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I shit on furniture. I hate houses. — The Life of Joseph Roth | The Times
I shit on furniture. I hate houses. — The Life of Joseph Roth | The Times
If there is a line that most profoundly sums up the principle of writerly independence, a refusal to be pinned down to a single place or perspective, a willingness to take the whole world as one’s subject, it might — and I say this with genuine conviction — be this stray remark in an exasperated letter from a homeless, broke drunk on the eve of the Second World War: “I shit on furniture. I hate houses.”
I shit on furniture. I hate houses. — The Life of Joseph Roth | The Times
Epic fascinating interview with Shirley Hazzard from 2005 (The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 185)
Epic fascinating interview with Shirley Hazzard from 2005 (The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 185)
The Sydney of my childhood had no concert hall. The echoing old Town Hall was used by the unadventurous orchestra, and the Conservatorium of Music by the ballet company. The theater was very limited, with constant repetitions of casts and plays, yet there was interest in the theater, and some circumscribed efforts by small groups. The visual arts were worst off. The public gallery at Sydney had some good paintings--some, for instance, by nineteenth-century British painters who had come "out" to what was then a colony--but even these were displayed in such gloom and institutional dreariness that one dreaded the Sunday afternoons on which one was taken there. The government, entirely male and philistine, was actively inimical to the arts; ridicule was the keynote. These things, in Australia, have greatly, if not entirely, changed.
Epic fascinating interview with Shirley Hazzard from 2005 (The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 185)
Emmanuel Carrère Writes His Way Through a Breakdown
Emmanuel Carrère Writes His Way Through a Breakdown
it doesn't make me any more inclined to read his book but it is a fascinating article neverthless especially in the light of well you know
his usual instinct as a writer had been to seek narrative orderliness—to “always connect one sentence with the next, always look for a smooth transition.” Now he tried to take some encouragement from the novelist Georges Perec’s formal experiments with narrative gaps and omissions. “I never experienced such an uncomfortable situation,” Carrère told me. “Honestly, it’s a flaw of the book. Well—this flaw, it’s part of its identity.” He mimed a limp.
Emmanuel Carrère Writes His Way Through a Breakdown
Column | Niet de schrijver maar de lezer is kwetsbaar
Column | Niet de schrijver maar de lezer is kwetsbaar
Moed is het eerste vereiste voor de schrijver, zeggen de schrijvers. Voor iedere zin moet je je opnieuw zelfvertrouwen aanpraten. Want, o, de ontoereikendheid van de taal en, ach, het besef nooit volledig te worden begrepen.
Column | Niet de schrijver maar de lezer is kwetsbaar
Gerard Reve heeft me leren leven
Gerard Reve heeft me leren leven
Gerard Reve (is) op zijn best wanneer hij zich te midden van alle twijfel die zich uit in spot op een reële manier tot de wereld verhoudt. Alsof je nooit iets serieus neemt. Terwijl je alles serieus neemt. Maar je probeert alles, de hele ellende, wel tot hanteerbare, menselijke proporties terug te brengen.
Gerard Reve heeft me leren leven
Torrey Peters: ‘Als je als schrijver ergens geen woorden voor hebt, dan begint het interessant te worden.’ | De Volkskrant
Torrey Peters: ‘Als je als schrijver ergens geen woorden voor hebt, dan begint het interessant te worden.’ | De Volkskrant
‘Schrijven is een uiting van het ego. De lezer heeft twee opties: lezen of niet lezen. Als iemand mijn boek wel leest, spreek ik op zijn minst vier of vijf uur tegen ze. Ik vraag om hun aandacht. Luister naar mijn stem en naar wat ik te zeggen heb.’
Torrey Peters: ‘Als je als schrijver ergens geen woorden voor hebt, dan begint het interessant te worden.’ | De Volkskrant
Johannes Klabbers | AustLit
Johannes Klabbers | AustLit
Johannes Klabbers is a Dutch/Australian writer and posthumanist therapist, living in Europe. He also holds a doctorate in fine arts.
Johannes Klabbers | AustLit
Hannie Michaelis
Hannie Michaelis
survived the Holocaust but her parents were killed in Sobibor. She described saying goodbye to her parents as follows: ‘Tot op het
Hannie Michaelis
The story of my madness | Emmanuel Carrère
The story of my madness | Emmanuel Carrère
Late in life a major depressive episode got Emmanuel Carrère hospitalised and diagnosed as bipolar. In some ways it made sense of his problems, but in the midst of it, everything was broken
You’re bipolar type 2: agitated without necessarily being euphoric, but sometimes also seductive, flirtatious, very sexual, outwardly very much alive, but inclined to make the type of decisions you regret the most, while being dead sure that they’re right and that you’ll never go back on them. Then after that you’re dead sure of the very opposite, you realise that you’ve done the worst thing possible, you try to fix it and do something even worse. You think one thing and then its opposite, you do one thing and then its opposite, in frightening succession. But the worst is that if you’re like me and are used to analysing yourself, once the diagnosis has been reached and the mood swings identified, you gain hindsight – only this hindsight is of little use. Or if it is, it’s just to see that no matter what you think, say or do, you can’t trust yourself because there are two of you in the same person, and those two are enemies.
in the definition of bipolar disorder, the pole opposite the dive into depression isn’t necessarily a state of spectacular euphoria and disinhibition that leads to social suicide and often to suicide itself, but just as frequently what psychiatrists call hypomania, which means in plain language that you act like a fool, but not to the same extent.
The story of my madness | Emmanuel Carrère
The Punk-Prophet Philosophy of Michel Houellebecq — Justin E.H.Smith
The Punk-Prophet Philosophy of Michel Houellebecq — Justin E.H.Smith
The success of France’s most famous novelist has less to do with art and knowledge than anxiety and rock ’n’ roll.
One of Houellebecq’s more endearing juvenile enthusiasms is his passion for quantum mechanics, his admiration for the physicist Niels Bohr, and his belief that culture has not yet caught up with the mind-blowing implications of 20th-century theoretical physics. In a typical 1995 interview with Jean-Yves Jouannais and Christophe Duchâtelet, the author warns: “We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes.” The problem, Houellebecq thinks, is that “we’re stuck in a mechanistic and individualistic view of the world,” as a result of which, he predicts, “we will die.” Of course, many physicists and philosophers of science have themselves grappled with the problem of how to preserve what is sometimes called “the manifest image” of the world, while also accepting the reality of such puzzling phenomena as quantum superposition. Many believe our minds are simply so evolved as to keep us constantly convinced of the reality of midsized physical objects, of individual humans and animals, of all that is “manifest,” even if our best theory tells us it’s all in fact a lot more complicated than that. If failure to think in consistently quantum-theoretical terms leads to death, one would want to ask Houellebecq what it’s like to pass one’s time in a state of such profound enlightenment that even Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger only dipped into it as their work required. But of course Houellebecq is in no such state. He is not living each moment in full light of the implications of quantum theory, and his insistence that we must do so reminds us more of the common than of the exceptional quality of his mind.
The Punk-Prophet Philosophy of Michel Houellebecq — Justin E.H.Smith