Der Zuschauer

Nude Volley Ball has suffered severe blows from all the rainstorms and thunder-clapping clouds of late, as have most nude beach activities, not to mention the US Open. Many established groups, such as the writer’s colony in Provincetown, Norman Mailer’s group, and the reconstituted Partisan group do their volley balling indoors in Truro, Wellfleet, etc., where all the talk is about Obama’s influence on the recent events in Tehran, or possible retaliation to a North Korean missile strike on Pearl Harbor. Super models continue to get knocked up, bait shops are open, and Critical Inquiry is still on sale at the bookstore in Vineyard Haven; thus you have to drive back to Oaks Bluff to get alcohol with your moralism, or is it the other way round? Savvy salty dogs have their TLS or NYRB delivered via post or internet. Your correspondent appreciates writing on the internet via this Journal for really big bucks, but I do not listen to Little Dorrit on an I-Pod or I-Phone, or try to read it online with any of the various new reading technologies now available. If you can’t get sand in it in the summertime why go to Marseille or Chatham in the first place. Of course the situation hasn’t changed that much. Reading a New Yorker after an Ivy League BA is held the height of casual awareness. There is much perfect storm discussion of the French airliner “disapeared” over the Atlantic. The usual blather about the Red Sox and the Yankees, spottings of Ayn Rand paperbacks continue, as well as the odd Decline of the West or Civilization and its Discontents. There always seem to be more French readers than German readers on Cape Cod and the Islands. Almost everyone now drinks Aussie Swill-Shiraz, which is the current dago red. John Ashbery seems set to live forever and one can’t help but think somewhat fewer Europeans will weep if he dies, than as they did for Lord Byron. My editors continue to remind me they are due articles on Icelandic economic reform and the Mongolian theatrical avant-garde. Max Klinger is in heavy debate with scientists over the presence of hotel resorts and spas in the Marinas Trench. C.D. Grabbe and Ekaterina Degout are no longer speaking to another.
Dear Reader, I write to you from the broad, sandy beaches which surround the hill-populations of Somerville, City of Trees and Dogshit. I travel to my local Brazilian Beer Store on an outboard-powered skiff. I have promised Herr Klinger more on this topic later, and some translations from the German poems of George Heym. My Best to you.
Stanley Richardson, Correspondent for Der Zuschauer
Northeast Corridor All Rights reserved Guam Battalions

So far there is little to say; he is recovering.

He may survive. Editors, Grabbe and Degot, under investigation.

I remain at the helm,
Thomas Shadewell

Yes, well, you know, I wonder as I wander through the streets of Somerville, city of trees, Spring one day, sixteen inches of snow another; what with Max Klinger in the hospital I can’t help but think of Jacob Lenz dead in a snowbank, eyes open, in a Mosow back-alley, mysterioulsy clutching a copy of Viktor Shklovsy’s History of Soviet Polar Bears.

We have replaced the Leibniz Reader on our john with a copy of Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam. Frankly, of late, we have been too poor to go to the cinema, bars, resturants, much less the theatre. Books, books, and periodicals, English muffins, high gravity lager, Steel Reserve 211. Our Brazilian Beer Store, in Union Square, opens up eight in the morning. They sell 40 and 50 pound bags of rice from all over the world, and real sugar cane, mangoes, and plantains–they even sell bags of MSG, just for you and your retro traditional cooking. The languages are Portuguese, Creole, Spanish, and English, for the few Herr Doktor German Speakers who come in as well.

The birds are chirping. They are building egg palaces out of twigs and dead leaves. Squirrels are behaving like Harrier Jump-Jets. F-Troop is now out on regular Boob-Patrol. I have managed to come up upon the crest of 56 years of age.

I have been reading Cicero, Juvenal, and the Aeneid. Last night I finished Tenny Frank’s wonderful, cogent Life and Literature in the Roman Republic. I am also enjoying the delicious A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. One is not really poor so long as one has light, warmth, books, and good companonship. Food and drink help. O, and we have the radio and the internet and the Times Literary Supplement.

My Frau is a broad-shouldered Amazon with fair blue eyes and a sly smile. She is five feet ten inches tall in her stocking feet though I look down on her and her deep penetrating intelligence from a greater height. Busenvollig is also 8 years younger then I am. When do we begin to start thinking about age? When do we begin to worry about age? Do we ever?

I find trees are a comfort to me in my 50s. I have two special friendships with trees just now. One is stunted, crabbed, cut back by power lines, and very brave, and the other is a vast, stout giant. In my walks, in Somerville, city of trees watching for birds, I greet these trees; sometimes I touch them. No, I don’t fucking hug the things nor do I piss on them. But often I am unsure if I bless them or they bless me. We have now got through the appalling winter of 09. May the trees and the birds bless my two daughters.

My best regards,
Stanley Richardson

Written for Der Zuschauer. Copyright by Guam Battalions, 2009. All rights reserved.

Dear Readers,
It is true that our august editor, Max Klinger, has suffered a heart attack while dealing with some iconographic issues regarding this journal. These have been resolved and he is recovering in a Guam Island hospital room surrounded by a bevy of Gooney Bird interns. Christian Grabbe and I soldier on here although we have lost contact with writer Stanley Richardson, who seems convinced we, the afore mentioned editors, were behind die Blendung in the first place. Some of you have asked where in the hell has Mrs. Inchbald gone to and does she paint her nails? Broad-Rump speaking, we’ve no idea. Klinger is, in his lordly hospital bed, reading Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary, and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. He has also had his toe-nails painted cherry red.

