LITERATURE

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Of the thousands of books published in Britain each year, only a handful are translated from foreign languages. Given the dominance of English as the international language of business and politics, perhaps our literary chauvinism is inevitable. Does this narrowing of our reading world matter? Are we in danger of missing out on today's Tolstoy or tomorrow's Murakami? Novelist Adam Thirlwell has recently masterminded 'Multiples', a globe-trotting collection of 12 stories, translated in and out of English and 17 other languages by 61 authors. He chairs a conversation between three champions of translated literature - the writer and francophile Julian Barnes, the novelist Ali Smith, and Irène Némirovsky's translator, Sandra Smith - as they discuss the challenges of Anglocentricity, the relationship between authors and their translators, and the role of translators in shaping our cultural imagination and inheritance.

We are grateful to Portobello Books for sponsoring this event, and to the TLS for supporting it.

Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, Sandra Smith & Adam Thirlwell on translated literature

Novelist and short story writer Margaret Drabble discusses the ethics of portraiture, the public versus the private image, the defining of character in paint and prose, and the many faces of Doris Lessing.

This event was part of 'Portraits of Writers', a series of talks in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, to coincide with the exhibition 'On Paper: Portraits of Writers'.

Portraits Of Writers Royal Society Of Literature - Margret Drabble on Doris Lessing

THE HAWTHORNDEN LECTURE

In 1948, the novelist and poet Jack Kerouac coined the name 'Beat Generation' for an underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York. In the decade that followed, works such as Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg's Howl and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (the last two sparkling obscenity trials that ultimately revolutionised American publishing) formed a distinct 'Beat' literature. Iain Sinclair has been described by the Daily Telegraph as 'one of our most dazzling stylists', and American Smoke, published this month, completes the trilogy he began with Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire and continued with Ghost Milk. In a talk introduced by novelist and screenwriter Deborah Moggach, he conducts a memory interrogation, touching on the past meetings, lost archives, chance discoveries, volcano obsessions and fated decisions of the Beats.

We are grateful to the Hawthornden Charitable Trust for sponsoring this event.

Ian Sinclair on the Beats

THE TAGORE MEMORIAL MEETING

'Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery,' Nadeem Aslam has written, 'but no nation should ever require its citizens to be that brave.' His sentiment is shared by Kamila Shamsie, and the work of both novelists has focused on the human cost of conflict in their homeland. Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan, and experienced the devastation of General Zia's martial rule before his family fled to Huddersfield when he was 14. He has traced the plight of his compatriots from small-town Pakistan in 'Season of the Rainbirds' (1994), to the north of England in Maps for 'Lost Lovers' (2005), and back again in 'The Blind Man's Garden', published earlier this year. Kamila Shamsie grew up in Karachi, and many of her novels - 'In the City by the Sea', 'Salt and Saffron', 'Kartography' and 'Broken Verses' - have centred on struggles in her hometown. In a conversation chaired by essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, Aslam and Shamsie discuss writing fiction, set in Pakistan and beyond, during the 'war on terror' years.

We are grateful to the Robert Gavron Charitable Trust for sponsoring this event.

The Pakistani novel today

‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated,’ Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote. She considered herself one of these, and despite great early promise lived much of her life in drudgery and near destitution. Then, in her late 50s, she began to write. Over the next two decades, she not only published three biographies, but nine brief and brilliant novels, four of which were shortlisted for the Booker, Offshore winning it. At 80, Fitzgerald found fame both sides of the Atlantic. Chaired by Hermione Lee, whose widely acclaimed biography of Fitzgerald was published last autumn, and who will speak about her life, three writers celebrate one of the great writers of the 20th Century, and one of the most fascinating. Biographer and critic Susannah Clapp, who regularly edited Fitzgerald’s work at the LRB, considers her biography of the poet Charlotte Mew. Penelope Lively, who was a friend, talks about The Gate of Angels. Alan Hollinghurst looks at Offshore, a novel based on Fitzgerald’s experiences of living on a leaky houseboat on the Thames.

We are grateful to the Royal Literary Fund
for sponsoring this event.

On Penelope Fitzgerald

One hundred years after the outbreak of the Great War, Peter Parker introduces four writers, and the pieces of First World War literature that mean most to them. Poet and fiction writer Tobias Hill looks at Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. The Irish poet Michael Longley, whose father was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry during the First World War, reads from the poetry of Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas, as well as his own war-inspired work. Timberlake Wertenbaker, whose most recent play, Our Ajax, looks at the trauma of modern warfare, explains how she was
marked by Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. And Louisa Young, author of the bestselling First World War novel My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, considers The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West.

