ReadySteadyBook - a literary site

Tuesday 01 June 2010

Gone Fishin'

Actually, I've not gone fishin' at all, but we are freezing the data (!) here on ReadySteadyBook whilst we do a major upgrade of the site (especially in the "back end")...

On Friday, I finished working for The Book Depository after a wonderful four years with them. In July, I start a new adventure (in trade publishing) which I'm very excited about. But, for once, for now, I'm going to put my feet up for a few weeks, unplug from the matrix, and read some big books...

See you in July.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, rsb, the book depository

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Wednesday 26 May 2010

Save Middlesex Philosophy!

Publishers, including Verso and Bloomsbury Academic, have called for the decision to close Middlesex University's philosophy department to be reconsidered and have branded the suspension of students and three members of staff from the department "an unwarranted and unjustifiable act of intimidation" (via The Bookseller):

The staff - professors Peter Osborne, Peter Hallward, and Christian Kerslake - and students were suspended last Friday, following a sit in to protest against the closure of the department. According to the New Statesman, a spokesperson for the university board of governors alleged that a group of protesters had "forcibly entered the building", breaching a High Court Injunction obtained by the institution a week earlier.

The letter sent to The Bookseller and national media, and signed by 18 publishers, said the decision to close the philosophy department had "roused the indignation of the academic community across the world". The letter continued: "As publishers we have benefited in many ways from the skills of those teaching at the department, and from the lively atmosphere of debate engendered across the disciplines by its work.

"Consequently, we feel bound to speak up in its defence. The closing of this department would be disastrous for the academic and intellectual life of this country, and we urge that the decision to do so be reconsidered."

Other publishers who signed the letter included Serpent's Tail, Pluto, Edinburgh University Press, Earthscan, Manchester University Press, Jessica Kingsley and I B Taurus. It added the publishers had expressed "grave concern" at the suspension of the professors and students.

"We believe this to be an unwarranted and unjustifiable act of intimidation by the administration and board of governors of Middlesex University, and we call for the immediate reinstatement of suspended students and staff."

Last November, The Bookseller revealed the institution's senior management had decided to shut down Middlesex University Press, claiming it was "irresponsible" to invest further in the company (more...)

More at Save Middlesex Philosophy (also on twitter.com/saveMDXphil).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, philosophy, politics

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Tuesday 25 May 2010

Roubaud and the troubadours

Interesting post over on Named Tomorrow about the troubadors and how thinking about them can help us think about the work of Jacques Roubaud (with whom there is a fascinating interview over on Bombsite):

In the collection of essays The Troubadors: An Introduction, edited by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, Stephen G. Nichols argues that, though there are indeed some salient features of the troubadour lyric which support modern ideas about troubadours by harmonizing with the modern conception of the artist (such as a ‘high seriousness’ of style and the distinctly individualized voices of the poets), the traditional conception of a continuous and homogenized school of poetry is more than a little misleading in its development from ‘early troubadour’ Guilhem de Peitieu, through the golden age of the ‘classic period,’ and then on to the end of the tradition in the 13th century (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, poetry

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Monday 24 May 2010

Vasily Grossman on the up?

Is Vasily Grossman beginning to achieve (in the English-speaking world) the recognition that is his due? I've never read him, so I actually don't know if he is even due said recognition (he doesn't feel like my kind of guy) but RSB interviewee Robert Chandler (Grossman's translator) reckons he is, so I should probably pull my finger out and give him a read. I should probably pull my finger out and interview Robert again too, as we last spoke about 5 years ago!

Recent sightings (and citings) of Grossman include: Vasily Grossman, Russia's greatest chronicler, awaits redemption (in the Guardian); In praise of... Vasily Grossman (Guardian CIF); Anti-Socialist Realism (TNR); Everything flows: Robert Chandler on Vasily Grossman (Vulpes Libris); and A Russian titan revealed... (BookSerf).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book news, rsb

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Monday 24 May 2010

Two new Cixous

Via Continental Philosophy, I hear we have a new book from Columbia University Press of interviews with Hélène Cixous: White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics:

These interviews with Hélène Cixous offer invaluable insight into her philosophy and criticism. Culled from newspapers, journals, and books, White Ink collects the best of these conversations, which address the major concerns of Cixous’s critical work and features two dialogues with twentieth-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The interviews in White Ink span more than three decades and include a new conversation with Susan Sellers, the book’s editor and a leading Cixous scholar and translator. Cixous discusses her work and writing process. She shares her views on literature, feminism, theater, autobiography, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and human relations, and she reflects on her roles as poet, playwright, professor, woman, Jew, and, her most famous, “French feminist theorist.” Sellers organizes White Ink in such a way that readers can grasp the development of Cixous’s commentary on a series of vital questions. Taken together, the revealing performances in White Ink provide an excellent introduction this thinker’s brave and vital work-each one an event in language and thought that epitomizes Cixous’s intellectual and poetic force.

