Author: Rhys Tranter

Rhys Tranter is a writer based in Cardiff, Wales, UK. He is the author of Beckett's Late Stage (2018), and his work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, and a number of books and periodicals. He holds a BA, MA, and a PhD in English Literature. His website RhysTranter.com is a personal journal offering commentary and analysis across literature, film, music, and the arts.

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Sad to hear that Deirdre Bair, who wrote the first major biography of Samuel Beckett, has died at the age of 84. Her work continues to exert an influence on contemporary Beckett scholarship, to say nothing of its inspiration to modern practitioners and performers of his writing. She also wrote a biographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, Carl Jung, Saul Steinberg and Al Capone. Most recently, she was the author of Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me – a Memoir. She will be sorely missed.

Neil Genzlinger has written an obituary for Bair in The New York Times.

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“The first lesson a disaster teaches is that everything is connected. In fact, disasters, I found while living through a medium-sized one (the 1989 earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area) and later writing about major ones (including 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan), are crash courses in those connections. At moments of immense change, we see with new clarity the systems – political, economic, social, ecological – in which we are immersed as they change around us. We see what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s corrupt, what matters and what doesn’t.”
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Rebecca Solnit, ‘The impossible has already happened’, in The Guardian, 7 April 2020.

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The coronavirus has sparked a widespread cultural revaluation of writers who touched on themes of solitude in their work. Holland Carter takes a look at Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN, and suggests that “there’s plenty to learn from standing still”. Source: The New York Times.

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“Any adversity makes artists move closer to what is important, essential. Only time can show what fruits will such a focusing on the essential bear.”
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In a new interview, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt suggests what the coronavirus might mean for society and the arts. Source: Arvo Pärt Centre.

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“I translate it in my head as ‘far away from here’, the longing to be elsewhere.”
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In a recent interview with Granta, Teju Cole discusses his new book of photographs, Fernweh (literally, ‘far-woe’). Source: Granta Magazine.

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“In our current era of uprooting, thanks to economic policies that have created mass homelessness again in California and crushing debt across the nation, Lange’s images seem immediate, urgent, thorny again, questions that demand answers.”
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Rebecca Solnit discusses a 1956 portrait by Dorothea Lange for an upcoming exhibition of her work at the The Museum of Modern Art. Source: The Paris Review.

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“I’m always looking for something new. I don’t like to repeat myself. I want always to find something which is fresh.”
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Krzysztof Penderecki
Polish composer and conductor
1933-2020

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paulstewartMy friend and former editor has written a new novel. Paul Stewart’s Of People and Things is now available from Armida Books in print and electronic formats. Paul is not only a writer, but an actor and an academic who has been living in Nicosia, Cyprus, for over twenty years. He currently teaches as a Professor of Literature at the University of Nicosia. You can find out more about Paul and his new book at the Armida Books website.

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John Berger
John Berger

“I’d rather reject the terms optimistic and pessimistic. They suggest a calculation of how things are going to evolve, and if it’s going to evolve in the way you want, you’re optimistic. That has very little to do with despair and hope. Hope is not a form of guarantee, it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.”

— John Berger, who died on 2 January 2017.

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Cardiff at night. I walk through the streets as the sun is going down, and I am reminded that these are the closing days of a decade. May the next ten years bring greater peace, hope and community to this wonderful city.

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I have just started a new role as a pastoral tutor at St David’s Catholic College in Cardiff. Over the last two years I have been looking for a secure full-time job that would allow me to draw on my teaching skills and experience, while also offering an opportunity to serve my local community in a direct and meaningful way. I am absolutely thrilled.

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William Blake, ‘Newton’ (c.1795-1805)

The poet and artist William Blake was born in Soho in London on 28 November 1757. His ‘Newton’ conveys the scientist as allegorical figure: absorbed by man-made geometry to the exclusion of the self and the wonders of the natural world. Blake’s poetic and artistic works became important cultural touchstones during a tumultuous period in Western history, but his words and images comprise social commentary and critique that still speaks to our times.