Inside The Paris Review: NYC Offices

Two photographers take a look around the iconic literary journal

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

From Lena Dystant (Selectism):

Part of the “Where They Create” project, photographer Paul Barbera goes inside the offices of legendary literary journal, The Paris Review. 208 issues on from its first in 1953, the magazine was orginally produced by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton, Americans in Paris, the opening statement reading "The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines…" Featuring interviews and work from the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner, Ezra Pound, V. S. Naipaul, Joan Didion and Truman Capote, the magazine continues to introduce the work of new writers and reevaluate established names. More in our gallery, for the full set of images head here and read an interview with current editor Lorin Stein here. [Read More]

From Claudine Ko (Refinery 29):

In New York City's esteemed literary world, there are parties, and then there are The Paris Review parties. Indeed, as long as the quarterly journal has garnered respect for discovering new writing talent — Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, and David Foster Wallace, to name a few — it's also been known for its all-night, booze-flowing soirées where society and the counterculture drink from the same bottle of whiskey.

“It’s always been two things at once,” says editor Lorin Stein. “On the one hand, it’s a hyper-sophisticated, modernist, avant-garde magazine. On the other hand, it’s sort of a destination party.” And over the decades, the 60-year-old publication has continually attracted an eclectic crowd, from Jackie O, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, to more recently, Zadie Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, and the editors of Vice. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Self interviewed in The Paris Review
• Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Other Side of the Face
• Homes of German Philosophers
• Don DeLillo on researching Libra
• Toni Morrison's Writing Routine

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

50 Tough Books for Extreme Readers

Why read a 'difficult' book?

Alexander Deineka, 'Young Woman Reading' (1934)

Emily Temple (Flavorwire) has compiled a list of '50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers'. Their toughness varies from the sheer bulk of the volume (eg. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Stein's The Making of Americans), to their stylistic virtuosity (Finnegans Wake, anyone?). But despite their daunting reputations, there can be something special about reading a 'difficult' book.

Such novels can prompt a unique kind of reader interaction, making us rethink the way we look at the world around us. These are often the sort of books that aim to elevate the everyday, or shed light on issues that society tends to overlook. What we find 'tough' or 'challenging' is often simply unfamiliar, or different to what we might usually expect. What turns our noses to the air in a modernist novel is often its attempt to capture life as it really is: a character speaking in a local dialect, or the disjointed structure of a daydream. In these and other cases, what is difficult is not the book itself, but our decision as readers to go with it.

There are books that we consume, and sometimes there are books that consume us - novels, poems and plays which perpetually pull us back to them. As the filmmaker David Cronenberg once said of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, 'You find your favorite parts, like the I Ching. You look in it when you need it, and you find something there.' Temple has charted a wonderful selection of just this kind of book. Here are just a few of them:

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes (Amazon: US | UK)
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (Amazon: US | UK)
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (Amazon: US | UK)
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (Amazon: US | UK)
J R, William Gaddis (Amazon: US | UK)
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (Amazon: US | UK)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (Amazon: US | UK)
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (Amazon: US | UK)
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (Amazon: US | UK)
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (Amazon: US | UK)
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein (Amazon: US | UK)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (Amazon: US | UK)
2666, Roberto Bolaño (Amazon: US | UK)
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (Amazon: US | UK)
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (Amazon: US | UK)
Underworld, Don DeLillo (Amazon: US | UK)
The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson (Amazon: US | UK)
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis (Amazon: US | UK)
The Tunnel, William Gass (Amazon: US | UK)
Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (Amazon: US | UK)
The Castle, Franz Kafka (Amazon: US | UK)
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Amazon: US | UK)

[Read the Full List]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Man Ray: Photographs of Virginia Woolf
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

An NYRB Classics Original, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven

We Have Only This Life to Live: 
The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

From NYRB:

Jean-Paul Sartre was a man of staggering gifts, whose accomplishments as philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist still command attention and inspire debate. Sartre’s restless intelligence may have found its most characteristic outlet in the open-ended form of the essay. For Sartre the essay was an essentially dramatic form, the record of an encounter, the framing of a choice. Whether writing about literature, art, politics, or his own life, he seizes our attention and drives us to grapple with the living issues that are at stake.

