Austro-Hungarian subjects

Mia Slavenska

Otto von Habsburg's obituary: 'He died a happy man, right about almost everything, if usually too early.'

'“Only silence is innocent”: Zagajewski on Rilke, irony, and the future of poetry'

Brett Foster reviews Edward Snow's new translation of some Rilke poems (here's an excerpt from Zagajewski's introduction to Snow's translations)

Mark Harman's translation of Kafka's 'Message From the Emperor'

Isotropic Films is making a film of Kafka's Metamorphosis (the father's packin' heat -- I wonder if the bug will shoot electric rays from its antennae)

At Three Percent, Bill Marx goes to bat for Ernst Weiss's novel, Georg Letham, and Brady Evan Walker reviews Joseph Roth's Job, and Chad W. Post introduces Gregor von Rezzori's Ermine of Czernopol

Tom Nairn reviews a new biography of Ernest Gellner 

Otto Preminger one-ups Letterman:



Freud's cocaine thing. Here's a pdf about Freud's cocaine thing (and the much worse drug habits of renegade psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who had radical ideas about sex and free love, and who had an affair with Frieda von Richtofen, who later married D. H. Lawrence and might've presented to him [Lawrence] Gross' ideas about sex and free love ...).

A longish piece in Haaretz called 'Monk, Mystic, Mechanic' -- on a recent Berlin exhibit devoted to Wittgenstein

Alan Saunders' and Gavin Kitching's podcast on Wittgenstein's puzzlement

Wittgenstein's photos, and a 'Lost archive shows Wittgenstein in a new light'

Dave Maier on Wittgenstein and meaning: "Can I say 'bububu' and mean 'If it doesn't rain I shall go for a walk'?" 

Humpty Dumpty

Fergus Johnston reviews the new translation of Jens Malte Fischer's 2003 biography of Mahler, and here's Rupert Christiansen's review

And M. Werbowski reviews Norman Lebrecht's Why Mahler?

Bob Duggan reviews a Neue Galerie show on fin-de-siècle Vienna: 'How Vienna in 1900 gave birth to modernity' -- '“In his life, Klimt clearly divided women into those he respected, even exalted, and those he slept with,” [Jill] Lloyd acknowledges, but also “Klimt’s images of women are acknowledged as complex representations with a symbolic force; as such, they embody allusions to the ‘women question’ that are far from straightforward".'

Mattel's new 'Gustav Klimt Barbie doll echoes the artist's portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, reflecting the painting's Byzantine mosaics and Egyptian motifs. She wears a halter gown with silvery trim, draped chiffon sleeves and bustle .... She is a magnificent muse.'

The world's first mobile internal combustion engine was made in Vienna

Mahler, with Glenn Gould conducting, Maureen Forrester singing: 

Mid-June philosophy & literature links

Wilhelm Dilthey

Mr. Waggish mentions Dilthey in the lead-up to some remarks on a passage by Hans Blumenberg. Telos has issued a call for papers for a special issue on Blumenberg (deadling: June 1, 2011).

Catherine Pepinster reviews John Cornwell's new book on Cardinal Newman, and here's Cornwell interviewed about Newman by Jonathan Derbyshire

Michael Ruse: 'Lament for the Humanities'

'Hegel at Georgetown -- The Master-Slave Dialectic'

A posthumous review by Martin Gardner, and here's an interview with Gardner in 1997

Roger Scruton on 'the conflict between value and price'

A nice intro to Bayes' theorem

Steven Laureys & David Chalmers on 'the hard problem' of consciousness. Here are the mp3's, etc. for Chalmers' John Locke lectures at Oxford (see his site for more).

Cian Dorr defends analytic metaphysics from Ladyman, Ross, et al. (More discussion here.)

'What is a law of nature?' A report on a meeting of philosophers & physicists, inc. Julian Barbour. The talks from this conference are on-line.

The New Statesman finds J. G. Ballard's answers for a mid-90's interview but can't recollect what the questions were

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, has a nice reply to Steven Pinker's NY Times attack

Simon Winchester is preparing a new book on Lewis Carroll

Transaction Publishers has re-issued Stefan Zweig's essays on Dickens, Dostoevsky and Balzac, and will soon (end of summer?) re-issue his essays on Holderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche. These two volumes are part of a projected trilogy of Zweig's works entitled 'Master Builders of the Spirit'. They include new introductions by Transaction's senior editor, Laurence Mintz. I can't find any indication of what will be in the third volume.

Zweig's previously unpublished novella, Journey Into the Past, will soon be published by New York Review Books, who will also be issuing the first full English translation of Gregor von Rezzori's The Ermine of Czernopol

An article about German translator, John E. Woods

"Writers have no more moral authority than plumbers or butchers," says Han Magnus Enzensberger.

