nearly eight thousand pages in total. For some reason this extra load made the task easier for me, and I managed to write my review while we are still in the centenary year of Duras’s birth. I often invoke the wisdom in a remark once made by Muriel Spark, one of my very favourite twentieth-century writers, when in a BBC interview she was asked if she ever had trouble with writer’s block. She said she never did, that she was always delighted to be writing. Her interviewer (John Tusa, I believe) persisted rather incredulously, asking if she really never found herself in trouble when writing her novels. Spark hesitated a moment before admitting that she did occasionally find that her plots became too complex and that as a result she could not find a way forward. “And what do you do then?” asked the interviewer. “Make them more complex.”

At the risk of going on far too long, I have to admit that there is a hierarchy in the writing and editing projects I undertake: not a hierarchy of importance but of difficulty. Here the sporting analogy may be apposite again. For someone who does not train, a run round the block is a challenge, where for one who trains, it is as easy as a stroll. For me, writing fiction is the hardest thing: nobody can indicate how long a story or novel should be, nobody can tell me in what accent or with what tone the characters should speak, nobody can tell me when I’ve written (or edited) enough, and in any case nobody is demanding the novel of me in the first place. Writing fiction is the toughest sort of training. But alongside that, keeping up with Samuel Beckett offers an arduous workout too, for he is surely one of the most intelligent and learned writers, and even to begin to do him justice requires very serious intellectual training, retraining, expansion, investment. If one spends one’s morning trying to write fiction, and one’s afternoon trying to say something about a writer as difficult and important as Beckett, then if one has a few minutes left over in the evening to attend to words in other contexts, one may indeed feel a little like a trained sprinter taking a jog round the block. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Editing Beckett's Letters: An Interview with Dan Gunn
• Lydia Davis on Literary Influence
• Lydia Davis on Translating Madame Bovary
• Dan Gunn on Samuel Beckett's Letters
• The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956

Cormac McCarthy's 'Venomous Fiction'

From a 1992 interview with the American writer

Cormac McCarthy

From Richard B. Woodward (New York Times):

" You know about Mojave rattlesnakes?" Cormac McCarthy asks. The question has come up over lunch in Mesilla, N.M., because the hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America, wants to steer conversation away from himself, and he seems to think that a story about a recent trip he took near the Texas-Mexico border will offer some camouflage. A writer who renders the brutal actions of men in excruciating detail, seldom applying the anesthetic of psychology, McCarthy would much rather orate than confide. And he is the sort of silver-tongued raconteur who relishes peculiar sidetracks; he leans over his plate and fairly croons the particulars in his soft Tennessee accent.

"Mojave rattlesnakes have a neurotoxic poison, almost like a cobra's," he explains, giving a natural-history lesson on the animal's two color phases and its map of distribution in the West. He had come upon the creature while traveling along an empty road in his 1978 Ford pickup near Big Bend National Park. McCarthy doesn't write about places he hasn't visited, and he has made dozens of similar scouting forays to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and across the Rio Grande into Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila. The vast blankness of the Southwest desert served as a metaphor for the nihilistic violence in his last novel, "Blood Meridian," published in 1985. And this unpopulated, scuffed-up terrain again dominates the background in "All the Pretty Horses," which will appear next month from Knopf.

Text: "It's very interesting to see an animal out in the wild that can kill you graveyard dead," he says with a smile. "The only thing I had seen that answered that description was a grizzly bear in Alaska. And that's an odd feeling, because there's no fence, and you know that after he gets tired of chasing marmots he's going to move in some other direction, which could be yours."

Keeping a respectful distance from the rattlesnake, poking it with a stick, he coaxed it into the grass and drove off. Two park rangers he met later that day seemed reluctant to discuss lethal vipers among the backpackers. But another, clearly McCarthy's kind of man, put the matter in perspective. "We don't know how dangerous they are," he said. "We've never had anyone bitten. We just assume you wouldn't survive."

Finished off with one of his twinkly-eyed laughs, this mealtime anecdote has a more jocular tone than McCarthy's venomous fiction, but the same elements are there. The tense encounter in a forbidding landscape, the dark humor in the face of facts, the good chance of a painful quietus. Each of his five previous novels has been marked by intense natural observation, a kind of morbid realism. His characters are often outcasts -- destitute or criminals, or both. Homeless or squatting in hovels without electricity, they scrape by in the backwoods of East Tennessee or on horseback in the dry, vacant spaces of the desert. Death, which announces itself often, reaches down from the open sky, abruptly, with a slashed throat or a bullet in the face. The abyss opens up at any misstep.

McCarthy appreciates wildness -- in animals, landscapes and people -- and although he is a well-born, well-spoken, well-read man of 58 years, he has spent most of his adult life outside the ring of the campfire. It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview. None of his novels have sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. For most of his career, he did not even have an agent.

