Jaac

LATEST ARTICLES ( 103 )

• As I Prepare to Transform My Thoughts into Words

  It is interesting that, according to his lectures published in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, the visual is so important to Orhan Pamuk, not only in th... Read more

  Posted on 25 February 2011 CULTURE

• The Vivid Illusion That the World Has a Center and a Meaning

  In the recent publication of Orhan Pamuk's 2009 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, he writes that when he was starting out a... Read more

  Posted on 17 February 2011 CULTURE

• While Thinking That Work Will Never Get Done

  At the end of his speech for the awarding of the Georg Büchner Prize, Thomas Bernhard, who would have turned eighty today (Austrian time), had he both decided... Read more

  Posted on 09 February 2011 CULTURE

• Dracula and the iPhone

  In chapter two of Bram Stoker's Dracula, we read the following description given to the eponymous Count of the estate in England he is purchasing through the... Read more

  Posted on 02 February 2011 CULTURE

• Notes on Notes on Stendhal

  Proust, in his Notes on Stendhal, is appreciative of Stendhal's 'eighteenth-century style of irony', 'pessimistic morality', and 'Voltairean elegance' (even as... Read more

  Posted on 23 January 2011 CULTURE

• Mirrors

  One of the few benefits of reading a free download copy of Stendhal's The Red and the Black on my Ipod Touch -- in fact there are several benefits, including th... Read more

  Posted on 12 January 2011 CULTURE

• Everything Changes with Age

  To admit that initially I thought I was disappointed with Milan Kundera's most recent book of essays, Encounter, is also to admit that I missed something that... Read more

  Posted on 03 January 2011 BOOKS, CULTURE

• To Their 'logical Conclusion'

  As soon as I finished reading The Lover, by Marguerite Duras (translated by Barbara Bray), I began it again. This was not out of any conscious intention to... Read more

  Posted on 28 December 2010 CULTURE

• If Only Unconsciously

  There is no useful reason to compare Thomas Bernhard with Umberto Eco apart from the contingency of bedside book piles but, coming almost simultaneously to the... Read more

  Posted on 23 December 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Some Or Another Glimpse in His Mind

  There is a kind of music, or at least very recognisable rhythm, in the writing of Gerald Murnane. It is also clear that there is nothing at all obviously musica... Read more

  Posted on 16 December 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• A Confluence of Themes

  Sometimes I notice a confluence of themes in the several books that I'm reading and referring to, or at least a seeming confluence. Read more

  Posted on 01 December 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Tightens the Mechanism

  The blurb on the back of the Vintage edition of Thomas Bernhard's Gathering Evidence: a memoir, has it that the young Bernhard 'ran away from home', when it... Read more

  Posted on 30 November 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The First Edition

  

  When I learned that Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children was being reissued next month to mark the novel's seventieth birthday in October this year I... Read more

  Posted on 27 November 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Great Strange Machines

  Perhaps it is only because I am rereading James Joyce's Dubliners alongside a rereading of Thomas Bernhard's Gathering Evidence: a memoir -- not obvious... Read more

  Posted on 23 November 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Desired Restitution of the Self

  After paddling some swells in the internet, I discovered this quotation on BLCKDGRD from William H. Gass, from a 2008 edition of Harpers Magazine that is now to... Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• A Monstrous Quality

  Daniel Green, in his most recent post on the Reading Experience 2, concludes his analysis of 'newness' with:Art is worth our attention when it takes a... Read more

  Posted on 15 November 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• That Very Part of the Mind

  In my bookshelves - or should I say shelves and piles - one book is always leading to another, or something read somewhere else (such as in a blog post) gets... Read more

  Posted on 10 November 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• This Fixation on Story

  Daniel Green, in his blog The Reading Experience 2.0, notices how discussion around the supposed impact of the e-book on the writing of fiction seems to take fo... Read more

  Posted on 03 November 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Where There is Nothing but Foreground

  Perhaps there are simply two ways to write a novel. In the section 'Works and Spiders' in his second book of essays, Testaments Betrayed, Kundera compares Thoma... Read more

  Posted on 31 October 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Ruins of His Lyrical World

  While I don't always agree with Milan Kundera (he has too little time for Proust, none at all for Virginia Woolf, and too much, perhaps, for Salman Rushdie),... Read more

  Posted on 25 October 2010 BOOKS, CULTURE