Another review of Ernst Weiss's Georg Letham

Here's the text of the late Peter Porter's poem 'Wittgenstein's Dream' along with a recording of him reading it

Working towards a PhD online lets you explore more literature and study philosophers.

Literary Links

Ernst Weiss

Podcasts with Richard Powers, Rebecca Goldstein, August Kleinzahler, Orhan Pamuk, and many, many more

Eileen Battersby on Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, followed by an interview with Fallada's son
An excerpt from Herta Müller's Everything I Own I Carry With Me

David Auerbach on László Krasznahorkai

Video of Thomas Mann at the beach (wearing a tie)

The Canetti family: "In some Jewish families, the least admirable member may be the one who wins a Nobel Prize."

Stephen Vizinczey on Central European classics

William Gass on Knut Hamsun

Coverage of the latest pieces on Robert Walser

A description of P. D. Smith's Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-view of Science 1780-1955 (on Goethe, Büchner, Stifter, Musil & Brecht)
Christopher Byrd on Ernst Weiss' Georg Letham

Geoffrey O'Brien on Kleist

Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny

Providentia blogs on the Kaspar Hauser story

David Askew on Jonathan Swift
Kevin Hartnett on Haruki Murakami

Colin Marshall on the 'scientifically surreal, eerily erotic novels of Kobo Abe'
Joshua Willey on Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence

CIM is collecting the tributes to David Markson

Allan Massie on a new collection of essays about Jane Austen

Jim Thompson -- 'a dime-store Dostoevsky'?

Stücke

Lotte Lenya

20 of Trakl's poems translated by James Wright & Robert Bly

3 of Walser's stories translated by Damion Searls (ht Wandering with Robert Walser)

Bildung Mendelssohn

Carolyn Kelly's article on Herta Müller

"Ernst Weiss ... was a physician and creative writer [who] found a way to integrate the disciplines. The best of his books concern medicine and medical workers .... Weiss was born in 1882 outside Brünn, Austro-Hungary, now Brno, Czech Republic, and grew up in towns throughout Moravia and, later, in Prague and Vienna, where he obtained his medical degree in 1908. After practicing in Berne, Berlin, and Vienna (in the last under Dr. Julius Schnitzler, Arthur’s brother), he contracted tuberculosis, and went to recover on voyages aboard the liner Austria to India and Japan."

Thomas McGonigle recommends works by Heimito von Doderer (and Peter Handke among others): "He is equal of Robert Musil and has the advantage of having completed his great books."

'The Dark Side of the Enlightenment' -- "Romantics, Expressionists and Existentialists have all claimed [Heinrich von Kleist] as an inspiration. Kafka called him a "blood-brother." But Kleist belongs to no literary school and remains, as Thomas Mann observed, in a class uniquely his own. Outside the German-speaking lands, he is all too little read." (ht Dave Lull via Books, Inq.)

Mr. Waggish on Musil and Kant

Dan O'Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a radio adaptation of Ballard's High-Rise

Update (Dec. 29): George Steiner on Thomas Bernhard

A logophilist on Herta Müller's The Passport

Gleanings

Hedy Lamarr (image source)

Steven Nadler reviews a book on Spinoza and Maimonides.

'Anyone who enjoys the company of a provocative intelligence will want to pick up Night Music, a challenging collection of scattered Adorno essays. And pick a fight with it.'

Boyd Tonkin reviews Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind.

Cyril Connolly's '100 Key Books of the Modern Movement'

From the Guardian in 2002: '"We love only once," Connolly wrote, "and on how that first great love affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives." "Nonsense," Waugh mocked in the margin.'

Since kickstarting his career with his acclaimed travel bestseller, In Xanadu, at the age of 22, [William] Dalrymple has kept to writing about India and the Middle East consistently for 25 years. "Religion is a constant," he happily admits. "It seems to be something I can't quite escape."'

"On a steep slope overlooking Brno stands a modernist architectural masterpiece: the Tugendhat House. It is this remarkable building that provided Simon Mawer with inspiration for his most recent novel, The Glass Room."

More about Brno (which was the birthplace not only of Kundera but also of Kurt Godel, Adolf Loos, Erich Korngold, Pavel Tichy and Lorenz Eitner and in the environs of which were born Gregor Mendel, Ernst Weiss and Maurice Strakosch, AND which was the childhood home of Robert Musil) -- it has given Milan Kundera honorary citizenship.

David Sexton reviews The Letters of T. S. Eliot, and Josephine Hart reviews his tragic first marriage.

Amos Oz interviewed: “It's always a living miracle when I meet a reader. A reader is a co-producer of a book. I write the musical score, he plays it."

Footage of a John Nash interview.

Largehearted Boy and Fimoculous track the 'books of the year' lists.

More about the influence of Conan Doyle's medical background on his fiction ('more' in addition to this previously linked item).