tandeta

“Literature when I was a kid was always a place I could...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:58:09 -0400

“Literature when I was a kid was always a place I could escape and when I grew up and became a writer myself it was still a place where I could get away and get outside of everything and use it as a kind of perspective for everything. But this time I am deciding not move away, not to go away but just try to describe this here as it is. The only thing I was looking for really was meaning, because I started off with such a desperate feeling of meaninglessness and knowing that that feeling isn’t like things should be. To consider everything meaningless is one of the deadly sins, so I just try and make things alive and the only way I can do that is in writing.”

Karl Ove Knausgaard, 3:AM Magazine.

Celebrating Christine Brooke-Rose. / “All the stories are...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 11:27:00 -0400

Celebrating Christine Brooke-Rose. / “All the stories are conceived as spaces, like art installations.” Susana Medina. / The endless boredom of Terrence Malick. / Texts referenced in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. / Leo Hollis’ top 10 books on cities. / One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin. / I Won’t Say I Will See You Tomorrow, walking tour & sound installation responding to work of Wittgenstein. / WWTBD, what would Thomas Bernhard do? / “HOW CAN PEOPLE LIVE IN THAT FIRST-DRAFT WORLD?” Postcards from David Markson. / Gisèle Freund’s images of Joyce, Murdoch, Duras, Duchamp, Woolf, Zweig, Beckett, Eliot, Benjamin. / James Joyce in Paris by Freund. / Issue 2 of the Portable Museum. / Olena Bormashenko on translating Soviet-era science fiction. / “I’m very interested in a whole series of artists who know they have one story to tell & they keep on telling it, trying to finally get that story right.” David Shields. / “The only thing that I got from it was the opportunity to defile my own book.” Banville & co annotate first editions. / Turner Prize 2013 shortlist takes a mischievous turn. / Drawing is the cartographic precision of contour & building form from negative space. / George Barbier’s illustrations from Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires. / Kindergarde: Experimental Writing for Children. / “I don’t know that a story about people worshipping in a two-person synagogue in the woods & a book about poisonous language … I really don’t see that as my crossover bid.” Ben Marcus. / “I never listen to music when I write. I always felt that it had the effect of creating artificial wings for your prose.” George Saunders. / How Muriel Spark rescued Mary Shelley. / The deep roots of Modernism, on the Wiener Werkstätte. / Mysterious skin, the realia of William Gaddis. / “We worked the fiction into tiny historical cracks.” Stewart Home interviews Wu Ming. / The Poster Workshop 1968-1970. / Bolaño Archive 1977-2003, exhibition in Barcelona. / Notes towards a film adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. / New issue of The Junket includes death & the canal, plus Kraftwerk in a former kraftwerk. / Rick Moody’s essay on The Next Day based on 42 words given to him by Bowie.

Lori Nix’s post-apocalyptic dioramas.

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 11:18:34 -0400

Lori Nix’s post-apocalyptic dioramas.

Lolita / Robert Smith.

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 07:21:45 -0400

Lolita / Robert Smith.

writersnoonereads: “The history of literature is, of course,...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:36:38 -0400

writersnoonereads:

“The history of literature is, of course, strewn with the neglected, the misunderstood, the forgotten, the never fully realized, and minor figures more influential than renowned. If one were to draw a Venn diagram comprised of each of these categories, Marcel Schwob, along with a handful of others, would be at the heart of their intersections. But how, one despairs, can a man praised so highly during his own life fall completely by the wayside posthumously, as if it was his vitality alone that kept him from obscurity?”

At 3:AM Magazine, Stephen writes about the rediscovery of Marcel Schwob and interviews translator Kit Schluter about Schwob’s haunting work, The Book of Monelle.

Pen & Ink, tattoos & the stories behind them.

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 02:57:38 -0400

Pen & Ink, tattoos & the stories behind them.

Berlin underground.

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:51:49 -0400

Berlin underground.

