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Letters from Beckett

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:39:46 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

But that makes the letters of these years all the more precious. Beckett, by all accounts, was the most courteous of men, and it seems that even at the height of his fame he still tried to answer as courteously as he could the hundreds of letters he received. But the sixty-year-old smiling (or, more often, in the photos we have of him, scowling) public man now knew exactly where his priorities lay: after spending the mornings on his correspondence he would devote the afternoons to his own writing. In the 1930s, however, there was no public man, and we have to see the letters as merely one of many ways in which an ambitious, confused and tormented young writer attempted to discover who he was and what it was he wanted out of life and art. These early letters, in other words, are, like the early poems and stories, in the strict sense essais, the trying out of a voice, a tone, even, at times, another language.

Why Eastern Europe is so different from the West

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:17:48 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: www.signandsight.com

There's an online interview with Czech writer Jachym Topol, who's surprised that Eastern Europe is still so different from the West, twenty years after the Soviet collapse: "Take the subway ticket inspection, for example. Here in Berlin, all the people just show their tickets. In Prague, this would be inconceivable; there, the people intentionally rummage around in their pockets in as laborious and protracted a manner as possible because the inspector, as the representative of a public institution, is viewed as the enemy - and so it's valid to hold him up for as long as possible to give the fare dodgers time to get out of the carriage... A second phenomenon I hadn't counted on in 1989 is the fact that many Communist crimes have still not been atoned for after twenty years - the perpetrators have not been punished."

What We Deny

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:38:42 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: www.litkicks.com

I also find it inexplicable that we continue to romanticize and rhapsodize about the European Jewish Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s as if it were unique when in fact genocide is so prevalent, so common, so cheap around us. For instance, a vicious, carefully orchestrated holocaust rages in the Sudan right now, as we blog, as we twitter. Reviewers of Jonathan Littell's novel talk about the murder of children and grandmothers, but communities including children and grandmothers are being ground into nonexistence today in Darfur, and very few people seem to think anything can be done about it.

It's ironic that the Holocaust has become such a cottage industry -- shelves in bookstores, museums in cities around the world -- even as "holocaust denial" grows into its own odious cottage industry, taking root from the Vatican to Iran.

The Rehabilitation of Stalin

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:31:21 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

The Kremlin has been actively for the rehabilitation of Stalin. Its aim is not to deny Stalin's crimes but to emphasise his achievements as the builder of the country's "glorious Soviet past". It wants Russians to take pride in their Soviet past and not to be burdened with a paralysing sense of guilt about the repressions of the Stalin period.

On 4 December a group of masked men from the investigative committee of the Russian general prosecutor's office forced their way into the St Petersburg offices of Memorial. After a search the men confiscated hard drives containing the entire archive of Memorial in St Petersburg: databases with biographical information on victims of repression; details about burial sites in the St Petersburg area; family archives; sound recordings and transcripts of interviews.

What Hitler did read

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:59:10 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

What Hitler did read, as Ryback demonstrates, were the right-wing and racist books regularly presented to him by their pro-Nazi publisher J. F. Lehmann. Paul de Lagarde’s anti-Semitic German Essays have been thoroughly annotated, and Hans F. K. Günther’s Racial Typology of the German People, a key work of racial pseudo-science, is almost falling apart from frequent use

The other striking absence is literature. According to Oechsner, Hitler owned all the Wild West adventure stories by Karl May, all the detective fiction of Edgar Wallace, and many love stories by Hedwig Courths-Mahler (a German Barbara Cartland), but nothing that could send the imagination along unfamiliar tracks. Hitler’s mental world seems to have had no place for imagination. Instead, he relied on a naive conception of science, on which he claimed that National Socialism was based.

Understanding cats, an essay by Amit Chaudhuri

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:48:15 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: www.themanchesterreview.co.uk

Cats live in our building. They live in the spaces that have no definition, in the shadowy corners of the garage. Sometimes, deep in the night, you hear them quarrelling; as Durga, in Pather Panchali, half-asleep when Apu was born, thought she heard a kitten mewling, we can sometimes mistake the sound for a newborn crying inconsolably, and, looking at our sleeping daughter, be thankful that the trauma and bewilderment of those months, which seem not so long ago, have passed. By morning, that nocturnal passion is spent; when they are visible in daytime, or you are present, the cats will never give you the benefit of losing their self-possession. Strife and hysteria are their domestic affair; for the public – and you are the public – only an icy stare and an indifferent composedness are appropriate. Cats cultivate privacy and escape the human gaze in a way that celebrities no longer can.

John Updike's rules

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 23:32:29 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author "in his place," making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end."