We Have Only This Life to Live is the first gathering of Sartre’s essays in English to draw on all ten volumes of Situations, the title under which Sartre collected his essays during his life, while also featuring previously uncollected work, including the reports Sartre filed during his 1945 trip to America. Here Sartre writes about Faulkner, Bataille, Giacometti, Fanon, the liberation of France, torture in Algeria, existentialism and Marxism, friends lost and found, and much else. We Have Only This Life to Live provides an indispensable, panoramic view of the world of Jean-Paul Sartre. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York
• Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• On Albert Camus

Bret Easton Ellis talks to Matthew Specktor

An interview for Salon.com

Bret Easton Ellis (left) and Matthew Specktor (right)

From Salon.com:

Matthew Specktor and Bret Easton Ellis have known one another for 20 years. Neither of them can remember how they met. “I think it was at the Bowery Bar in New York,” Specktor says. “But that could just be a mathematical probability.”

Approximate generational peers, Ellis grew up in Sherman Oaks, Specktor in Santa Monica. These were two different versions of the same city. On a recent Friday night they sat down at the Polo Lounge, a Beverly Hills landmark that seemed as good a place as any for the two writers to drink martinis (Hendricks gin, with cucumbers) and talk about Los Angeles, writing, Twitter and Specktor’s new book, “American Dream Machine.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bret Easton Ellis talks to NUVO Magazine
• Schrader and Ellis to collaborate on The Canyons (2013)
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

Author Outlines for Famous Books

An online gallery by Flavorwire

Joseph Heller's intricate outline for Catch-22

From Flavorwire: ‘Writing a novel (or a story, for that matter) is confusing work. There are just so many characters running all over the place, dropping hints and having revelations. So it’s no surprise that many authors plan out their works beforehand, in chart or list or scribble form, in order to keep everything straight. After the jump, you’ll find a mini collection of those planning papers, so you can take a peek into the process of some of your favorite authors, from James Salter to J.K. Rowling’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Writers' Rooms: Siri Hustvedt
• Writers' Rooms: Virginia Woolf
• J.G. Ballard Manuscripts at British Library
• Watt: Samuel Beckett's Wartime Manuscripts

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York

Andy Martin on existentialists in America

Jean-Paul Sartre (left) and Albert Camus (right)

From The Opinionator in The New York Times: 'In December 1944, Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job of American correspondent. Perhaps, in light of the perpetual tension and subsequent acrimonious split between the two men, he was glad to get him out of Paris. What is certain is that Sartre was delighted to go. He’d had enough of the austerities and hypocrisies of post-liberation France and had long fantasized about the United States. Camus himself would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• On Albert Camus

Writers' Bedrooms

Bedrooms of famous writers, past and present

William Faulkner's bedroom

Apartment Therapy has posted photographs of the bedrooms of famous writers, including William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Sylvia Plath, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Victor Hugo (link via Jennifer Dawn Whitney) [See More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers' Rooms: Virginia Woolf
• Writers' Rooms: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Writers' Rooms: Siri Hustvedt
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama

American novelist interviewed on the Charlie Rose show in 1999

Bret Easton Ellis. Photograph: Source

A conversation with author Bret Easton Ellis about his book Glamorama, which explores the subjects of fashion and terror. He also discusses his development and influences as a young writer and the significance of his family in his life. [Watch the interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

Samuel Beckett's Reading List 1941-1956

Online blog compiles a list of the texts Beckett found interesting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crooked House by Agatha Christie: “very tired Christie”

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

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

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

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

Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux

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

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

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

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

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

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

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

Tom McCarthy in Praise of Freud

On the connection between psychoanalysis and literature

Tom McCarthy

3:AM Magazine has posted an extract from Tom McCarthy's essay, 'Against Psychology — in Praise of Freud': 'Literature, in short, is not made up of ‘characters’: it understands that existence, whether individual or collective, is formed and unformed within networks of language and ceremony, spread across topographies whose axes, or gravitational force-fields, are law, pleasure and mortality, subject to the exigencies of topography itself. As such, it offers, at its deepest, neither commentary nor entertainment; rather, it is the very source-code of our being, index of its contingencies. Freud understands this too, of course, and directly articulates it more brilliantly and systematically than anyone before or since. Which is why psychoanalysis, and not psychology, can lay claim to an intense, perhaps even an incestuous, relationship with literature' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Calling All Agents: Tom McCarthy Symposium
• Is Tom McCarthy a Modernist Writer?
• Sigmund Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher
• Freud and Global Economic Collapse
• Ballard: 'Freud was a born storyteller'

Top 11 Existentialist Novels?

