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OCCASIONAL COMMENTS ON THE ARTS HIGH AND LOW + AND ON HANDKE CONTROVERSIES ALSO SEE: http://handke-trivia.blogspot.com/ http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/

Monday, June 30, 2014

LINKS TO A LONG PIECE FROM steeped in seattle AND THE INTRO TO "write some numb's, bitch!"






    • 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/
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    • 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
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    • 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
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    •  
    • 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


    •  
    • (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
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    • http://moravian-nights-discussion.blogspot.com/2012/11/roloffs-initial-2007-take-on-moravian.html
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    • 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

  •  

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

OPEN LETTER TO PUBLISHER PUNCH SULZBERGER OF THE NY TIMES REGARDING THEIR MISERABLE COVERAGE OF THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE

 


  • Dear Mr. Sulzberger,
       

  • Perhaps the sheer surfeit of trivia in your 
    ​so parochial ​
    pages 
    ​{gladly specify at nausea upon request) ​
    no longer allows space for Non-Anglo Theater. Handke has been a kind of lightning rod since early on, thus if you're out of touch with him you're unlikely to be riding the ball of lightning anywhere else. True enough as your pages go when it comes to continental theater. Opera does score a few mention on occasion, you have better and more curious reviewers in that field!

  • Here the main news of the past few years & links which so far you have                     failed to note, you are welcome to exploit these links to your delight.

  • The Ibsen Prize
    Sincererly and with best wishes:​
      

    • I am writing you to let you know that at the very least in the instance of the theater as well as the prose of the deservedly famous Austro-German-Slovenian author Peter Handke the NY Times coverage and reviewing continues to be monstrously deficient, as well as generally abysmal at your Book Review. Handke just won the greatest drama prize in the world, deservedly so, 
    • http://www.internationalibsenaward.com/
    • not that a NY Times arts reader would know!

    • Two years ago his play FOREVER STORM won the most important German drama prize!
    • not that a NY Times arts reader would know!

    • With all the drivel that finds its way into your arts pages!

    • FOREVER STORM, a nove/drama hybrid, exists in English, published by Swallow, distributed by the University of Chicago Press

    • http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo16880859.html

    • Ditto for the plays VOYAGE BY DUGOUT (PAJ Journal), and UNTIL THE DAY (Swallow/ U, of Chicago)
    • The reviews of Handke's two most major novels, MY YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S BAY and CROSSING THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS, by respectively Lee Siegel and Neil Gordon, were contemptible and contemptibly incompetent,
    • Ample discussions of both at http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/
    •  and thus, overall, continued what has  become a tradition
      €‹,€‹in that respect, at your paper.
    • Thus my single-minded focus!
    • With best wishes for improvement!




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    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

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