substantial entries
activities & other news...
Thank you for writing and publishing the book Infinity The Story of a Moment, which I found both profound and heartwarming. The music described in its pages make my head spin even as I read it on the page, and I felt impelled to try Six Sixty-Six out to see what effect it had. It was very strong and strange. Because I was relying on an inner counting I could not drift into the trance state that beckoned, and had to remain in control of the inner voice...
Listen to Six Sixty-Six and read more fully about the composition here, and it's also available here.
Gabriel Josipovici and publisher Michael Schmidt of Carcanet Press at the May 24, 2012 launch of Infinity at Belgravia Books, London.
"The piano is not an instrument for young ladies Massimo, he said, it is an instrument for gorillas. Only a gorilla has the strength to attack the piano as it should be attacked, only a gorilla has the uninhibited energy to challenge the piano as it should be challenged."
Thus Tancredo Pavone,the wealthy and eccentric Sicilian nobleman and avant-garde composer, as recounted by his former manservant in the course of the single extensive interview which is this book. But as Massimo recalls what his master told him about his colourful life in Monte Carlo in the twenties, in Vienna studying with a pupil of Schoenberg's in the thirties, in post-war Paris and in Nepal where he underwent the revelation which fuelled his later music, and repeats Pavone's often outrageous opinions about everything under the sun, from the current state of civilisation to the inner life of each note, from why beautiful women are always unhappy to the vanity of his fellow composers, it becomes comically clear that not only does Pavone not always distinguish between memory and fantasy, but that Massimo does not always understand what it is he is repeating. Yet what ultimately emerges is the picture of a moving relationship between two people from very different walks of life, and, above all, the fact that behind Pavone's outrageousness and eccentricity lies a wounded and vulnerable man of profound integrity, for whom living and making music were always one.
"Thomas Bernhard and his Prizes" is an essay by Gabriel Josipovici focusing on My Prizes: An Accounting which appears on the Thomas Bernhard site in its original form, which differs from what was published in New Statesman.
"Modernism still matters," whicih appeared in connection with the publication of What Ever Happened to Modernism?, also appears on New Statesman's site.
Double book launch party for Gabriel Josipovici's two British publications of 2010, Only Joking and Heart's Wings, at Daunt Books in Holland Park on October 28, 2010, was a well-attended and happy event, with both publishers present and the author reading from "The Plot Against the Giant" in Heart's Wings -- more photos here.
At Shakespeare & Company in Paris, another reading, organized by CB Editions, publisher of Only Joking as well as many other worthy titles, was held on November 15th during which Gabriel Josipovici again read; photos are at CB Editions publisher Charles Boyle's blog, with a link to even more in his Facebook album.
2010: happy & busy year
for Gabriel Josipovici readers
Heart's Wings: New & Selected Stories from Carcanet Press in September
What Ever Happened to Modernism? from Yale University Press in September
Only Joking in English at last from CB Editions in October
Revue LISA/LISA e-journal will devote its February 2012 issue to Gabriel Josipovici, and has issued a call for papers:
We welcome original articles in English or French addressing any aspects of Josipovici's works (fiction, plays, criticism, biographical aspects). Contributions should be from 4,000-10,000 words in length and should be accompanied by a short abstract (200 words). Please mail submissions or send inquiries to Marcin Stawiarski (marcin.stawiarski@unicaen.fr).
After
and
Making Mistakes,
two new novels by Gabriel Josipovici in one volume, is now available from Carcanet and booksellers. More information from the publisher here.
Reviews (as they arrive):
Lee Rourke in The Independent
Jonathan Beckman in The Jewish Chronicle
Victoria Best at Tales from the Reading Room
Four essays on Everything Passes (of perhaps more: tell us if you know of them), written as part of an on-line colloquium that didn't happen (or hasn't happened yet), and have been published as blogs by each of the writers.
Stephen Mitchelmore at THIS SPACE
Richard Crary at THE EXISTENCE MACHINE
David Auerbach at WAGGISH
Daniel Visel at WITH HIDDEN NOISE
Gabriel Josipovici has contributed the essay, "Cousins" to this collection of the Independing Jewish Voices on the Middle East. A pdf of the essay is here, thanks to ReadySteadyBlog and Verso Books, the publisher.
Writer in Time: Tamara Yellin interviews Gabriel Josipovici in the Jewish Daily Forward of 4 March 2009 about his dedication to the modern European tradition in fiction. Missing from the online version is this paragraph:
Born in Nice in 1940, Josipovici escaped with his mother to Egypt in 1945 and in 1956 arrived in England, where he has lived ever since. This background of displacement has doubtless contributed to his unique sensibility. His locations and characters are often mundanely English, yet there is an alertness and unease in their portrayal which is rarely found among English Jewish writers: the alertness of a writer who has the stone of dislocation forever in his shoe.
"The Dark Waters" is a story by Gabriel Josipovici now appearing in the Eclectic England section of the Mad Hatter's Review.
What ever happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici's John Coffin Lecture in Literature on this subject, at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies of the University of London's School of Advanced Study, on March 14th, was very well attended. A blog account isat Ellis Sharp's The Sharp Side.
Gabriel Josipovici in Conversation with Bryan Cheyette
http://jewishbookweek.com/2007/040307a.php
on Sunday, March 4, 2007.
Two new Gabriel Josipovici titles in 2006:
The Singer on the Shore, a collection of essays and reviews,
March 2006,
from Carcanet
Press,
Reviewed
in The Guardian
and
Everything Passes, a novel, also from Carcanet
Press, September 2006 (now at Amazon
UK).
A major essay, "By a cool well: where to find the princesses and their frogs" in the 8th July 2005 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, reviewing Selected Tales: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, edited and translated by Joyce Crick, Oxford University Press. Opening paragraphs:
Why do we need another edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales? Are there not already several complete editions in English and any number of picture-book selections for children, with new ones appearing every Christmas? Instead of answering this question directly let us take another example of a "world's classic", the Bible. Though there are countless editions of the Bible around, and a large number of commentaries, OUP's World's Classics edition, published in 1997, filled a yawning gap. Edited by Robert Carroll, an Old Testament scholar with a real feeling for literature, and Stephen Prickett, a literary critic and scholar with a strong interest in the Bible and its afterlife in literature, this contained a long and extremely interesting introduction and copious footnotes. It did not try to summarize the many biblical commentaries, which tend to be theological and historical, but rather to raise questions about the Bible as a book and a great literary document, which of course it is, as well as being a cultural and religious one. In a similar way, Joyce Crick, a fine scholar of German literature who has always been adept at addressing a larger audience than simply her fellow Germanisten, has set out here to rescue Grimm's Tales both from children and from folklorists and to help us see it as a major literary work. Like Carroll and Prickett, she has done a magnificent job, and both she and OUP are to be congratulated.
For too long these haunting tales have been pulled out of context and subjected to mythological and psychological exegesis. Crick has done us an enormous service by returning them to their context in the Germanic lands of early modern Europe (Brueghel has always seemed to me a better key to their interpretation than Freud, Marx, or Mircea Eliade). Though she does not include some of my favourite stories (the wonderfully surreal "Herr Korbes" and "Lauschen und Flohchen", for example), and though she can do nothing about conveying the huge linguistic range of the collection, this is nevertheless a volume to treasure.
Full text available to TLS subscribers at
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2111602
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141188200/
on Saturday, May 28th, at 7 pm.