Literary classics of angst, ennui and despair

Still from Orson Welles' 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial

Flavorwire lists their top 11 existentialist novels:

• Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• André Gide, The Immoralist
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• Franz Kafka, The Trial
• William Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes
• Albert Camus, The Stranger
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
• Margery Williams, The Velveteen rabbit

[Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• William Faulkner on Writers and their Work

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]

Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett

Flavorwire lists their top ten literary mentorships

James Joyce (left) and Samuel Beckett (right)

Flavorwire select their top ten literary mentorships, including Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates and more. This is what they have to say about James Joyce and Samuel Beckett:

After being introduced by a mutual colleague, Samuel Beckett befriended the renowned Ulysses author and served as his assistant on research for what would later become Finnegans Wake. Beckett was displeased, however, by how much his writing was reminiscent of Joyce. In a letter to him, Beckett observes about an early poem, “Of course it stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavors to endow it with my own colors.” This led the celebrated playwright to find a literary voice by creating one in opposition to his mentor’s. “James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could,” Beckett once said. “I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” [Read more]

Kirthana Ramisetti, 'A History of Famous Literary Mentorships'

Flavorwire, 19 January 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Joycean Literature: Literature & Poetry 1910-2010
• James Joyce: Death and Wake
• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Re Joyce

Afromodernisms 2

What’s really new? Blackness and Atlantic Modernism, 1907–61

Afromodernisms 2
What’s really new? Blackness and Atlantic Modernism, 1907–61
30 June - 2 July 2011

Symposium: University of Liverpool, UK

About the Symposium

Confirmed Keynotes: Professor Tyler Stovall, University of California, Berkeley

Afromodernisms 2 focuses on the relationship between the Afro-Atlantic and the modernist canon. Specifically, the symposium seeks to address the ways in which current configurations of modernism—the art and literature of the new—may be inflected, expanded, or even called into question by either localized or transnational Africanist interventions into the politics and culture of the first half of the twentieth century.

Call for Papers

What constitutes a ‘modernist’ response to the experience of the modern? What categories underpin the aesthetic category ‘modernism’? How might emphasis on black diapora subject positions, representations, and artistic and political interventions, inflect current canonical configurations of modernism? To what extent might black feminist positions revise or even reject the totalizing tendencies of the male voice in canonical works of black modernism, for example, Négritude?

Themes and Topics

The aims of the conference are the following:

• to debate the tenets of modernism (its newness, breaks with tradition, interest in the exotic and the primitive, its sense of fragmentation and displacement, and the way it conceives of the individual subject) in two contexts: first in terms of the work produced by African diaspora artists and writers; second, in relation to the symbolic presence of representations of blackness in the work of Anglo-American, Caribbean and European modernists.

• to consider the degree to which a variety of actors operating from what might be termed ‘alternative’ or ‘displaced’ metropoles interacted to produce, in Jameson’s terms, an ‘active sense’ of the history of modernity, one in which a black presence was of key aesthetic, political and cultural importance.

• to expand Perry Anderson’s claim, directed primarily at European modernist movements, that one of the indispensible co-ordinates for locating modernism is its ‘proximity to social revolution,’ to include a range of Afro-Atlantic revolutionary positions. We therefore welcome papers that consider the range of anti-colonial and/or feminist responses to the experience of modernity operating across the Atlantic in the inter- and post-war years.

• to reconsider the emergence of literary and artistic avant-gardes in the context of black anti-colonial, feminist, and (pan)nationalist movements, the two world wars, and, in the interwar period, against the backdrop of fascism and communism.

Individual papers and proposals for panels, in English, are invited, addressing, but not limited to the following circumatlantic themes:

• Gender
• Black performance/performance of blackness
• blackness and/in visual art
• modernism and primitivism
• modernist landscapes and/or the city
• science, technology and the machine
• narrative, subjectivity, psychoanalysis
• the politics of history
• blackness and genre
• island modernisms (e.g. Antillean, Irish, Cape Verdian)
• tradition and experimentation
• modernism, politics and the metropole (Paris, London, Mexico, Dublin, Marseille, Berlin, Hamburg, Moscow, DC, New York)
• modernist soundscapes
• black writers/artists in/and Europe
• modernism and ideology
• modernism and the canon, including the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, and Paris Noir
• formal innovation/ the language of modernism
• informal networks
• the work of ‘high’ and not-so-high modernists, for example, Eliot,
• Faulkner, McKay, Beckett, Pound, Stevens, Williams, Hughes,  Joyce, Hurston
• responses to revolution: Easter 1916, November 1918, Spain 1936

Submissions

For individual papers, please send a working title, abstract of 250–350 words, and a biographical note to: Fionnghuala Sweeney: fsweeney@liv.ac.uk or Kate Marsh: clmarsh@liv.ac.uk

Proposal for panels should contain a panel title, working titles for individual papers, with individual abstracts of 250 words each, and brief biographical notes on the chair and/or speakers to: Fionnghuala Sweeney: fsweeney@liv.ac.uk or Kate Marsh: clmarsh@liv.ac.uk.

