Surplus Matter

Three panels will be devoted to Tom McCarthy’s work at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture on Thursday 23 and Friday 24 February 2012. Tom will be “creative keynote”.

Tom McCarthy will be reading from/talking about Men in Space at 192 Books on 25 February 2012.

Tom McCarthy at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Rejecting the widely held position that writing is an act of self-expression, a way of sharing what’s in our souls, (”sentimental humanism” he’s labelled this, in the past), McCarthy instead put forward the view that language speaks all of us, all the time. Books aren’t, he claimed, objects of individual creation, but “echo chambers”; the best of them “tune” the endless repetitions of language and thought that are zipping back and forth around us.

Sarah Crown in The Guardian on Tom’s Edinburgh Festival talk.

We want to go to the heavens as heroes, but we trip over our own shoelaces and piss ourselves.

Tom McCarthy in Simon Critchley’s Impossible Objects.

The first panel after lunch was cut short owing to speaker illness, but Eric Langley (pictured) gave an insightful, and delightfully visual, presentation on the influence of Hergé and Tintin on McCarthy’s work, even daring to suggest that the Wolfman case, a key interpretative cipher for C, might allude to Snowy, for: “The wolves sitting on the tree were in fact not wolves at all but white … dogs with pointed ears” (Sergei Pankeiev, letter to Freud, 1926). Certainly my vote for most enjoyable paper of the day!

Martin Paul Eve reports back from the Calling All Agents symposium.

Full programme of the Calling All Agents symposium on the work of Tom McCarthy at Birkbeck College, University of London on 22-23 July.

Details of three talks by Tom McCarthy at the Institut Français in London (on Alain Robbe-Grillet), Words on Mondays (with Robert Coover and John Banville) and at the National Portrait Gallery (with Francesco Pedraglio).

Details of the symposium that will be devoted to Tom McCarthy’s work at Birkbeck College (University of London) on 22 and 23 July 2011.

Tom McCarthy mentioned by David Shields in the Los Angeles Review of Books.