Women,Writing,and the Problem of Succes

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:10:41 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: bitchmagazine.org

Anyone who’s stepped into a literary community—readings, performances, writing workshops, mfa programs—will testify to the disclaimers that issue regularly from the mouths of women writers in particular. “This is just something I thought I’d try,” and “I’m not really a poet, but…” are words regularly uttered even by those who made drastic life changes in order to carve out time to write. I prepared for months for a major fiction contest in college, for instance, which I entered five years in a row, claiming to others each time that I just “threw something together.” Later, I applied to a single mfa fiction program, and told no one until I got in. I just didn’t want anyone to know what I wanted most. Perhaps I was preparing for failure: If I said openly that I not only wanted to be a writer but that I worked hard at it, my ambitions could be judged against external rewards—and easily dismissed when I missed out on them. 

Tags: writing

cats and books

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:47:29 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: latimesblogs.latimes.com

Saramago on blogging

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:46:38 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: www.signandsight.com

The writer Manual Rivas talks to the literary Nobel prize laureate and avid blogger Jose Saramago: "You could write in one of the major dailies everyday – so why blog instead? It is about dissidence?", asks Rivas. Saramago: "Perhaps it's the feeling of being able to start over again: writing without limits. The papers would pay, of course. But look, Obama won and I'm happy about it so I sit myself down and write an article in my blog, and I demand outright that he shut Guantanamo and lift the trade embargo against Cuba. And I can do this sort of thing whenever I want. Of course you will be eventually integrated into the system. Basically you are just a morello cherry on a cake. They tolerate you, laugh at you – that Saramago again... But I refuse to give up. I wake up feeling like a libertarian communist every morning. There are three questions which we should never stop asking: Why? What for? For whom?"

Kirjoittamisen rajoitteet

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:01:04 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: kunkirjoitan.ma-pe.net

“Oulipolaisille ilmaisun vapaus oli pateettinen harha, koska kaikki kirjailijat ovat joka tapauksessa monien erilaisten rajoitteiden alaisia. He keskittyivät kehittämään systemaattisesti kirjoittamista ohjaavia rajoitteita, sääntöjä ja generoivia periaatteita. Vapaan alitajunnan ja ”inspiraation” sijaan oulipolaiset toivat kirjoittamiseen formaalit metodit: algoritmit, joukko-opin, kombinatoriikan ja permutaatiot. Oulipo keskittyi myös erilaisiin tekstien ja niiden tuottamisen koneellisuuden kysymyksiin. Rajoitteiden ja tekniikoiden pohtimisen johdosta oulipolaiset olivat luontevasti ensimmäisten joukossa suunnittelemassa myös tietokoneen ja kirjoittajan yhteistoimintaa.”

13 ways of looking at the blackbird

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:52:00 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Tags: literature

Shakespeare would have had a blog

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:24:30 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: www.moreintelligentlife.com

In any case, Shakespeare would have loved the internet. (This is something Mark Rylance cleverly suggested in last year's play "The Big Secret Live ‘I Am Shakespeare' Webcam Daytime Chat-Room Show", an ambitious comedy that resurrects the bard using the electric human power of the web.) Our beloved neologising court jester of coinage, Shakespeare invented some 2,000 new and compound words and a host of now-familiar phrases. He was particularly partial to turning nouns into verbs--to cudgel, to champion, to gossip--just as we like to twitter, to spam or to blog (he would surely have gorged himself on Google like a kid in a sweetshop). He created numerous compounds from existing words (farmhouse, bloodsucking); we do the same (homepage, podcasting). The man who first used the falconry term ‘hoodwinked' to describe human trickery might even have enjoyed being rick-rolled.

The funny and beautiful world of graffiti

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:59:52 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

There's a vast conversation going on, and it's happening right now in a street near you. Some of it is funny, some of it is strangely beautiful, some of it is downright disturbing. Paul Vallely has seen the writing on the wall

If graffiti is a kind of conversation it's a pretty solipsistic one, a dialogue of the deaf, peppered with Pinter pauses, for there are none so deaf as those who will not listen. The standard polarity is between those who insist that graffiti is a modern art and those who think it a vandalising nuisance.

Tags: graffiti, street art

Clipmarks | akonkka's clips

Letters from Beckett

Why Eastern Europe is so different from the West

What We Deny

The Rehabilitation of Stalin

What Hitler did read

Top 10 Works of Postmodern Literature

Understanding cats, an essay by Amit Chaudhuri

John Updike's rules

Women,Writing,and the Problem of Succes

cats and books

Saramago on blogging

Kirjoittamisen rajoitteet

13 ways of looking at the blackbird

Shakespeare would have had a blog

The funny and beautiful world of graffiti