Jaac

LATEST ARTICLES ( 103 )

• So Now I Am Alone in the World

  'So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own.' Thus begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of a... Read more

  Posted on 21 September 2011 BOOKS

• I See Shades of Blue Everywhere

  If you bear in mind Chekhov's legendary advice that if you hang a gun on the wall during the first act of a play, it needs to go off in the last -- advice that... Read more

  Posted on 17 September 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Of (engendering) Pleasure in French and English

  Here Catherine Rey describes the role of pleasure in writing -- 'of (engendering) pleasure in French and English' as the video notes put it. Read more

  Posted on 23 August 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• It is with Their Own Flesh That They Feed Their Books

  In her essay 'How Do Salamanders Die?' in HEAT 9, New Series, the French-Australian writer Catherine Rey contends that 'writers work on themselves, on their... Read more

  Posted on 23 August 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• It is Really No More Than a Gesture Sketched to Banish Memory

  In W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, he comments on the 'rather unreal effect' of the eyewitness reports of the fire-bombing of German citie... Read more

  Posted on 10 August 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• How He Was Adapting the Gothic Novel to Local Conditions

  It was more than half my life ago that I first read Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm. White was still, then, living at 20 Martin Road opposite Centennial... Read more

  Posted on 03 August 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• It Says: a Whole Form of Literary Pretence is Over

  In his interview by Bibliokept, Lars Iyer describes what it means to be 'posthumous' as a reader and a writer, referring to the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig's... Read more

  Posted on 21 July 2011 BOOKS

• I Was Only Cured of This Mania Much Later

  Since The Life of Henry Brulard is still lying next to this computer, I thought I should add to to Scott Esposito's thoughts 'On How Writers Write' the followin... Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• And of Course a Book Exists Only as a Consequence of Antitheses

  This is what happens when you move from the page onto your own staked paths through the embedded white screens of the internet: an inevitable resonance. Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Only in Opera Buffa Can I Be Moved to Tears

  Although Stendhal's autobiographical fragment, The Life of Henry Brulard, was eventually published in 1890, I haven't yet been able to ascertain whether Proust... Read more

  Posted on 06 July 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• How Marcel Became Proust

  

  In one of the narrow aisles on the eighth floor of Fisher stack, at Sydney University, I came across Thierry Marchaisse's fascinating book, which deserves to... Read more

  Posted on 03 June 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• I Regard, and Have Always Regarded My Works as Lottery Tickets

  Next month it will be 179 years since Stendhal began his Memoirs of an Egotist (Souvenirs d'Egotisme, the last a word he borrowed from English) when he was 49... Read more

  Posted on 22 May 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Language of Others is Unintelligible to Me

  The back of the New Directions edition of Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp displays this quotation from Bolaño (in gold lettering on the matte black fabric): 'The only... Read more

  Posted on 20 April 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Something Like a Cross Between an Expensive Shirt and a Telephone Message

  

  Already before his death, Proust must have been anticipating the way 'une espèce d'instrument optique' would be mistranslated in Enright's revised version of th... Read more

  Posted on 11 April 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• To Make Us Know an Additional Universe

  Looking back at that letter Proust wrote to Antoine Bibesco in 1912 for the benefit of Gide and Copea in the Nouvelle revue française (NRF), I see that he... Read more

  Posted on 03 April 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• At One of the Highpoints of Culture and Civilization

  In his monograph on Proust, Edmund White shows himself to be deeply sympathetic to the life of his subject, but as for his work -- apart from his thorough... Read more

  Posted on 27 March 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• I Have Had to Show the Experience Recorded as Extended in Time

  My 1950 edition of Proust's letters is the colour of our third-hand sofa. The only annotations in the book occurs on the page opposite a black and white... Read more

  Posted on 25 March 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• It Can Do No Other

  I didn't expect to find on a discount book table, let alone finish reading -- in the time between dropping off my car for a service and when I had to collect... Read more

  Posted on 13 March 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Poet, He Said, is Either Nature, Or He Will Seek It

  What I hadn't quite grasped from Pamuk's lectures, is that Schiller saw the sentimental poet as being engaged in a quest for the ideal in nature:The poet, I... Read more

  Posted on 06 March 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Mr. Pamuk, Are You a Naive Novelist Or a Sentimental One?

  The title of Orhan Pamuk's 2009 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, comes, as he explains in his first lecture, from Friedric... Read more

  Posted on 27 February 2011 CULTURE