Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl

New reissue is 'one of her most unsettling'

Patricia Highsmith, November 20, 1975. Image: AFP/Getty Images

Richard Rayner reviews a reissue of Patricia Highsmith's relatively unknown The Cry of the Owl (link via Susan Tomaselli): 'Guilt was Patricia Highsmith's great theme. In her books even the good know they're not innocent, and they carry an apprehension that they too will be found out. "Night was falling quickly, with visible speed like a black sea creeping over the earth," reflects Robert Forester at the beginning of The Cry of the Owl (Grove: 272 pp., $14), one of her lesser-known works from 1963 and one of her most unsettling. Which is saying plenty.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Patricia Highsmith's Greenwich Village

W. G. Sebald's Writing Style

Notes on a Voice

Illustration: Kathryn Rathke

A.D. Miller discusses the work of W.G. Sebald as part of More Intelligent Life's 'Notes on a Voice' series (link via 3 Quarks Daily): 'The essential theme of W.G. Sebald’s books is memory: how painful it is to live with, how dangerous it can be to live without it, for both nations and individuals. The narrators of his books—of which Austerlitz and the four linked narratives of exile in The Emigrants are the most compelling—live in a state of constant reminder. Everything blends into everything else: places, people, their stories and experiences, and above all different times, which seep into each other and blur together, often in long, unmoored passages of reported speech. The narrator of Vertigo gives a concise account of this method: “drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order”.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• W. G. Sebald interviewed on Bookworm
• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• Will Self on Sebald and the Holocaust

Jack Kerouac Playing Pool

Footage of the acclaimed Beat writer

The New Republic has posted a brief clip of Jack Kerouac playing pool (link via TheBookSlut) [Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jack Kerouac's On the Road as iPad app
• Kerouac and Ginsberg Correspondence
• Carolyn Cassady on the Beat Generation
• Writers' Autographs
• The Photography of Tom Palumbo

Burroughs vs. Capote

Burroughs placed a curse on Capote for perceived misuse of talent

At Reality Studio, Thom Robinson reveals that William S. Burroughs attempted to place a curse on Truman Capote's writing career: 'Burroughs suggests Capote could have made positive use of his talents, presumably by applying them to the expansion of human consciousness (“You were granted an area for psychic development”). Instead, Burroughs finds that Capote has sold out a talent “that is not yours to sell.” In retribution for having misused “the talent that was granted you by this department”, Burroughs starkly warns “That talent is now officially withdrawn,” signing off with the sinister admonition, “You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished.”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: William S. Burroughs

Sigmund Freud and Cocaine

Did the use of stimulant drugs aid Freud's creative process?

Howard Markel, The Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug, Cocaine

Laura Miller reviews Howard Markel's An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug Cocaine over at Salon.com: 'Markel's provocative book is a dual addiction biography of Freud and his contemporary, William Halsted, arguably the greatest surgeon of his time, a founding professor at Johns Hopkins Hospital and deviser of at least a half-dozen revolutionary surgical techniques and procedures still employed today, such as the use of rubber gloves. Both were unquestionably great men, but they also wrestled with dangerous drug habits that imperiled their work. Both sought to conceal or downplay their drug use and, as a result, information on that use and how, if at all, they managed to stop it is pretty sparse on the ground.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method: Official Trailer (HD)

Shiberhur adapt Kafka's In the Penal Colony

Kafka's short story performed in London

Shiberhur's 2011 production of Franz Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony'

ShiberHur perform a theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's short story 'In the Penal Colony' at the Old Vic in London. Michael Billington reviews the production in The Guardian: 'Where the earlier play was a raw, moving lament for a lost Palestine, this is a well-honed, more literary piece about torture and injustice: one that would, I suspect, have even more resonance if seen on its home soil.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method: Official Trailer (HD)

New Cronenberg film explores birth of psychoanalysis

David Cronenberg's new film, A Dangerous Method, dramatizes the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It stars Viggo Mortensen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung, and Kiera Knightley as Sabina Spielrein. The film is scheduled for release in the UK on 10 February 2012.

The Unmade Films of J. G. Ballard

On the cinematic qualities of Ballard's work

A still from Chris Petit's The Unmade films of JG Ballard (1990)

UBUWeb are hosting a fragment of Chris Petit's The Unmade films of JG Ballard [1990], a film possibly also known as Moving Pictures: JG Ballard. The website describes the film as an 'essay on Ballard's fiction, and its unrealised cinematic potential, with particular reference to David Cronenberg's (yet to be filmed) Crash, featuring an interview with the director, prior to making of his film.' (link via Ballardian) [Watch the Film]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: J. G. Ballard
• Chris Petit on J. G. Ballard
• Chris Petit: Content and Radio On
• Chris Petit: Watch Radio On