Voices of the Great War

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION/RSL SERIES: MEETING 2

Best remembered for her Moomin books, the Finnish writer Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is also celebrated for her adult fiction. But where do books for children end, and books for adults begin? Can an author’s writing invite the states of adulthood and childhood to merge and address each other? Jansson was inspired to create the Moomins after an argument about the philosopher Immanuel Kant; The Summer Book, a luminous novel for adults, explores the relationship between a six-year-old girl and her aging grandmother. Ali Smith is a prizewinning novelist, and has written introductions to several of Jansson’s books. Thomas Teal, who spent time with Jansson on her summer island in the 1970s, has translated six of her books, including The Summer Book. In 2009 he won the Bernard Shaw Prize for his translation of her novel Fair Play. To celebrate Jansson’s centenary, in a discussion chaired by Kate Kellaway, Smith and Teal look at her life and work, and the effect her characters have on readers of all ages.

On Tove Jansson

Please note: this recording contains some strong language.

Sir Richard Eyre, who ran the National Theatre from 1987 to 1997, is this country’s most distinguished director of film, theatre, television and opera. His numerous triumphs include the noted 1982 revival of Guys and Dolls, his recent version of Ghosts, the musical of Mary Poppins, and the film of Zoe Heller’s novel Notes on a Scandal. They also include a number of never-to-be-forgotten productions of Shakespeare: Hamlet, with Jonathan Pryce in 1980 and with Daniel Day-Lewis in 1989; Richard III with Ian McKellen; King Lear with Ian Holm; and the recent television version of Henry IV Parts 1 and II. In celebration of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, Sir Richard reflects on the challenges and rewards of bringing his plays to stage and screen.

We are grateful to the National Portrait Gallery, our partner for this event. 

Living with Shakespeare (Richard Eyre)

If Virginia Woolf came back to life today, what would she make of it? How would she feel about what’s happening to books, and to the reputation of her own books, and of the Bloomsbury group?  The acclaimed novelist Maggie Gee, whose thirteen previous books include The White Family, My Cleaner and My Animal Life, this month publishes her new novel, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, which imagines what ensues when an author working in the New York Public Library becomes so passionate about Woolf that she suddenly materialises. In a conversation chaired by Anne Chisholm, biographer of Frances Partridge, the long-lived Bloomsbury diarist who remembered Woolf from her youth, Maggie Gee discusses her novel with Alexandra Harris, author of Romantic Moderns, which explores connections between some of the 20th Century’s greatest writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Eric Ravilious and John Piper, and of a short biography of Woolf. They reflect on her imaginings of both past and future, and ask what she means to readers and writers today. Is she, for women writers in particular, a hard act to follow?

We are grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for sponsoring this event, and to the Bloomsbury Hotel for supporting it.

Virginia Woolf in the 21st Century

Background and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/10/mary-oliver-on-punctuation/

Recorded by the Lannan Foundation, 2001

TRANSCRIPT

Seven White Butterflies: Mary Oliver on punctuation

Interview by Luisa Cotardo conducted in 1995. Transcript and background: http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/11/jeff-buckley-interview/

Recording courtesy of Luisa Cotardo (http://luisacotardo.tumblr.com) for Brain Pickings (http://www.brainpickings.org)

TRANSCRIPT / CONTEXT

Jeff Buckley on music and life

Section 1: Lacan Permits Us to Return to Philosophy
Section 2: The Subject in Lacan and Badiou 
Section 3: Action of the Subject: Badiou and Lacan on the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Section 4: The Death Drive: Antigone vs. Athena 
Section 5: Our Bodies, Ourselves

Presenters: Daniel Tutt and Itai Farhi
Lacanian Forum of Washington, DC 
June 2015 

Badiou And Lacan

Adam Phillips reflects on the relationship between creativity and mental health, asks whether we try too hard to be happy, and explores his belief that psychotherapy is ‘a king of practical poetry’ in a conversation with Joan Bakewell, one of the country’s most highly respected broadcasters.