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 04:28:01 -0400

Extract from W.G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country. /...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 04:22:35 -0400

Extract from W.G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country. / Reveries of a solitary walker, Iain Sinclair, Robert Macfarlane, James Wood & Will Self on Sebald. / ‘Decontaminating the Union: post-industrial landscapes & the British psyche’ by Will Self. / Ascent of the Modernists. / Sympathy in Modernist literature. / Jacques Bonnet’s Phantoms on the Bookshelves reviewed. / Literary archaeology, Muriel Rukeyser’s lost novel & the recovery of work by women writers. / Kafka’s inner life, a portrait of the author before his name became an adjective. / A translator’s life. / “Every year I feel more trapped & useless.” Sam Lipsyte. / David Foster Wallace on ambition, an animation. / “Ambition is death to me. If I have ambition I can’t write.” Karl Ove Knausgaard. / Knausgaard reviewed in The Quietus. / [Patrick Hamilton] inhabits the rhythms of drunkenness, the swaying segue from relaxation to merriment to silliness to melancholia. And no one has written better about pubs. / Instant forever, the Polaroid art collection. / How a Bach Canon works.

"To read is to cover one’s face. And to write is to show it."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 16:04:54 -0400

““To read is to cover one’s face. And to write is to show it.””

- Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home.

William Miller’s elegy to the Polaroid SX-70.

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 05:02:47 -0400

William Miller’s elegy to the Polaroid SX-70.

William Burroughs by Robert Mapplethorpe. / Outtakes from Patti...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 05:00:45 -0400

William Burroughs by Robert Mapplethorpe. / Outtakes from Patti Smith/Mapplethorpe session by Norman Seeff. / Glitch art. / “Pynchon’s had no impact on British fiction apart from perhaps on me & Tom McCarthy. For me he’s the king.” Ned Beauman / An Irish Granta? / Merrrrdrrrre! The ‘pataphysical life of Alfred Jarry & the monstruous Père Ubu. / “If the labyrinth is the Oulipo’s preferred metaphor then the artist’s goal would not be to exit it but to know its every last twist.” Perec’s La boutique obscure reviewed. / New ‘issue’ of The Kakofonie is printed on beer bottles & features Derek Beaulieu. / Americanspokenlanguage, the poems of Gertrude Stein by way of cut-up rap vocals. / “In an essay, you can see where there’s static. In fiction it’s very hard.” Renata Adler. / Robert Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography [PDF] / Kim Gordon in Mono.kultur. / Kent Haruf interviewed. / Map of literary L.A. / Where do all the dead stories & characters go? / “[Flann] O’Brien was reportedly tickled to discover that his hoax had got as far as the James Joyce Yearbook.” / James Joyce’s Leopold gets his own book for Bloomsday. / Clothing references in Joe Brainard’s I Remember. / “I am the absolute center of everything.” Aleksandar Hemon. / Kashtanka, a 1952 animated adaptation of Chekhov’s short story. / Eight critical essays on Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers.

Kent Haruf’s Colorado.

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:45:34 -0400

Kent Haruf’s Colorado.

Spoila manifesto. / Roberto Bolaño’s ‘Mexican Manifesto’. / “[Alejandro] Zambra’s latest novel...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:45:14 -0400

Spoila manifesto. / Roberto Bolaño’s ‘Mexican Manifesto’. / “[Alejandro] Zambra’s latest novel represents his deepest achievement. It is the most intricate of his experiments with brevity.” / Joyce misquoted. / The Codex Seraphinianus. / On the set Naked Lunch. / “Fiction died a while ago, I’ve been reading a lot about it. The essay is also dead. As is the poem. The only viable form is the interview.” Sam Lipsyte. / New emotion, Paris Review on Kirill Medvedev. / Beautiful failures, Nabokov & Flaubert’s early attempts. / Nabokov professor hunts down sinister scholar who fabricated meeting between Dostoevsky & Dickens. / “Newly published essays will allow readers to explore Pessoa’s philosophy in the context of his work.” / “The ideal is to make the distance between the self & the writing as small as possible.” Karl Ove Knausgaard. / ”[Knausgaard] shows us by the route of life that there is no story, & in so doing he finds…authenticity.” / Barry Hannah’s ‘lost’ novel. / Literary salons. / Virginia Woolf’s ‘How Should One Read a Book’. / “The essay is a particularly alluring form for those who are tired of the novel.” Amit Chaudhuri. / Seagull Books profiled. / Interview with Mikhail Shishkin. / How has Granta list shaped the literary landscape?