But among a small fraternity of writers and academics, McCarthy has a standing second to none, far out of proportion to his name recognition or sales. A cult figure with a reputation as a writer's writer, especially in the South and in England, McCarthy has sometimes been compared with Joyce and Faulkner. Saul Bellow, who sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, exclaims over his "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences." Says the historian and novelist Shelby Foote: "McCarthy is the one writer younger than myself who has excited me. I told the MacArthur people that he would be honoring them as much as they were honoring him." [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Cormac McCarthy win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
• Pen, pencil or typewriter?
• Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road
• Picador 40th Anniversary Series
• David Foster Wallace's Annotated Books

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

A new biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont

Philip Roth. Photo: Francois Reumont

From Linda Grant (The Independent):

The curse of the novelist is the question ‘Is it autobiographical?’ Is writing down of the events of one’s own life considered to be more authentic than the exercise of the imagination? Philip Roth must have been plagued more than any other writer with this dumbest of demands. For he writes out of his native Newark, sends his characters to his own high school, makes novelists his narrators, and calls one of his characters Philip Roth. After his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, wrote a tell-all memoir of their marriage, he wrote an answering novel, in which an actress writes a memoir of her failed marriage to a radio star.

Sooner or later there will be a biography. James Atlas has already crawled all over Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz and we are bound to hear the laments of Roth’s many ex-girlfriends and perhaps the children of his first wife, as well as friends and editors. Yet a new book, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, by Claudia Roth Pierpont (no relation, literary Roths are legion – Joseph, Henry, Philip) binds the books to the man not by mining them for nuggets of autobiographical information but by talking to Roth himself about what he put into them, by which she doesn’t mean the facts, but the territory of imagination and self that creates fiction.

Pierpont met Roth in 2002. A couple of years later she received a letter from him responding to a New Yorker article she had written. Roth, it turns out, has a habit of writing to the authors of writing he admires. This impulse led fortuitously to a series of meetings and eventually the idea for a book which began after he had completed Nemesis and announced his retirement. It has grown out of conversations with him and research in his personal files in the attic of his Connecticut house. Unlike a biographer, she has not interviewed other sources. Like a critic, she has made her own judgements about the work. What emerges is his charm – he has certainly charmed her. “He loves to listen: he’s as funny as you might think from his books, but he makes the people around him feel funny too – he may be the easiest laugher I’ve ever met.” [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth
• Where to start with Philip Roth?
• Philip Roth on reading fiction
• Philip Roth's Reading Habits
• Television Interview with Philip Roth (2010)

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

David Denby on Fyodor Dostoyevsky

'Can Dostoevsky still kick you in the gut?'

Source

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

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

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

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

Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples

Lars Iyer picks his favourite literary 'frenemies'

Ian McKellen and Roger Rees as Estragon and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Photo by Sasha Gusov

Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, Dogma and two books on Maurice Blanchot, names his favourite literary 'frenemies'. He choice picks a number of classic antagonistic couples from the works of Samuel Beckett, Cervantes, Thomas Bernhard, D. H. Lawrence, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Mann, Patricia Highsmith, and Saul Bellow, to name just a few. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Writers: J. G. Ballard
• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Writers: Thomas Bernhard
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Literature and Shoplifting

Tracing a cultural tradition

I've 'handpicked' this story from Maud Newton's blog. In a review of Rachel Shteir's The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting, Dwight Garner notes several examples of the practice in literary works, including those by Jack Kerouac, Daniel Defoe, and Saul Bellow [Read More]

Philip Roth: Man Booker International Interview

30 Minute Interview with the American novelist

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Philip Roth

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

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

Joy Division, 'She's Lost Control'/'Atmosphere' single. Art direction: Peter Saville.

Literature:

100 Notable Books of 2010: An annual round-up from the New York Times

Margaret Atwood: 'Human creativity is not confined to just a few areas of life. The techno-scientific world has some of the most creative people you'll ever meet.'
Robert McCrum interviews Atwood in The Observer

Irish Company: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: Friedhelm Rathjen embarks on a cycling tour of Ireland in search of his literary heroes

James Joyce's burnt kidney breakfast: A selection of quotations from Ulysses, compiled by Biblioklept.

William S. Burroughs: Dangerous Minds compiles a number of biographical sources on Burroughs' collaboration with Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain

Saul Bellow: 'Of course, readers of Bellow will plunge into these letters eager to trace the making of a writer, and in this they will not be disappointed.' John Banville reviews Saul Bellow's Letters in The Observer

Philip K. Dick: A map of Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High Castle

Norman Mailer: The New York Times profiles Norris Church Mailer, 'artist and ally' of the American novelist, who passed away recently

Paul Celan: Ian Pindar celebrates the German poet on what would have been his 90th birthday

Patti Smith: Musician reflects on winning National Book Award for Just Kids, a non-fiction work based on her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe

Tom Waits: The Guardian reports that the American musician is planning to publish a collection of his poetry. Hard Ground will be published by University of Texas Press in March 2011.