All in the mind (Adam Phillips & Joan Bakewell)

Background: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/07/the-histories-of-the-universe-patti-smith/

Patti Smith "The Histories of the Universe" (1975)

This was recorded during the "Criticism, Critique, Crisis: Event (Ereignis) – in Philosophy, Politics, Art & the Maternal" class co-taught by Avital Ronell and Slavoj Zizek at NYU, after an email I sent to Slavoj about some problems I had with his treatment of Buddhism in his recent book "Less Than Nothing." What I thought would be a brief exchange turned into a dialogue over 40 minutes long. Realizing that some of this doesn't make sense without the initial email, I'm attaching it below

Dear Prof. Zizek,

I've read your book "Less Than Nothing" and have some notes, mainly on Buddhism, which you said you'll discuss in tomorrow's class. You introduce Buddhism on p. 108, where you talk about the three types of Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. There is a mistranslation where you call Hinayana "the small wheel" and Mahayana "the great wheel," as yana actually means "vehicle." Also, the former is usually called Theravada ("teaching of the ancients") Buddhism, since Hinayana is rather pejorative and diminutive, and Theravada practitioners who predominantly make up the population of southeast Asia, do not consider their practice in any way inferior. The "wheel" however does have an important place in Buddhist teachings in the idea of the "three turnings of the wheel of Dharma," which says that in the sutras there are three levels of teachings for people of simple, middle, and high capacities. This is an important hermeneutic tool in interpreting Buddhist philosophy to which I'll return shortly. The different schools are not incompatible, it is the same liberation that is reached with the three vehicles, they mostly differ in respect to method and efficiency (tho some do claim to have additional higher levels of enlightenment), with the Vajrayana claiming to have all the teachings (and then some) of Mahayana, which in turn includes all the Theravada teachings in its framework. There is no "irreducible split" here, in that the "egotism" and "elitism" of Theravada does not make sense, since liberation from the self is not an egotistic move, if anything anti-egotistic. Also, calling Tibetan Vajrayana regressive is inaccurate. While it did incorporate elements of earlier regional religions like Bon, the system which was imported into Tibet was at the height of philosophical complexity (right before the decline of Buddhism in India and the destruction of the university in Nalanda). On p. 110 you say Vajrayana "ended up clinging to the most mechanical and firmly entrenched institutional hierarchical framework," this is not true, there is great diversity of schools within Vajrayana, Nyingma - the oldest one, did not even have an official "head" until one was elected recently on behest of HH Dalai Lama, and even then mostly for administrative purposes of the government in exile. Meanwhile, other sects differ widely in their institutional hierarchy, e.g. the HH Sakya Tenzin, head of the Sakya school, following a monarchic bloodline back to the Khon royal family of ancient Tibet, or the Ganden Tripa, head of the Gelug school (which is not led by HH Dalai Lama as many believe) who is democratically elected. Most of the more rigourous institutional hierarchy was imposed on Tibet by the Mongols, who were the ones to make the Dalai Lama the political head of region, which has been disputed to this day, and recently HH declared that from now on his post will be filled democratically. Also, there is a very rich tradition of hermetic yogis and "divine madmen" (Drukpa Kunley, Transnyon Heruka) in Tibet who were completely outside any religious/political framework but were nonetheless admired and respected for their spiritual insight.
     From the side of Buddhist practice, I think there's a problem in the way you approach things like prayer-wheels and mantra recitation, as "total externalization" used to achieve "mindlessness" (p. 110). I've noticed you use the example of mantras repeatedly in the sense of a blind repetition. However, in practice, each mantra is usually accompanied by specific and often complex deity visualizations and meditation topics, with the mantra itself being a means to keep your mind focused on the object of contemplation, rather than just letting it go. Similarly, the prayer-wheel and similar technologies are not meant to replace or externalize meditation on emptiness, but enhance it throughout all activities in daily life. The idea here being that the best thing to do is to sit and meditate on emptiness, but when one can no longer sustain this, then resort to mantras/visualizations of buddhas/bodhisattvas, and if one can't do that, like when talking to somebody or doing something, then resort to spinning prayer-wheels, rings, etc. to keep from losing focus altogether. Here there's also a karmic dimension, in that in addition to bad and good karma, there are many things (eating, walking, sleeping) that are karmically neutral, which can be used to generate good karma instead, as in the case of walking down the street while spinning a prayer wheel, or wishing in your mind that all sentient beings taste enlightenment while you are eating (typically a karmically neutral activity). 
