Sebald, Shakespeare, Josipovici, Bentham's mummy and so on

Theda Bara

A neat article on Prague and Kafka

An interview with Susan Bernofsky on translating Robert Walser

A roundup of choice Walser links from the past few years

Another review of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future

A new translation of Theodor Fontane's poem, 'The Tragedy of Afghanistan' (1859)

A review of Hannay's translation of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Gladstone: the grandest of old men

Via Maitresse, the new translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex has errors, hopefully to be corrected in time for the US release of this work

Will Self's Sebald Lecture

'Weavers, scholars, and writers, Sebald claims, tend “to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, [and] it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created.”'

The Mookse & the Gripes on Sebald's Rings of Saturn

'Love Across the Borders' by Gabriel Josipovici

Notes on Josipovici's Everything Passes by Paul Griffiths, Mr. Waggish, Stephen Mitchelmore, Richard Crary, and Dan Visel.

Aussie radio is on to Albert Camus, the James Dean of philosophy

More antipodean radio -- this time on David Eagleman, neuroscientist & novelist

Bellow-ing away at depression

A brief review of Breon Mitchell's new translation of The Tin Drum

Herta Müller's folk (with a tantalizing remark in the 4th paragraph about the roots of the Dracula story)

A three-week workshop on writing theology with Marilynn Robinson in Princeton (ht F&T)

Issa rocks out with a jukebox full of lit rock (ht Books, Inq.)

Bentham's mummy, Ginsberg and Kafka in one post

'There are more things in heaven and earth than ...,' -- okay, now let's look at some philosophers on Shakespeare. Here's a review (via Books, Inq.) of Colin McGinn's book on the bard, and McGinn's review of a book on Iago, and Martha Nussbaum's review from last year of McGinn's book along with Nuttall's and Zamir's

Hofmann damns even Zweig's suicide note

In the London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann pours torrents of abuse on Stefan Zweig.

Here are some of the more pointed zingers: "Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing."

"... this uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; this un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew ...; not a pacifist much less an activist but a passivist; this professional adorer, schmoozer ... who logged his phone calls and logged his letters and logged his books, and, who knows, probably logged his logs; ... who left a suicide note which, like most of what he wrote, is so smooth and mannerly and somehow machined – actually more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a suicide note – that one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it ...."

Quit beating around the bush, Mr. Hofmann, and tell us what you really think about Zweig.

I'm not in a position to evaluate Zweig's writing. I've read only one of his works, Fantastic Night, about which I have mixed views (it's repetitive but has some good writing in places). He may have been an inveterate schmoozer, but at least he was generous, trying to help a younger writer schmooze, too.

Here's Zweig with Joseph Roth in 1936.

Update (Jan. 22): Well, I've slept on it and decided three things about Hofmann's article. First, it's outrageously unfair. Second, I'm glad he wrote it, and that the LRB published it without softening Hofmann's vituperation. Third, I've got to read more Zweig ASAP.

I've followed Hofmann's work and have high regard for it, but I also have lots of respect for Anthea Bell, who, as John Self has noted (in the comments to one of his posts), has devoted much time to translating Zweig, so she must want his novels to be read. Hofmann notes that several giants of Zweig's culture didn't take Zweig's work seriously. However, while I'm loath to disagree with Thomas Mann, Musil and Karl Kraus, I'm not convinced by their low estimation of Zweig's abilities. After all, Musil apparently held Thomas Mann's work in low regard, and Kraus ridiculed Freud (who was admired by Schnitzler). Then again, these guys might have disliked Zweig's work because he was a hack-writer, not much better in their eyes than a writer of pulp fiction, but some pulp-fiction and supposedly hack writers have drawn more appreciation in recent times than they received in their own day. Also, Zweig was seen as a tireless self-promoter, which, esp. in his culture, was definitely a vice (not so much being a self-promoter, but being seen as one). So, perhaps these luminaries disliked Zweig and allowed their personal disdain to colour their opinion of his work.

What's an early 21st-century anglo reader to do? I guess I've just got to knuckle down and read me some Zweig!

