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Describe your latest book. Wages of Rebellion looks at the nature of rebellion, those who do it, why they do it, and the price they pay for being a rebel. There are interviews with great rebels, from Julian Assange to Mumia Abu Jamal, who have sacrificed enormously for their resistance. The book posits that these [...]

Good information about Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon's Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org) can be found over on the Vertigo blog.

The second volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters will be published in October by Cambridge University Press. The Cahier series, which I mentioned a little while back, will be publishing a pamphlet by George Craig on his experiences translating letters for this volume, titled “Writing Beckett’s Letters.”

I would highly recommend this Cahier to anyone interested in Beckett, translation, or writing. What Craig does is to use his translations as a focus through which to draw a number of apparently divergent but in fact related threads: these would include handwriting (and an author’s physical interaction with a text); particular, in-depth translation questions; failure and futility; the uses of intellectual and cross-genre collaboration; the effects of writing in another language; and the ways in which the effects of writing in another language are transcended.

This is quite a bit of ground for a long essay that comes in at 36 pages (with illustrations), but Craig impressively remains light on his feet while treating each of these subjects with rigor. His method is to use many short, overlapping sections to build up a related set of ideas about Beckett’s writing and translation.

Via Conversational Reading.

My friend the poet and publisher Micheal Schmidt once told me that he liked poetry that was made up of simple words. "Sex, love, food... the vital things are simple words," he said to me (or something like that). I took his point, and certainly agree that it isn't obscure vocabulary that makes e.g. the late Beckett such a vital (and challenging) read. But should we always eschew the arcane? And is it arcane to write "arcane" when I could have written "difficult"? Wrong to have written "eschew" when I could have said "avoid"? It surely isn't always sesquipedelian ostentation to use the multisyllabic when the monosyllabic would have fitted almost as well - is it? (Surely only a sesquipedelian ever invokes the term sesquipedelian.) Isn't the abstruse sometimes the more accurate? The recondite might not be as recognisable, but it might be the more rigorous; simple might simplify to the point of becoming wrong, complex might be confounding but absolutely correct (now, is "absolutely correct" a pleonasm? Oh, bother!) Isn't the move from "fitted almost as well" to "fitted exactly" the move from a basic to more a complex vocabulary? Well, not always, for sure...

Beckett's Proust was written in 1931, when he was 25 years old, and exhibits the sort of language use one might expect from a precociously gifted academic rather than a poet. The poetry of the later work, when Beckett showed us impotence, futility, loss, has shorn its lexicon of flash, academic jargon: Worstward Ho is far, far from simple, but its difficulty doesn't arise from tricky terminology. His prose, now, is exactly as Michael would like it: simple words directing us towards vital things (and non-things, of course: to the unsayable). Still, between the baby-language of the modern media and the blistering, elementary severity and clarity of Beckett, there does lie a place where being wordy is surely just about ok. I'd guess that even Michael would want me to know the difference between disinterested and uninterested, whilst expecting me to be neither with regard to sex, love, food... and poetry.

Mr Mitchelmore tell us that:

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 are exceeding even my high expectations. Above all the gift these letters offer is the chance to follow a young writer as he seeks a way forward, finding glimpses of a path in both writing, music and painting. In July 1937, Beckett responded to Axel Kaun, who worked for Kafka's publisher Rowohlt Verlag and had suggested that he translate a German poet. Beckett declines but doesn't stop there. He complains of finding writing in formal English "more and more difficult, even pointless" (more...)

Via wood s lot -- Figures of Subjective Destiny: On Samuel Beckett by Alain Badiou:

Why there is a close relationship between poetry and philosophy, or more generally between literature and philosophy? It’s because philosophy finds in literature some examples of completely new forms of the destiny of the human subject. And precisely new forms of the concrete becoming of the human subject when this subject is confronted to its proper truth.

I name figure this textual presentation of forms of the subjective truth. The figures are of great interest for a philosophical theory of the subject. My example today will be some figures that we discover in the novels of Samuel Beckett (more...)

Edmond Caldwell, over at The Chagall Position, on B.S. Johnson's relationship with Beckett:

In Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe tells how Johnson got to meet his hero, Samuel Beckett, in Paris in 1966. Johnson had already been sending the older writer what Coe describes as “fan letters” as well as copies of his first couple of books, and as a result of this first meeting Beckett became an even more important figure to Johnson. They would meet on further occasions over the subsequent years, to “drink whiskey and play billiards together” whenever Johnson went to Paris, and they exchanged letters and postcards in between times. On Beckett’s side these were invariably rather “brief and functionally worded,” Coe reports, and although the relationship was clearly a significant prop to Johnson’s morale Coe is agnostic about Beckett’s investment in it beyond hazarding the opinion that there was probably more to it than mere “writerly courtesy.” Beckett certainly proved ready to give practical support to Johnson on several key occasions, including writing a letter to a recalcitrant editor testifying to Johnson’s talent, sponsoring Johnson for an Arts Council grant, and even helping him out financially. In 1973, however – a bad year generally for Johnson – he found the limit of Beckett’s generosity when he used a flattering remark from their private correspondence as a jacket blurb for Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry without Beckett’s permission. Beckett replied with an angry letter that seemed to have brought an end to their relations. On a Sunday night in the November of that same year, Coe reports that Johnson tried unsuccessfully to reach Beckett on the phone a number of times. The next night Johnson successfully opened his arteries in the bathtub.

Film by Samuel Beckett is up on YouTube (via the essential wood s lot).