     On p. 692 you reference Jacques-Alain Miller: "'Thanks to the veil, the lack of objects is transformed into object, and the beyond makes its entrance in the world' - this gap is crucial, and is missed by Buddhist 'nihilism' where we have only flat appearances and the Void." This misses the crucial insight that "Samasara is Nirvana," articulated by Nagarjuna and central to the Madhyamaka (or Middle-Way) philosophy which most of the schools you discuss ascribe to. The middle way is to avoid the extremes of Absolutism (or Eternalism) and Nihilism, and I find you often seem to represent Buddhism as falling into the extreme of Nihilism. Here I think it's important to bring up the Two-Truths doctrine (which I feel you come very close to on p. 719 in discussing direct/indirect meaning in Buddhist hermeneutics), this being the notion there is a relative/conditioned/mundane reality and absolute reality. From the standpoint of absolute reality, nirvana and samsara are indistinguishable. The Buddha never denied the existence of the world, self, etc. he just said that they exist relatively in a conditioned manner. Relative truths are called "words for a deceiver" in Tibetan. Absolute reality is reached through equanimity and balance between extremes, rather than falling into the nihilism of voidness. Right before this on p. 720 you say "the limitation of Buddhism is that it is not able to accomplish this second step - it remains stuck at the insight that there is no true Self." From the absolute truth perspective, this is exactly what Madhyamaka accomplishes in claiming that samsara is nirvana. The Buddha does not deny that there are objects and people in the world, he denies they exist in an absolute way. Here I think it's good to return to the three turnings of the wheel of Dharma, which basically teach the emptiness of the self (to beginners), the emptiness of phenomena (to intermediates), and the emptiness of emptiness (to the advanced). I feel like many of your criticism of Buddhism are more targeted at a Westernized New Age faux Buddhism popular in America, rather than authentic traditional teaching (and to be fair you sometimes openly say you're talking about Western Buddhism, but other times like p. 946, talk about "authentic" Buddhism with 'The Karate Kid' remake as your source). Also, in your treatment of Zen you make it seem like it can be applied to any military-political structure (p.134-135), following a D.T. Suzuki quote, which completely disregards the belief in karma. I've noticed you rely heavily on D.T. Suzuki in "Parallax View" as well, which is problematic, while Suzuki was instrumental in initially spreading Zen to the West, he is often wrong on many points, since he was just a lay academic practitioner with limited philosophical understanding, with strengths more in the area of translation. I had a few other points, but this is getting quite long, so I'll just add a few minor notes I have on your book and wrap it up.
     On p. 461 you say that Neptune is no longer a planet, I think you mean Pluto, and while at first it would seem to support your claim about Hegel being right about the number of planets, you'd be forgetting Eris (previously called, Xena) which would still make the total 9).
    Jack London's "suicide" which you talk about on p. 563, has largely been disproved by recent scholarship (granted you're quoting another's work here)
     In the footnote on p. 682 you make it seem like only Hindu priests can will an erection (saying it's largely involuntary), however this is not limited to Hinduism, or even general Eastern tantric practice, in a purely secular sense, this can be accomplished by most people who abstain from sex/masturbation for a month or more, with some practice allowing not only willed erection, but even a hands-free orgasm. Similarly, different tantric practices teach how to stop an erection as well, usually by focusing on blood returning to the heart center. 
     Lastly, on p 700 (and somewhere a few before) you talk about the Nazca lines (geoglyphs) in Peru, but call them Inca and say they were made by Incas, even though they were made (presumably) by the Nazca people 400-650 while the Inca empire ran 1438-1533.
     I hope this was helpful, and I really enjoyed your book. See you in class, sincerely,

aa

Buddhism Debate - Slavoj Zizek and Alexei Aitouganov Oct 25 2012

Excerpt from Orwell's fantastic 1946 essay outlining his 11 "golden" rules of tea perfection: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/14/george-orwell-a-nice-cup-of-tea/

TRANSCRIPT / DETAILS

George Orwell on how to make the perfect cup of tea

Founded in 1820, the RSL acts as a voice for the value of literature, honouring and supporting emerging and established writers whilst creating a bridge between authors and audiences of all backgrounds and experiences to engage as many people as possible with the wealth of literature in the UK.

All in the mind (Adam Phillips & Joan Bakewell)

Royal Society Literature