Ekaterina Degot

Dear Reader, every now and then after an editorial breakfast of ashes, Asche zum Fruhstuck, I take a Joy through Travel tour to a little Fischzucht resort in the Marianas Trench, seven and a half miles below the surface of the shark-infested waters around the Phillppine Islands, where I like to commune with the gigantic-microscopic, incandescent, luminious monsters of our very deepest-sea oceans. The heat of the hellacious inner core of our cooling planet (think entropy) warms the frigid waters and produces an aquatic life, a Walpurgisnachtwelt, of swimming demons, devils, Confucianism, and haiku. Bosch couldn’t stand the place. I love it.

I always take Bach, Wagner and Mahler with me and a few books: this time Celine’s Nord, Turgenev’s Virgin Soil, Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and always Holderlin. Not too much for a weekend.

The beer is good; rheinisch wine flows straight out of knotholes in the wooden tables; if it lands on the table it catches on fire; I, therefore prefer Cote Rotie or Grange-Hermitage. The food is also good. The beaver and buffalo. We avoid shellfish and red snapper, most swimming fish in fact. But hedgehog, porcupine, reindeer rump, all good stuff. The best joint is called Tobias Smollet’s. Their jellyfish infusion on veal cutlets is challenging indeed. The jewel in the ear is Dante’s Lobster.

There are tennis courts, plasma-diving,, and vigorous ping-pong. I prefer the libraries.

What I really go to the Marianas for is Bathospheric Bowling. One enters a sphere of glass in complete darkness and wait for the goldfish ghouls to appear, the sucking carp-nasties, the dragon seahorses, the Bolshie seaworms; they are all actually outside, and they catch the light in your eyes; they want to eat you alive. Wolfen blood-hounds of the deep. They are in fact philosophic hogs of the dirty deep. They are the stars of interstellar inner space. This is no superbowl; this is Aligheri on a Guelf/Ghibelline burn.

“The ant is a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
made courage, or made order, or made grace.
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down,
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down!
The green casque has out done your eloquence.”
EP, From the Pisan Cantos

When I come back to Guam, what do I find? Lesbian pornography from Ekaterina Degot. Christian Grabbe trying to teach sea turtles and gooney birds how to march in goose-step.

I found a note from Stanley Richardson describing a pigeon in Union Square trying to eat ice and snow for water, and the ice was slippery enough that the neck-snapping idiot couldn’t keep his balance and kept sliding, falling, pecking, and finally, flying off, like that Hudson River airbus that was able to flly back out of the water on its own exhausted spiritual power.

There was also a note describing a Richardson sighting in Praha, at a cafe table arguing with a red-headed woman about whether she could fly over the city on a pig. She said she could. He said she hadn’t.

Then, there was the smell of the oceans, the reek of the guano. Everyone was wearing little or nothing. The Stealth-bombers continued to take off and land. Someone told me his pet skunk, Fruity, had escaped. There was concern of a miscegenation between Fruity, and datenut bat he was in love with.

I read the Toronto Globe&Mail.. Someone brought me in a Roderick Random Boston Dock Rhum. I thought of endless war and needless death. I smoked a Camel. I went to sleep to white noise and the sound of the ocean. My best to you. comrades.

Max Klinger

We have had a lot of snow up here in January and some quite viciously cold days. The squirrels still leap and bounce; they never seem to fall. As far as history goes we don’t all go to the expected events, nor witness history in the field. It comes to us often, as it will, fortuitously. One can’t help but thinking of Gregory of Tours opening his History of the Franks, in the 6th century with the immortal, “A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad.” I woke up this morning and read Lucretius, and then packed up some volumes to sell in Harvard Square, a griveous sin I know. and always I feel Professor Kien will pounce on me in the stairwell, and I don’t know, Dear Readers, if I managed to arrive at the Harvard Bookstore (1932, and independent from the University), just at 12 o’clock on purpose or not, but arrive I did at noon, and the place was pleasantly crawling with people drinking champaign and watching Obama take office, and gleefully, with some dark elements, bidding Georgie Boy’s backside goodbye. It was a raucous crowed for “elite intellectual types”; in fact it reminded me of another Harvard Square institution: late night screenings of bad B-movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space at the Brattle Theatre. People laughed out loud, cheered, were irreverent but gracious, and we all enjoyed the experience very much. Aretha Franklin came out wearing a serious Plan 9 From Outerspace Sunday morning hat. The prayers were boring; that’s when I made my capitalist bid on books about linguistics and and windbaggy volumes of Mark Twain, speeches, essays, reviews. The potted-palm music of Yo Yo Ma, et al, was an exquisite ineffable, but the cannon salute was a groove; the oath-taking was moving and slightly inept; god bless the man, his fortunes, and our fortunes. I won’t at this time remark on the address itself; its delivery was moving, forceful, and with a quality of mind-round-some-thing, that was exhilirating. One remembers how greatly underestimated the Gettysburg address was for decades. The Valley Forge Washington quotes were stormy and exciting. It was a bright, sunny day, without any wind. I left smiling with some tears in my eyes. I felt proud to be an America citizen again, but I was aware it was a pride that we would all have to work hard for. It is not a time for sunshine patriots; it is a time for hope.

For Der Zuschauer, Stanley Richardson
Copyright 2009, Guam Battallions

Ich bin dreissig Jahre.
Mein haar wird grau.
Ich bin nicht mude.