Update (Feb. 3, 2010): The next issue of the LRB (Vol. 32, no. 3) is on-line and contains six letters objecting to Hofmann's review. Notice, though, that Hofmann's article is the "most-read" on-line item at the LRB's site. This is lit-crit tabloid journalism. Scandal and intrigue sell papers. Yes, I've changed my mind. While it's good for the LRB to run a bracing critique, they shouldn't have run Hofmann's review with its more scathing personal remarks.

Update (March 14, 2010): Nicholas Lezard has a word or two about Hofmann's attack in a review of Pushkin's latest Zweig publication

Update (March 26, 2010): Stuart Walton in the Guardian -- "[Hofmann] has called [Zweig's] output 'just putrid.' A tad harsh, perhaps, but he has a point."

Update (May 13, 2010): Will Stone replies to Hofmann's article.

Update (Oct. 9, 2010): Here's a PEN panel-discussion in NY of Stefan Zweig from April 30, which includes Michael Hofmann, Paul Holdengräber, and others. Here's some coverage of the event.

'Inverted snobbery' -- an old political vice

It's his fault!

I thought it was only today's politicians who curried favour by playing at being 'one of the boys,' or 'someone you could have a beer with.' It turns out that this trick is quite old, old enough to have been ridiculed in a mystery novel in 1951. The novel in question is The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (aka Elizabeth MacKintosh). She has one of her characters blame Cromwell for starting this shtick:

'Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. "I'm a plain man, I am. No nonsense about me." And no manners, grace, or generosity, either. ... In some parts of the States, I understand, it's as much as a political man's life is worth to go to some constituencies with his tie tied and his coat on. That's being stuffed-shirt. The beau ideal is to be one of the boys' (The Daughter of Time, p. 30).

Elizabeth MacKintosh (one of whose pseudonyms was Josephine Tey):

The state, the arts, gossip & accomplished nephews

Ludwig Feuerbach

On Aussie radio, Alan Saunders interviews Moira Gatens on Spinoza, Feuerbach and George Eliot's Middlemarch

More radio from Oz -- Parts 1 and 2 of a program on dreams (interviews with a Jungian [Part 1] and a neuroscientist [Part 2])

'Wallace Stevens, Armchair Visionary' (ht Books, Inq.)

'Aufklärung für Kinder' -- Walter Benjamin wrote 30 German radio broadcasts for kids between 1929 and 1932

The new English translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex

A long excerpt from Marilynn Robinson's 2006 article, 'Onward Christian Liberals'

The Glorious Revolution and the making of the modern state

Review of Jon Elster's book on disinterested action

Joseph Margolis on his 2009 book, The Arts and the Definition of the Human

Mary Midgley reviews The Master and His Emissary

'Dark secrets about Charlie Chaplin's mother'

'Fuss over English egghead' -- the strange twists of Colin Wilson's career, including his meeting with Marilyn Monroe ("I had been told she was bookish")

Vintage crime fiction -- Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson

A Scotsman summit on Montaigne

Jan Morris -- "I've been egocentric. Egocentric all my life."

I discovered Edward Bernays (a nephew of Freud) while teaching a course in media ethics a few years ago -- here's a piece on his relation to consumer culture. More about Bernays from Mind Hacks

One of Willard van Orman Quine's nephews, Robert Quine, was a great guitarist who gave up tax law for punk rock -- he worked with Lou Reed and Brian Eno among others

June Christy performs 'How High the Moon' with Nat King Cole and Mel Tormé:

Two philosophy-&-literature publications

Great news for fiction readers with a philosophical bent:

First, in June Columbia University Press will issue a collection of papers by philosophers on J. M. Coetzee's works. It's called J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer. The table of contents looks intriguing (to say the least).

Secondly, down the street in Buffalo The Monist has issued a call for papers for an issue on the philosophy of Robert Musil. Scroll to the bottom of that page for the Musil call. The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2013. That gives me only three years to read, contemplate and expand upon Musil's The Man Without Qualities -- I don't think I'll make that deadline.