-
- http://crosscut.com/2011/07/21/crosscut-blog/20410/A-private-bower-wildness-in-Seattle/?page=single
- I got lucky - for once - having David Brewster as editor for A PRIVATE BOWER, a section from STEEPED IN SEATTLE, in making it fit Crosscut's purposes (his work involved eliding a side story and then proved marvelously permissive in allowing a few adumbrations I only thought of at the last moment).
- Not so in Seattle with "WRITE SOME NUMB'S, BITCH!".
- http://www.workliterarymagazine.com/submission/michael-roloff-6302014/
- After the Seattle Times and one of their Pulitzer Prize winning writers and I did not find a way of translating my approach to this material into something that might fit a family paper & even though I had the recommendation from a Seattle Weekly writer I never even heard back from Mossback then the editor there..
- The title "WRITE SOME NUMB'S BITCH" was a frequent utterance by an ex-prize fighter (Think white Sugar Ray Robinson!) who ran City of Troy, an outfit that hustled circus tickets, and who employed a den of cross-country thieves. Troy, holding fists full of hundred dollar bills in his hands, a hard-on in punk shorts, would utter this memorable phrase to his sale folk while merrily dicking them and holding the fists under their nose. ("Smell this, Bitch!") It goes nearly without saying that the circus AT Troy's was far more amusing than the circus that he was selling in Seattle to raise funds for the Police Guild.
- This priceless experience is the only matter that made up for being broke, broke for having been hustled by the likes of a sly brute of a crook like Roger Straus.
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2013/07/roger-straus-robert-giroux-jonathan.html,
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2014/05/rogerstrausjonathangalassifarrarstraus.html
- http://www.vulture.com/2013/07/farrar-straus-giroux-jonathan-galassi-on-hothouse.html
- For, had it not been for Straus's dastardliness the disappearance of a small stipend that allowed me to pursue some long term projects after I left the so distracting and sybaritic NY City, would not have entailed these interesting consequences, as of 1994, and also entailed another ten year's worth of translating, some fine texts, of course - especially the work of Josef Winkler, Adorno, Habermas – chiefly for Ariadne Press in Riverside California, a firm that, however, does not even send galleys to Publisher's Weekly or Library Journal: so no great surprise if no one has heard of some of the marvelous Austrian stuff that they put out, such as my best translation, of Handke's WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES
- http://www.ariadnebooks.com/productinfo.aspx?productid=1572410000
- And, a further THUS
- it is probably irrelevant that Ariadne
fail to send out royalty statements as their
contracts stipulate.
- It is astonishing the world I bumbled into as of 1960 when I had an ABC OF READING epiphany in Alaska while contemplating what adventure to pursue after forest fire-fighting and geological surveying
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2013/08/mis-attribution-of-translation-credits.html
- THUS, there is the occasional thought that I might have been better off pursuing a second love, of wildlife biology. Having had my own kind of peculiar childhood where I found myself communing with animals, I cannot imagine that I could have done worse than with some of the wolverines, wolves and grizzlies I encountered in the world of the arts, jackals all. Not that there is anything to prevent FSG/MacMillan USA/ Holzbrinck (who after all are living off the 50 books they have in print courtesy of my work in the late 60s) from repairing Straus’s infamy, so I might at least get my teeth fixed; but no – the ones who will get the money are the lawyers.
- In the event, I, who am involved in multiple projects, haven’t even tried to hustle "WRITE SOME NUMB'S, BITCH!" First, I held back for a documentary in the making, but the AG indicted Troy for taking illegal in-kind donations, Troy took a powder and drove a truck full of these donations back to Illinois, then I turned WSNB into a screenplay on which, say, a Microsoft Millionaire took an option - it turned out without having read it, only so as to have first dibs on it. My writer friends like it. The screenplay itself – which incorporates its transformation from its documentary origins - needs to be made more playful. This is one of those books that has a saga attached to it even prior to final publication.
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2013/07/precis-of-write-some-numbs-bitch.html,
- NEWS
- (1) A PROFESSOR Leland Durantay FROM CLAREMONT COLLEGE proved to be ante-deluvian and ignorant and gratuitously nasty (an "ignoranus") in once more and again, and in the London Review of Books!, coming down on Handke's affording the Serbians a modicum of justice for being exclusively accused of crimes or being first among nationalists, whereas they were the last. There is a particular way in which academics share in universal and infinite stupidity, any McGoo who has been in Academe will know what I mean.
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2014/05/durantayes-lrb-infamy.html
- (2) SCOTT ABBOTT AND I have a discussion going at Scott's
http://thegoaliesanxiety.wordpress.com/2014/06/05/stormy-weather-peter-handkes-immer-noch-sturm/- on the theme of "Language is the first casualty of War" in Handke's amazing Muehlheim Prize winning STILL STORM that was published a while back by Seagull Books/ University of Chicago Press who are proving far more alacritous than Farrar, Straus. Our disagreement is a truly academic but not uninteresting one as to whether that Orwellian theme is then part of what drives the play’s "dramaturgy"!
- http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html
-
- (3) I am completing SCREEN MEMORIES,
- The Self-Analytic Memoir of a Mid-20th Century German-American Youth.
- I've put the new, long, and gentle opening, that now precedes the screen memory at the inception of WW II
- and a tentative Part One of the postscript on line @
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2014/06/opening-chapter-of-screen-memories-by.html
- http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2014/03/preface-to-screen-memories-part-i.html,
- (4) If Farrar, Straus ever manage to put out Handke's MORAVIAN NIGHT, which was published in Krautland (adjacent to Puntland as you know!) eight years ago, Scott Abbott and I will conduct what we hope will be a widely attended on-line discussion of that fascinating, many-sided but I think interestingly imperfect work @:
- http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2012/06/anouncement-driving-directions.html
- http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2012/11/roloffs-initial-2007-take-on-moravian.html
- In what is now 75 years of reading (I started with a magical wax writing tablet that my mother gave me at age 4) I have had more astonishing reading experiences with Handke's work than with any other writer’s {A SLOW HOMECOMING - the novel fragment; ABSENCE, MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN’S BAY, ONE DARK NITE I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE, especially with the “Hill and Dale” section at the end of CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS, and MORAVIAN NIGHT has stretches of the finest of Handke's classical prose, which if read at a continuous clip, uniquely induced a reading quake, which was comparable to one of the minor quakes that precede the deadly serious events, the kind that someone like me who has spent a third of his life on the West Coast will be especially sensitive to, but sure surprised the hell out of me in the context of that activity. I account for it, to myself, as being due to an unconscious over-accumulation of beauty, it was a release of a different kind of tension.
- I leave you with the opening poem of STEEPED IN SEATTLE that just appeared with VOX POETICA
- The
first blackberries are late this year--
it was a late spring. - The blackberries will be that much more plentiful in fall--
- most will rot in the early rains.
- Most did.
- MICHAEL ROLOFF