Proposals on teaching and curating are also welcomed, as are offers to act as chair or respondent.

Deadline for Submissions: 11 April, 2011.

Literature & Philosophy Desktop Wallpapers

Philosophical and literary quotes for your desktop

What follows is a small selection of the desktop wallpapers available at Sentense.me, a website devoted to quotations from writers, philosophers, musicians, artists and celebrities:

 

Mad Men Summer Reading List

Flavorwire compiles your literary guide to the AMC show

Flavorwire has compiled a definitive summer reading list in honour of AMC's 1960s television series, Mad Men.

Season One

• The Best of Everything — Rona Jaffe (1958)
• Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
• Exodus — Leon Uris (1958)
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
• Babylon Revisited and Other Stories — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Season Two

• The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner (1929)
• Meditations in an Emergency — Frank O’Hara (1957)
• Ship of Fools — Katherine Ann Porter (1962)
• The Agony and the Ecstasy — Irving Stone (1961)

Season Three

• Confessions of an Advertising Man — David Ogilvy (1963)
• The Group — Mary McCarthy (1963)
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Edward Gibbon (1776-1789)

Read the article: Judy Berman, 'The Definitive Mad Men Summer Reading List', Flavorwire, 22 July 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Don DeLillo on Mad Men and Writing

Disjecta: This week's links

Promotional poster for Howl (2010)

Literature:

Philip Roth: This month's Featured Artist on A Piece of Monologue
Philip Roth: Your very own Philip Roth Desktop Wallpaper! Imagine that
Philip Roth: On Suicide and the Stage
Good Morning, Philip Roth! An extract from Portnoy's Complaint
Franz Kafka: Safety Deposit Boxes containing documents by Kafka and Max Brod to be opened
Susan Sontag: Audio interview (2000) with Robert Stone and William Styron
Will Self and Martin Amis at the Shakespeare & Co. Festival
James Joyce: Mills Baker on the Irish writer's daughter, Lucia Joyce
Allen Ginsberg: New trailer for Howl, a film about Ginsberg and the Beat Generation
William Faulkner: An audio archive with transcripts of Faulkner's audience sessions in Virginia
The Lure of Writers' Houses
The Art of Slow Reading
Don DeLillo: Granta publishes 'At Yankee Stadium' to read online
The Bookcase You'll Want to Live In
Who Do You Write Like?
Sylvia Plath: The Bed Book, a book for children
Penguin Books 75: A Q&A with Paul Buckley and Christopher Brand
Thomas Bernhard: Four new Bernhard books to be published in English for the first time

Philosophy:

Sigmund Freud on the BBC

Music

Manic Street Preachers: New book, Richard: The Life and Disappearance of Richey Edwards

Theatre

Samuel Beckett: French Culture Broadcasts of Beckett's work

Film & Television:

Seinfeld: Lessons and Hugs. Spoof trailer for George
David Lynch: Lynch and Danger Mouse give audio interview
Andrei Tarkovsky: Films now available to watch free online

Art:

Harvey Pekar 1939-2010: Reviews and clips from Pekar's life and career
Harvey Pekar 1939-2010: Los Angeles Times reports the passing of Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar 1939-2010: The Guardian notes the passing of the American Splendor creator
Robert Crumb: R. Crumb's Depression Graph

Etc.

