Watch Welles' 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel online

A recent post on An und für sich describes a Humanities class where students compared Franz Kafka’s The Trial with Orson Welles’ 1962 film adaptation: 'Generally speaking, the students were disappointed in the changes Welles made to the story — the way he ended it was a particular source of outrage, but other changes seemed to “flatten” the book and the character of K. somehow. I agree with them, but I actually take that as evidence that Welles has done a very capable adaptation of the novel into a film.' As part of a discussion on 'Cold War Kafka', the site also points out that Welles' film is out of copyright, and so is freely available to watch online. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Top 11 Existentialist Novels?
• Orson Welles' The Stranger
• Franz Kafka, The Trial (Folio Society)
• Franz Kafka, The Trial

Philosophical essay available on Spurious

In a 2005 article originally published in Parallax, Lars Iyer summarises his book on Maurice Blanchot, Blanchot's Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical:

'For Blanchot, like the early Levinas, the world of things is a dead world, but it is one that is not inert. It is a dead world, but one possessed of a strange kind of life – a dying that is active, a force of becoming that is the experience of the being of things. How can being be brought together with becoming? The difference between beings and being, as Levinas and Blanchot will present it, is given in the relation between the thing and its image. As readers will know, for Levinas and Blanchot it as though, for them, the image was the condition of possibility of the thing and not the other way round. Broadly speaking, the image is what gives itself in the relation to the thing when it is turned from the tasks and projects to which we subordinate it, resisting the very impulse of our existence to create meaning, to, as it were, ‘exist’ things by bringing them towards us as potential tools or as potential raw material. It gives itself as what ‘in’ the thing exists over and above our interests. But even as it does so, its resistance captures my attention and struggles with it, escaping me even as it seems to offer itself to me. Yet I am not indifferent to it, and this is the point. The image of the thing no longer exists at any distance from me at all; fascinated, I am as though pressed by the thing against its image, as though the heart of the thing held me at what one commentator calls ‘its distance’.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

'He shows us the strangest damn things.'

Laura Harring and Naomi Watts as Rita and Betty in Mulholland Dr. (2001)

Nicholas Lezard asks why the films and television shows of David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., Twin Peaks) exercise such a lasting grip on our imaginations: '[...] we are unsure what is dream and what is reality. This is at least the most consistently abiding characteristic of dreams when we are experiencing them, and in his book Lynch on Lynch, in which the director talks engagingly, if not always revealingly, about his work, Chris Rodley (who edited the book) puts it very well: that the borderland between dream and reality in his work (although he's specifically talking about Mulholland Dr.) is "a badly guarded checkpoint where no one seems to be stamping passports".' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Lynch on Music, Ideas and Brutality
• David Lynch, Works on Paper
• David Lynch in Paris
• Inside David Lynch's Club Silencio, Paris
• Is David Lynch Retiring from Film?
• Will Self Interviews David Lynch

English translation of Thomas Bernhard short story

Christiaan Tonnis, 'Thomas Bernhard #1', pencil and coloured pencils on paper, 1985

The website The Philosophical Worldview Artist has posted a translation of Thomas Bernhard's 'In Flammen aufgegangen. Reisebericht an einen einstigen Freund'. The piece has been translated as 'Burst into Flames. A Travel Journal to a Former Friend', and you can read it by following the link [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

'Gee emulates the act of attentive reading.'

A still from Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald)

Vertigo reviews Grant Gee's recent documentary about W. G. Sebald, Patience (After Sebald) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Remembering W. G. Sebald
• Sebald as Academic
• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• James Wood on Sebald's Austerlitz