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Tag Archives: literature
Uncovering Céline
by Wyatt Mason
from The New York Review of Books
1.
Louis-Ferdinand Destouches met Cillie Pam in Paris, at the Café de la Paix, in September 1932. Destouches was a physician who worked at a public clinic in Clichy treating poor and working-class patients; Pam was a twenty-seven-year-old Viennese gymnastics instructor eleven years his junior on a visit [...]
Posted in articles, history, literature Also tagged biography, celine, cillie pam, concentration camps, london review of books Leave a comment
Interview: Martin Amis
by James Knight
from Vice Magazine
Martin Amis is one of the great writers of contemporary fiction. Even if he’d given up putting pen to paper after his third novel, Money, this would be an irrefutable fact. Period. Sorry. He writes grippingly of ugly characters consuming for the sake of consumption, blind to their own greed. His [...]
Ben-Hur: The Book That Shook the World
by Amy Lifson
from Humanities
“Hate keeps a man alive.”
Those famous words do not actually appear in the original 1880 novel Ben-Hur by General Lew Wallace. Karl Tunberg, or more likely Christopher Fry or Gore Vidal (there was a dispute over the screenplay credit), gave that line to Roman patrician Quintus Arrius as he confronted the magnificent, [...]
Eelworks
by Seamus Heaney
from Times Online
i
To win the hand of the princess
what tasks the youngest son
had to perform.
For me, the first to come a-courting
in the fish factor’s house,
it was to eat with them
an eel supper.
ii
Cut of diesel oil in evening air,
tractor engines in the clinker-built
deep-bellied boats,
landlubbers’ craft,
heavy in water
as a cow down in a drain,
the men [...]
Speak, Nabokov
by Michael Maar
from n+1
Playboy supposedly paid the highest advance in its history for the right to serialize the work. The offer was made sight unseen. One would rather not imagine the long faces when Laura finally lays bare her scant charms.
For thirty years there were whispers about Laura. The manuscript that the dying author in [...]
Posted in articles, literature Also tagged laura, nabokov, post-humous publication, unfinished novel Leave a comment
Night Mail
This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent [...]
The Critic's Critic
by Harold Bloom
from The New York Times
It has been three centuries since Dr. Johnson was born, on Sept. 7, 1709. He died on Dec. 13, 1784, still struggling for the mixed blessing of more life. His Falstaffian vitalism is always my first thought when I reread, teach again or continue brooding upon the canonical critic [...]
Ayn Rand: The perverse allure of a damaged woman
by Johann Hari
from Slate
Ayn Rand is one of America’s great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that “the masses”—her readers—were “lice” and “parasites” who [...]
Posted in articles, comment/analysis, literature Also tagged ayn rand, biography, philosophy Leave a comment
Slavoj Žižek / Pordenonelegge Literary Festival 2009
Slavoj Žižek in conversation with Pierpaolo Antonello at the 2009 edition of ‘Pordenonelegge’, a Literary Festival held in Pordenone, Italy. September 2009.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bojWw-KfDW4&feature=PlayList&p=70B140E03A8C4EBD&index=0&playnext=1]
Posted in comment/analysis, current affairs, literature, philosophy, politics, videos Also tagged peirpaolo antonello, philosophy, zizek Leave a comment
The Rise of the Neuronovel
by Marco Roth
from n+1
The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein [...]
Posted in comment/analysis, literature Also tagged art and science, genetics, neurobiology, pasychology, psychiatric syndromes in literature Leave a comment
A Dry Black Veil
by Brian Dilon
from Cabinet
By the last decades of the nineteenth century, an obscuring perplex of ideas regarding dust hung above the inhabitants of the European city like overlapping clouds, variously threatening or inspiring with the weight of knowledge, quantity of filth, or degree of infection they contained. London, especially—having only lately escaped a mid-century cholera [...]
American Centaur: An Interview with John Updike
From THE NEW YORKER
On October 21, 1978, John Updike was in Zagreb, Croatia, at the invitation of the Writers’ Association of Croatia and the American Information Center. In the afternoon, he gave a lengthy interview to Zvonimir Radeljkovi? and Omer Hadžiselimovi?, professors of English who specialized in American literature at the University of Sarajevo. In [...]
From a Notebook that Never Was
by Fernando Pesoafrom the POETRY FOUNDATION
I always acted on the inside . . . I never touched life . . . Whenever I began to trace an action, I finished it in my dreams, heroically . . . A sword weighs more than the idea of a sword . . . I commanded large armies, [...]
Holywood Today: Report from an Ideological Frontline
by Slavoj Žižekfrom LACAN.COM
Ideology in Hollywood? Let’s begin, quite arbitrarily, with Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001, scenario by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris), which takes place in 1943, among the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park working day and night to crack the German “Enigma” code. They are rejoined by Tom Jericho, a troubled [...]
Posted in art, articles, philosophy, politics Also tagged book-to-film, enigma, hollywood, michael apted, robert harris, zizek Leave a comment
2009 Nobel Prize for Literature
from GRANTA
Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist, has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Müller, fifty-six, is internationally renowned for her portrayal of life under dictatorship. Announcing the 2009 award, the Swedish Academy praised Müller, ‘who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed’.
Müller’s [...]
Baudrillard Recites His Poetry!
Unbelievable but true! Baudrillard recites his poetry backed up by an all star band featuring Tom Watson, Mike Kelley, George Hurley, Lynn Johnston, Dave Muller and Amy Stoll, special guest vocalist Allucquère Rosanne Stone. Recorded live as part of the Chance Festival at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in Stateline Nevada, 1996. You’ve never heard Baudrillard like [...]
Vladimir Nabokov discusses Lolita
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA&hl=en&fs=1&]
When Writers Speak
by Arthur Krystalfrom THE NEW YORK TIMES
That’s Vladimir Nabokov on my computer screen, looking both dapper and disheveled. He’s wearing a suit and a multibuttoned vest that scrunches the top of his tie, making it poke out of his shirt like an old-fashioned cravat. Large, lumpish, delicate and black-spectacled, he’s perched on a couch alongside [...]
Posted in articles, comment/analysis, literature Also tagged nabokov, new york times Leave a comment
What Matters
by Walter Benn Michaelsfrom the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKSIn the US, there is (or was) an organisation called Love Makes a Family. It was founded in 1999 to support the right of gay couples to adopt children and it played a central role in supporting civil unions. A few months ago, its director, Ann Stanback, [...]
Posted in articles, comment/analysis, philosophy, politics Also tagged london review of books, politics, racism, us Leave a comment
Wanting to Be Something Else