What Remainders to be said

May 31st, 7 pm. London. Calder Books. One of the few good reasons to live in London, which I don't. To mark the publication of the paperback, Tom McCarthy tells us he has "the huge honour of being interviewed about Remainder by the greatest publisher of the twentieth century, the person who brought us Beckett, Burroughs, Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Trocchi, Ionesco and, frankly, just about every writer worth reading for the last fifty years." That's John Calder if you're struggling.

Nor do I live in Newcastle, but I wish I had been there last weekend. Rangy Manatee reports on a philosophy conference about music there which provokes fond memories of similar events at my own alma mater:

"Have you read Heidegger’s unpublished work on the duality of the new in the face of unprincipled reckonings regarding the torture that is being?"
"No."
"Well, if you had, you’d understand all this. Idiot!"

At just such an event many years ago, I met the Austrian writer Jakov Lind - "one of the best and most distinctive European, Austrian and Jewish writers of our time" according to Anthony Rudolf in his eulogy following Lind's death in February. It was to me in the bar afterwards he "implausibly" claimed not to have read Thomas Bernhard!