I've just been sent a copy of Manuscript Genetics: Joyce's Know-how, Beckett's Nohow by Dirk van Hulle (University Press of Florida; I was also kindly sent Cannibal Joyce). I have precious little idea what "manuscript genetics" is/are, so, before I've read it, here is what the UPF website has to say about van Hulle's book:

By taking the principles of manuscript genetics and using them to engage in a comparative study of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Dirk Van Hulle has produced a provocative work that re-imagines the links between the two authors. His elegant readings reveal that the most striking similarities between these two lie not in their nationality or style but in their shared fascination with the process of revision.

Van Hulle's thoughtful application of genetic theory -- the study of a work from manuscript to final form in its various iterations -- marks a new phase in this dynamic field of inquiry. As one of only a handful of books in English dealing with this emerging area of study, Manuscript Genetics: Joyce's Know-How, Beckett's Nohow will be indispensable not only to Joyce and Beckett scholars but also to anyone interested in genetic criticism.

Indispensable: you heard the man!

The book opens with a nice epigraph quoting Virginia Woolf:

It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that.

Babble with Beckett: How foreign languages can provide writers with a way out of the familiar (thanks Dave Lull):

About twenty years ago, a friend from Paris gave me a copy of Premier Amour (1945), one of Samuel Beckett’s very early works in French. This friend especially treasured this little-known short récit, but there was a word he did not understand. The protagonist does some kind of business with a “panais”. “Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un panais?”, he asked. “It’s a parsnip.” “Yes, so the dictionary says. But what is a parsnip? The French don’t eat parsnips. They feed them to animals.” The appearance of the panais in Premier Amour is ruefully comic; it brings into play the cryptic, the abject and the theatrical. It hints, according to punning dream logic, at the proverb, “Fine words butter no parsnips”. Beckett was finding his way out of fine words.

Great news for Beckett fans! Cambridge University Press had originally announced The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929–1940, edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and due out in October, at £85 but they have substantially reduced that figure and it now looks like the Letters will sell at a RRP of £30. Still expensive, but a hell of a lot cheaper than before. Excellent stuff. Well done CUP!

Tom McCarthy writes to tell me:

Since Calder is no longer allowed to sell its editions of Beckett's work after March this year (Faber will have exclusive rights), the Calder shop on The Cut is currently selling all of its Beckett stock half-price. You should tell your readers about it: it's a wonderful opportunity to pick up these beautiful and valuable (in the cultural and doubtless eventually the financial sense) books. When they're gone they're gone. I got the whole set today for £56, and was amazed not to see queues down the street, like at the Radiohead secret gig.

Mick Finch reviews Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (via This Space):

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of their encounter is the degree of difference in each man's presentation of their world. Van Velde's nihilism weighs heavily upon the reader and this is not alleviated by his repeated claims that laughter is the only true response to the existential conundrum. Beckett, on the other hand, embodied such a response in both his life and his work and laughter is a product of his writing, not a subject.

I've just mentioned Lydia Davis's essay The Problem in Summarising Blanchot (forthcoming in Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red [Sylph Editions]). Well, summarising the great thinker does not seem to be a problem for Steve This Space Mitchelmore in his fine essay Always beginning again: Blanchot on Beckett.

Steve's essay is a response to the "gross caricature" of Blanchot's reading of Beckett to be found in Pascale Casanova's Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. I've read Casanova's book and I enjoyed it. Whilst I disagreed with her take on Blanchot, I think her target was actutally those unnamed, academic critics who adopt a sub-Heideggerian approach to reading Beckett inspired by -- but poor parodies of -- Blanchot's deep engagements. I sensed that her beef was more with those who mimicked Blanchot but, for sure, she blames Blanchot for the "mysticism" and the "hierophantic glosses" he has, she avers, inspired.

Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution starts with Casanova's wonderfully clear reading of Worstward Ho. Casanova is saying, here, that those who run too quickly towards the idea of Beckett as inpenetrable or, worse, as some kind of prophet, who consider him to be sui generis, handicap themselves before they even start reading. With close attention to the text, and a bit of historical context, even Beckett's most difficult works can be read and understood without recourse to what she would think of as Blanchot-inspired mumbo-jumbo about Being. Certainly, in her own reading, she shows that the fine art of close reading is all we need to understand any work and I would commend her book for that reason alone. Philosophy needs to take a back seat whilst we concentrate on what is in front of us on the page.

As Steve states, however, Casanova woefully misreads Blanchot. He isn't a mystic, he is a harsh realist, the most demanding of readers, who knows that we read and write in the face of death. In fact, it is mysticism to pretend otherwise:

In The Unnamable, we continue without "characters under the reassuring protection of their personal name" or even with a story, it's just "phantoms without substance, empty images revolving mechanically around an empty center that the nameless 'I' occupies". This is "experience lived under the threat of the impersonal". Surely this is straightforward explication of a text; nothing hierophantic at all?

Indeed: "straightforward explication of a text" and done as only Blanchot can. Once we have read a text, as closely and as carefully as Casanova herself reads Worstward Ho, we then must engage with the meaning of that text. Its meaning is always about, always tied up with, our own lack of meaning, the absurdity of our smallness. Its meaning is always about how the text engages with us engaging with its engagement. As soon as we have carefully read what is in front of us on the page, "philosophy" -- inspired by Blanchot or not -- is the only thing that will allow us to be straightforward about writing, about reading, about life and about death.

A production of Beckett’s Happy Days opens at the National Theatre, London, on the 18th January. The National have written to me saying:

We are very keen for Beckett enthusiasts to attend the preview performances in order for them to continue discussions about the production. We are therefore offering a great ticket deal for these enthusiasts for the 18 – 23 Jan whereby they can claim best available seats for £15.