Steve Finbow discusses Shuichi Yoshida‘s Villain & Japanese crime fiction on BBC World Service’s The Strand. * New literary gang around town, includes Ned Beauman & Evie Wyld. * Popular culture goes back to the Thirties. * Dancing on Hot Bricks, Virginia Woolf in 1941 [PDF] * Thomas Bernhard, the alienator. * “To read Bernhard is to be trapped in a corner of a Viennese cafe with a splenetic central European intellectual who won’t shut up and won’t move on. He’s funny, but funny-scary. And ultimately boring.” * Why Edward Hopper puzzles. * Five must-read small press titles from 2010. * “The Coen brothers make two kinds of movies: ones that obsess over the existence of evil and ones that muse on it, accept it merrily, and plow on.” * Georges Bataille on French television, 1958. * In case you missed it, The Believer runs the INS‘ Declaration on the Notion of “The Future”. * Terry Gilliam‘s steampunk puppet movie1884. * RiP: A Remix Manifesto, an important (free) documentary about intellectual property & remix culture. * From a beat cafe in San Francisco to Robert Louis Stevenson‘s burial ground, the Guardian readers’ tips to literary locations. * A Roxy Music documentary presented by Jarvis Cocker (via) * Amanda Palmer & Neil Gaiman remake a scene from Labyrinth. * “I fear the result would be unacceptable in Ireland.” Why Samuel Beckett declined to write for RTE (via) * “Hazlitt was smashing the boundaries between styles of writing and species of prose, of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture a century and a half before the Modern Review got in on the game.” In praise of the neglected William Hazlitt, “progenitor of much of what is read today.” * Demolition of the Paris Metro, photo-essay on the forgotten stations of Paris (via) * An addition to Hair of the Dog, Through a Glass Darkly, Malcolm Lowry, booze, literature & writing.
First posted: Tuesday, December 28th, 2010.