Surplus Matter

A Frieze Foundation podcast of a talk between Alasdair Gray and Tom McCarthy which took place on Friday 17 October 2008.

Tom McCarthy’s Agamemnon - a Play in Two Acts appears in Everyday Genius courtesy of Lee Rourke who is curating the site throughout October 2009.

The British premiere of Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take, written by Tom McCarthy, takes place at the BFI London Film Festival (15, 16 and 19 October).

Tom McCarthy will give a talk on David Lynch’s work at Tate Modern on Halloween.

You can now watch a video of Tom McCarthy’s “How Marinetti Taught Me to Write” talk delivered at the Futurism and the Avant-Garde symposium at Tate Modern on 27 June 2009.

We begin by congratulating the Obama Administration on commissioning this report from the INS. Turning to an organization whose thinking is steeped in literature, philosophy, and the arts in the hope of acquiring insight into the economic recession and suggestions as to how this hardship might be overcome may to some smack of desperation. Yet the INS commends the administration’s decision to do so as both courageous and enlightened. In (implicitly) acknowledging the critical role played by art in creating (and subverting) value, President Obama has, symbolically at least, righted the wrong done to the poet Seanchan in W. B. Yeats’s play The King’s Threshold.

Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy’s “Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics” from the June 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Tom McCarthy will be talking about Futurism at Tate Modern next Saturday, as part of a day-long symposium (”Futurism and the Avant Garde”) to coincide with their new exhibition. Tom will wonder “what characteristics a genuinely Marinettian contemporary literature might have”. Be there or be Cubist!

The novel is a good, pacey and ultimately unchallenging read. Why couldn’t they just say that on the cover? “Entertaining, zippy and unchallenging — X, author of Y.” The reason they don’t, of course, is that, as with the whiskey-soused prospective purchaser, there’s a bigger sale being made: we’re being asked to buy into the notion that lively storytelling and more-than-adequate craftsmanship constitute great, “classic” literature. I’m not so sure. To bastardize the Latin, emptors need to sober up and exercise a little caveating over that one. I suspect that real, high-karat literature, with its complexity and ambiguity, its general slipperiness, is sitting in another box, one opening to a dimension that How to Sell doesn’t breach (and, to both its and its author’s credit, doesn’t itself actually claim to) — or, to use a fittingly ur-geological metaphor, that it’s lying buried in a rock-seam that this book walks comfortably over the top of but leaves unmined.

Tom McCarthy reviews Clancy Martin’s How to Sell in the New York Times.

I’d talked to Iain and Jane before about the status of the copy both in art and in experience, and its relation to the notion of authenticity. We’d agreed that copies never reproduce originals completely. ‘The shortfall is where the real emerges,’ they had said, ‘where understanding can begin,’ demonstrating a perfect comprehension of the secret all real artists come to know: that good art always, at some level, fails.

Tom McCarthy on Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 2004 Cramps gig re-enactment.

In moments like this, Toussaint closes in on the essence of literature as practiced by Francis Ponge or Wallace Stevens. For him as for them, writing enacts a head-on collision with the material realm, a struggle with brute facticity. Ponge and Stevens also use fruit as their battleground: Ponge’s orange, “expressed,” leaves sticky residue across the hands; Stevens’s plum “survives its poems.” It seems that Toussaint’s fruit might prevail too — as Camera progresses there’s a sense that reality, not the hero, will end up on top. In an interview reproduced at the novel’s end, Toussaint cites Kafka: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

Tom McCarthy reviews Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Camera for the New York Times.