Rojak: Before school.

Rojak is a regular collection of assorted links as well as a bulletin summarising the week (or thereabouts) on this blog.

Yup, school begins again tomorrow. Here’s your last dose of Rojak before that happens.

Assorted

Beck will release his new album through McSweeney’s in December 2012. Called Song Reader, it asks you to play it in order to bring it to life. [via McSweeney’s]

Chatting with Annie Janusch, who translated Wolf Haas’s Brenner and God into English. [via Melville House]

A graphic essay on Thomas Bernhard. [via A Piece of Monologue]

While we’re there, A Piece of Monologue also points us to The Blue Velvet Project, which is a frame-by-frame analysis project of the David Lynch film. [via A Piece of Monologue]

LCD Soundsystem concert film, Shut Up and Play the Hits, to arrive on DVD and Blu-Ray. [via Consequence of Sound]

Interview with Liza Klaussmann, who has her debut novel Tigers in Red Weather out from Picador and is also the great-great-great-granddaughter of Herman Melville. [via The Guardian]

Bulletin

In a visual art-heavy week on WKLC:

• Edward Gorey.
• Francis Bacon.
• Robert Hughes.
• Roman Cieślewicz.
• Walter Benjamin.

d

Rojak: Record Store Day

Rojak is a regular collection of assorted links as well as a bulletin summarising the week (or thereabouts) on this blog.

A happy Record Store Day (and Earth Day) to everyone!

Assorted

On reading Thomas Bernhard. [via The Millions]

I’ve got my eyes on whiteonwhite: algorithmicnoir, the new film by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation. [via The Paris Review]

Alfred Hitchcock season. [via The Telegraph]

Have you seen the New Directions catalogue yet? [via New Directions]

Werner Herzog and Into the Abyss. [via The Guardian]

Conversational Reading points to an article on Tzvetan Todorov. [via Conversational Reading]

Enhance your Louvre experience with the Nintendo 3DS. [via Kill Screen]

Bulletin

Notable posts from these past couple of weeks:

• Coachella highlights.
• Margaret Carson on Sergio Chejfec.
• Benjamin Moser on Clarice Lispector.
• New Beach House song.
• New Enrique Vila-Matas book with a focus on Bob Dylan.
• New tUnE-yArDs video.
• Books I ordered and preordered.

d

Let’s read some Thomas Bernhard.

In a heavily damaged condition, as you would say, I finally sat down, after I had run through this detestable and trashy and moronic Austria, in my characteristically breathless way, I will have you know, on a conglomerate boulder on the Salzburger Haunsberg, from which I looked down on the city of Salzburg, totally stultified by its inhabitants, totally annihilated by its architects, your colleagues, but for all that still basking in its [own] megalomania.

Excerpt from “Burst into Flames.  A Travel Journal to a Former Friend” a translation of “In Flammen aufgegangen. Reisebericht an einen einstigen Freund”

[Full text at The Philosophical Worldview Artist.]

d

On Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser.

Conversational Reading pointed me to this excellent essay on Thomas Bernhard by Douglas Glover, titled “A Scrupulous Fidelity, On Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser“. [The Brooklyn Rail, via Conversational Reading]

It’s a great look at what makes Bernhard work.

An excerpt:

The Loser is very much a novel-as-performance, both image and allegory, more image than discursive thought yet very much a novel of ideas with the ideas implicit in the structure, action, and style. Besides the aesthetics of German Romanticism The Loser reflects a conception of art inherited from Schopenhauer—especially Schopenhauer’s notion that art itself is the intermediary between the supra-sensory and the merely human, that in creating or correctly appreciating great art we enter an eternal realm of Platonic Ideas (Beauty, God, or even Being in Heidegger’s sense) and leave the tawdry realm of existence behind (what the narrator calls “the existence machine”).

d

Understanding Thomas Bernhard

A great essay by E.J. Van Lanen on reading Thomas Bernhard over at Quarterly Conversation.

What I see in Bernhard is an examination of the problem of consciousness—if we understand consciousness to be the thing that provides us with ex-post facto justifications. And what is truly disturbing in Bernhard is not that his characters have created justificatory structures that verge on the insane, or at the very least the disturbed, but that these justifications are our own. For Bernhard’s characters always have an explanation, and those explanations, while delivered by unconventional people, and in unconventionally strident ways, are quite common: society caused this, or the family, or money, or fear of failure, or our innate goodness and seriousness running up against an uncomprehending and intolerant other. And maybe what he’s showing is that any attempt at justification or explanation is a kind of madness, that the causal search is a denial of the reality of the situation we’re faced with, that there is no significance, that our consciousness is just as deceptive as the consciousnesses of these half-mad characters, that our lives are based on stories, that we use these stories to paper, pitifully, over a truth that we can’t face, that these madnesses are our own madness.

Hit the link to read more.

[via Quarterly Conversation]

d

“Two Tutors”

An early Thomas Bernhard story, first time in English, as translated by Martin Chalmers.

While the new tutor has until now remained silent during our lunchtime walk, which to me has already become a habit, today from the start he had a need to talk to me. Like people who for a long time have said nothing and suddenly feel it to be a terrible lack, as something alarming to themselves and the whole of society linked to them, he explained to me all at once, agitatedly, that, really, he always wanted to speak, but could not speak, talk. I was no doubt familiar with the circumstance, that there are people, in whose presence it is impossible to speak . . . In my presence, it was so difficult for him to say anything that he was afraid of every word, he did not know why, he could investigate it, but such an effort would probably vex him over far too long a period of time. Especially now, at the beginning of term, under the pressure of hundreds of pupils, all of them hostile to discipline, under the pressure of the ever coarsening season, he could not afford the least vexation.  “I permit myself absolutely nothing now,” he said,  “I consist one hundred per cent only of my personal difficulties.”

[via Little Star Journal]

d