Bookslut interview Chloe Aridjis.
Certainly an inspiration for the first novel was a book of Joseph Roth’s brilliant essays on Berlin, written in the 1920s and the deepening shadows of the early ’30s; although he was writing about what he observed around him, they of course reveal a great deal of the author himself. The same could be said of Robert Walser’s and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin. The more infused a city’s portrait is with the author’s own spirit, the better.
Alain Robbe-Grillet on Michelangelo Antonioni’s aesthetic in L’Avventura and Blowup (via).
In The White Review, Heathcote Williams on William Burroughs’ London years.
I think Bill found London bleak. He once said with cold sarcasm at UK Customs on being asked for his reason for visiting Britain: ‘Number one: the food. Number two: the weather.’
Dermot Bolger on Brendan Behan.
The tragedy was that by 1958 Behan was becoming as well-known for his drinking as his writing; for being the ultimate dangerous live television guest; for unprintable soundbites and missed deadlines; for riotous scenes in hotels and airports; for the fact that – long before the age of celebrity – he became an international celebrity.
Ruin Lust, the Tate exhibition curated by Brian Dillion, is reviewed in the Guardian.
The pleasure the human mind takes in ruins is not easy to explain. It has something to do with time. In JMW Turner’s sketches of decayed abbeys that come like Soane’s broodings from the Romantic age, the artist lingers over the details of each crumbly, broken stone. Looking at his studies you get a powerful sense of the time he spent on them and the escape from daily care this involved. A ruin, in other words, is a time machine that releases the mind to wander in nooks and crannies of lost ages – and ages to come. That is why John Constable finds the ruins of Hadleigh Castle so grimly consoling in his painting of this medieval heap quietly decaying, the wars and oppressions it once embodied long forgotten.