Readers of Cixous should also be reminded that Zero's Neighbour: Sam Beckett is out next week with Polity: "In this unabashedly personal odyssey through a sizeable range of his novels, plays and poems, Cixous celebrates Beckett’s linguistic flair and the poignant, powerful thrust of his stylistic terseness, and passionately declares her love for his unrivalled expression of the meaningless ‘precious little’ of life, its unfathomable banality ending in chaos and death."

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: literary criticism, philosophy

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Monday 24 May 2010

Tarkovsky and Levinas

The nature of film is such that it is difficult to feel that one takes it in completely; no sooner is one frame mentally captured than it is succeeded – in a process that could be called ‘jaillissement’ – by another. Film moves too fast for even the cinematographer to be in full control of the things that it throws up (over and above the way in which any kind of text may be uncontrollable by its author). Directors and editors can choose to minimise these characteristics of the medium, manipulating both images and audience so as to create a final sense of semiotic order and unambiguous declaration: such, according to a somewhat sweeping and antagonistic Tarkovsky, was the practice of Eisenstein, who ‘makes thought into a despot’. But Tarkovsky himself does his best to accentuate the life of its own that film, with its density and speed, possesses. And often, as in The Sacrifice, it is the very profusion and inexhaustibility of the sequence of images and the possible implications and offshoots of narrative that give hope to an otherwise generally bleak set of representations of human existence.

Here, then, there is an obvious starting point for the uneasy project of comparing Levinas with Tarkovsky (or indeed with anyone): both make the most of the resources of their respective media to speak distinctively but with a kind of self-undermining. The saying of the philosophical essay of the moment, and the unrolling of time, both in simulacrum and in the real time of the audience, in film, are both held up as somehow redemptive and transcendent in their resistance to reduction and control.

Tarkovsky and Levinas: Cuts, Mirrors, Triangulations [PDF] by Dominic Michael Rainsford (via wood s lot).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, film, philosophy

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Tuesday 11 May 2010

Review: 'Britannica Latina' by Mark Walker

Along with Peter Jones, whose Learn Ancient Greek and Learn Latin courses (subsequently published in book form) enthralled many Daily & Sunday Telegraph readers some years back, and whose Ancient and Modern column continues to adorn The Spectator, Mark Walker should be declared a national treasure...

Now, Walker gives us Britannica Latina: 2000 Years of British Latin, proclaiming via the dust-jacket blurb "It is time for British Latinists who reclaim their heritage." It is, indeed, when we contemplate ignoramus philistines in departments and ministries of education who dismiss Latin and Greek as 'dead' and ancient history as 'elitist' and/or 'irrelevant'.

Barry Baldwin reviews Britannica Latina by Mark Walker here on ReadySteadyBook.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, rsb

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Monday 10 May 2010

Beth Steel's 'Ditch'

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed Beth Steel's play Ditch plugged in the Guardian Guide this weekend: "Following the sell-out London transfer of Stovepipe in 2009, HighTide transfers Ditch from the HighTide Festival to The Old Vic Tunnels for a limited season:

"I've listened to all the stories of my generation, then watched 'em get sick or fade away. And it wasn't this world that killed 'em. It was the other... the memory of it."

Britain, the near future. Much of the country is underwater and the government has been reduced to a group of fascist strongmen. In a rural outpost of the state, the men patrol the moors for illegals whilst the women run a self-sufficient farm to provide what all they need to survive. The living conditions are harsh, every meagre ration is grown from scratch and they must battle with inclement weather and a draconian government. As their numbers dwindle, they struggle to retain a semblance of civilisation in the face of the inevitable onset of global war.

Stark and imperative, but shot through with a sense of warm compassion, Beth Steel's debut play Ditch is a clear-eyed look at how we might behave when the conveniences of our civilisation are taken away, and a frightening vision of a future that could all too easily be ours. Ditch is a brutal and uncompromising play, with a grounded, earthy sense of humanity. The result is both heart-rending and chilling, depicting a convincing, bleak vision of the future.

Beth is a good friend of mine, so I'm thrilled her play is getting all this well-deserved attention. Anyway, for more, see Ditch the movie (well, trailer!) on YouTube; or just head over to the Old Vic website.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: theatre

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Monday 10 May 2010

Twitter: a reminder

Just a wee reminder -- when it goes quiet here on ReadySteadyBook it is probably because I'm pretty slammed, but that doesn't mean there isn't much inconsequential chatter, and often some pretty interesting links, being thrown into the ether from my Twitter account...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: rsb

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Tuesday 27 April 2010

Beckett and "the absurd"

"... moral values are inaccessible. And they cannot be defined. In order to define them, you would have to pass judgement, which is impossible. That's why I could never agree with the notion of the theatre of the absurd. It involves a value judgment. You cannot even speak about truth. That's what's so distressful. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form to formlesssness. It is only in that way, perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found."

Beckett and "the absurd" over on This Space.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, samuel beckett

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