Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Funny Firbank, Hamilton's plaque, and a little flower girl


Ingeborg Bachmann

From Christopher Fowler's list of nearly forgotten but good authors: 'Asked for his opinion of literature, [Ronald Firbank] admitted that he adored italics; a typically oblique Firbankian remark. His books contain party chatter consisting of disconnected words and phrases, much as we actually perceive them. Infamously, one chapter consisted of the exclamation “Mabel!” repeated eight times.'

An NPR segment on Patrick Leigh Fermor's Time to Keep Silence AND Werner Herzog reading Roger Ebert's review of the animated movie based on J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip

Patrick Hamilton gets a blue plaque in London but it isn't on a pub

Some Anglican evangelicals in literature

Sir Isaac Newton's alchemical forays 

A short piece on Friedrich Torberg and Vienna café writers

Five questions for Jenny Erpenbeck

Mooks & Gripes reviews Gert Hofmann's Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl 

A neat-looking British horror anthology from 1969

Tess Lewis on Victor Serge's novels

F. R. Leavis remembers Wittgenstein

Steven E. Aschheim in Mittelweg: 'The critique of liberal-bourgeois instrumentality and mass modernity invariably informed the nature of their projects and the political positions they adopted – conservative, Zionist, Marxist, or religious. These sentiments were very much in the mould of Weimar intellectuals. ... Now, I want to compare them to another intellectual who ... occupies a remarkably iconic position precisely because he is a liberal. I am referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin.'

Vince Taylor, on whom the character of Ziggy Stardust was partly based:

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher -- The Schleiermacher blog is back in action with new material on Troeltsch

According to Joseph Bottum, Charles Taylor believes that 'Selves are formed in community, even when the community has ... decided, communally, that we each carry around our own unique, non-communal selves.'

Mark Vernon on Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue ethics

Pat Devine reviews a new book on Karl Polanyi's economics

A video of Chris Hedges speaking about his new book, the Death of the Liberal Class

George Prochnik on Vienna's 'Kaffeehaus Canon' (inc. a photo of Cafe Hawelka)

Matthew Gallaway on the 'city of dreams' in Musil's Man Without Qualities

Brad Johnson on Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé

Lesley Chamberlain on a collection of Karel Capek's short pieces
 

This fall, Random House will release Robert Walser's Berlin Stories as an e-book (trans. S. Bernofsky) (ht Wandering with Robert Walser)

Rudy Rucker on Cronenberg's Naked Lunch

Hari Kunzru's interview with Michael Moorcock
 
Recommended books for a novice reader of Rebecca West

Pamela Norris reviews Kathleen Jones' book on Katherine Mansfield

Lavinia Greenlaw on the Nova Scotian background of Elizabeth Bishop

Ange Mlinko on Robert Duncan and H. D.

The University of Chicago Press has released Powell's Dance to the Music of Time as 12 e-books

Murakami's 1Q84 to appear in English this year

Shashi Tharoor reviews Nelson Mandela's Conversations With Myself

Rare footage of the Ballets Russes

Another review of Kristin Hersh's memoir

P. J. Harvey reads Joyce, Pinter and T. S. Eliot