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Assuming Gender: This year's annual lecture is by Professor Mandy Merck, entitled 'The Question of Caster Semenya: Gender and the Level Playing Field'. 01 December from 4.30 at Cardiff University. Free to attend.

Noam Chomsky: Chomsky is due to speak at Cardiff University on 11 March 2011. More details to be confirmed.

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: The Guardian reviews Michael Lawrence's production, Krapp, 39, inspired by Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape

Franz Kafka: Two British comedians, Tom Basden and Tim Key, star in Joseph K., a darkly comic adaptation of Kafka's The Trial

Music

David Bowie: BBC's 1975 Omnibus documentary, Cracked Actor, available online

Joy Division: Peter Saville and Studio Parris Wakefield's beautiful design work for the Joy Division back catalogue

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

Saul Bellow, Letters

John Banville on the correspondence of a great American novelist

Saul Bellow, Letters,
edited by Benjamin Taylor

John Banville reviews Saul Bellow's Letters in The Guardian: 'Of course, readers of Bellow will plunge into these letters eager to trace the making of a writer, and in this they will not be disappointed. Bellow was one of those artists who find themselves and their gift puzzling and worrisome. Early on, in 1941, while still in Flaubertian mode, he wonders if "maybe it is wrong to be too painstakingly careful and perhaps I might have been in print long ago but for that scrupulous observance of standards", and a lifetime later, in 1995, writing to thank Amis for his Everyman introduction to Augie March, he is still full of misgiving, that early book seeming to him now "one of those stormy, formless American phenomena – like action painting".' [Read more]

Source: John Banville, 'Saul Bellow: Letters', in The Guardian, 20 November 2010

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: J. M. Coetzee, John Banville, John Minihan, Simon Critchley, John Calder all to attend Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive in June 2011
James Joyce: Wake in Progress: A new project that will attempt to illustrate James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
Gabriel Josipovici: The Millions reviews What Ever Happened to Modernism?
Paul Auster: 2003 interview with The Paris Review
Paul Auster: Review of The Red Notebook
Franz Kafka: Letter to the New York Times critiques Elif Batuman's portrait of Kafka
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethe's death mask
Philip Larkin: Review of Letters to Monica
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A. S. Byatt on Demons and political activism
State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico: Event to include readings from Paul Auster and Don DeLillo
Not the Booker Prize: Congratulations to the winners: Lee Rourke and Matthew Hooton
Marilyn Monroe's Reading Habits: New book, Fragments, includes references to Beckett, Conrad, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Camus, Ellison and more
Michael Dirda's favourite literary essayist
Saul Bellow: Rachel Cooke talks to Bellow's widow about the American writer, and also touches upon a collection of correspondence that includes John Cheever, Philip Roth and Martin Amis
William S. Burroughs shoots William Shakespeare

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

William Shakespeare: Cardiff Shakespeare launches publications page
Bible:  Review of Gordon Campbell's Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011

Art & Design:

Francis Bacon: Painting of cricketer to be auctioned in New York

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

Saul Bellow, Letters

Literature:

Will Self: This month's Featured Artist on A Piece of Monologue
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethe's Light
Paul Celan: Stephen Mitchelmore on the Bachmann/Celan correspondence
Saul Bellow: Letters, to be published 04 November 2010
J. M. Coetzee: Nobel Prize Lecture
10 Classic Stories of Suburban Ennui
Bret Easton Ellis: Interview with AskMen
Apocalypse in Literature and Film
Chick Lit: NPR discusses the genre
Thomas Bernhard: A guide to the complete English translations of Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard/Thomas Mann
Barney Rosset: Obscene, a documentary on Rosset and Grove Press
Paul Auster: An excerpt from Auster's forthcoming novel, Sunset Park

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Samuel Beckett: Online academic journal sends call for papers on Beckett and cliché
Sigmund Freud: One-day conference at the Anna Freud Centre: Psychoanalysis and Surrealism in the digital age
David Lynch: Video footage now available of the Mapping the Lost Highway Conference

Theatre

Thomas Bernhard: Canadian production of Ritter, Dene, Voss

Film & Television:

David Lynch: Video footage now available of the Mapping the Lost Highway Conference
Twin Peaks Weekender: 30 hour marathon of every episode at Battersea Arts Centre, London
Watch Chris Petit's Radio On free online
Barney Rosset: Obscene, a documentary on Rosset and Grove Press

Art, Design & Photography:

Stanley Donwood: San Francisco exhibition, 2010
Caspar David Friedrich: A short extract from Joseph Leo Koerner's The Subject of Landscape
40+ Stunning Minimalist Book Covers
Vincent van Gogh: Painting recovered after being stolen from Cairo museum
Visual Editions

Etc.

Will Self: Bigness and Littleness

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