Marcel Dzama’s Puppets, Pawns & Prophets.

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:17:12 -0400

Marcel Dzama’s Puppets, Pawns & Prophets.

"Stop reading so many books…give up reading contemporaries, give up the English-language bias..."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:06:56 -0400

“Stop reading so many books…give up reading contemporaries, give up the English-language bias and read some books in translation, or in the original, if possible. Most importantly, do not review books. Engage in responsible criticism, but do not write book reviews. Reject the language of critical theory.”

- Greg Baxter.

“A work of art is a proposition about the world, but it’s not a final statement.” Sheila Heti. /...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 17:31:17 -0400

“A work of art is a proposition about the world, but it’s not a final statement.” Sheila Heti. / Heti in Numero Cinq. / Heti’s Riot Grrrl ‘zine, Brillantine. / On the design of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. / “Most of my longer novels mix several genres, but I’ve seldom wanted to concentrate on one.” Alasdair Gray. / Movement in light, the cinema of Man Ray. / Haneke & sadomodernist filmmakers. / Junkopia, a short film by Chris Marker. / “What Hobsbawm’s Marxism also did, however, was to turn him from a lifelong optimist..into a bewildered pessimist.” / “The crying need is for a comprehensive collection of [Tony] Judt’s essays & occasional writings.” / “We both are outlaws in different ways.” Wayne Koestenbaum in conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith. / “For the past eight years, I have been working on Capital, a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project set in New York City in the twentieth century.” Kenneth Goldsmith in Paris Review. / An algorithm that discovers haiku buried in NYT copy. / Writing-machine, letters from a quarter century of correspondence between Robert Bly & Tomas Tranströmer. / “There’s a machine that dissects reality - everything I want to write about has to pass through a set of personal turbines before I can seize it as mine in order to narrate it.” Enrique Vila-Matas. / Why Nabokov matters. / Sylvia Beach talks about publishing Ulysses (1962 broadcast). / “Beckett lost every game of chess he ever played by eventually conceding.” 100 literary rumours by Blake Butler. / “A left-hand opening batsman, possessing what he himself called a gritty defence.” Samuel Beckett’s Wisden obituary. / Richard Ford on Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! / Patti Smith reads Jim Carroll. / From poet to cultural phenomenon, on Sylvia Plath. / Reading lists by artists. / Cabinet on Trial: A Magazine of No Qualities? / “Peru’s truth lies not in its correspondence to reality, but in its consistency with itself.” On Gordon Lish. / ‘Pataphysician René Daumal reviewed. / A non-review of Georges Perec’s La Boutique Obscure. / Potential literature, actual reading, Oulipo in 2013.

Pavel Maria Smejkal’s ‘Fatescapes’, iconic war photographs with...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 07:36:42 -0400

Pavel Maria Smejkal’s ‘Fatescapes’, iconic war photographs with all their subjects removed.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis magazine. / ‘A Collapse of Horses’ by Brian Evenson. / Boris Akunin retires...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 07:36:34 -0400

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis magazine. / ‘A Collapse of Horses’ by Brian Evenson. / Boris Akunin retires from writing crime novels, devotes himself to a massive history of Russia. / James Joyce loved Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. / Photos from University of Buffalo’s James Joyce collection. / A rare recording of Beckett reading from Watt. / William Burroughs as scientologist. / Remembering Nelson Algren. / ‘Didactic Elegy’ by Ben Lerner. / “I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels.” David Shields . / “Reality Hunger burned literature down to the ground. I wanted to write a book that built literature back up for myself.” Shields. / Joanna Walsh’s MANIFESTO! / The fluid medium of translation. / Regeneration X. / “I lament the death of irony. Also the death of manners. And the novel. I lament the death, also, of the novel of manners.” George Saunders.

Vila-Matas at the James Joyce statue, Dublin.

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:24:30 -0400

Vila-Matas at the James Joyce statue, Dublin.