Jaac

LATEST ARTICLES ( 71 )

• A Series of Increasingly Brutal Events Unfold

  How is it that some blurb writers can get a book so wrong? Whoever was asked to describe László Kransznahorkai's Satantango for the Tuskar Rock Book edition,... Read more

  Posted on 24 April 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• A Chair Threatened, Bougainvillea Clawed

  How is it that great, wide books like this one exhaust me? I spend all day, all night, running just ahead of the converging tides. Read more

  Posted on 02 April 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Prodigiously Alive

  When Michel Leiris encountered the work of Alberto Giacometti -- and wrote the first ever piece about this then still relatively unknown sculptor in the... Read more

  Posted on 17 March 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Sentences Frighten Us

  When we have sentences in our heads we still can't be certain of being able to get them down on paper, I thought. The sentences frighten us; first the idea... Read more

  Posted on 06 March 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• An Ever-ready Faculty of Enthusiasm

  To George Sand who, in her letter to Flaubert, had predicted that Sainte-Beuve would be 'the last of the critics' -- the 'others' being 'either artists or... Read more

  Posted on 15 February 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Something of a Throwback to the Eighteenth Century Literary Salon

  I move now from the very tangible livre de poche of the wonderfully weird to a soon-to-be expansive virtual literary salon for all minds that have grown... Read more

  Posted on 05 February 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Read Slowly to Avoid Complications

  As publishers keep pressing on us taller, fatter and wider editions of books that might once have fit in our bookcases but now have to be shoved in side-on so... Read more

  Posted on 04 February 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Gone in the Grate

  The central motif of Geordie Williamson's The Burning Library: Our Great Novelists Lost and Found -- Walter Benjamin's idea of the lasting work of art as a... Read more

  Posted on 24 January 2013 BOOKS, CULTURE

• In Fact Depth Does Not Matter

  It is through our writing that we see this a little more clearly, or so we kid ourselves, as Bernhard's Rudolph observes:I might call myself relatively... Read more

  Posted on 06 December 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE

• In the Unsettling of Narratives

  

  It is appropriate that I should first write about Samuel Frederick’s new book, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert... Read more

  Posted on 09 October 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE

• A Complex Symbolic Rendering of Emotional Life

  While, in my memory of Susanne Langer's writings on art, her ideas on symbolic form seemed too quick to assign certain aspects of experience to one art form or... Read more

  Posted on 04 October 2012 BOOKS

• Goes a Little Something Like This

  It is nearly a fortnight ago now since I saw Chris Mann perform live as part of Machine for Making Sense -- that is (this time) with Amanda Stewart, Jim Denley... Read more

  Posted on 31 August 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Faithful to the Library

  Last month, when Milan Kundera accepted the prix de la BnF at the same venue, the National Library in France, he revealed that for several years now he has adde... Read more

  Posted on 29 July 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Histrionic

  It was entirely by chance that we were offered tickets last night to Thomas Bernhard's The Histrionic (or so it has been translated by Tom Wright for the... Read more

  Posted on 29 July 2012 CULTURE, THEATRE & OPERA

• But as I Had No Powers of Observation at All

  Even though on the very next page he describes for us the patterned grey damask of the napkins at Gilberte's house, the narrator of À l'ombre des jeunes filles... Read more

  Posted on 16 July 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE

• A Pair of Shorts

  Last week I bought a pair of shorts at the publisher's launch: Varamo and Recluse.Along with Evelyn Juers, author of Recluse, I have long been interested in... Read more

  Posted on 16 June 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE

• A Fundamental Desire to Tell Over the Contents of What May (but May Also Not)...

  Narrative digression, perhaps because of its very association with wandering off-topic, going astray, loitering around, failing to get to the point and beating... Read more

  Posted on 10 May 2012 BOOKS

• No Sooner Are You, Than You Are No Longer, a Writer

  At the near center of Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster, this necessary counter to every misguidedly encouraging self-help writing programme:What... Read more

  Posted on 15 April 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE

• We Were Ventriloquised

  I wonder if the Lars Iyer of the "Nude in your hot tub, facing the abyss (A literary manifesto after the end of Literature and Manifestos)" would feel either... Read more

  Posted on 18 March 2012 SELF EXPRESSION

• What is It to You How Ruskin Feels: Feel for Yourself

  In his Preface to La Bible d'Amiens, Proust writes:When we work in order to please others, we may fail to succeed, but the things we have done to satisfy... Read more

  Posted on 18 February 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE