A feature by Gábor Schein
The themes of memory and forgetting are not as distinct from the theme of responsibility as we would like them to be. Gábor Schein's beautifully developed and persuasive essay begins with the physical description of a specific part of Budapest, tracing it from its origins as a swamp through its development as an industrial slum and then as a quarter for the wealthy, going on to examine the regular changing of the city's street-names as a series of excisions from memory. Such excisions, he argues, lead to apathy and indifference. Corpses float down the river in 1945 but no one notices any more. The homeless and hungry of today move past us in the street but liberal public opinion uses them more to flatter its own conscience than to do anything. The Sebaldian sense of deep ground constantly opens at our feet but we move on, returning to the moral and psychological equivalent of the swamp out of which the city sprang . . .
MICHAEL BARRON: What prompted the inception of Music & Literature? Could you describe the process from idea to publication?
M&L: Roberto Bolaño described his dream reader as the sort of person who engages with the complete works of an author. There’s an impulse behind this project similar to the drive to read every word by a writer like Dickinson, Kafka or—to choose a more recent example—Bolaño. Among the greatest delights of assembling each issue is the nature of the labor required: total submersion in the cosmos of a superlative artist. To my knowledge, no other journal comes close to satisfying this thirst for depth and sustained attention. In a publishing climate where commercial “viability” determines content, there’s a genuine need for such unapologetic focus. Despite its own host of challenges, being a not-for-profit assures us greater freedom of inclusion than most other editors enjoy. Quality and relevance determine the content, not word count or precedent.
A feature by Bradley Harrison
The following conversation appears in Music & Literature No. 4, which devotes some 90 pages to coverage of Mary Ruefle's entire published catalog to date and includes portfolios of new poems and erasures . . .
A feature by Reif Larsen
What makes Where You Are so fascinating is its dual existence as a box containing sixteen physical booklets and a website, where-you-are.com, to which this content has been ported. While many print books have attempted a similar multi-platform extrapolation, Where You Are seems particularly suited for a dual paper/digital edition given some of the central themes of the project, which seeks to explore how we locate ourselves in a swiftly changing world and how these methods of location have changed since the rich mnemonic stomping grounds of our childhood . . .
A feature by Paul Kerschen
László Krasznahorkai's 2014 Best Translated Book Award for Seiobo There Below—presented in Ottilie Mulzet's expert translation—serves to cement the Hungarian's status as one of the most original writers. And yet, only a portion of Krasznahorkai's extensive catalog is currently available to Anglophone readers. Here, Paul Kerschen delivers a masterful reading of the award-winning Seiobo There Below and offers a glimpse of what awaits us in coming years, including Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens (forthcoming from Seagull Books in Ottilie Mulzet's rendering), The Prisoner of Urga, and Krasznahorkai's debut short-story collection, Relations of Grace. This essay, originally published in Music & Literature No. 2, is accompanied here by a series of photographs documenting the author's encounter, organized by Osaka University and held at the temple of Hōzan-ji, with the original manuscripts of the fourteenth-century Japanese actor and Noh playwright Ze'ami, whose spirit infuses Seiobo There Below, and whose influence is felt throughout much of Krasznahorkai's as-yet-untranslated oeuvre . . .
A feature by CJ Evans
The closing lines of Clarice Lispector's novel The Hour of the Star open a fascinating conversation about the Brazilian author's transgressive and hugely influential life, as a public literary figure and as a private person. Her works have inspired an astonishing range of artists, from novelist Colm Tóibín to film director Pedro Almodóvar. Here we join two of Lispector’s translators, Idra Novey and Katrina Dodson, and acclaimed writers Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Hector Tobar for a lively, 80-minute exploration of the infamous life and dazzling work of one of the twentieth century’s great innovators . . .
A feature hosted by Sarah Gerard
For Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst, writing was a continuous process of transcendence without ever reaching the transcendent; a radical subjugation of all traditional or seemingly “correct” modes of thought. A prodigious student throughout her life, she wrote in part to engage and challenge world thinkers, and drew from an incredibly wide set of traditions and fields of thought, including psychoanalysis, spiritism, Gnosticism, EVP (or ESP), pure mathematics and philosophy, biology, astronomy, and quantum physics. Her prose is ludic and polyphonic—physical and titillating—and often challenges a reader’s notions of what is sexually “appropriate.” This roundtable on Hilst is convened on the occasion of the translation and publication into English of three of her novels in less than two years by the American publishers Nightboat Books, in collaboration with A Bolha Editora, and Melville House. Our panel gathers six authorities on Hilst’s work, including four of her English-language translators and two of her publishers . . .
A feature by Benjamin Dwyer
British composer and double bassist Barry Guy is sui generis among modern artists. Guy is at once an ardent student of early and Baroque music and a master improviser across all musical genres, an architect and a Samuel Beckett devotee, who, by age 13, was immersed in the life of a professional musician in southeast London. Guy has served as principle bassist in virtually every major London orchestra, and his compositions for large improvisational ensembles as well as chamber and solo works have been performed internationally. Now Barry Guy speaks in an extensive, retrospective conversation with composer Benjamin Dwyer about his earliest musical impulses, jamming with Sonny Boy Williamson in the back of a liquor store, studying with legendary Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, collaborating with his wife and musical partner, the Swiss Baroque violinist Maya Homburger, and playing an instrument to the limit of one’s physical capabilities . . .
A feature by Taylor Davis-Van Atta
In the late 1990s, Ukrainian Victoria Polevá abandoned her own successful career as an avant-garde composer of polyphonic music in pursuit of the “absoluteness of renunciation, the pureness of an experiment.” Interweaving sacred and secular texts and musical traditions from a wide variety of eras, Polevá has since defined herself as one of Eastern Europe’s most original composers whose works are routinely performed by leading ensembles and soloists around the globe. In 2005, the world-famous violinist Gidon Kremer included Polevá’s “Warm Wind” in his concert cycle Sempre Primavera. Speaking here “completely unarmed, impoverished, down to zero” from amid the burning tumult of Kiev, Victoria Polevá addresses her daring evolution as a composer, the origins of her passion, the nature of collaborating with Kremer, and sorrow as a creative act. Music & Literature is honored to present the first English-language interview with Ukrainian composer Victoria Polevá . . .
Perhaps the video-game developer Jason Rohrer has the same issue that writers have: Passage shows his drive to create a type of art out of one’s personal and private thoughts. What makes the video game so special is the need for interactivity: that instead of reading about someone’s voyages, we become the author—that when we play, we become Rohrer—his anxieties become our anxieties; his fears are our fears . . .
A feature by Kolin Jordan
The experimental Mexican author Mario Bellatin is not concerned for your comfort. He doesn’t care if you get lost. His narration will jump from one scene to the next and if you trip on the lip of a conjunction or fall behind as he darts around the corner of a participle, that’s on you.
A feature by Emily Hoffman
László Krasznahorkai’s Animalinside is, in itself, already an adaptation. The Slovakian choreographer Jaroslav Viňarský has adapted Krasznahorkai’s novella for dance. The performance embodies the modes of existence the text describes, and yet does so within its own aesthetic parameters, with its own aesthetic integrity. At its best, the performance builds upon the original dialogue between the book’s text and images, and becomes a third surface for interpretive ricochet . . .
A feature by Nairi Galstanian
In 1969, the Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov released his masterpiece Sayat-Nova. A world-cultural event, the film prompted Andrei Tarkovsky to deem Parajanov “a genius” and Michelangelo Antonioni to proclaim the film “of a stunningly perfect beauty… Parajanov, in my opinion, is one of best film directors in the world.” For Tigran Mansurian, the Armenian composer who, with its score, invented a new musical language, Sayat-Nova was “an extraordinary phenomenon of universal importance.” Based on the life of the eighteenth-century poet and musician Sayat-Nova (King of Song), the film was released in English under the title The Color of Pomegranates. In the following interview, which took place during the summer of 2006, Mansurian offers a unique point of inquiry to Parajanov’s creative world as well as his magnum opus. Music & Literature is grateful to Tigran Mansurian for the opportunity to present this conversation for the first time in English.
A feature by Mauro Javier Cardenas
On June 26th, 2012, I found myself touring San Francisco with László Krasznahorkai, who was on his first U.S. tour, promoting the release of Sátántangó. During lunch with László and his wife in Chinatown, I received an email asking if I would moderate a discussion with László at City Lights Books the next day. Presented here for the first time is our conversation from before and after László Krasznahorkai’s appearance at City Lights on June 27th, where the overflowing crowd stood enraptured by his impassioned answers. All the while, László spoke in long, warm monologues, which brought to mind the intense monologues of György Korin, the hero of his novel War & War.
A feature by Jeff Bursey
Scholar, editor, and literary historian Steven Moore has gained notoriety as the preeminent explicator of William Gaddis’s fiction. A tireless champion of maximalist and so-called “experimental” fiction, Moore has helped to publish and edit works by David Markson, Joseph McElroy, Rikki Ducornet, Alexander Theroux, and David Foster Wallace, among many others. In 2004, Moore embarked on the ambitious, multi-volume The Novel: An Alternative History, the second volume of which was released this past summer. The project, nearly a decade in the making, is as much an effort to reconceptualize the contemporary definition of the novel form as it is an attempt to revolutionize the manner in which we discuss fiction. On a hiatus from writing, Moore reflects on his own early development and the project that has changed his life with fiction writer and literary critic Jeff Bursey.
Music & Literature is proud to debut the complete and comprehensive catalog of Gerald Murnane's remarkable personal archives. Murnane is the reclusive Australian author of eleven works of fiction, and has for decades accumulated an impressive collection of literary, personal, and creative manuscripts, including his legendary Antipodean Archive. Murnane has stated that these archives will not be made public until after his death, but here we are given a glimpse into his many worlds. Revered in his home country and deemed "a genius on the level of Beckett" by Teju Cole, Murnane is regularly rumored as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.