Will Self on The Daily Mail

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

Disjecta: This week's links

Artist Tony Lee Jnr reimagines Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

Literature:

Philip Larkin: As the Larkin25 festival begins, Rachel Cooke explores the private life of the problematic poet
William Faulkner: Designer Tony Lee Jr reimagines Faulkner's novel, As I Lay Dying
Harper Lee: Author grants rare interview to The Mail on Sunday
Samuel Beckett on Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka on Loneliness
J. M. Coetzee: The Guardian reports that Coetzee has smiled in public. News indeed.
J. M. Coetzee: Coetzee scholar David Attwell interviews the writer about his work and influences
Beryl Bainbridge 1934-2010

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David Attwell interviews J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee scholar discusses literature with the Nobel winner

David Attwell interviews South African writer J. M. Coetzee, soon after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, who discusses his influences and his work:

David Attwell: I would like to ask something about the literary life. Since Doubling the Point, you have both written (and written about) autobiography. In one of the less well-known of these pieces, "Homage," published in The Threepenny Review a decade ago, you write about the influence of Rilke, Musil, Pound, Faulkner, Ford Madox Ford, and Beckett. An unusual collection of names, not recognisable as a general canon, but they seem to be a personal canon of some kind. What is striking, though, is the almost visceral relationship you have to these influences, if I may put it that way. "The deepest lessons one learns from other writers," you say, "are, I suspect, matters of rhythm, broadly conceived." And later, you say, it is not "ideas" that one picks up from other writers, but (I simplify here) style: "a style, an attitude to the world, [which] as it soaks in, becomes part of the personality, part of the self, ultimately indistinguishable from the self." Is a canon, then, properly conceived, more than a handy bag of sources - it is, rather, a mode of living?

J. M. Coetzee: The article you refer to is a fairly hastily written piece, the text of a public lecture given in the days when I still did that kind of thing. I dont believe it will bear close interrogation. For one thing, the "influences" I list are not of the same order. The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint. In the case of Musil, for example, it was certainly not The Man without Qualities that influenced me as a young man but the earlier, lusher stories. In the case of Beckett, it was the work pre 1952 rather than the work post 1952.

There is a further complication that I dont believe I saw at the time when I was preparing the piece. There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind. I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.

Bearing these caveats in mind, and others that it is too boring to spell out, and turning to your question, I would say that in ones canon (to use that term for the moment, which I do without pleasure, since it is overworked nowadays) one does find a style of response to experience - or (a more sceptical way of putting it) ways of confirming ones responses to experience.

[...]

David Attwell: Within the great expanse of European history you describe, if I may say so, the aesthetics of the early to mid-twentieth century seem to have been especially influential. And for those who follow what you have achieved with this heritage - "modernism," "late modernism," "European modernism" are also unsatisfactory labels, but I will use them as a kind of short-hand - you have contributed your own distinctive mark, perhaps in part because of where you have done much of your writing. South Africa, for example, seems to have brought out degrees of suffering, a sense of the body in history, that is remarkable in your work. Another example would be your particular account of what it means (ethically, and aesthetically) to live with difference, or alterity. In this respect, your writing is more challenging than the traditions sometimes conventional take on human failures of communication. There are, of course, many other achievements, and it seems to me that the Swedish Academy has rightly observed and affirmed them.

J. M. Coetzee: It is not for me to comment on the word of the Swedish Academy. But, since you quite correctly mentioned Samuel Beckett as a formative influence on my writing, let me say something about Beckett. Beckett can certainly be called a high modernist or even a proto-postmodernist. Beckett was an Irishman and a European with no African connections at all. Yet in the hands of a dramatist of the sensitivity and skill of Athol Fugard, Beckett can be transplanted into South African surroundings in such a way that he seems almost native there. What does this show? That the history of the arts is a history of unceasing cross-fertilization across fences and boundaries.

David Attwell: There is a line of self-doubt in the central figure of your latest work, Elizabeth Costello, which culminates in the postscript to the volume, the "Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon." This text is based on Hugo von Hoffmansthals famous Chandos letter, in which he rejects the aestheticism of his own earlier lyric poetry. More deeply, Hoffmansthals letter is anguished over a loss of faith in language itself and its ability to unite us to a world of meaningful objects. Elizabeths letter positions her in the same sense of crisis - even catastrophe, since the date you choose for her missive is September 11th (1603)! She leaves the text, in other words, in a state of self-repudiation. Is she saying that the literary life does not, after all, provide release, or relief, for the "extreme soul"?

J. M. Coetzee: I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction. If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction? Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?

As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.

Turning to the question of what way of life is best for "the extreme soul," I would say that what you call "the literary life," or any other way of life that provides means for interrogation of our existence - in the case of the writer fantasy, symbolization, storytelling - seems to me a good life - good in the sense of being ethically responsible.

An exclusive interview with J M Coetzee

Dn.se, 12 August 2003

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• Coetzee's Summertime: A Disembodied Man
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• J. M. Coetzee on Beckett's Letters
• Quiet, Discreet: J. M. Coetzee's Youth