Jaac

LATEST ARTICLES ( 103 )

• 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

• A Good Formula to Test the Quality of a Novel

  Nabokov's penchant for Robert Louis Stevenson reminds me of Borges's for G. K. Chesterton. In his preparation for a series of lectures on European Fiction for... Read more

  Posted on 08 January 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Though I Would Not Have It Look as Though I Wanted to Complain

  There's a strange panting, obsessive quality to the narrator in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Significant is the narrator's confession early on:It was the time... Read more

  Posted on 28 December 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Supposed Misinterpretations

  It is ironic that Nicholas Zurbrugg should accuse Beckett of misreading Proust. His own study of the two writers, with its many clods of such unwieldy terms as... Read more

  Posted on 07 December 2011 BOOKS

• Love is Space and Time Measured by the Heart

  Recently a friend was given a birthday card with a picture of Proust on the front along with the line: 'Love is space and time measured by the heart'. Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• De Ne Rien Ajouter De Son Propre Cru

  I am yet to track down the essay in which this appears, but according to Nicholas Zurbrugg's Beckett and Proust:Perhaps the most important of all Proust's... Read more

  Posted on 06 November 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• What is There Left but Physical Violence?

  

  It was only by chance that I got to see Richard Mills' opera, The Love of the Nightingale. 'Flu had kept the legitimate ticket holder at home and in bed. On... Read more

  Posted on 05 November 2011 CULTURE, THEATRE & OPERA

• The Same Artifical Attempt at the Real

  It is an interesting experience, once in a while, to read books that are seemingly effortlessly written and effortlessly read. Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE