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Monday, November 12, 2007
NORMAN MAILER OBIT/ ROGER KIMBALL
[http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/rogerkimball/2007/11/10/norman_mailer_a_dissenting_vie.php] ROGER KIMBALL ONLY PUBLISHES THOSE THAT AGREE WITH HIS FUDDY DUDDINESS ON HIS BLOG http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/rogerkimball/2007/11/10/norman_mailer_a_dissenting_vie.phphttp://www.aldaily.com/ mr. kimball's instant [?] obit is mere opinion mongering, adjective riddled -- "execrable": how so? it fails to address the underlying problem of which normal mailer and his writing and his life are/ were a manifestation. one of the most telling matters about mailer is that he was a good little boy in having lunch with his mother every sunday, he was a mama's boy, like hemingway, but was not cross dressed as a child. mailer protested via wilhelm reich against the emasculation of american men by their schoolmarm mothers who much rather have daughters to perpetuate themselves who are so much more pliable. so, as psychopaths go, norman was a rather would be. he was afraid. as a media star he was entirely of new york. but there is some good writing there, e.g. in "why are we in vietnam" [the book susan sontag, too] thought his best, for the astonishing lyricism of his descriptions of the brooks range in alaska. coming from a city boy.executioner's song, though co-produced -- perhaps more of his work ought to have been coed. by the 70s in new york half its girls wanted to be buggered and dominated and a strong man. norman was tentatively working himself in a direction of basic instinct, unfortunate as these may be. however, the fuddy duddy conservative direction of mr. kimball, there lies the way of true emasculation and impotence. somehow norman, up until "egyptean nights" was always interesting. the moon expedition book i was able to read from back to front. the book on hitler deserves the adjective "execrable" -- in light of the great analytic studies by fritz redlich and and ted dorpat. mailer's insecurities in needing to attach his to names more famous than his - it, too, is a cultural manifestation. of course that is not how you go about wanting to change consciousness. i only know of one writer who can do that, who understands the medium, of language, down to everything it can do for the length of a book or a few hours in the theater - before we, our beings, sink back into the muck of opinions and reactions and unconscious fantasies. norman was/ is an interesting and important transitional figure.ALSO SEE http://www.aldaily.com/ FOR THE VARIOUS FOR OTHER RESPONSES TO MR. MAILER'S DEMISE...
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
http://crosscut.com/arts-beat/2539/#comments
http://crosscut.com/arts-beat/2539/#comments
1. My friend Arne a true man of the theater, alerted me to his piece in Crosscut, but I was going to respond anyhoo. Arne is a man with a lot of heart and the only one here whose temperament I share. Arne does a bit of the usual name dropping, mentions Handke, the great divide playwright, most of whose plays I translated and some of which I directed, work or its significance Arne didn't know when last we discussed it. Arne's call is one along the line of plaints for the mere existence of theaters, while failing to provide a rationale for their being. What if they are super-annuated, merely near private indulgence? I am puzzled whether theater in Seattle contributes anything to the milling-grinding social consciousness, whether it is any any way integral or whether its greatest benefits accrue the eateries which are so much more adventurous. Since Seattle already has a museal Opera and Ballet it might get itself a theater that does the world's great theater from ancient time to the by and large puerile present. I am not talking about theater as a diversion, as in "oh lets catch a show" ; but about a theater that serves as an enlightening and possibly consensus or not, a fractious forum-function within a social complex such as a city-region; if theater served such a function, then theaters might well deserve funding. At one time theater made news, now the news is put on in the theater for the reality-deprived reality t.v. watchers.An industrialized culture creates the culture industry - regional theaters and their dozen or so predictable chestnuts are a variation of that. That means that theater must provide experiences unique to it, not duplicate anything outside its space and confines, take itself seriously; what can still be done in theater is an experience as intense as reading: an anti-Aristotelian theater that dissociates the audience into a state of keen awareness, that cleans the audience's clocks, a subliminal catharses, that makes it leave the theater with freshened senses, for more powerful stuff than Brecht dared dream of. The dramatist who can do this, a nearly Shakespearean talent for our times is the Albatross that nourishes me, Peter Handke. Let me add a few asides on Theater in Seattle, details of my travails are at their continuance at http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com At least a half dozen mid-size theaters have gone down since I came here in summer of 1994. The "Aha", the "Ethnic-Cultural" I think it was called, Arne's "Bathhouse, " John Kazanian's "The Theater of a New City," became what's called a "mom and pop theate" when he sold the space that is now the Hugo House; the "Empty Space" finally bit the dust with yet another huge debt, the Tacoma Rep, which I visited only once, with M. Burke Walker, the founder of the original "Empty Space", and we saw an absolutely "good enough" Miss Julie; the "Fringe" which invariably had half a dozen things that I cottoned to; ACT nearly went under, shouldering a huge debt load, not long ago; no doubt others that I forget or whose demise I am unaware of. Aside the failure, not just of these theaters, to be self-supporting [say, by doing "heartfelt, utterly needed work" in the likes of a bombed-out cellar!] but of the culture's failure to renew the audience - the need for theater as a possible public forum, unifier - instead of a middle class fancy - these theaters went down because there are no critics to speak of, or rather because of miserable critics [right now there is but a one I pay heed to: Annie Wagner of "The Stranger"]; because editors lack either courage or ability to hire critics [Joe Adcock got the job at the P.I., these eons ago, because there was no one else around; that's how little importance was paid to that position], editors who understand what a theater critic can do. As far as I am concerned, good critics or artistic directors might personally be Dick Cheney and Saddam Hussein rolled into one, not that being great at theater work would necessarily redeem their entire lives. I doubt that it will Carl Rove's. Misha Bernson at the Seattle Times, for the job she has can't really kill off the shows or the theaters: she is meant to keep them on life support. The lack, the aversion, to sharp, conceptually well conceived, self-reflected criticism in Seattle, of course is not confined to Theater.
As I was saying,"there is no good reason for the continues existence of small theaters... " but did not yet say: "Except that nothing would percolate up to the established war horses... who feed off the labor of the forever struggling peons... [ here in Seattle it took nigh 30 years for a Sam Shepard play - the now regionalist chestnut TRUE WEST - to be done at The Rep it happened to be, a fine light production directed by Kurt Beattie, that did not emphasize its dark undercurrent - whereas the smaller theaters, such as "Aha", had been doing Shepard since the early 70s ]... but who do not treat them to the support that major league teams do their minor league franchises.
yes, it is always amateur time. can't help but be. i was in publishing in new york for 25 years. amateurs all around. at the biggies and the smallies. and when it was not: it was dead.
What if the three majors here in Seattle had sponsored just three of those now demised?
The Mariners have let go off an entire championship worth of a starting line-up in the past 15 years, among them, most famously, The Big Machine, Griffey, A-Rod, Cruz..
=====================================
Arne also got a little over-confident there with thinking that Teatro Zin Zanni would help pay the bills; instead his Bathhouse took a bath courtesy of some green leaf fanatics in Green Lake; got a bit discombobulated, put a mortgage on his house to keep his dream going. How I detest "green" fanatics: soon there will be a green cop hidden behind each leaf! Grass grows back!
As I was saying: "Arne does a bit of the usual name dropping." Sam Shepard, one strange Cool Hand Luke, perhaps as strange as Howard Hughes about whom he wrote an interesting play: but a first rate author, a true American natural, right out of left field, I published him from 1975 to 1982, and put all his other works back into print. He isn't much done hereabouts. Not anymore anyhow.
When we discussed Arne's doing Handke's great dramatic poem WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, he was reminded of Beckett by something that is a Eurepidean drama of the "aristocracy of the working class" written in a Nietzchean Credence Clearwater Revival spirit. I did the first Kroetz plays, por nada, as an act of generosity for the Berliner Ensemble trained director Carl Weber, acquaintance going back to 1857 [!], but regretted doing so once I got to know the author, but for some the interesting challenges posed finding equivalents in Amurrican for the broken Bavarian patois of the originals. Worked on a lot of the Mueller translation; worked with Herbert Berghod, E.G. Marshall, and did quite a few other things; and published Augusto Boal, Richard Schechner; if the gods had smiled I would have done more. But theater, had it not been for Handke, and psychonalysis would have remained much more of a side-line of mine.
A bit of historical comparative perspective: The most sought after job during the 1020s, one of the great ages of German theater, was that of drama critic! So if you wish to mine good criticism, that is where you go, and some people in the North West do.
As I was saying: "What is needed now is/ are critics who understand what theater in, historically, a multi-media age can still do. [No mention of the expiry of the really important American theater critic Richard Gilman hereabouts that I noticed.] Theater can provide uniquely theatrical mind-and-sense opening experiences in that real and only theatrically real space - quite aside the vaunted supposed wonders of being close to the flesh of actors: If I want to be close to human flesh, I take the bus, or go shopping, etc.
Among editors, who might have done a better job, I include Knute Berger who found no better replacement for the first rate, though then self-serving but in every other respect highly problematic, theater critic Roger Downey with the likes of Longenbaugh and Richard Morin at the Weekly - Steve Wiecking was a better call. I actually proposed a forum on just this subject to Mr. Berger, I never heard back. As far as I am concerned, at least in his dealings with me, courtesy is not his strong suit. You can always say no, a one word syllable takes a second.
I also include David Brewster among those responsible, as I recall his forbidding Downey to review plays at ACT, 'cause Mr. Brewster's wife was a principal there I think that was the reason... i.e. nepotism, provincial narcissism [a category all its own!] Lacking a critic, theater audiences will not have a sense of the importance, if any, of these subsidized enterprises. Get used to vigorous criticism, it happens in the courts all the time. As a matter of fact if you don't defend vigorously, the appeals court may order a retrial or throw out a conviction. Why do people, by and large, pussyfoot so much around here in the open... in closed quarters...
I must say that my experiences in the theater in Seattle have been grim. Travails they have been. Although, on my first return to Berlin,the city of my birth, I studied for six months at the Berliner Ensemble in 1957 , my life in New York, after grad school and far too few adventures, became that of a book editor and translator, with a brief invaluable stint as a literary agent for the best that German publishing and play publishing has to offer; but had it not for translating most and directing some of Peter Handke's plays, theater would not have become more than a side interest, because theater, as something not irrelevant, seemed such an impossible enterprise, even in N.Y.
Generalizations are based on specifics.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
LETTER TO PHI BETA KAPPA MEMBERS RE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
# 5 SENDING OF 6.
Dear Phi Beta Kappans:
Your preamble# 5 SENDING OF 6.
Dear Phi Beta Kappans:
Your preamble states that:
"The ideal Phi Beta Kappan has demonstrated intellectual integrity, tolerance for other views." It is in light of this standard that I want to call your attention to a heinous short fall, a travesty of travesties, an assassination of character and work that appears, of all unexpected places, in the Spring 07 issue of The American Scholar where it takes the form of a most primitive and meretricious attack - both political and literary - by a certain Michael McDonald, counsel for "The American Interest," on the by no means infallible but uniquely great writer Peter Handke; a political attack based on Handke's "being soft on Milosevic", a literary attack based on a single paragraph whose function within the [1974] novel "A Moment of True Feeling" that the assassin has not read.
It is my feeling that an editor who allows publication of a travesty such as Michael McDonald's ought to be forced to resign, he has lost all credibility and scholarly standing. McDonald is of little concern to me; he is one of those uniquely vile beings, albeit an untalented member of this species, that began - under the conditions such as they are - to appear in droves in all walks and works of life in the early 80s, that entire range from "Diego Cortez", Adam Gopnik [a talented member], Milken, Newt Gingrich, Stephen Schwartz to name just a few representatives of this class.
Below you will find links to my open letter to Editor Wilson. The three-part letter [A-B-C] and my detailed critique, in entirety, can be found at:
http://www.handke-discussion.blogspot.com
states that:
"The ideal Phi Beta Kappan has demonstrated intellectual integrity, tolerance for other views." It is in light of this standard that I want to call your attention to a heinous short fall, a travesty of travesties, an assassination of character and work that appears, of all unexpected places, in the Spring 07 issue of The American Scholar where it takes the form of a most primitive and meretricious attack - both political and literary - by a certain Michael McDonald, counsel for "The American Interest," on the by no means infallible but uniquely great writer Peter Handke; a political attack based on Handke's "being soft on Milosevic", a literary attack based on a single paragraph whose function within the [1974] novel "A Moment of True Feeling" that the assassin has not read.
It is my feeling that an editor who allows publication of a travesty such as Michael McDonald's ought to be forced to resign, he has lost all credibility and scholarly standing. McDonald is of little concern to me; he is one of those uniquely vile beings, albeit an untalented member of this species, that began - under the conditions such as they are - to appear in droves in all walks and works of life in the early 80s, that entire range from "Diego Cortez", Adam Gopnik [a talented member], Milken, Newt Gingrich, Stephen Schwartz to name just a few representatives of this class.
Below you will find links to my open letter to Editor Wilson. The three-part letter [A-B-C] and my detailed critique, in entirety, can be found at:
http://www.handke-discussion.blogspot.com
Below the lead-in to each
Dear Phi Beta Kappans:
Your preamble# 5 SENDING OF 6.
Dear Phi Beta Kappans:
Your preamble states that:
"The ideal Phi Beta Kappan has demonstrated intellectual integrity, tolerance for other views." It is in light of this standard that I want to call your attention to a heinous short fall, a travesty of travesties, an assassination of character and work that appears, of all unexpected places, in the Spring 07 issue of The American Scholar where it takes the form of a most primitive and meretricious attack - both political and literary - by a certain Michael McDonald, counsel for "The American Interest," on the by no means infallible but uniquely great writer Peter Handke; a political attack based on Handke's "being soft on Milosevic", a literary attack based on a single paragraph whose function within the [1974] novel "A Moment of True Feeling" that the assassin has not read.
It is my feeling that an editor who allows publication of a travesty such as Michael McDonald's ought to be forced to resign, he has lost all credibility and scholarly standing. McDonald is of little concern to me; he is one of those uniquely vile beings, albeit an untalented member of this species, that began - under the conditions such as they are - to appear in droves in all walks and works of life in the early 80s, that entire range from "Diego Cortez", Adam Gopnik [a talented member], Milken, Newt Gingrich, Stephen Schwartz to name just a few representatives of this class.
Below you will find links to my open letter to Editor Wilson. The three-part letter [A-B-C] and my detailed critique, in entirety, can be found at:
http://www.handke-discussion.blogspot.com
states that:
"The ideal Phi Beta Kappan has demonstrated intellectual integrity, tolerance for other views." It is in light of this standard that I want to call your attention to a heinous short fall, a travesty of travesties, an assassination of character and work that appears, of all unexpected places, in the Spring 07 issue of The American Scholar where it takes the form of a most primitive and meretricious attack - both political and literary - by a certain Michael McDonald, counsel for "The American Interest," on the by no means infallible but uniquely great writer Peter Handke; a political attack based on Handke's "being soft on Milosevic", a literary attack based on a single paragraph whose function within the [1974] novel "A Moment of True Feeling" that the assassin has not read.
It is my feeling that an editor who allows publication of a travesty such as Michael McDonald's ought to be forced to resign, he has lost all credibility and scholarly standing. McDonald is of little concern to me; he is one of those uniquely vile beings, albeit an untalented member of this species, that began - under the conditions such as they are - to appear in droves in all walks and works of life in the early 80s, that entire range from "Diego Cortez", Adam Gopnik [a talented member], Milken, Newt Gingrich, Stephen Schwartz to name just a few representatives of this class.
Below you will find links to my open letter to Editor Wilson. The three-part letter [A-B-C] and my detailed critique, in entirety, can be found at:
http://www.handke-discussion.blogspot.com
Below the lead-in to each
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
PART "C" OF AN OPEN LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF "THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR" RE M. MCDONALD'S PIECE
order of publication is C-B-A..
RE:
If you feel, as I do, that the publication of such a piece calls for the ouster of its editor; contact "American Scholar" board members; drop editor Wilson a line rwilson@pbk.org
=C=Like the Yugoslavia controversy, its Handke-Yugo parallel is a cold battle field. The corpses are strewn all about grotesquely, occasionally there is still a hiss, from Handke, or from Kosovo, and the occasional righteous US super-moron will show up belatedly and bedraggled to scream "Milosevic lover!" Historians can discern, get a good outline of the sequence of events that made for the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation; passions can cool; also of the parallel literary political war that ensued with the publication of Handke's second book on the subject [the first being "Farewell to the Dream of the 9th Land" - that 9th land being the land of peace] "A Winter's Journey," and the two other installments "A Summer's Sequel" and "Imploringly in Tears",and the big Yugoslavia Play, "The Play about the Film about the War" where you can find the 13 blackbird takes that Handke has on the subject. However, if you, Mr. Wilson, as editor, who may even have penned the sub-title of Michael McDonald's APOLOGY , agree to a gross, tendentious distortion of this kind in a journal of alleged scholarly provenance, in the very header... you launch yourself and your mag into the instant realm of diatribe and falsification. You ought to resign forthwith. You can count on me to campaign, to lobby for your ouster. Failure of the most minimal standards of due diligence and editorial oversight characterize this piece; the cheapest of cheap shots and low blows instead of what might have been a thoughtful look. Sit down. Have a cigar!Michael McDonald signs as Counsel to the "American Interest" - based on this piece I would not have him advise me in a small claims case, or anything of anything having to do with any kind of public - that is general or literary - interest. He also signs as the author of a forthcoming literary biography of Curzio Malaparte; he is not only "counsel" but a reviewer for "The American Interest." These pieces of information allow me to assume, perhaps, probably - knowing how low my assumption batting average is running - incorrectly, that Mr. McDonald is acquainted with what are called "findings" in law, the elementary matters of "discovery", and certain elementary conventions of naming within the realm of literary discourse; even a polemic needs to be halfway well founded and not just rely on the provenance that will provide it with the cover of the semblance of legitimacy; that is, the evaluation of facts, how to make a fairly objective generalization; that is, that he does not subscribe to the Bush presidency's version of reality as being of the kind that we make make it up as we bumble on as though we were still a frat boy on a drunken spree. Something that gave me instant cause for pause is McDonald calling both Grass and Handke the pre-eminent German postwar "stylists"... but let me pause before dealing with the matter of "stylist": The fact that McDonald appears aware of the impact if any of solely these two writers on the the so impervious United States, and leaves out Enzensberger, Peter Weiss, Boell, Frisch, Duerrenmatt, Uwe Johnson, Alexander Kluge, Thomas Bernhardt [though he mentions B. later on,] Heiner Mueller, Hochhut, and younger German, Austrian and Swiss who have become known... of course only in modest editions with small followings... well what can you ask for in a country inundated with junk... I recall traveling to Bulgaria, for the government, part of my mission being to help redress the difference of 7 Bulgarian writers and poets having been published in American between 1947 and 1980 whereas 4000 U.S. titles had appeared in translation in the then so despised [by the U.S media] Bulgaria, a country with "ten thousand years of Thracian" blood coursing through their veins, as they put it as their socialism was seeking out a differentiated one from their sterile socialism, that is a country with an age old poetic tradition. As to McDonald's even basic familiarity with the work of either Grass or Handke - as distinct from the undeniability that both are famous for being famous - but not a stylist, the meaning of the word "stylist" as that is used in a halfway accurate manner in literary discourse. Who might be described as a "stylist" in contemporary German literature? Botho Straus, perhaps. Most certainly the famous esthete Ernst Juenger. In American literature: Paul and Jane Bowles come to mind. There are a few off in the smaller magazines. Handke during his six phases cannot even be said to have developed what is generally called "a style" or a voice; however, his writing throughout features certain constants as he developed form being initially irritated to the point of being nauseated by the very materiality of words to someone who calls himself a "Wortklauber," an advance on "mot juste" since it means to love words as though they were the sparrows that feed from your hand; as he became, and perhaps is still becoming an ever ...a kind of to me painfully overly perfectionistic over-user of the conventions of German punctuation [but that is definitely very much the objection of someone who prefers to be nonchalant in this matter]... invariably accurate even when he needs to be as vague as possible, but even then: his vagueness is precise. Certainly M.Mcdonald tries to couch his sentences, thus his language is couché.There ought to be laws that condemn the failure to read; severe punishment for the crime of gross and intentional misrepresentation; punishment of the same severity as that which is visited on legal incompetence:disbarment ought to have as its equivalent in Shira law: King Abdul condemns McDonald to having both hands severed at the wrists; if he wishes to continue to write, let him do it with his toes, then we will have foutrés in each and every respect. As literary assassins go, McDonald is not up to the snuff of what Rupert Murdoch has in his down-under stable.Yes, where did you of a journal, with some legitimate pretensions of scholarship, find this primitivo, as I think of the antediluvian so prehistoric so crude antecedents of the so much refined feathered friends, the pelicanos who make life simple and just bomb themselves from a few feet into the river? His work is on the order of Der Stuermer. You know, Mr. Wilson, the story, the real story about that case of cases the often very great writer/ composer romantic most problematic character Peter Handke is so much more interesting than the platitude and cliches in which your crudité casts his bombs. If only you had a noggin with a tad of curiosity left in it! You don't know what you just missed! Sit down; have a shot of Jose Cuervo with that Cigar
Monday, March 26, 2007
PARTS B [of REVERSE ORDER C-B-A] OPEN LETTER TO THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, RE MICHAEL MCDONALD
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.html
=B=
II McDonald the Literary Rocker
Pertinent quotes from McDonald on Handke's works and my commentary:
It appears the few if any U.S. reviewers and critics have realized - exceptions are the late Richard Gilman and Frank Conroy, and the still living great William Gass and the near great John Rockwell - that no matter that Handke has gone trough approximately six stages as a writer and dramatist since his appearance of the world stage in 1966, he has remained true in his fiction and his drama to the knowledge that all you can do with words is to create independent works of art, artificial creations, projection screens in which the innerworld of the author poet in play with the outer world affects the innerworld of the reader; the longing for authentic communication through and approximations of states of mind. Handke is a formalist in the sense that the romantics thought all works ought to approximate music, and the laws of formalism, with its themes and variations, from Bach to Hip Hop, is the most efficient way of doing so.
Deriving from an initial experience where everything material, including the sheer materiality of words, nauseated Handke's senses that, e.g., he needed to wear dark glasses at all times during those days - "nausea of the eyeballs" was the most extreme expression that someone, who I think still suffers from occasional bouts of color blindness, found for this experience, a matter I decided to trace to its complicated vari- and over-determined origin. And what a great learning educational experience it has been. The vagic nerve which produces the feeling of nausea to defend us against ill-making interior and exterior matters of all kinds is also irritated by sheer excess of information, in the case of someone with Handke's autistic hyper-sensibility it does so with much greater ease, since the autistic may have far greater input but, let me put it this way, have only the standard processor and modulator - the words "sensory overload" makes a kind of everyday language sense.
Although Handke initially - the Handke who had had eight years of Greek and Latin, whose acquaintance with law and its fine distinctions had brought some clarity into his angry adolescent noggin [read "The Essay on Tiredness" to see the plethora of his symptomatology as a young man], as he would later write - despaired at getting out of what is called "the prison house of language," it is of course astonishing to note with what perfection he operated to create works such as his first "Sprechstuecke" to make an audience aware, by means of these "happenings" of the imprisonment, these social lattice works, in which they reside, how painfully self-conscious the experience of "Offending the Audience" can make that audience as it becomes more and more aware of itself. [McDonald: "The most remarkable attribute of these works [the early plays] is a total absence of action... Other than language itself, nothing happens."] is McDonald on the subject writing from D.C in 2006/07 who evidently never underwent any of these experiences at the well reviewed, by the Washington Post, shows of these plays by "Fraudulent Productions" in that city]. Nor that of the dissociating experience, magical, the "cleans your clock" experience of "Ride Across Lake Constance"[ 1970] or that of the play without words, consisting of nothing but beautiful stage directions, so much approximating musical notations or those for dance, "My Foot my Tutor", [1969] and one of the great texts, in German, also consisting of directions only, for "The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other" [1991], a mesmerizing series of tableaux that leave all of your senses freshened, leave you reborn because it makes you see that much more keenly, nearly as keenly as the autistic Handke sees perhaps, until you have to deal with one too many nauseating idiot like Michael McDonald. That, say, the 1971 "Goalies Anxiety at the Penalty Kick", by means of syntactical legerdemain, for which Handke had prepared himself by reading in the field of paranoid shizophrenia, purely by mean of syntax, puts the reader into the same paranoid schizophrenic state of mind as its protagonist/ personae/ projection screen of the eventual murder ["Hey, McDonald, there is some blood for you!"]Josef Bloch; or that a real reader, who does not look for an experience above and beyond what he is reading, whose mind has not become cluttered with notions that words ever loose their material quality, will experience the novelistic fairy tale, "Absence" [1987] as though he were seeing a film.
What Handke achieves is to make the prison house playful, more and more inhabitable, as he has absorbed, slurped up in his insatiability, for language to fill the void, the entire classic tradition; but, finding especial use not just for Flaubert but for Goethe, Eichendorf and Stifter and the one contemporary writer Handke and Thomas Mann agreed on, the fairly recently deceased Hermann Lenz; Francis Ponge Francis Ponge, Grillparzer, etc etc. It is amazing what Handke has absorbed and then transformed to his use. There are dissertations or long scholarly pieces, few showing evidence that their writers as writers have been influenced by such intense exposure, on Handke and Nietzche, Handke and Stifter, Handke and Rilke, you name it.
That oddly cheerful, astonishingly vigorous person, that idiot, who announced in 1966 "I am the new Kafka", meanwhile presents himself as the "anti-Kafka" which is closer to the truth once he accessed what lay prior to the terror, fear inducing experiences of his childhood.
I don't think McDonald has read more than one single Handke novel, and even that not to completion or he couldn't write: ""Who reads (outside of the classroom) Robbe-Grillet and the other nouveaux romanciers from whom Handke has learned so much?" and some of the other matters for which I will take him to task. Nor do I think he knows German though his talk about "the early novels" might lead the ignorant to believe that he does. McDonald is a fraud, a worse fraud than the fraudulent critic Lee Siegel; he is either a hired or self-appointed literary assassin who however with the fifty pot shots he takes at Handke not once hits the barn.
The object of his exercise is to ride a blind easily mounted high moral horse, and to hell with what is trampled along the way. He's a Stryker Brigade in one. If he at least knew Handke's early work! He does not mention a single one of the 30 plus works Handke has produced since 1974.He cites a single paragraph from the 1974 novel "A Moment of True Feeling", and probably does so only because Updike refers to it, and so he feels he has some kind of backup:
"As though the sky now partook of an alien system, it became too high for the high towers of civilization in the foreground of the picture, and against the compact, menacing background the human landscape degenerated into a junkyard. The deep blue with which a time grown plethoric weighed on the world was the essential—the scattered leaflets down below, in which only fear of life or death could beguile him (or anyone else!) to find the slightest meaning, were a secondary, minor factor. Keuschnig saw the sky arching over the Place de la Concorde as something incongruous and hostile. "
as being typical. This is the novel into which Handke dissociated the suididal state he was then in. The then young lay-abroad, whose mother had recently committed suicide, couldn't handle being left by his first wife, finding him the trapped house-husband to a toddler daughter, for cause I might say in the way sleep walkers come together and abandon each other with as little sense as the would be famous actors of "Ride Across Lake Constance" have. Handke began to fugue, as you can read the three great fuguing poems in "Nonsense and Happinesss", he noted every involuntary thought that popped up in his noggin in "Weight of the World," and, as we can read there, ended up hospitalized, for tachychardia attack it looks like, started to ingest valerium, the anxiety inducing nausea softened, and he experienced that "Moment of True Feeling" that is the object of that novel, which Gunner McDonald never got to, even that one book, that McDonald appears not have read through to the end: love burst through, disproving in advance what an idiot, a complete moron who does not even know that linguistically he contradicts himself within just one sentence, named Michael McDonald would write appr. 30 years later: "HANDKE HAS NEVER abandoned his bedrock faith that language is merely a set of debilitating fictions used to mask reality." [How can language, either written or spoken, be a fiction? Does it contain some kind of black matter?]
Instead of continuing to be nauseated by the materiality of words, Handke becomes what he calls a "Wortklauber" - he begins to love them, in somewhat Rilkeish fashion if you like, they become endearing, like his darling sparrows; one step up in the world from being a "mot juster" as he had always been. Handke, who had agreed with his psychotherapist that he lacked access to his feelings, becomes possessed by the extraordinary love he had absorbed as a child, from intra-uterine [yes, someone who knows how to read an author like Handke in the dozen ways that analysis then teaches you to "read" also finds those memories in his work, in the great, the ever so rich "Walk About the Villages"] and during the first two years of his life from his bounty-fully beauteous mother; at least for a while, he opens up to the world, as is evidenced especially by the first chapter of the title text of "A Slow Homecoming" so that one might come under the impression that even if all of Alaska were consumed by Dick Cheney's energy consortium it continued to live in Handke's response to what it had once been. Handke's dissociations lessen, yet his powers to be in the necessary dissociative state of mind to produce these amazing texts is not diminished. If that amazing pretender McDonald knew anything about Robbe Grillet or perhaps he is really thinking of Robbe Fricasse, [yes, just one thing, Mr. McDonald - give me a single item, just one - not the "so much" that Handke allegedly learned] he would cite the one Handke text where, if you have absorbed Robbe Grillet, you can sense RG's work as providing a kind of supporting grid: Handke's amazingly lucid Der Hausierer / The Panhandler[1969]. It is a series of 12 I think separate, alternating texts; the even numbered ones consist of extremely short sentences in the present tense, sentences by a consciousness that is evidently watching, that is transfixed by a horrendous, barely glimpsable series of bloody [more blood, McDonald! oh what terror inducing horrors are just off stage]; the odd-numbered sections, in italics, provide a kind of sequential meta description of the essence of crime and detective novels. The book was written during a period during which our Kafka redivivus was demonstrating over and over again [the "Innerworld" poems, "Radio Play One", "Kaspar"] what mastery he had acquired over his fear, that he could induce it and keep mastering it, as he did, too, to a large extent during his ten year exposure to violent brutal primal scenes, read "Sorrow Beyond Dreams", Mr. McDonald. And it is not a novel you fraud, it is Handke's most famous book, it is a biography of his mother's life, even those who have little use for the rest of Handke find it a great text. "Sorrow for Gunner McDonald." And evidently, Handke as a person with literature as his medicine, as his defense against the terror of the dark night, very cooly very hotly utilized every formal means he could get his hands on. The consciousness reporting sections, a demonstration ad absurdum of pure phenomenology Mr. McDonald, also apparently contain no end of quotes from American and British crime novels cited by Handke from their German translations, which is one reason it does not yet exist in English, since a discouraged me failed do ask Handke whose "Kaspar" I was just translating if he at least remembered what books they were from and what pages. But "Der Hausierer" exists in Italian, French and Spanish. Since Mr.McDonald claims to be working on a literary biography of Curzie Malaparte I assume {???} that he knows Italian. Poor dead Malaparte he trembles in his grave at what is going to be done to him: "Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool." No, nothing is emptier than Michael McDonalds brain! Or rather,filled with crap.
Handke as of appr. 1974 became a writer composer who could achieve any effect he wanted; except, being autistic, he was never going to write socialist realist novels like Heimito von Doderer, no matter his vain claim that he could have. For his autism also implies an imprisonment in what is known as "the autistic position"... from which we sense that immense longing to break out, to make contact, that impresses the reader of Handke's first novel, "Die Hornissen" [1965], which he would later re-write in the more accessible form of "The Repetition" [l984]; yet Handke - as he has said in a sentence non of the scholars that cite it have ever followed through on: "I am so anxious and everything I write is then so calm." Since the basic source of Handke's writing is anxiety inducing libido, its transformation into calming text implies the opposite of what Freud and Breuer called hysterical conversion, or a way of productively dealing with it; since writing is not only Handke's chief means of staying emotionally well, but also this industrious and ambitious savant's gift; of his ambition to be the recipient of the laurel crown... he is indeed condemned to be the most productive living author, and who does little if any revising of his first and only draft; and who has also translated some of the greatest and other fine texts, since though he may write one book and play a year, that still leaves a lot of other time that needs to be devoted to keeping pencil in hand.
As the author, also, of biography ["Sorrow Beyond Dreams", "A Child's Story"] and artistic musings cum walking tours such as "The Lesson of St. Victoire"] and of travelogues [three of of the 7 of his Yugoslavia related texts] Handke makes also for an excellent, pretty regular kind of first rate reporter and historian. I saw enough of him from the mid sixties to the late 70s to certify that he's got the essence of things right in, "A Child's Story" [1980] [part III of the Homecoming Quartett].
Mcdonald writes: "Similarly in his first novel, as well as those that followed in the 1970s such as "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," "A Moment of True Feeling," and "The Left- Handed Woman," Handke dispenses with linear narrative. In its place, he offers readers a static “story” built almost entirely around the inner thoughts of characters who discover that life is absurd and language inadequate to their needs."
Let's see now: "Sorrow Beyond Dreams" is an account of Handke's mother's life, evidently McDonald has not read it. He is just looking at a list of published books.
"Static stories?" eh? Lightning fast tortoises perhaps. Action, cut, another bucket of blood for McDonald: I was always under the impression, as its translator, that Vim Wenders managed to extract a pretty good well-moving story line from "A Goalie's Anxiety of the Penalty Kick" [1970]. "A Short Letter long Farewell [1972] sure moves like crazy all over the United States! The suicidal Keuschnig of "A True Moment" [1974] seems to do a lot of pavement pounding in Paris! Sorger in Alaska ["A Slow Homecoming", 1979] moves, albeit already as the "king of slowness" as which "The Repetion's" [1986] walking syntax can induce a sense of true being in its readers following Filip Kobal on his way to Lubliana.
And as to psychology, the abandoned husband in "Lefthanded Woman" [another personae for a side of Handke], does a lot of peeing against house walls in the company of his male pals! What ought Handke the allegedly non-psychological write: a dissertation on the emasculating, crushing effect of being abandoned by your wife? In "Weight of the World" Handke notes that he feels he is walking around as though his ass is stuck out high, like that of a homosexual! It appears that McDonald like so many Americans like to have their texts and their films with characters that have a set of psychological categories in which they can then be discussed away, the horror of psychological pseudo-understanding which is worse than denial; real people as it were, instead of encountering their being. The work is rife with the under-currents of psychodrama!
McDonald: "In the 1980s, however, after delving into the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger, he ventured outside the minds of his characters long enough to offer readers finely drawn evocations of natural landscapes," Mr. McDonald has it.
I have come across a single mention of Heidegger in Handke who finds his work monolithic and unapproachable. Handke's close friend the poet Kolleritch, however, is reputed to derive useful backup from it. I would say that first of all Handke did not and does not "delve" whatever that might mean in the context and that to respond to nature and to communicate that response so that a reader can respond, sure as hell did not require Heidegger. In Handke's case it required the knowledge when to name and when not to. Stifter and Hermann Lenz yes, Heidegger no. Stifter and Lenz because they gave Handke the confidence that you could create texts other than those that merely reproduce an ugly world, and Cezanne, but in which the world's horror appeared as the occasional distant thunderstorm or burst in like a chain wielding Inuit. Handke is oblique, McDonald. But never intentionally obscurantist.
"But Handke has hardly been silenced or relegated to obloquy." I have not the faintest what this might mean "to be silenced or relegated to obloquy" - does McDonald feel it is time to throw in some big word? Is he slipping this nonsense past an editor? I gladly subject McDonald to an endless withering stream of obloquy, however. But only because his nonsense appears so improbably in the once wonderful "American Scholar."
McDonald: "At his best, as Updike has remarked, Handke is 'a kind of nature poet, a romantic whose exacerbated nerves cling like pained ivy to the landscape.' And Updike cites, rightly, this passage [the same one from "Moment of True Feeling" see above] But his [Handke's I presume] visionary power of description has little in the way of intellect behind it to engage the reader. By concentrating with surgical precision on the physical details of life, Handke can paint a horrifying image of the mechanical numbness of everyday habit. But is what he describes really life? Literature is many things, but it wouldn’t be worthy of our attention if it didn’t have something to do with human psychology—from which Handke clearly wishes to escape."
Some of this nonsense I have already dealt with above. But here are a few comments:
I am glad that precision continues to be surgical!
Handke may wish to escape the McDonalds of this world, but someone who knows psychology as intimately as he does so as to be able to forego its pedestrian enumeration, is certainly not as foolish as to want to escape it. Handke is first and foremost a materialist. He may have his foolish mystical sides, but the thought of escaping psychology of all things, I cant imagine it crossing his mind. The alleviation of the painful states that his autism can still produce is quite another matter. Just because you don't write psychological motivations for your characters, but leave them implicit, as the impressionist lyrical novel [say Henry Green, or D.H. Lawrence, or the Joyce up to and including "Portrait" have always done] doesn't mean that you as an author propose to escape the great complexity of human or any kind of monkey motivation. You want "real life" in your books, McDonald: you get the Pope's nose, Michael McDonald.
As mentioned before: the cited paragraph is an instance of Keuschnig's dissociated state.
"Little in the way of intellect" ... I see: a phenomenologist like Handke is supposed to demonstrate to a moron like Michael McDonald the operation of the sytem prctp. in conjunction with the linguistc system? Pray why ought poetry demonstrate that the poet might also have the most powerful :"innellecual" capacities, which however, only manifest themselves in his powers to give musical form to his product? Such calls for intellect coming from the McDonalds of this world!
Perhaps McD.s statement is really a projection of the fact that he has an inkling of how intellectually deficient he himself is?
Updike used to feel that Handke was the best living German writer; upon reading Updike's review, in The New Yorker, of Handke's "The Afternoon of a Writer" [1987] I decided to forgo Updike reviews, and only read his wonderful pieces on the visual arts. But therefore it would be interesting to discuss - I think I will write him - what he thinks of Handke now that an extraordinary painterly element [van Ruysdael] started to enter his work as of the 1984 "Across."
The Mcdonald wants real people ... well, there is always the rampaging surrogate for Handke, the Loser of the 1984 novel Across [Chinese des Schmerzens]. But I think what reality- deprived McDonald wants from novels: he wants real life! Like you want coke to be real, which, in its original green glass bottle, always at least made for a great douche. He wants words to make him forget all about words. Naif realism, here we come. He wants Handke to be something that he isn't, but can only respond to what he knows already: to "real life"... my preference is for "unreal life!"
As far as I am concerned, Handke is batting around .750, pretty high on the totem pole. Occasionally, his grandiosity gets the better of him [the 500 k word "Image Loss: or Across the Sierra del Gredos, [2002] or he does something just "to stay in the picture" [the 2005 play "Subday Blues" might fit this desciption.] He is best, as he knows, at a 30 to 40 thousand word clip of his concentrated efforts. For example his "Don Juan" [2004] which moves both forward and backward simultaneously, in time, and, as usual, is also anchored in one place as its protagonist moves from one city to one woman to another in the course of one week, is even better, more cleanly and clearly articulated than the two great Assayings, as I call them, the one "About the Jukebox" and the one about "The Day that Went Well" in "Three Essays" [1994]. Think of H. as composer with the inclinations of a Cezanne, to create alternative verbal worlds that stand in an unusual relationship to the world that we inhabit. Handke is also a didactitician, a kind of activist Wittgenstein. To live in the age of Goethe is many a Germanist's pipe dream, I am glad to live in a world that at least has one Handke. He nourishes me as no other writer does. A few pages of Handke, one good analytic essay, my friends the smart crows and I forget all about the McDonalds of this world.
=B=
II McDonald the Literary Rocker
Pertinent quotes from McDonald on Handke's works and my commentary:
It appears the few if any U.S. reviewers and critics have realized - exceptions are the late Richard Gilman and Frank Conroy, and the still living great William Gass and the near great John Rockwell - that no matter that Handke has gone trough approximately six stages as a writer and dramatist since his appearance of the world stage in 1966, he has remained true in his fiction and his drama to the knowledge that all you can do with words is to create independent works of art, artificial creations, projection screens in which the innerworld of the author poet in play with the outer world affects the innerworld of the reader; the longing for authentic communication through and approximations of states of mind. Handke is a formalist in the sense that the romantics thought all works ought to approximate music, and the laws of formalism, with its themes and variations, from Bach to Hip Hop, is the most efficient way of doing so.
Deriving from an initial experience where everything material, including the sheer materiality of words, nauseated Handke's senses that, e.g., he needed to wear dark glasses at all times during those days - "nausea of the eyeballs" was the most extreme expression that someone, who I think still suffers from occasional bouts of color blindness, found for this experience, a matter I decided to trace to its complicated vari- and over-determined origin. And what a great learning educational experience it has been. The vagic nerve which produces the feeling of nausea to defend us against ill-making interior and exterior matters of all kinds is also irritated by sheer excess of information, in the case of someone with Handke's autistic hyper-sensibility it does so with much greater ease, since the autistic may have far greater input but, let me put it this way, have only the standard processor and modulator - the words "sensory overload" makes a kind of everyday language sense.
Although Handke initially - the Handke who had had eight years of Greek and Latin, whose acquaintance with law and its fine distinctions had brought some clarity into his angry adolescent noggin [read "The Essay on Tiredness" to see the plethora of his symptomatology as a young man], as he would later write - despaired at getting out of what is called "the prison house of language," it is of course astonishing to note with what perfection he operated to create works such as his first "Sprechstuecke" to make an audience aware, by means of these "happenings" of the imprisonment, these social lattice works, in which they reside, how painfully self-conscious the experience of "Offending the Audience" can make that audience as it becomes more and more aware of itself. [McDonald: "The most remarkable attribute of these works [the early plays] is a total absence of action... Other than language itself, nothing happens."] is McDonald on the subject writing from D.C in 2006/07 who evidently never underwent any of these experiences at the well reviewed, by the Washington Post, shows of these plays by "Fraudulent Productions" in that city]. Nor that of the dissociating experience, magical, the "cleans your clock" experience of "Ride Across Lake Constance"[ 1970] or that of the play without words, consisting of nothing but beautiful stage directions, so much approximating musical notations or those for dance, "My Foot my Tutor", [1969] and one of the great texts, in German, also consisting of directions only, for "The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other" [1991], a mesmerizing series of tableaux that leave all of your senses freshened, leave you reborn because it makes you see that much more keenly, nearly as keenly as the autistic Handke sees perhaps, until you have to deal with one too many nauseating idiot like Michael McDonald. That, say, the 1971 "Goalies Anxiety at the Penalty Kick", by means of syntactical legerdemain, for which Handke had prepared himself by reading in the field of paranoid shizophrenia, purely by mean of syntax, puts the reader into the same paranoid schizophrenic state of mind as its protagonist/ personae/ projection screen of the eventual murder ["Hey, McDonald, there is some blood for you!"]Josef Bloch; or that a real reader, who does not look for an experience above and beyond what he is reading, whose mind has not become cluttered with notions that words ever loose their material quality, will experience the novelistic fairy tale, "Absence" [1987] as though he were seeing a film.
What Handke achieves is to make the prison house playful, more and more inhabitable, as he has absorbed, slurped up in his insatiability, for language to fill the void, the entire classic tradition; but, finding especial use not just for Flaubert but for Goethe, Eichendorf and Stifter and the one contemporary writer Handke and Thomas Mann agreed on, the fairly recently deceased Hermann Lenz; Francis Ponge Francis Ponge, Grillparzer, etc etc. It is amazing what Handke has absorbed and then transformed to his use. There are dissertations or long scholarly pieces, few showing evidence that their writers as writers have been influenced by such intense exposure, on Handke and Nietzche, Handke and Stifter, Handke and Rilke, you name it.
That oddly cheerful, astonishingly vigorous person, that idiot, who announced in 1966 "I am the new Kafka", meanwhile presents himself as the "anti-Kafka" which is closer to the truth once he accessed what lay prior to the terror, fear inducing experiences of his childhood.
I don't think McDonald has read more than one single Handke novel, and even that not to completion or he couldn't write: ""Who reads (outside of the classroom) Robbe-Grillet and the other nouveaux romanciers from whom Handke has learned so much?" and some of the other matters for which I will take him to task. Nor do I think he knows German though his talk about "the early novels" might lead the ignorant to believe that he does. McDonald is a fraud, a worse fraud than the fraudulent critic Lee Siegel; he is either a hired or self-appointed literary assassin who however with the fifty pot shots he takes at Handke not once hits the barn.
The object of his exercise is to ride a blind easily mounted high moral horse, and to hell with what is trampled along the way. He's a Stryker Brigade in one. If he at least knew Handke's early work! He does not mention a single one of the 30 plus works Handke has produced since 1974.He cites a single paragraph from the 1974 novel "A Moment of True Feeling", and probably does so only because Updike refers to it, and so he feels he has some kind of backup:
"As though the sky now partook of an alien system, it became too high for the high towers of civilization in the foreground of the picture, and against the compact, menacing background the human landscape degenerated into a junkyard. The deep blue with which a time grown plethoric weighed on the world was the essential—the scattered leaflets down below, in which only fear of life or death could beguile him (or anyone else!) to find the slightest meaning, were a secondary, minor factor. Keuschnig saw the sky arching over the Place de la Concorde as something incongruous and hostile. "
as being typical. This is the novel into which Handke dissociated the suididal state he was then in. The then young lay-abroad, whose mother had recently committed suicide, couldn't handle being left by his first wife, finding him the trapped house-husband to a toddler daughter, for cause I might say in the way sleep walkers come together and abandon each other with as little sense as the would be famous actors of "Ride Across Lake Constance" have. Handke began to fugue, as you can read the three great fuguing poems in "Nonsense and Happinesss", he noted every involuntary thought that popped up in his noggin in "Weight of the World," and, as we can read there, ended up hospitalized, for tachychardia attack it looks like, started to ingest valerium, the anxiety inducing nausea softened, and he experienced that "Moment of True Feeling" that is the object of that novel, which Gunner McDonald never got to, even that one book, that McDonald appears not have read through to the end: love burst through, disproving in advance what an idiot, a complete moron who does not even know that linguistically he contradicts himself within just one sentence, named Michael McDonald would write appr. 30 years later: "HANDKE HAS NEVER abandoned his bedrock faith that language is merely a set of debilitating fictions used to mask reality." [How can language, either written or spoken, be a fiction? Does it contain some kind of black matter?]
Instead of continuing to be nauseated by the materiality of words, Handke becomes what he calls a "Wortklauber" - he begins to love them, in somewhat Rilkeish fashion if you like, they become endearing, like his darling sparrows; one step up in the world from being a "mot juster" as he had always been. Handke, who had agreed with his psychotherapist that he lacked access to his feelings, becomes possessed by the extraordinary love he had absorbed as a child, from intra-uterine [yes, someone who knows how to read an author like Handke in the dozen ways that analysis then teaches you to "read" also finds those memories in his work, in the great, the ever so rich "Walk About the Villages"] and during the first two years of his life from his bounty-fully beauteous mother; at least for a while, he opens up to the world, as is evidenced especially by the first chapter of the title text of "A Slow Homecoming" so that one might come under the impression that even if all of Alaska were consumed by Dick Cheney's energy consortium it continued to live in Handke's response to what it had once been. Handke's dissociations lessen, yet his powers to be in the necessary dissociative state of mind to produce these amazing texts is not diminished. If that amazing pretender McDonald knew anything about Robbe Grillet or perhaps he is really thinking of Robbe Fricasse, [yes, just one thing, Mr. McDonald - give me a single item, just one - not the "so much" that Handke allegedly learned] he would cite the one Handke text where, if you have absorbed Robbe Grillet, you can sense RG's work as providing a kind of supporting grid: Handke's amazingly lucid Der Hausierer / The Panhandler[1969]. It is a series of 12 I think separate, alternating texts; the even numbered ones consist of extremely short sentences in the present tense, sentences by a consciousness that is evidently watching, that is transfixed by a horrendous, barely glimpsable series of bloody [more blood, McDonald! oh what terror inducing horrors are just off stage]; the odd-numbered sections, in italics, provide a kind of sequential meta description of the essence of crime and detective novels. The book was written during a period during which our Kafka redivivus was demonstrating over and over again [the "Innerworld" poems, "Radio Play One", "Kaspar"] what mastery he had acquired over his fear, that he could induce it and keep mastering it, as he did, too, to a large extent during his ten year exposure to violent brutal primal scenes, read "Sorrow Beyond Dreams", Mr. McDonald. And it is not a novel you fraud, it is Handke's most famous book, it is a biography of his mother's life, even those who have little use for the rest of Handke find it a great text. "Sorrow for Gunner McDonald." And evidently, Handke as a person with literature as his medicine, as his defense against the terror of the dark night, very cooly very hotly utilized every formal means he could get his hands on. The consciousness reporting sections, a demonstration ad absurdum of pure phenomenology Mr. McDonald, also apparently contain no end of quotes from American and British crime novels cited by Handke from their German translations, which is one reason it does not yet exist in English, since a discouraged me failed do ask Handke whose "Kaspar" I was just translating if he at least remembered what books they were from and what pages. But "Der Hausierer" exists in Italian, French and Spanish. Since Mr.McDonald claims to be working on a literary biography of Curzie Malaparte I assume {???} that he knows Italian. Poor dead Malaparte he trembles in his grave at what is going to be done to him: "Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool." No, nothing is emptier than Michael McDonalds brain! Or rather,filled with crap.
Handke as of appr. 1974 became a writer composer who could achieve any effect he wanted; except, being autistic, he was never going to write socialist realist novels like Heimito von Doderer, no matter his vain claim that he could have. For his autism also implies an imprisonment in what is known as "the autistic position"... from which we sense that immense longing to break out, to make contact, that impresses the reader of Handke's first novel, "Die Hornissen" [1965], which he would later re-write in the more accessible form of "The Repetition" [l984]; yet Handke - as he has said in a sentence non of the scholars that cite it have ever followed through on: "I am so anxious and everything I write is then so calm." Since the basic source of Handke's writing is anxiety inducing libido, its transformation into calming text implies the opposite of what Freud and Breuer called hysterical conversion, or a way of productively dealing with it; since writing is not only Handke's chief means of staying emotionally well, but also this industrious and ambitious savant's gift; of his ambition to be the recipient of the laurel crown... he is indeed condemned to be the most productive living author, and who does little if any revising of his first and only draft; and who has also translated some of the greatest and other fine texts, since though he may write one book and play a year, that still leaves a lot of other time that needs to be devoted to keeping pencil in hand.
As the author, also, of biography ["Sorrow Beyond Dreams", "A Child's Story"] and artistic musings cum walking tours such as "The Lesson of St. Victoire"] and of travelogues [three of of the 7 of his Yugoslavia related texts] Handke makes also for an excellent, pretty regular kind of first rate reporter and historian. I saw enough of him from the mid sixties to the late 70s to certify that he's got the essence of things right in, "A Child's Story" [1980] [part III of the Homecoming Quartett].
Mcdonald writes: "Similarly in his first novel, as well as those that followed in the 1970s such as "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," "A Moment of True Feeling," and "The Left- Handed Woman," Handke dispenses with linear narrative. In its place, he offers readers a static “story” built almost entirely around the inner thoughts of characters who discover that life is absurd and language inadequate to their needs."
Let's see now: "Sorrow Beyond Dreams" is an account of Handke's mother's life, evidently McDonald has not read it. He is just looking at a list of published books.
"Static stories?" eh? Lightning fast tortoises perhaps. Action, cut, another bucket of blood for McDonald: I was always under the impression, as its translator, that Vim Wenders managed to extract a pretty good well-moving story line from "A Goalie's Anxiety of the Penalty Kick" [1970]. "A Short Letter long Farewell [1972] sure moves like crazy all over the United States! The suicidal Keuschnig of "A True Moment" [1974] seems to do a lot of pavement pounding in Paris! Sorger in Alaska ["A Slow Homecoming", 1979] moves, albeit already as the "king of slowness" as which "The Repetion's" [1986] walking syntax can induce a sense of true being in its readers following Filip Kobal on his way to Lubliana.
And as to psychology, the abandoned husband in "Lefthanded Woman" [another personae for a side of Handke], does a lot of peeing against house walls in the company of his male pals! What ought Handke the allegedly non-psychological write: a dissertation on the emasculating, crushing effect of being abandoned by your wife? In "Weight of the World" Handke notes that he feels he is walking around as though his ass is stuck out high, like that of a homosexual! It appears that McDonald like so many Americans like to have their texts and their films with characters that have a set of psychological categories in which they can then be discussed away, the horror of psychological pseudo-understanding which is worse than denial; real people as it were, instead of encountering their being. The work is rife with the under-currents of psychodrama!
McDonald: "In the 1980s, however, after delving into the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger, he ventured outside the minds of his characters long enough to offer readers finely drawn evocations of natural landscapes," Mr. McDonald has it.
I have come across a single mention of Heidegger in Handke who finds his work monolithic and unapproachable. Handke's close friend the poet Kolleritch, however, is reputed to derive useful backup from it. I would say that first of all Handke did not and does not "delve" whatever that might mean in the context and that to respond to nature and to communicate that response so that a reader can respond, sure as hell did not require Heidegger. In Handke's case it required the knowledge when to name and when not to. Stifter and Hermann Lenz yes, Heidegger no. Stifter and Lenz because they gave Handke the confidence that you could create texts other than those that merely reproduce an ugly world, and Cezanne, but in which the world's horror appeared as the occasional distant thunderstorm or burst in like a chain wielding Inuit. Handke is oblique, McDonald. But never intentionally obscurantist.
"But Handke has hardly been silenced or relegated to obloquy." I have not the faintest what this might mean "to be silenced or relegated to obloquy" - does McDonald feel it is time to throw in some big word? Is he slipping this nonsense past an editor? I gladly subject McDonald to an endless withering stream of obloquy, however. But only because his nonsense appears so improbably in the once wonderful "American Scholar."
McDonald: "At his best, as Updike has remarked, Handke is 'a kind of nature poet, a romantic whose exacerbated nerves cling like pained ivy to the landscape.' And Updike cites, rightly, this passage [the same one from "Moment of True Feeling" see above] But his [Handke's I presume] visionary power of description has little in the way of intellect behind it to engage the reader. By concentrating with surgical precision on the physical details of life, Handke can paint a horrifying image of the mechanical numbness of everyday habit. But is what he describes really life? Literature is many things, but it wouldn’t be worthy of our attention if it didn’t have something to do with human psychology—from which Handke clearly wishes to escape."
Some of this nonsense I have already dealt with above. But here are a few comments:
I am glad that precision continues to be surgical!
Handke may wish to escape the McDonalds of this world, but someone who knows psychology as intimately as he does so as to be able to forego its pedestrian enumeration, is certainly not as foolish as to want to escape it. Handke is first and foremost a materialist. He may have his foolish mystical sides, but the thought of escaping psychology of all things, I cant imagine it crossing his mind. The alleviation of the painful states that his autism can still produce is quite another matter. Just because you don't write psychological motivations for your characters, but leave them implicit, as the impressionist lyrical novel [say Henry Green, or D.H. Lawrence, or the Joyce up to and including "Portrait" have always done] doesn't mean that you as an author propose to escape the great complexity of human or any kind of monkey motivation. You want "real life" in your books, McDonald: you get the Pope's nose, Michael McDonald.
As mentioned before: the cited paragraph is an instance of Keuschnig's dissociated state.
"Little in the way of intellect" ... I see: a phenomenologist like Handke is supposed to demonstrate to a moron like Michael McDonald the operation of the sytem prctp. in conjunction with the linguistc system? Pray why ought poetry demonstrate that the poet might also have the most powerful :"innellecual" capacities, which however, only manifest themselves in his powers to give musical form to his product? Such calls for intellect coming from the McDonalds of this world!
Perhaps McD.s statement is really a projection of the fact that he has an inkling of how intellectually deficient he himself is?
Updike used to feel that Handke was the best living German writer; upon reading Updike's review, in The New Yorker, of Handke's "The Afternoon of a Writer" [1987] I decided to forgo Updike reviews, and only read his wonderful pieces on the visual arts. But therefore it would be interesting to discuss - I think I will write him - what he thinks of Handke now that an extraordinary painterly element [van Ruysdael] started to enter his work as of the 1984 "Across."
The Mcdonald wants real people ... well, there is always the rampaging surrogate for Handke, the Loser of the 1984 novel Across [Chinese des Schmerzens]. But I think what reality- deprived McDonald wants from novels: he wants real life! Like you want coke to be real, which, in its original green glass bottle, always at least made for a great douche. He wants words to make him forget all about words. Naif realism, here we come. He wants Handke to be something that he isn't, but can only respond to what he knows already: to "real life"... my preference is for "unreal life!"
As far as I am concerned, Handke is batting around .750, pretty high on the totem pole. Occasionally, his grandiosity gets the better of him [the 500 k word "Image Loss: or Across the Sierra del Gredos, [2002] or he does something just "to stay in the picture" [the 2005 play "Subday Blues" might fit this desciption.] He is best, as he knows, at a 30 to 40 thousand word clip of his concentrated efforts. For example his "Don Juan" [2004] which moves both forward and backward simultaneously, in time, and, as usual, is also anchored in one place as its protagonist moves from one city to one woman to another in the course of one week, is even better, more cleanly and clearly articulated than the two great Assayings, as I call them, the one "About the Jukebox" and the one about "The Day that Went Well" in "Three Essays" [1994]. Think of H. as composer with the inclinations of a Cezanne, to create alternative verbal worlds that stand in an unusual relationship to the world that we inhabit. Handke is also a didactitician, a kind of activist Wittgenstein. To live in the age of Goethe is many a Germanist's pipe dream, I am glad to live in a world that at least has one Handke. He nourishes me as no other writer does. A few pages of Handke, one good analytic essay, my friends the smart crows and I forget all about the McDonalds of this world.
PART A OF AN OPEN LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF "THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR" RE M. MCDONALD'S PIECE
PART A OF AN OPEN LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF "THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR" RE M. MCDONALD'S PIECE
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.htmlDear Editor Wilson,Here comes a detailed letter about Michael McDonald's atrocity "THE APOLOGIST The Celebrated Austrian writer Peter Handke appeared at the funeral of Serbian Dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Should we forgive him" [pages 59-69 of the print edition Spring 07 issue of the American Scholar.http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.html ]. It is but the latest, albeit crudest and most ignorant and distorted, baffled as much as baffling self-righteous libel to appear in the United States on the same subject; and if it had not appeared in the medium that bears the title scholar and is sponsored by the crossword puzzle champs I can't imagine anyone paying it the least heed. McDonald's piece is but the latest installment of the forever same caricature of Handke's political position on Yugoslavia which is then employed to cudgel the work of an author that one misreads just as badly. It's the old two sucker punches in a row. As an editor you failed to exercise due diligence, or were/are a partner in crime. Since McDonald appears unable to read, I am not surprised at his misuse of language. And whoever carved his piece from whatever cutlet he presented to you, produced a most disjointed text.I have little confidence that you will publish the devastation that I will visit on Counsel McDonald's - a lack of confidence due to the failures of editors of The New Republic, the New York Review of Books or The New York Times to respond to my, Handke's first translator into American [see my bio athttp://roloff.freeservers.com/about.html ] and other's letters objecting to gross and ignorant misreadings of Peter Handke's fallible work and political positions and person - thus I post this missile on-line at:http://www.artscritic.blogspot.comThere you can also find posted, six months ago, a detailed take on Peter Handke's association with the late Slobodan Milosevic, plus all pertinent links. A good source for pertinent information on the unfolding of the controversy has been online, in English, for more than half a year, good time for McDonald not to need to distort the most elementary matters, if that had not been his intent from the git-go:http://www.signandsight.com/features/809.htmltI myself, cleaning up after the stupidities perpetrated by the corrupt U.S. literary culture, feel like one of those old women that Hans Magnus Enzensberger keeps seeing knocking the mortar off the bricks from the buildings destroyed after men have gone to war. Many of those in Belgrade, Iraq and Afghanistan, and metaphorically in desperately provincial Seattle.PART ONE- POLITICSMcDonald opens and closes his mugging with tendentious and not pertinent quotes, to lend some kind of pretend weighty frame to his drivel, so let me, too start off with a few quotes, from Handke, and others, which are to the point.Handke: " "What I did not say" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "I have never denied or played down, not to speak of sanctioned, any of the massacres in Yugoslavia from 1991 – 1995." ... "When it comes to the wars in Yugoslavia, let us forget all comparisons and parallels. Let's stick with the facts of a civil war that a disingenuous or at least unknowing Europe instigated or at least co-produced, and which are terrible on all sides. (...) It is a fact that between 1992 and 1995, in the Yugoslavian Republic, and in Bosnia in particular, prison camps existed where people were starved, tortured and murdered. But let us refrain from mechanically linking these camps with the Bosnian Serbs. There were also Croatian and Muslim camps, and the crimes committed there will be punished in the tribunal in Den Haag."Botho Strauß [first rate playwright, and someone who might be described as a "stylist" - as which McDonald describes both Grass and Handke, which neither are - writes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "What remains today of Bertolt Brecht, a poet who valued the revolution over human life and whose only opposition to the bloody Stalin was a spot of dialectics? What remains is someone who changed the theatre more lastingly than any other European author... What remains, at the end of the day, of the alleged bard of the Greater Serbian Empire, Peter Handke? Not just the most gifted poetic craftsman of his day, but an episteme-creator (to use Foucault's term) as only the most outstanding minds can be, a milestone of seeing, feeling and understanding in German literature. Those who fail to see guilt and error as the stigmata (or even as stimulants in some cases) of great minds, shouldn't busy themselves with true poets and thinkers."Frank Schirrmacher, editor in chief of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the paper that gave Handke the hardest time for his position on Yugoslavia, on the fiasco of the Heine Prize:"Honouring someone, regardless of how controversial he may be, and then openly declaring him unworthy of that honour, without anything else having happened, is the ultimate form of social backslide. It turns the literary critic into the henchman of the politician. With the politicians' interference, the critic's objections to Handke now sound like a denunciation to the police."Martin Mosebach writes in Die Zeit on the Peter Handke affair: "Too bad the American ambassador who encouraged Slobodan Milosevic to wage war in Bosnia didn't come to his funeral in Belgrade. Someone like Handke who remained faithful to the dead Milosevic is much more worthy of admiration than all the Western politicians who made it possible for Milosevic to commit his crimes while he was alive."Handke in the Neue Zuricher Zeitung:"Where is there any order from Milosevic? How can you bring him together with Srebrenice? I don't know. And on top of that Milosevic was no dictator. He was an autocrat who exercised a semi-authoritarian regime. The press was free, but the television was state-controlled. I don't have any opinion about Milosevic. None. I can't find him either good or bad. I don't want to compare him with Ceausescu or Saddam Hussein, for me that's wrong. Setting Milosevic up as the major evil of the Balkan Wars is a simplificationhttp://www.signandsight.com/features/819.html [for the entirety of this fascinating interview]Aren't the scholarly often the worst deadbeats! What a chump you are Editor Wilson to be mining the same dead vein, and with the likes of McDonald as your Kumpel! As you continue, you will see the story that you missed!I ask the several thousand recipients of this communication to comment, if they wish, at the http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com site or reply directly to me and to join me in my call for the resignation of Editor Wilson. But if editor Wilson wishes to run this response in his pages, too, or on the American Scholar web-site, be my guest. I link to you, you link to me, and then you will be on life-support!For stretches I simply quote McDonald and comment, finding that the most efficient way to decimate his assertions. I quite realize that I am that "chien Andalusien" baying at the moon but, that way, I can at least "bark my way!" as old "Blue Eyes" used to sing. From the beginning now, point by point:1] The "we" in the rhetorical "Shall we forgive him"... ": are "we" using the royal "WE", what assumptsionary accusatoryness, what band of McCarthyite vigilantes might this "we" comprise? Is that your editoral board, the Phi Beta Clan, the heavy exercises of the right frontal lobe, or the 100 French "innelectuals" [George Herbert Walker Bush's pronunciation] that endorsed "Bozo" Bozonet's canceling of the greatest play of the past 50 years, Handke' s Faust, 1998 "The Journey into the Sonorous Land: or The Art of Asking".[Not "recent" really, as McDonald, who has no idea of the progress of the rake's work, has it: subsequent and far more recent the second in a great sequence of three amazing plays is "Hour" 1991, Handke's Yugoslavia play: "The Play about the Film about the War" [1999] that provides the full range of his takes on the subject; "Subday Blues" [2005] "Traces of the Lost" 2006/7 ] which entire series starts with Handke's richest work WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES [1992, Ariadne Press], a dramatic poem whose language reaches Shakespearean grandeur, Handke's Euripedean/ Goethen [alternating discourse] pean to the "Rolling on the River" aristocracy of the working class... Perhaps the "we" refers to the same 100 French "innelectuals" who are demanding the criminalization, in analogy of German criminalization of denial of the Shoa, of denial of the Turkish genocide on Armenians, whose 100 strong intercession in behalf of that idiot Bozonnet McDonald fails to mention but with whose dismissal at the end of this sorry affair he commiserates, whereas they might actually look to the denial of French colonial atrocities and collaborations with their occupiers, those French whores. [Handke's position vis a vis Yugoslavia and Milosevic had been well known in Yugoslavia prior to Bozonnet's dermarche].Yes that "we": You and Mr. McDonald? Mr. McDonald and all the other McDonalds? Or does Counsel McDonald comprise and presume to speak for some consensus of U.S. "innelectuals"? I can't imagine, except perhaps certain reviewers for the Weekly Standard and henchers for the New York Review. As to the rhetoricals of "forgiving", which McDonald thinketh we ought not: Who is doing the accusing? Where forgiveness exists as a possibility there must be a conviction? Or is this sorry "counsel" - for that presumption "The American Interest" - judge jury and executioner and insinuator of the deep lie all in one? Poor, ill-served "American Interest" that numbers at least one huge war criminal in its midst.For on a level of true world historical, truly unforgivable criminality shall we forgive his employer client Zsigismund Brezinksy, the initiator of the "destabilization of Afghanistan" [now a "failed state" in "tink thanks" language]. Shall I forgive the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter for signing off on Brezinki's brilliant idea, an idea with malice aforethought if ever there was one, or Reagan Casey for following up the organizing the Mujahadeem and providing these proxies with Stinger Missiles, and then betraying these legions to their own flukish [Ossama bin Fluke and his millions that could buy 1000 Toyota four wheelers at the drop of a Turban] devices? The thought is enough to give poor forever obsequious Hennery the K of Wurstburg on the Hudson a break from being lambasted haunted hunted for endorsing, enabling Pinochet. I doubt that you want me to go on as I could for pages along the same line. A country of 25 million human beings! Big time crime! Very cute. Let counsel take care of Ziggie before he sticks it to Handke, let all American rights hyenas turn their attention to U.S. prisons, to the wages of 200 years of U.S. imperialism, inland and in Central America. Or does this all go "without saying"? Yes, poor Handke, he has a screw loose, if only he'd get of this Serbian kick he is on!On a level closer to the crimes of association and ideological artistic confusions: there is poor old wonderful Pound's overvaluation of the aesthetic; Elliot's hideous anti-semitism; the head wound Celine suffered during WW I; Hamsun an apparent Quisling though I do not know the details and allow that his ill repute in may be ill founded; no end of other politically engaged who run afoul of politics, if Handke in fact did, which is not clear to me at all no matter that he is the biggest showboat of them all [which makes him suspect in some respects]. Will not the time come if it has not come already that the words "Special Forces" and the "U.S. Marines" strike as much terror into hearts as the words "Waffen SS" still does in some?I followed the entire controversy from its inception in the early 90s to its current status,[see early long takes of mine at the sitehttp://www.handkeyugo.scriptmania.com ] and also Professor Scott Abbot's rejoinder to Michael Schneider's review of "Journey to the Rivers" as "Justice for Serbia" is properly called, which the New Republic refused to run]and as someone engaged in a very long term Handke project knew of Handke's deep, very deep intra-psychic affiliation to Yugoslavia [read Hornissen, his first novel, its accessible repetition THE REPETION for comprehension of this] and his great familiarity with the Dalmatian and considerable sophistication about the in and outs of Belgrade and other politics [he is not fooled in the least by the ultra nationalists]: and what struck me most was how to the very quick its dissolution injured him, most manifest in petulant public outcries, violent verbal counter-attacks: when I see and hear something of the kind, it makes the me, the me who I am mostly now, sit back and listen and become puzzled... and not rage back.Do I forgive Susan Sontag for writing in the New York Times Magazine on the occasion of the Kosovo bombardments "and now the Serbs are the victims". Yes, I do: because it proved to me how utterly ignorant she still was, ignorant say of the half million Serb who had to flee Croatia, even after acting out some kind of human rights scenario film in Sarajevo [is she one of those "disinterested" observer of the kind that McDonald invokes into his fictitious tribunal that convicts Milosevic?]. I forgive her because of her essays, for the gutsiness of the position she took after 9/11; for her essay on U.S. Torture, for many many things, certainly not because she was a sorry novelist no matter the NYRB's attempts to prop up that part of her reputation which seemed not have convinced her insecurity in the matter; but because she really was a spectacularly good egg as only American girls can be: for that is a what struck me the first time I saw her, in Princeton at the Gruppe 47 meeting that May 1966, "why that's the kind of American girl that you want with you in an American car", and "oh my Gawd, you could really talk to that formidable head, that real intelligence, that didn't jibe with that bod!"I do not forgive the simple minded Serb and Milosovic blamers such as Roger Cohen of the NY Times, or any cowardly simpleminded vigilantes or any of those who make life easy for their heads...I can't really forgive the NYRB, which really knew better for the previous reviews they had run if not for many other reasons, for unloosing a certain Marcus on Handke [see http://www.handkeprose.scriptmania.com + http://www.handkescholar.scriptmania.com for a point by point emendation of the literary points in Marcus's piece] and then using the political disagreement to lay waste to Handke's work. Most amusing was Marcus gunning for pro-Serb sentiment in Handke's then latest book in English, "One Dark Night I Left My Silent House," dismissing it as "just more dream-writing" but then failing to note the dream wishfulfilment of some damaged blue and white trucks being towed westward on the Salzburg Autobahn. A dreambook all right, never before had a writer succeeded in engaging the reader in the syntax of a dream, how much closer can the transmission of one innerworld into another innerworld get, in literature? What amazing literary possibilities are opened up - never to be further used! [On the couch it can make you think that telepathy is for real!] No blood of course as McDonald seems to prefer, well there must be enough of that on the streets in D.C. and at Walter Reed, and if he wants to have it written about, I think bodice rippers might just be his style. I could go on, but I expect you notice in the matter of my forgiveness the rarity of it.Handke's exceptionalism where McDonald uses Günter Grass to attack Handke: why not let Handke bear the consequences of regret for his personal crimes and derelictions - over the years he has expressed his heartfelt regrets for any number of matters, for which the once supremely arrogant and still hot tempered and sometimes quite pathetic takes responsibility, and if he was mistaken in his evaluation of Milosevic [see anon] I expect that he will not wait as long as Günter Grass did to own up to his act of [perhaps convenient]cowardice.As a matter of fact, on Grass's admission that he had spent 45 days at the end of WW II as a member of a troupe so desperate for members that it created foreign divisions in its name, if Handke's most unattractive side, his righteousness did not spring forth with alacritous cries of "shame", the same Handke who a year before had, at his desk, written with fine self-deprecating irony about that streak of his. seehttp://begleitschreiben.twoday.net/files/Die-Tablas-von-Daimielhttp://for the entire wonderful piece where Handke explains why he won't appear as a witness for the defense. My thinking on his explanation for this refusal is that it does not jibe: although Handke of course was not present at any of the occasions during which Milosevic might have ordered or failed to prevent crimes from being committed, nonetheless the appearance of someone who visits heads of the Austrian state, as a character witness... if you see what I mean. I also thought of Handke's once saying that he did not think he would hold up well under cross examination if ever accused of anything. Perhaps that was said during a time the he was more down on himself. But, conceivably, the idea of being in the limelight for perhaps some days on that kind of hot seat then thwarted his exhibitionistic impulses.Your Mr. McDonald, and yours and "The American Interest's" he is, feeds into the sheeps' wish for the simplest of the simplest being the case: that the big bad wolf from Progarevic [and that is where the funeral was permitted not in Belgrade, McDonald] in as much as the sheep are interested or go the immense labor to get some drift of what really went down: it isn't just the distortions and the propaganda, but the sheer mass of information that your scholarly mouse needs to chew through; you need, literally, to become a historian in short order in order to have some idea how something like the disintegration occurred within the span of 20 years. Who might these disinterested be in McDonald's:"Even accepting Handke’s version, his having taken respectful part in the burial services could not be interpreted as anything other than a sign of his support for Milosevic, a man most disinterested observers believe to have been responsible for a series of wars that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people during his 13 years in power."I ask: who might any just one of these of the "most disinterested observers" be?Stephen Schwartz, the once estimable Christopher Hitchens; Neal Acherson whom I recently caught burbling that it was all Milosevic's fault; Roger Cohen; the judges of the tribunal; the millions whose solitude has been muddied by the falsifications that they have absorbed?No, there were no "disinterested" parties [if McDonald means to say "objective" or whatever disinterested might mean coming from him] only interested parties; Handke's was for peace and as McDonald seems to have realized the continued existence of the federation; my guess is also because as of the mid-80s Handke adopted grandfather Sivec's identity who had voted for the federation as a contiuance in some form of Austro-Hungarian federation in 1921, not that this wish of Handke's for a dream federation did and does not contradict his once feeling that there ought to be tough borders between small countries each with its own treasured language, among no end of contradiction in the "Swiss Cheese" that Handke has become. Once the federation devolved into ethnic and religious strife, as compared to conflict within the several states, it became M.s's task to defend, first of all, the Serbian minority in Croatia that was given 2nd class status; something that led to Vukovar; which led to Galbraith calling for us.arming.... Each stage brought, brings, a whole new set of equations into play. Yes, and each of these then small nation states is permitted its nationalism, has it endorsed by the West, but Serbian nationalism is found heinous, why might that be the case?But I don't think that this way of proceeding will get anyone anywhere. And no: it does not appear that it was McDonald "overflow crowd of some 20,000 radical Serb nationalists" at the funeral; I trust Handke's differentiated report that yes there were some, but that the mood chiefly was one of somber mourning. McDonald is intent it appears to turn the Serbians into Nazi type fascist: it is he who is the fascist in being a fitting writer for a new "Der Stuermer."McDonald also uses "disinterested" in claiming [how would he know?] that M. preferred Handke as a "disinterested" observer than a witness in his defense. No, Handke felt M. was innocent, that the case had not been proven ; and, to my considerable amazement, Handke bases his conclusion [but perhaps he was joking, you can't quite tell, always, when he is pulling some idiot reporter's stupid leg] on the smile he saw cross M.'s face when the court prosecution threw everything including the kitchen sink at him in its list of crimes: on the principle, I suppose, well all we need is one count, and we'll find one among those thousands. Handke felt that this tribunal was not appropriate, that the cards were stacked, with which I tend to agree in as much I was able to follow the trial at this remove [and I did not just rely on the hopeless Marlise Simon and the somewhat better Nicholas Wood of the N.Y. Times] and Handke felt that though M's underlings were fit subjects for the court, including the two chief Srbska Bosnian Serb accused, Mladic and K. that M. ought to have been tried in Belgrade by his own people. McDonald with his "most disinterested observers"thus sets up something that does not exist, another fictitious consensus following on the heels of his fictitious "we" of parties that have concluded, and in a "disinterested" state of mind that M. was guilty of Srebrenice... Some counsel! I can see him disbarred, getting thrown out of court in short order! Based on what I managed to get of the De Haag trial, I could not convict beyond a reasonable doubt. If Mr. McDonald's has some specifics: please share them with us! Hey, he might even convince Mr. Handke that he had it wrong.Most disinterested observers agree that squirrels like to consume nuts. An observer has been there, he or she has seen, it makes no difference whether they are interested or disinterested. If McD. had read Handke's Sommerlicher Nachtrag [A Summer Sequel], the second of his travelogues he might have noticed that surrogate Serb that Handke has exclaiming at the sight of Srebrenice "I don't ever want to have been a Serb" [or words to that effect] which made me, initially write: "who the hell asked Peter Handke who just gone through the hard earned task of becoming a Slovenian to turn into a Serb." Well, if you repeat a lie often enough, like Ronald Reagan, enough people will believe you and and you will win the election.What troubles me most in the whole affair is that Handke hasn't said a peep about M.s' posthumous Belgrade conviction for murder of his predecessor. I can see no real interest in Handke's being served in stubbornly insisting on M.s innocence, on his being [merely !] a tragic figure [definition]. Obviously,it brings the Bozonnets the Mcdonalds out of the wood works. Since I used to be acquainted with Mr. Handke and translated most of his plays I myself have good reason to give some real cred to his opinion, his instant x-ray vision of ugly people, not only physically ugly but "dark" people; that he might be right about M. If I had the confidence that I have now with respect to his judgment in that respect my life, my "career" in publishing might have been very different. Handke nearly throws up at ugliness. M. was a nice block head of a Serbian, but it is not merely a matter of looks, though I think Handke has as much of a blind spot when it comes to feminine beauty as I do, he with all his actresses, who he imagines to be as light as when they dance across the stage; I myself was brought up so protected as to have been the most gullible of critters, meanwhile one of the nastiest much bitten Kettenhunde!Unless, Handke just has a stick up his ass! Which he can too. Handke calls them as he sees them, also in his books, quite unsparingly. Also, the powerful. Including his own now deceased publisher, Siegfried Unseld. No matter that he is an upstart if ever there was one.Anyone who reads Handke's autobiography of everything that is in him - WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES - will also make acquaintance with Handke's self-acknowledged "dark" side. Nor does Handke "gloss" anything over. My findings find that the hyper-sensitive autistic Handke since the inception of his exposure to violent primal scenes at age 2 [the born to terror] has only represented the horrors glancingly, and refuses to do so in the usual cliches. It is all there in the travelogues, just off stage or underground in the plays, in an observation, to his friend Thomas Deichmann, the editor of Novo, who has featured Handke on three covers, Handke mused that maybe he ought not have written these travellogues so metaphorically and theatrically. Yes, for sure: who understands anything but a sledge hammer? Certainly not Michael McDonald.That is not what the bloody minded McDonalds of this world want: they want real t.v. blood and they demand it all the time. And instead of taking care of the wages of imperialism in the United States or in Central America they turn into human rights hyaenas in every other part of the world.As to Handke's appearance in P. [not Belgrade as McD. has it] I bet and won: put a camera an interviewer within Handke's sight... He is what he accuses others of being in that respect, a space displacer... He has to hog the limelight! He is a media darling. On receiving his honorary doctorate at age 60 he promised to remove his "idiocy" as he called it, from the public sphere for the rest of his life. That rest lasted about two years, and he crept back in with an interview on publication of his "Del Gredos" novel in France, a big interview with Greiner of Die Zeit, and his refusal to ever accept any further prizes when it looked as though he would not win it for his weakest play ["Subday Blues"], and a fine piece in Literaturen on why he would not appear as a witness in Milosevic's behalf, and with a new play and new book coming out in 2007, the Milosovic funeral made for the kind of media orgy that allowed my man to "Play the game. Stay in the picture" as he calls it! As a youngster he dreamed of appearing on the cover of Der Spiegel, and I know what the pathos of his deprivations and the many reasons that made him so. But doesn't he ever have something to display aside his Carinthian "Schwanz" when the groupies used to show up in Paris! More importantly, without that overpowering drive to display himself we would not have the great works. But the closest and oldest friends are instantly taken mushrooming in the Chaville primeval forest, whereas if an interviewer or a T.V. crew show up: the great chef Handke [he ought to link up with the Handkes in Ohio who have a famous restaurant!] holds forth: perhaps the access to the mirror makes him overcome his nausea of other bodies a place of his own.The U.N. court recently absolved the Serbians of genocide in Bosnia but found it responsible for failing to prevent Srebrenice. The chief culprits for this well planned massacre are Karadic + Mladic, by all accounts. If Milosevic knew that this massacre was being planned, did he wink for it to proceed? Could he have prevented it if he knew it was being planned. I lack the information. So does McDonald. Handke, the last I heard, evidently feels that M. could not have prevented it. If the opposite proves the case I expect we wil hear from Peter Handke. He knew the family, visited with M. jail, was invited to be a witness for the defense, to the funeral?Who is more responsible for the mutual crimes in Kosovo? M. had to secure a minority ethnic; some of the Kosovo Albanian leaders, Madelaine Albright's pals, are now on trial in de Haag. Perhaps Handke misjudged, was deluded, his judgment impaired by sentiment. But that M. ought to be known as "the butcher of the balkans" is the conclusions of simple and ugly minds."Did Handke believe that, because of his prestige, people would shrug off his act of solidarity with the “Butcher of the Balkans”? McDonald asks.One] among many reasons Handke gave for attending to funeral was precisely to make a demonstrative gesture [as I knew this great exhibitionist would when given the right opportunity, oh how well my Vegas bet in that respect turned out!] to disavow the moniker "dictator" that is invariably affixed [in the so monotonous US of A.] to the name Milosevic. Milosevic was elected three times and lost his last election, and then, albeit rather reluctantly, gave up his position. [see Handke's words at the beginning of this section]. Eventually M. was delivered over to the Court in Scheveningen as so many monsters have not been. An autocrat for sure, as Handke, who has occasional autocratic flourishes of his own, acknowledges numerous times in the several important statements and the host of interviews he gave subsequent to his notorious attendance, and a great majority of which have been online collected athttp://www.signandsound.comfor nearly a year; or more recently, amplified by me with a long thoughtful finding athttp://www.artscritic.comBut which, though the McDonald cites Handke's words in P., and have been online, fails to provide.Additionally, in various numerous interviews in his now again media orgy, Handke provided a few further reasons for going. To absorb the athmosphere for a book about a tragic character, although his most recent, the 2007 Kali is not it.What gives me pause is M's posthumous conviction in Belgrade, where Handke felt was the fit place for a trial... I have sought to find out... perhaps H. would say, to be condemned posthumously without having had the opportunity to defend himself...I suspect that P.H. is giving Milo a bit of a break, that M. is part of the dream that refuses to disappear entirely, that M. has a bit of grandfather transference going on; but that is just a guess of mine based on what I know about how Handke finally wrested a father figure out of the grandfather. Perhaps my guess makes too much sense I tell myself. It's the best that I, who loves answers, can come up with. Handke's little book Rund um das Grosse Tribunal, strikes me like the Handke cat sneaking around the hot sauce but refusing to put as much as a paw into it. Handke is a trained lawyer, who did not take his final exam because he felt he could make it as an independent writer. If not he might have become what he envisioned as a career that could be combined with writing: an Austrian cultural attache - and with his touces of Tourettism might have been the exception to the rule of an excellent crew; and as which cultural attache personae he appears in several books.Handke also defended M. against the accusation of being an "autist", pointing out that this painful condition ought not to be used as a pejorative. Handke, the savant, knows whereof he speaks. He has the nose of your best hunting dog, the eyes of a cat, the ears of a bat! The skin sensitivity of a Virginia Woolf.What is that paragraph about the history of Austrian enthusiastic welcoming for Hitler about? Why is it in this piece? I myself would connect Maria Sivec enthusiasm for German soldiers... to that enthusiasm. Otherwise it would seem to be another instance of dreadful editing on your, Mr. Wilson's part.Although Handke writes like an angel he is nothing of the sort. My chief objecting to him is that meanwhile writes so well, that I can abide little else that I set my eyes on. He is both the most loving man I know, and a man who can be as "humorless as death.""bad when i am bad, very good when i am good." True enough. Now on to Michael McDonald, literary critic!
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.htmlDear Editor Wilson,Here comes a detailed letter about Michael McDonald's atrocity "THE APOLOGIST The Celebrated Austrian writer Peter Handke appeared at the funeral of Serbian Dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Should we forgive him" [pages 59-69 of the print edition Spring 07 issue of the American Scholar.http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.html ]. It is but the latest, albeit crudest and most ignorant and distorted, baffled as much as baffling self-righteous libel to appear in the United States on the same subject; and if it had not appeared in the medium that bears the title scholar and is sponsored by the crossword puzzle champs I can't imagine anyone paying it the least heed. McDonald's piece is but the latest installment of the forever same caricature of Handke's political position on Yugoslavia which is then employed to cudgel the work of an author that one misreads just as badly. It's the old two sucker punches in a row. As an editor you failed to exercise due diligence, or were/are a partner in crime. Since McDonald appears unable to read, I am not surprised at his misuse of language. And whoever carved his piece from whatever cutlet he presented to you, produced a most disjointed text.I have little confidence that you will publish the devastation that I will visit on Counsel McDonald's - a lack of confidence due to the failures of editors of The New Republic, the New York Review of Books or The New York Times to respond to my, Handke's first translator into American [see my bio athttp://roloff.freeservers.com/about.html ] and other's letters objecting to gross and ignorant misreadings of Peter Handke's fallible work and political positions and person - thus I post this missile on-line at:http://www.artscritic.blogspot.comThere you can also find posted, six months ago, a detailed take on Peter Handke's association with the late Slobodan Milosevic, plus all pertinent links. A good source for pertinent information on the unfolding of the controversy has been online, in English, for more than half a year, good time for McDonald not to need to distort the most elementary matters, if that had not been his intent from the git-go:http://www.signandsight.com/features/809.htmltI myself, cleaning up after the stupidities perpetrated by the corrupt U.S. literary culture, feel like one of those old women that Hans Magnus Enzensberger keeps seeing knocking the mortar off the bricks from the buildings destroyed after men have gone to war. Many of those in Belgrade, Iraq and Afghanistan, and metaphorically in desperately provincial Seattle.PART ONE- POLITICSMcDonald opens and closes his mugging with tendentious and not pertinent quotes, to lend some kind of pretend weighty frame to his drivel, so let me, too start off with a few quotes, from Handke, and others, which are to the point.Handke: " "What I did not say" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "I have never denied or played down, not to speak of sanctioned, any of the massacres in Yugoslavia from 1991 – 1995." ... "When it comes to the wars in Yugoslavia, let us forget all comparisons and parallels. Let's stick with the facts of a civil war that a disingenuous or at least unknowing Europe instigated or at least co-produced, and which are terrible on all sides. (...) It is a fact that between 1992 and 1995, in the Yugoslavian Republic, and in Bosnia in particular, prison camps existed where people were starved, tortured and murdered. But let us refrain from mechanically linking these camps with the Bosnian Serbs. There were also Croatian and Muslim camps, and the crimes committed there will be punished in the tribunal in Den Haag."Botho Strauß [first rate playwright, and someone who might be described as a "stylist" - as which McDonald describes both Grass and Handke, which neither are - writes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "What remains today of Bertolt Brecht, a poet who valued the revolution over human life and whose only opposition to the bloody Stalin was a spot of dialectics? What remains is someone who changed the theatre more lastingly than any other European author... What remains, at the end of the day, of the alleged bard of the Greater Serbian Empire, Peter Handke? Not just the most gifted poetic craftsman of his day, but an episteme-creator (to use Foucault's term) as only the most outstanding minds can be, a milestone of seeing, feeling and understanding in German literature. Those who fail to see guilt and error as the stigmata (or even as stimulants in some cases) of great minds, shouldn't busy themselves with true poets and thinkers."Frank Schirrmacher, editor in chief of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the paper that gave Handke the hardest time for his position on Yugoslavia, on the fiasco of the Heine Prize:"Honouring someone, regardless of how controversial he may be, and then openly declaring him unworthy of that honour, without anything else having happened, is the ultimate form of social backslide. It turns the literary critic into the henchman of the politician. With the politicians' interference, the critic's objections to Handke now sound like a denunciation to the police."Martin Mosebach writes in Die Zeit on the Peter Handke affair: "Too bad the American ambassador who encouraged Slobodan Milosevic to wage war in Bosnia didn't come to his funeral in Belgrade. Someone like Handke who remained faithful to the dead Milosevic is much more worthy of admiration than all the Western politicians who made it possible for Milosevic to commit his crimes while he was alive."Handke in the Neue Zuricher Zeitung:"Where is there any order from Milosevic? How can you bring him together with Srebrenice? I don't know. And on top of that Milosevic was no dictator. He was an autocrat who exercised a semi-authoritarian regime. The press was free, but the television was state-controlled. I don't have any opinion about Milosevic. None. I can't find him either good or bad. I don't want to compare him with Ceausescu or Saddam Hussein, for me that's wrong. Setting Milosevic up as the major evil of the Balkan Wars is a simplificationhttp://www.signandsight.com/features/819.html [for the entirety of this fascinating interview]Aren't the scholarly often the worst deadbeats! What a chump you are Editor Wilson to be mining the same dead vein, and with the likes of McDonald as your Kumpel! As you continue, you will see the story that you missed!I ask the several thousand recipients of this communication to comment, if they wish, at the http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com site or reply directly to me and to join me in my call for the resignation of Editor Wilson. But if editor Wilson wishes to run this response in his pages, too, or on the American Scholar web-site, be my guest. I link to you, you link to me, and then you will be on life-support!For stretches I simply quote McDonald and comment, finding that the most efficient way to decimate his assertions. I quite realize that I am that "chien Andalusien" baying at the moon but, that way, I can at least "bark my way!" as old "Blue Eyes" used to sing. From the beginning now, point by point:1] The "we" in the rhetorical "Shall we forgive him"... ": are "we" using the royal "WE", what assumptsionary accusatoryness, what band of McCarthyite vigilantes might this "we" comprise? Is that your editoral board, the Phi Beta Clan, the heavy exercises of the right frontal lobe, or the 100 French "innelectuals" [George Herbert Walker Bush's pronunciation] that endorsed "Bozo" Bozonet's canceling of the greatest play of the past 50 years, Handke' s Faust, 1998 "The Journey into the Sonorous Land: or The Art of Asking".[Not "recent" really, as McDonald, who has no idea of the progress of the rake's work, has it: subsequent and far more recent the second in a great sequence of three amazing plays is "Hour" 1991, Handke's Yugoslavia play: "The Play about the Film about the War" [1999] that provides the full range of his takes on the subject; "Subday Blues" [2005] "Traces of the Lost" 2006/7 ] which entire series starts with Handke's richest work WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES [1992, Ariadne Press], a dramatic poem whose language reaches Shakespearean grandeur, Handke's Euripedean/ Goethen [alternating discourse] pean to the "Rolling on the River" aristocracy of the working class... Perhaps the "we" refers to the same 100 French "innelectuals" who are demanding the criminalization, in analogy of German criminalization of denial of the Shoa, of denial of the Turkish genocide on Armenians, whose 100 strong intercession in behalf of that idiot Bozonnet McDonald fails to mention but with whose dismissal at the end of this sorry affair he commiserates, whereas they might actually look to the denial of French colonial atrocities and collaborations with their occupiers, those French whores. [Handke's position vis a vis Yugoslavia and Milosevic had been well known in Yugoslavia prior to Bozonnet's dermarche].Yes that "we": You and Mr. McDonald? Mr. McDonald and all the other McDonalds? Or does Counsel McDonald comprise and presume to speak for some consensus of U.S. "innelectuals"? I can't imagine, except perhaps certain reviewers for the Weekly Standard and henchers for the New York Review. As to the rhetoricals of "forgiving", which McDonald thinketh we ought not: Who is doing the accusing? Where forgiveness exists as a possibility there must be a conviction? Or is this sorry "counsel" - for that presumption "The American Interest" - judge jury and executioner and insinuator of the deep lie all in one? Poor, ill-served "American Interest" that numbers at least one huge war criminal in its midst.For on a level of true world historical, truly unforgivable criminality shall we forgive his employer client Zsigismund Brezinksy, the initiator of the "destabilization of Afghanistan" [now a "failed state" in "tink thanks" language]. Shall I forgive the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter for signing off on Brezinki's brilliant idea, an idea with malice aforethought if ever there was one, or Reagan Casey for following up the organizing the Mujahadeem and providing these proxies with Stinger Missiles, and then betraying these legions to their own flukish [Ossama bin Fluke and his millions that could buy 1000 Toyota four wheelers at the drop of a Turban] devices? The thought is enough to give poor forever obsequious Hennery the K of Wurstburg on the Hudson a break from being lambasted haunted hunted for endorsing, enabling Pinochet. I doubt that you want me to go on as I could for pages along the same line. A country of 25 million human beings! Big time crime! Very cute. Let counsel take care of Ziggie before he sticks it to Handke, let all American rights hyenas turn their attention to U.S. prisons, to the wages of 200 years of U.S. imperialism, inland and in Central America. Or does this all go "without saying"? Yes, poor Handke, he has a screw loose, if only he'd get of this Serbian kick he is on!On a level closer to the crimes of association and ideological artistic confusions: there is poor old wonderful Pound's overvaluation of the aesthetic; Elliot's hideous anti-semitism; the head wound Celine suffered during WW I; Hamsun an apparent Quisling though I do not know the details and allow that his ill repute in may be ill founded; no end of other politically engaged who run afoul of politics, if Handke in fact did, which is not clear to me at all no matter that he is the biggest showboat of them all [which makes him suspect in some respects]. Will not the time come if it has not come already that the words "Special Forces" and the "U.S. Marines" strike as much terror into hearts as the words "Waffen SS" still does in some?I followed the entire controversy from its inception in the early 90s to its current status,[see early long takes of mine at the sitehttp://www.handkeyugo.scriptmania.com ] and also Professor Scott Abbot's rejoinder to Michael Schneider's review of "Journey to the Rivers" as "Justice for Serbia" is properly called, which the New Republic refused to run]and as someone engaged in a very long term Handke project knew of Handke's deep, very deep intra-psychic affiliation to Yugoslavia [read Hornissen, his first novel, its accessible repetition THE REPETION for comprehension of this] and his great familiarity with the Dalmatian and considerable sophistication about the in and outs of Belgrade and other politics [he is not fooled in the least by the ultra nationalists]: and what struck me most was how to the very quick its dissolution injured him, most manifest in petulant public outcries, violent verbal counter-attacks: when I see and hear something of the kind, it makes the me, the me who I am mostly now, sit back and listen and become puzzled... and not rage back.Do I forgive Susan Sontag for writing in the New York Times Magazine on the occasion of the Kosovo bombardments "and now the Serbs are the victims". Yes, I do: because it proved to me how utterly ignorant she still was, ignorant say of the half million Serb who had to flee Croatia, even after acting out some kind of human rights scenario film in Sarajevo [is she one of those "disinterested" observer of the kind that McDonald invokes into his fictitious tribunal that convicts Milosevic?]. I forgive her because of her essays, for the gutsiness of the position she took after 9/11; for her essay on U.S. Torture, for many many things, certainly not because she was a sorry novelist no matter the NYRB's attempts to prop up that part of her reputation which seemed not have convinced her insecurity in the matter; but because she really was a spectacularly good egg as only American girls can be: for that is a what struck me the first time I saw her, in Princeton at the Gruppe 47 meeting that May 1966, "why that's the kind of American girl that you want with you in an American car", and "oh my Gawd, you could really talk to that formidable head, that real intelligence, that didn't jibe with that bod!"I do not forgive the simple minded Serb and Milosovic blamers such as Roger Cohen of the NY Times, or any cowardly simpleminded vigilantes or any of those who make life easy for their heads...I can't really forgive the NYRB, which really knew better for the previous reviews they had run if not for many other reasons, for unloosing a certain Marcus on Handke [see http://www.handkeprose.scriptmania.com + http://www.handkescholar.scriptmania.com for a point by point emendation of the literary points in Marcus's piece] and then using the political disagreement to lay waste to Handke's work. Most amusing was Marcus gunning for pro-Serb sentiment in Handke's then latest book in English, "One Dark Night I Left My Silent House," dismissing it as "just more dream-writing" but then failing to note the dream wishfulfilment of some damaged blue and white trucks being towed westward on the Salzburg Autobahn. A dreambook all right, never before had a writer succeeded in engaging the reader in the syntax of a dream, how much closer can the transmission of one innerworld into another innerworld get, in literature? What amazing literary possibilities are opened up - never to be further used! [On the couch it can make you think that telepathy is for real!] No blood of course as McDonald seems to prefer, well there must be enough of that on the streets in D.C. and at Walter Reed, and if he wants to have it written about, I think bodice rippers might just be his style. I could go on, but I expect you notice in the matter of my forgiveness the rarity of it.Handke's exceptionalism where McDonald uses Günter Grass to attack Handke: why not let Handke bear the consequences of regret for his personal crimes and derelictions - over the years he has expressed his heartfelt regrets for any number of matters, for which the once supremely arrogant and still hot tempered and sometimes quite pathetic takes responsibility, and if he was mistaken in his evaluation of Milosevic [see anon] I expect that he will not wait as long as Günter Grass did to own up to his act of [perhaps convenient]cowardice.As a matter of fact, on Grass's admission that he had spent 45 days at the end of WW II as a member of a troupe so desperate for members that it created foreign divisions in its name, if Handke's most unattractive side, his righteousness did not spring forth with alacritous cries of "shame", the same Handke who a year before had, at his desk, written with fine self-deprecating irony about that streak of his. seehttp://begleitschreiben.twoday.net/files/Die-Tablas-von-Daimielhttp://for the entire wonderful piece where Handke explains why he won't appear as a witness for the defense. My thinking on his explanation for this refusal is that it does not jibe: although Handke of course was not present at any of the occasions during which Milosevic might have ordered or failed to prevent crimes from being committed, nonetheless the appearance of someone who visits heads of the Austrian state, as a character witness... if you see what I mean. I also thought of Handke's once saying that he did not think he would hold up well under cross examination if ever accused of anything. Perhaps that was said during a time the he was more down on himself. But, conceivably, the idea of being in the limelight for perhaps some days on that kind of hot seat then thwarted his exhibitionistic impulses.Your Mr. McDonald, and yours and "The American Interest's" he is, feeds into the sheeps' wish for the simplest of the simplest being the case: that the big bad wolf from Progarevic [and that is where the funeral was permitted not in Belgrade, McDonald] in as much as the sheep are interested or go the immense labor to get some drift of what really went down: it isn't just the distortions and the propaganda, but the sheer mass of information that your scholarly mouse needs to chew through; you need, literally, to become a historian in short order in order to have some idea how something like the disintegration occurred within the span of 20 years. Who might these disinterested be in McDonald's:"Even accepting Handke’s version, his having taken respectful part in the burial services could not be interpreted as anything other than a sign of his support for Milosevic, a man most disinterested observers believe to have been responsible for a series of wars that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people during his 13 years in power."I ask: who might any just one of these of the "most disinterested observers" be?Stephen Schwartz, the once estimable Christopher Hitchens; Neal Acherson whom I recently caught burbling that it was all Milosevic's fault; Roger Cohen; the judges of the tribunal; the millions whose solitude has been muddied by the falsifications that they have absorbed?No, there were no "disinterested" parties [if McDonald means to say "objective" or whatever disinterested might mean coming from him] only interested parties; Handke's was for peace and as McDonald seems to have realized the continued existence of the federation; my guess is also because as of the mid-80s Handke adopted grandfather Sivec's identity who had voted for the federation as a contiuance in some form of Austro-Hungarian federation in 1921, not that this wish of Handke's for a dream federation did and does not contradict his once feeling that there ought to be tough borders between small countries each with its own treasured language, among no end of contradiction in the "Swiss Cheese" that Handke has become. Once the federation devolved into ethnic and religious strife, as compared to conflict within the several states, it became M.s's task to defend, first of all, the Serbian minority in Croatia that was given 2nd class status; something that led to Vukovar; which led to Galbraith calling for us.arming.... Each stage brought, brings, a whole new set of equations into play. Yes, and each of these then small nation states is permitted its nationalism, has it endorsed by the West, but Serbian nationalism is found heinous, why might that be the case?But I don't think that this way of proceeding will get anyone anywhere. And no: it does not appear that it was McDonald "overflow crowd of some 20,000 radical Serb nationalists" at the funeral; I trust Handke's differentiated report that yes there were some, but that the mood chiefly was one of somber mourning. McDonald is intent it appears to turn the Serbians into Nazi type fascist: it is he who is the fascist in being a fitting writer for a new "Der Stuermer."McDonald also uses "disinterested" in claiming [how would he know?] that M. preferred Handke as a "disinterested" observer than a witness in his defense. No, Handke felt M. was innocent, that the case had not been proven ; and, to my considerable amazement, Handke bases his conclusion [but perhaps he was joking, you can't quite tell, always, when he is pulling some idiot reporter's stupid leg] on the smile he saw cross M.'s face when the court prosecution threw everything including the kitchen sink at him in its list of crimes: on the principle, I suppose, well all we need is one count, and we'll find one among those thousands. Handke felt that this tribunal was not appropriate, that the cards were stacked, with which I tend to agree in as much I was able to follow the trial at this remove [and I did not just rely on the hopeless Marlise Simon and the somewhat better Nicholas Wood of the N.Y. Times] and Handke felt that though M's underlings were fit subjects for the court, including the two chief Srbska Bosnian Serb accused, Mladic and K. that M. ought to have been tried in Belgrade by his own people. McDonald with his "most disinterested observers"thus sets up something that does not exist, another fictitious consensus following on the heels of his fictitious "we" of parties that have concluded, and in a "disinterested" state of mind that M. was guilty of Srebrenice... Some counsel! I can see him disbarred, getting thrown out of court in short order! Based on what I managed to get of the De Haag trial, I could not convict beyond a reasonable doubt. If Mr. McDonald's has some specifics: please share them with us! Hey, he might even convince Mr. Handke that he had it wrong.Most disinterested observers agree that squirrels like to consume nuts. An observer has been there, he or she has seen, it makes no difference whether they are interested or disinterested. If McD. had read Handke's Sommerlicher Nachtrag [A Summer Sequel], the second of his travelogues he might have noticed that surrogate Serb that Handke has exclaiming at the sight of Srebrenice "I don't ever want to have been a Serb" [or words to that effect] which made me, initially write: "who the hell asked Peter Handke who just gone through the hard earned task of becoming a Slovenian to turn into a Serb." Well, if you repeat a lie often enough, like Ronald Reagan, enough people will believe you and and you will win the election.What troubles me most in the whole affair is that Handke hasn't said a peep about M.s' posthumous Belgrade conviction for murder of his predecessor. I can see no real interest in Handke's being served in stubbornly insisting on M.s innocence, on his being [merely !] a tragic figure [definition]. Obviously,it brings the Bozonnets the Mcdonalds out of the wood works. Since I used to be acquainted with Mr. Handke and translated most of his plays I myself have good reason to give some real cred to his opinion, his instant x-ray vision of ugly people, not only physically ugly but "dark" people; that he might be right about M. If I had the confidence that I have now with respect to his judgment in that respect my life, my "career" in publishing might have been very different. Handke nearly throws up at ugliness. M. was a nice block head of a Serbian, but it is not merely a matter of looks, though I think Handke has as much of a blind spot when it comes to feminine beauty as I do, he with all his actresses, who he imagines to be as light as when they dance across the stage; I myself was brought up so protected as to have been the most gullible of critters, meanwhile one of the nastiest much bitten Kettenhunde!Unless, Handke just has a stick up his ass! Which he can too. Handke calls them as he sees them, also in his books, quite unsparingly. Also, the powerful. Including his own now deceased publisher, Siegfried Unseld. No matter that he is an upstart if ever there was one.Anyone who reads Handke's autobiography of everything that is in him - WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES - will also make acquaintance with Handke's self-acknowledged "dark" side. Nor does Handke "gloss" anything over. My findings find that the hyper-sensitive autistic Handke since the inception of his exposure to violent primal scenes at age 2 [the born to terror] has only represented the horrors glancingly, and refuses to do so in the usual cliches. It is all there in the travelogues, just off stage or underground in the plays, in an observation, to his friend Thomas Deichmann, the editor of Novo, who has featured Handke on three covers, Handke mused that maybe he ought not have written these travellogues so metaphorically and theatrically. Yes, for sure: who understands anything but a sledge hammer? Certainly not Michael McDonald.That is not what the bloody minded McDonalds of this world want: they want real t.v. blood and they demand it all the time. And instead of taking care of the wages of imperialism in the United States or in Central America they turn into human rights hyaenas in every other part of the world.As to Handke's appearance in P. [not Belgrade as McD. has it] I bet and won: put a camera an interviewer within Handke's sight... He is what he accuses others of being in that respect, a space displacer... He has to hog the limelight! He is a media darling. On receiving his honorary doctorate at age 60 he promised to remove his "idiocy" as he called it, from the public sphere for the rest of his life. That rest lasted about two years, and he crept back in with an interview on publication of his "Del Gredos" novel in France, a big interview with Greiner of Die Zeit, and his refusal to ever accept any further prizes when it looked as though he would not win it for his weakest play ["Subday Blues"], and a fine piece in Literaturen on why he would not appear as a witness in Milosevic's behalf, and with a new play and new book coming out in 2007, the Milosovic funeral made for the kind of media orgy that allowed my man to "Play the game. Stay in the picture" as he calls it! As a youngster he dreamed of appearing on the cover of Der Spiegel, and I know what the pathos of his deprivations and the many reasons that made him so. But doesn't he ever have something to display aside his Carinthian "Schwanz" when the groupies used to show up in Paris! More importantly, without that overpowering drive to display himself we would not have the great works. But the closest and oldest friends are instantly taken mushrooming in the Chaville primeval forest, whereas if an interviewer or a T.V. crew show up: the great chef Handke [he ought to link up with the Handkes in Ohio who have a famous restaurant!] holds forth: perhaps the access to the mirror makes him overcome his nausea of other bodies a place of his own.The U.N. court recently absolved the Serbians of genocide in Bosnia but found it responsible for failing to prevent Srebrenice. The chief culprits for this well planned massacre are Karadic + Mladic, by all accounts. If Milosevic knew that this massacre was being planned, did he wink for it to proceed? Could he have prevented it if he knew it was being planned. I lack the information. So does McDonald. Handke, the last I heard, evidently feels that M. could not have prevented it. If the opposite proves the case I expect we wil hear from Peter Handke. He knew the family, visited with M. jail, was invited to be a witness for the defense, to the funeral?Who is more responsible for the mutual crimes in Kosovo? M. had to secure a minority ethnic; some of the Kosovo Albanian leaders, Madelaine Albright's pals, are now on trial in de Haag. Perhaps Handke misjudged, was deluded, his judgment impaired by sentiment. But that M. ought to be known as "the butcher of the balkans" is the conclusions of simple and ugly minds."Did Handke believe that, because of his prestige, people would shrug off his act of solidarity with the “Butcher of the Balkans”? McDonald asks.One] among many reasons Handke gave for attending to funeral was precisely to make a demonstrative gesture [as I knew this great exhibitionist would when given the right opportunity, oh how well my Vegas bet in that respect turned out!] to disavow the moniker "dictator" that is invariably affixed [in the so monotonous US of A.] to the name Milosevic. Milosevic was elected three times and lost his last election, and then, albeit rather reluctantly, gave up his position. [see Handke's words at the beginning of this section]. Eventually M. was delivered over to the Court in Scheveningen as so many monsters have not been. An autocrat for sure, as Handke, who has occasional autocratic flourishes of his own, acknowledges numerous times in the several important statements and the host of interviews he gave subsequent to his notorious attendance, and a great majority of which have been online collected athttp://www.signandsound.comfor nearly a year; or more recently, amplified by me with a long thoughtful finding athttp://www.artscritic.comBut which, though the McDonald cites Handke's words in P., and have been online, fails to provide.Additionally, in various numerous interviews in his now again media orgy, Handke provided a few further reasons for going. To absorb the athmosphere for a book about a tragic character, although his most recent, the 2007 Kali is not it.What gives me pause is M's posthumous conviction in Belgrade, where Handke felt was the fit place for a trial... I have sought to find out... perhaps H. would say, to be condemned posthumously without having had the opportunity to defend himself...I suspect that P.H. is giving Milo a bit of a break, that M. is part of the dream that refuses to disappear entirely, that M. has a bit of grandfather transference going on; but that is just a guess of mine based on what I know about how Handke finally wrested a father figure out of the grandfather. Perhaps my guess makes too much sense I tell myself. It's the best that I, who loves answers, can come up with. Handke's little book Rund um das Grosse Tribunal, strikes me like the Handke cat sneaking around the hot sauce but refusing to put as much as a paw into it. Handke is a trained lawyer, who did not take his final exam because he felt he could make it as an independent writer. If not he might have become what he envisioned as a career that could be combined with writing: an Austrian cultural attache - and with his touces of Tourettism might have been the exception to the rule of an excellent crew; and as which cultural attache personae he appears in several books.Handke also defended M. against the accusation of being an "autist", pointing out that this painful condition ought not to be used as a pejorative. Handke, the savant, knows whereof he speaks. He has the nose of your best hunting dog, the eyes of a cat, the ears of a bat! The skin sensitivity of a Virginia Woolf.What is that paragraph about the history of Austrian enthusiastic welcoming for Hitler about? Why is it in this piece? I myself would connect Maria Sivec enthusiasm for German soldiers... to that enthusiasm. Otherwise it would seem to be another instance of dreadful editing on your, Mr. Wilson's part.Although Handke writes like an angel he is nothing of the sort. My chief objecting to him is that meanwhile writes so well, that I can abide little else that I set my eyes on. He is both the most loving man I know, and a man who can be as "humorless as death.""bad when i am bad, very good when i am good." True enough. Now on to Michael McDonald, literary critic!
Thursday, January 25, 2007
re norman mailer's book on young adolf
there are two absolutely first rate psychoanalytic studies of H. by, respectively, the psychoanalsts fritz redlich + ted dorpat.
Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet
and
Wounded Monster.
Redlich's book is exhaustive in its medical history of Hitler. Dorpat makes a strong case that H'.s permanent warlike nature derived from his five years of continuous service as a gutsy front line runner; except for a brief stint off at the end for a gassing, and then a major shell exploding nearby. Post Traumatic Stress on top of lots of childhood trauma injuring an extremely agressive and then aggrieved German nationalist fanantic. so if mailer claims that there's not a lot on h. in english and that is why he wrote the book.... maybe h. is the new marilynn. i'll take a looks, but mailer seems to be still more of a self-promoter. anyhow, h. is not all that interesting as a case, unless you dwell on his relatinship with his bride, the geman people.
Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet
and
Wounded Monster.
Redlich's book is exhaustive in its medical history of Hitler. Dorpat makes a strong case that H'.s permanent warlike nature derived from his five years of continuous service as a gutsy front line runner; except for a brief stint off at the end for a gassing, and then a major shell exploding nearby. Post Traumatic Stress on top of lots of childhood trauma injuring an extremely agressive and then aggrieved German nationalist fanantic. so if mailer claims that there's not a lot on h. in english and that is why he wrote the book.... maybe h. is the new marilynn. i'll take a looks, but mailer seems to be still more of a self-promoter. anyhow, h. is not all that interesting as a case, unless you dwell on his relatinship with his bride, the geman people.
re misha berson
LETTER TO MISHA BERSON re:
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=fringe19&date=20070119&query=handke
Dear Misha, I don't think you have ever seen "Public Insult" as I now call it. It has never been done in Seattle. The Empty Space didn't do it... because the director fell ill.However, if you go to http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com
you will see what that "grenade" is about. In other words, the end is like Haydn's Surprise Symphony. Otherwise it is an essay on being in the theater, in the world. If done at the opening of the season of the major houses here, and intermittently, out of the blue, it would go a long way to making the gigglers aware.
Best,
P.S. And be careful in what you call audacious, what will you use when something that really is comes along? [this regarding that poor sod of a wanna be non-philistine, calling the rest of the Seattle Season "audacious". Ms. Berson and I had an e-mail exchange about a year ago, on the occasion of my long list of partilars, during which she strenously sought to claim the status of "non-philistinism".... alas, poor Yorick..
MICHAEL ROLOFF \ never been done in Seattle. The Empty Space didn't do it... because the director fell ill.
However, if you go to http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/
you will see what that "grenade" is about. In other words, the end is like Haydn's Surprise Symphony. Otherwise it is an essay on being in the theater, in the world. If done at the opening of the season of the major houses here, and intermittently, out of the blue, it would go a long way to making the gigglers aware.
Best,
P.S. And be careful in what you call audacious, what will you use when something that really is comes along?
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=fringe19&date=20070119&query=handke
Dear Misha, I don't think you have ever seen "Public Insult" as I now call it. It has never been done in Seattle. The Empty Space didn't do it... because the director fell ill.However, if you go to http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com
you will see what that "grenade" is about. In other words, the end is like Haydn's Surprise Symphony. Otherwise it is an essay on being in the theater, in the world. If done at the opening of the season of the major houses here, and intermittently, out of the blue, it would go a long way to making the gigglers aware.
Best,
P.S. And be careful in what you call audacious, what will you use when something that really is comes along? [this regarding that poor sod of a wanna be non-philistine, calling the rest of the Seattle Season "audacious". Ms. Berson and I had an e-mail exchange about a year ago, on the occasion of my long list of partilars, during which she strenously sought to claim the status of "non-philistinism".... alas, poor Yorick..
MICHAEL ROLOFF \ never been done in Seattle. The Empty Space didn't do it... because the director fell ill.
However, if you go to http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/
you will see what that "grenade" is about. In other words, the end is like Haydn's Surprise Symphony. Otherwise it is an essay on being in the theater, in the world. If done at the opening of the season of the major houses here, and intermittently, out of the blue, it would go a long way to making the gigglers aware.
Best,
P.S. And be careful in what you call audacious, what will you use when something that really is comes along?
Thursday, January 04, 2007
an exchange of letters about steve pearson's ;production of brecht's mother courage in 2006 at the uw school of drama
Steve:
Let me let you have the customary unvarnished estimate of your Mother Courage from someone who spent six months, chiefly at the Ensemble in 1957, someone who had seen Mother and the Ensemble first in Paris that Spring, which convinced me to leave Munich for Berlin, and if the wench had been faithful there I would have stayed; not too much to entice one back to the US mid-fifties, after all. And from someone who spent a few weeks two years ago thinking and investigating what a truly Americanized Mother C could be, but that cowardly mediocrity Kurt Beattie then chickened out on his pathos-ridden wish to put Mother on in Seattle 60 some years after its European whelping, and where he put his money instead, well just look at the fallow seasons of ACT....
First to the good: some of the young actors at the School are admirable, and can sing too! Your wife is delightful too, though she seems to be an escapee from Three Penny Opera and does not convince me that she might last longer than one week on the road, much less a thirty years war.
Now to the execrable:
Brecht may have made a major enlightenment-engendered change in Aristotle's aesthetics and substituted a series of small catharses for that one big one [paralleling the procedure of psychoanalysis], but in the more fundamental respects of the unity of time, place and action he understood that to focus an audience's mind you could not be all over the place, that theme and variation creates the requisite knife to get through to the audience's thick skull; that is, he did not make a change in the western notion of an organic work of art, that would come subsequently.
Thus your all over the place style, -- mod suits, contemp party dresses mixed in with authentic 30 years gear nonetheless playing on the map of the thirty years war that is also projected onto the back drop - that 50s Chevy truck being the prime culprit - may in the shallowest of ways subscribe to the au courant of post modern aesthetics, but then lacks the aesthetic as well as political conviction of those premises, and so remains a purely decorative tease. That map with all those great place names of the 30 years war thus ought to be the map of the world, and if your truck derives from the 50s... Mother C. needs to change modes of transportation... you and I both know the places of conflict where say, the various Ms. Halliburton & Co., have done ever profitable biz. ... to the suggestion of the super sonic jet....
Your misconceived compromised abortion comes a complete cropper at the end [1] when Mother Courage needs a winch [lacking a revolving stage the actress lacks the vigor to pull it by herself] to wind around an invisible tree to pull the Chevy, on its visible surrogate wheels.... what... just a few feet further into the eternal roundelay of war. One of the greatest images of 20th century theater -- Helene Weigel, as her own nag, pulling the business cart forever, eternally onward, and here ... alas, the quintessence of a pathetic fallacy.
2] Mute Katrin drumming, thrumming to warn the townsfolk -- what do we have here instead of that stark and memorable image: a lot of folks running around, a stupid winch, another winch pulling her up on a metal tray, instead of her sitting at least atop the cab of the silly over-sized Chevy; all it takes is one soldier aiming his blunderbuss -- what do we have here: something off in the rafters the size of the telescope... alas, a busy-minded unfocussed director...
3] The Hare adaptation is at least good Brit, instead of Bentley's unspeakable [the wonderful Eric then lacked ears], or the fusty Mannheim, but I do not recall that so much of the dialogue was of the fuck shit corruption variety... that one might agree with Roger Downey that Brecht was a very bad playwright [well, roger seemed to object to bert screwing all the girls that crawled into his bed].
4] Brecht's kind of singing which he extracted from no matter his collaborator - that off-kilter delivery within a non-harmonic music - led to his notion of arrhythmic non-rhyming poetry, and this also influenced his dialogue, which is not naturalistic gibberish as it becomes in the mouths of your actors. The estrangement effect if you have heard of it, or if Sarah, who claims to have been your dramaturg, managed to impress it on you, is absent here...
5] Though the Acting School's actors can sing and act they still can't talk their way out of a brown paper bag...
That ought to do it for this drizzly day.
===========================
Dear Michael Roloff:I admit to being perplexed at receiving your e-mail... perhaps mystified is abetter word...particularly as to why it was sent. My first thought was that you intended a useful aesthetic response which might cause me to think moreexpansively or specifically, ie a practical critique. I quickly rejected thisnotion as I read words like 'execrable' and 'compromised abortion' and'busyminded, unfocused', not words one might use, even to one with as thick a skin as I have, if one is truly trying to teach or encourage thought or even shock to action as Brecht might have wanted. The vitriol of your writing, and general mean-spirited personal tone of it is guaranteed rather shut down dialogue, to in actuality alienate. Or perhaps you thought that we had some kind of personal relationship which might withstand such a communique? We don't. We are at best very distant acquaintances and as such might expect some kind of professional courtesy or at least restraint.But the most telling clue to the fact that this was not a genuine attempt atartistic communication was that you sent it not only to friends and colleaguesof mine but also to people I don't know. How disingenuous. If you are bloggingwhy not make it a public review and call it that? Clearly it was not intendedas a real communication to me. So what was it? The main clue is in the carefulestablishment of your Brechtian bona fides. From your writing it is obviousthat you are an expert on Brecht. I am reminded by Shunryu Suzuki's statementin ZEN MIND BEGINNER'S MIND that in the beginner's mind there are manypossibilities but in the expert's mind there are few. And the promoting of this Brechtian intellectual expertise seems to be the chief intent of the email. But for whom? Certainly not to impress me or the other people that you villify in the document. So I assume it was for ...is that Len Berkman?...or Sabine Wilke...or more likely for your own sense of yourself? ... if so, how sad.A few specific points. The woman who played Mother Courage is Robyn Hunt, andsince you sent this email to her you might have the courtesy to refer to her by name. She is after all a full professor in this university, a highly skillful artist, a recognized master teacher and intellectually astute. In your reference to her ability to survive I must assume that you saw something in her performance which caused you to draw conclusions about the Mother Courage she created, rather than what she as a person might be capable of. The qualities of MC which she conveyed are subject to debate. If you are referring to her personal fortitude then your ignorance is complete. You know nothing about her and show great arrogance in drawing any conclusion.I have always thought actors are some of the most courageous people I know.They put their ideas up for view in the moment and are judged by the reactionto that moment. In this aspect Robyn Hunt evidenced an extraordinary courage in daring to put up to view her ideas about one of the great roles, in herhometown, and in the shadow of the much hallowed Helene Weigel.As to 'all over the place style'.....the clothes came from a fairly narrow time period in the mid twentieth century..there were in fact no contemporary party dresses, no mod suits and no thirty years war clothing. The setting was not post-modern..I have no interest in that notion, or in being au courant for that matter... it was an image which I believed would resonate with this audience. The truck has an American patina and seems also somehow to typify the 100 years war of the twentieth century, coming as it does from the center of that century. This American audience knows very little of the thirty years war but, according to many responses I had, found visual rhymes with trucks in WW I, the dustbowl, WW II, Korea, and certainly the most recent wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They also got the connection to Halliburton et al. They were not 'thick-skulled' but quite perceptive. Many people said that it was as if the play were coming off the newspaper page. So historicity did seem to work on some level.1]How interesting that you would fault us for not having a turntable, and thatyou were so locked into a fundamentalist view of how the end of the play should be done that you didn't realize that the truck was indeed extremely heavy and that Robyn Hunt did in fact push it by herself and that with the use of the block and tackle we paid homage to the image of Weigel by having her pull for a time in order to get the truck rolling, and that in spite of the actual physical difficulty, MC was going to persist. Many in the audience did get the fact that she was continuing in her feeding off the war in spite of magnified difficulty.2]The gun which killed Kattrin was a replica of a machine gun used at leastuntil the end of the WW II. The winch a practical and aesthetic decision to infact place her above everyone in the scene and the audience. Scholars anddesigners as well as general audience members found it theatrically anddramatically persuasive. The scene as written is chaotic once she starts todrum. 3]I suggest you re-read the Hare adaptation. And that you resist thetemptation to make some kind of snide personal attack on Roger Downey.4]The V-effect worked for others who approached the work with intellectualrigour at least equal to yours.I have spent too much time on this, but hope that it will at least encourageyou not to trespass on my time (or professional email address) unless you havesomething constructive to say.Steven PearsonAh. I just read what you wrote to Roger Downey. Your motives are transparent. I admit to being embarassed to read such elementary schoolyard vituperation from a grown man ...and to notice that another name has been added to the cc list... And I like Peter have thrice been faithless..... well I have a good junk mail filter on this email address.
============================================
Steve,sorry to get back to you only now. i had a to finish a big piece & then wentto the premiere of peymann's new production of Brecht's MUTTER KURASCH @ theensemble. Below a link to a review that does the production justice, and ifyou haven't the German you certainly know some folks who can give you thegist.http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/kultur_und_medien/feuilleton/?cnt=763704&you might want to go to Berlin over the holidays and find out what the realthing is like.http://www.berliner-ensemble.de/and if you can't make a reservation, you can always contact peymann atdirektion@berliner-ensemble.de and say that you've come for a first handremedial.i am also sorry to have felt to write as i did since i was about to, at aforum, praise you as one of half of half a dozen directors whose work i haveseen here the past decade that i could recommend - i was thinking of yourPlatanov, what you did with Handke's HOUR, and on such short notice with theHeiner Mueller texts when I came to see your KURASCH.however, not all that sorry since i am still waiting for at least a dozenreplies & promises and the like from half a dozen hoaries of the past. nodoubt these remissions of yours and others, such as lacking thecourtesy to come to my handke lecture, whom you claim to love so dearly,contributed to my "not wrapped in the usual cotton candy" comments.however,since the pearson family claims to live by the vauntedauthenticity, i was then going to be authentic if nothing else.well, you asked for it.your production was not only all the things i said in my first missive, buton further reflection & now comparison it entirely lacked the EPIC - itlacked a SENSE OF THE LONG TIME & therefore it lacked the ESSENTIALEXTRAORDINARY PATHOS of the piece that reaches it culmination with the twomajor scenes at the end that you managed to muck up with busyness, all thosefolks running around. inexcusable. u.s. chicken without heads.It is good to hear what you had in mind stylistically with the variousreferences. why then play these signals on the ground visual and earthy ofGerman lands during the 30s year war? Evidently I misread your signals.evidently we exist in separate universes of logical artistic references,which always have their effect cumulatively. well, i've been misreadingAmerican signals ever since i thought i really could kiss sue dorland underthe mistletoe back in junior high, where she had positioned herself, only toscream if anyone tried. if not post modern, it was a stylistic hotch potchby accident, which is even worse.I couldn't tell what that black tube was up in the rafters though I wasstaring at it directly vis a vis. anyhow, katrin is not killed from ambush.it's a small but important point. and WW I, though the Brits suckered the USto come in on their side... it was a better moment for this country than thedays of Andrew Jackson, Polk & Buchanan...when democratic business feastingof the public trough first really went big piggy..... well, to me it cameacross as a stylistically muddled cabaret version of Mutter Courage.Eminently consumable, too, judging by the reactions of the friends Ibrought,for none of whom Brecht is more than a name... and so are as undemanding asthe rest of the nice Northwesterners are in that respect. but it didn't sinkin deep.A reference to Helen Weigel in using the winch to pull the chevy truck,in-jokes where scarcely any one knows what is being referred to?? and towaste one of the great moments over that. of course i considered what to doif one hasn't a revolving stage. once you committed yourself to thatchevytruck, however... you forced yourself into work-around mode...However, I ought to have complimented you and your actress wife Robin Huntfor dramatically bringing out the pain that Mother's conflicted relationshiptween her love for her brood & survivorship and need to go on truckin'.That was finely and strongly manifested, and for that lack of mine Iapologise. if only the rest had been as starkly drawn.And it is probably true that I am locked into some originalist version ofwhat I think the piece can accomplish. but it is no more than a rock of areference point. when kurt beattie of menopause the musical van gogh inlondon fame asked me a year or so ago whether i might be interested in doingan American adaptation of the play i first checked with variousacquaintances in NY who had been involved in the usual failed u.s. Brechtventures for the past 50 years fortheir pessimistic assessments. i got as far as concluding that i wouldsituate the play in the civil war era and have Big Mama Thornton as mywaggoner in a symbiotic relationship with the various armies, and then "cutout west" with the confederate disarray that fled there... but then Kurt puthis money on fiction and no end of other crap at ACT.Sisyphus was complimented no end for his hard work, to no avail of course.Be constructive? Any concrete criticism is constructive.However, i must say that i was quite pleased to see roger rabbit flushed outinto the open to get a good dose of deserved buckshot. that came as awelcome and surprising opportunity. perhaps tony kuschner will have thegenius to develop a latent element in mother courage and model her on roger,perhaps r. will get to like brecht.i am ccing sarah since she is one of two people i know in these parts thathave a fine sense of brecht. the other is sammy mcclean, emeritus associatein german, whose first rate book on the origins of some of brechts methodsin the german country fair and its ancient traditions i was the first tocrack in the near thirty years that it has been gathering dust at oodegard.Sincerely,Michael "Ezara" Roloff
Let me let you have the customary unvarnished estimate of your Mother Courage from someone who spent six months, chiefly at the Ensemble in 1957, someone who had seen Mother and the Ensemble first in Paris that Spring, which convinced me to leave Munich for Berlin, and if the wench had been faithful there I would have stayed; not too much to entice one back to the US mid-fifties, after all. And from someone who spent a few weeks two years ago thinking and investigating what a truly Americanized Mother C could be, but that cowardly mediocrity Kurt Beattie then chickened out on his pathos-ridden wish to put Mother on in Seattle 60 some years after its European whelping, and where he put his money instead, well just look at the fallow seasons of ACT....
First to the good: some of the young actors at the School are admirable, and can sing too! Your wife is delightful too, though she seems to be an escapee from Three Penny Opera and does not convince me that she might last longer than one week on the road, much less a thirty years war.
Now to the execrable:
Brecht may have made a major enlightenment-engendered change in Aristotle's aesthetics and substituted a series of small catharses for that one big one [paralleling the procedure of psychoanalysis], but in the more fundamental respects of the unity of time, place and action he understood that to focus an audience's mind you could not be all over the place, that theme and variation creates the requisite knife to get through to the audience's thick skull; that is, he did not make a change in the western notion of an organic work of art, that would come subsequently.
Thus your all over the place style, -- mod suits, contemp party dresses mixed in with authentic 30 years gear nonetheless playing on the map of the thirty years war that is also projected onto the back drop - that 50s Chevy truck being the prime culprit - may in the shallowest of ways subscribe to the au courant of post modern aesthetics, but then lacks the aesthetic as well as political conviction of those premises, and so remains a purely decorative tease. That map with all those great place names of the 30 years war thus ought to be the map of the world, and if your truck derives from the 50s... Mother C. needs to change modes of transportation... you and I both know the places of conflict where say, the various Ms. Halliburton & Co., have done ever profitable biz. ... to the suggestion of the super sonic jet....
Your misconceived compromised abortion comes a complete cropper at the end [1] when Mother Courage needs a winch [lacking a revolving stage the actress lacks the vigor to pull it by herself] to wind around an invisible tree to pull the Chevy, on its visible surrogate wheels.... what... just a few feet further into the eternal roundelay of war. One of the greatest images of 20th century theater -- Helene Weigel, as her own nag, pulling the business cart forever, eternally onward, and here ... alas, the quintessence of a pathetic fallacy.
2] Mute Katrin drumming, thrumming to warn the townsfolk -- what do we have here instead of that stark and memorable image: a lot of folks running around, a stupid winch, another winch pulling her up on a metal tray, instead of her sitting at least atop the cab of the silly over-sized Chevy; all it takes is one soldier aiming his blunderbuss -- what do we have here: something off in the rafters the size of the telescope... alas, a busy-minded unfocussed director...
3] The Hare adaptation is at least good Brit, instead of Bentley's unspeakable [the wonderful Eric then lacked ears], or the fusty Mannheim, but I do not recall that so much of the dialogue was of the fuck shit corruption variety... that one might agree with Roger Downey that Brecht was a very bad playwright [well, roger seemed to object to bert screwing all the girls that crawled into his bed].
4] Brecht's kind of singing which he extracted from no matter his collaborator - that off-kilter delivery within a non-harmonic music - led to his notion of arrhythmic non-rhyming poetry, and this also influenced his dialogue, which is not naturalistic gibberish as it becomes in the mouths of your actors. The estrangement effect if you have heard of it, or if Sarah, who claims to have been your dramaturg, managed to impress it on you, is absent here...
5] Though the Acting School's actors can sing and act they still can't talk their way out of a brown paper bag...
That ought to do it for this drizzly day.
===========================
Dear Michael Roloff:I admit to being perplexed at receiving your e-mail... perhaps mystified is abetter word...particularly as to why it was sent. My first thought was that you intended a useful aesthetic response which might cause me to think moreexpansively or specifically, ie a practical critique. I quickly rejected thisnotion as I read words like 'execrable' and 'compromised abortion' and'busyminded, unfocused', not words one might use, even to one with as thick a skin as I have, if one is truly trying to teach or encourage thought or even shock to action as Brecht might have wanted. The vitriol of your writing, and general mean-spirited personal tone of it is guaranteed rather shut down dialogue, to in actuality alienate. Or perhaps you thought that we had some kind of personal relationship which might withstand such a communique? We don't. We are at best very distant acquaintances and as such might expect some kind of professional courtesy or at least restraint.But the most telling clue to the fact that this was not a genuine attempt atartistic communication was that you sent it not only to friends and colleaguesof mine but also to people I don't know. How disingenuous. If you are bloggingwhy not make it a public review and call it that? Clearly it was not intendedas a real communication to me. So what was it? The main clue is in the carefulestablishment of your Brechtian bona fides. From your writing it is obviousthat you are an expert on Brecht. I am reminded by Shunryu Suzuki's statementin ZEN MIND BEGINNER'S MIND that in the beginner's mind there are manypossibilities but in the expert's mind there are few. And the promoting of this Brechtian intellectual expertise seems to be the chief intent of the email. But for whom? Certainly not to impress me or the other people that you villify in the document. So I assume it was for ...is that Len Berkman?...or Sabine Wilke...or more likely for your own sense of yourself? ... if so, how sad.A few specific points. The woman who played Mother Courage is Robyn Hunt, andsince you sent this email to her you might have the courtesy to refer to her by name. She is after all a full professor in this university, a highly skillful artist, a recognized master teacher and intellectually astute. In your reference to her ability to survive I must assume that you saw something in her performance which caused you to draw conclusions about the Mother Courage she created, rather than what she as a person might be capable of. The qualities of MC which she conveyed are subject to debate. If you are referring to her personal fortitude then your ignorance is complete. You know nothing about her and show great arrogance in drawing any conclusion.I have always thought actors are some of the most courageous people I know.They put their ideas up for view in the moment and are judged by the reactionto that moment. In this aspect Robyn Hunt evidenced an extraordinary courage in daring to put up to view her ideas about one of the great roles, in herhometown, and in the shadow of the much hallowed Helene Weigel.As to 'all over the place style'.....the clothes came from a fairly narrow time period in the mid twentieth century..there were in fact no contemporary party dresses, no mod suits and no thirty years war clothing. The setting was not post-modern..I have no interest in that notion, or in being au courant for that matter... it was an image which I believed would resonate with this audience. The truck has an American patina and seems also somehow to typify the 100 years war of the twentieth century, coming as it does from the center of that century. This American audience knows very little of the thirty years war but, according to many responses I had, found visual rhymes with trucks in WW I, the dustbowl, WW II, Korea, and certainly the most recent wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They also got the connection to Halliburton et al. They were not 'thick-skulled' but quite perceptive. Many people said that it was as if the play were coming off the newspaper page. So historicity did seem to work on some level.1]How interesting that you would fault us for not having a turntable, and thatyou were so locked into a fundamentalist view of how the end of the play should be done that you didn't realize that the truck was indeed extremely heavy and that Robyn Hunt did in fact push it by herself and that with the use of the block and tackle we paid homage to the image of Weigel by having her pull for a time in order to get the truck rolling, and that in spite of the actual physical difficulty, MC was going to persist. Many in the audience did get the fact that she was continuing in her feeding off the war in spite of magnified difficulty.2]The gun which killed Kattrin was a replica of a machine gun used at leastuntil the end of the WW II. The winch a practical and aesthetic decision to infact place her above everyone in the scene and the audience. Scholars anddesigners as well as general audience members found it theatrically anddramatically persuasive. The scene as written is chaotic once she starts todrum. 3]I suggest you re-read the Hare adaptation. And that you resist thetemptation to make some kind of snide personal attack on Roger Downey.4]The V-effect worked for others who approached the work with intellectualrigour at least equal to yours.I have spent too much time on this, but hope that it will at least encourageyou not to trespass on my time (or professional email address) unless you havesomething constructive to say.Steven PearsonAh. I just read what you wrote to Roger Downey. Your motives are transparent. I admit to being embarassed to read such elementary schoolyard vituperation from a grown man ...and to notice that another name has been added to the cc list... And I like Peter have thrice been faithless..... well I have a good junk mail filter on this email address.
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Steve,sorry to get back to you only now. i had a to finish a big piece & then wentto the premiere of peymann's new production of Brecht's MUTTER KURASCH @ theensemble. Below a link to a review that does the production justice, and ifyou haven't the German you certainly know some folks who can give you thegist.http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/kultur_und_medien/feuilleton/?cnt=763704&you might want to go to Berlin over the holidays and find out what the realthing is like.http://www.berliner-ensemble.de/and if you can't make a reservation, you can always contact peymann atdirektion@berliner-ensemble.de and say that you've come for a first handremedial.i am also sorry to have felt to write as i did since i was about to, at aforum, praise you as one of half of half a dozen directors whose work i haveseen here the past decade that i could recommend - i was thinking of yourPlatanov, what you did with Handke's HOUR, and on such short notice with theHeiner Mueller texts when I came to see your KURASCH.however, not all that sorry since i am still waiting for at least a dozenreplies & promises and the like from half a dozen hoaries of the past. nodoubt these remissions of yours and others, such as lacking thecourtesy to come to my handke lecture, whom you claim to love so dearly,contributed to my "not wrapped in the usual cotton candy" comments.however,since the pearson family claims to live by the vauntedauthenticity, i was then going to be authentic if nothing else.well, you asked for it.your production was not only all the things i said in my first missive, buton further reflection & now comparison it entirely lacked the EPIC - itlacked a SENSE OF THE LONG TIME & therefore it lacked the ESSENTIALEXTRAORDINARY PATHOS of the piece that reaches it culmination with the twomajor scenes at the end that you managed to muck up with busyness, all thosefolks running around. inexcusable. u.s. chicken without heads.It is good to hear what you had in mind stylistically with the variousreferences. why then play these signals on the ground visual and earthy ofGerman lands during the 30s year war? Evidently I misread your signals.evidently we exist in separate universes of logical artistic references,which always have their effect cumulatively. well, i've been misreadingAmerican signals ever since i thought i really could kiss sue dorland underthe mistletoe back in junior high, where she had positioned herself, only toscream if anyone tried. if not post modern, it was a stylistic hotch potchby accident, which is even worse.I couldn't tell what that black tube was up in the rafters though I wasstaring at it directly vis a vis. anyhow, katrin is not killed from ambush.it's a small but important point. and WW I, though the Brits suckered the USto come in on their side... it was a better moment for this country than thedays of Andrew Jackson, Polk & Buchanan...when democratic business feastingof the public trough first really went big piggy..... well, to me it cameacross as a stylistically muddled cabaret version of Mutter Courage.Eminently consumable, too, judging by the reactions of the friends Ibrought,for none of whom Brecht is more than a name... and so are as undemanding asthe rest of the nice Northwesterners are in that respect. but it didn't sinkin deep.A reference to Helen Weigel in using the winch to pull the chevy truck,in-jokes where scarcely any one knows what is being referred to?? and towaste one of the great moments over that. of course i considered what to doif one hasn't a revolving stage. once you committed yourself to thatchevytruck, however... you forced yourself into work-around mode...However, I ought to have complimented you and your actress wife Robin Huntfor dramatically bringing out the pain that Mother's conflicted relationshiptween her love for her brood & survivorship and need to go on truckin'.That was finely and strongly manifested, and for that lack of mine Iapologise. if only the rest had been as starkly drawn.And it is probably true that I am locked into some originalist version ofwhat I think the piece can accomplish. but it is no more than a rock of areference point. when kurt beattie of menopause the musical van gogh inlondon fame asked me a year or so ago whether i might be interested in doingan American adaptation of the play i first checked with variousacquaintances in NY who had been involved in the usual failed u.s. Brechtventures for the past 50 years fortheir pessimistic assessments. i got as far as concluding that i wouldsituate the play in the civil war era and have Big Mama Thornton as mywaggoner in a symbiotic relationship with the various armies, and then "cutout west" with the confederate disarray that fled there... but then Kurt puthis money on fiction and no end of other crap at ACT.Sisyphus was complimented no end for his hard work, to no avail of course.Be constructive? Any concrete criticism is constructive.However, i must say that i was quite pleased to see roger rabbit flushed outinto the open to get a good dose of deserved buckshot. that came as awelcome and surprising opportunity. perhaps tony kuschner will have thegenius to develop a latent element in mother courage and model her on roger,perhaps r. will get to like brecht.i am ccing sarah since she is one of two people i know in these parts thathave a fine sense of brecht. the other is sammy mcclean, emeritus associatein german, whose first rate book on the origins of some of brechts methodsin the german country fair and its ancient traditions i was the first tocrack in the near thirty years that it has been gathering dust at oodegard.Sincerely,Michael "Ezara" Roloff
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- SUMMA POLITICO
- seattle, Washington, United States
- MICHAEL ROLOFF http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name exMember Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS: http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html "MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce} "Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben] contact via my website http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html