Archive for the ‘Correspondence’ Category
Notes on the Northeast Corrider Redux
Dear Readers, I was water-skiing along Somerville Avenue where the current swings along the hill in Union Square when our speed-boat, and then I and the editors, Klinger, Grabbe, and Degout, all collided with several barges bearing Volga Boatmen singing Gorky songs. I was in the hospital for 49 days. Others are still recovering. We all decided to read Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, inside, and I can refute earlier reports of our demise either in Monogolia or tsunami-swept Guam Island. We are all, in our own way, trying to keep our knickers on, be they boxers, thongs, or bronze shields. I myself have left the sparrow-graced, squirrel-jumping haunts of Somerville’s Walnut Hill for a cozy and incendiary flat off Porter Square in Cambridge. We should all be back in full voice shortly. Our best wishes. A reading recomendation: The Soviet Writers’ Conference 1934. Zhandov, Radek, and Bukharin are all a laugh-riot, and Gorky is a bit on song as well. Keep the growling tractor between your thighs. We live in History.
Stanley Richardson
Grabbe Speaks Out
Of late I have been reading: D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (a mad but brillant book), George Steiner’s little book on Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, To Begin Where I am: Selected Essays by Czeslaw Milosz, And What Coleridge Thought by Owen Barfield, Witold Gombrowicz’s Polish Memories, and the St. Petersburg Dialogues of Joseph de Maistre.
I write to you from the South Island of New Zealand where the recent huge earthquake resulted in 4 kilometers being added to the South Island in the direction of Australia. From here I will also be reporting on India’s launch of its first nuclear submarine. Max Klinger is in the Marianas Trench. Ekaterina Degout is in Moscow trying to figure out what is going on in regard to historical writing about the Second World War, and also to see if Joseph Stalin actually receives the highest vote for greatest Russian of all time, Stalin being of course a Georgian.
Thomas Shadewell has remained on Guam Island and is ably keeping the lid on as well as closely watching developments in regard to North Korea and its nuclear fire-works.
My best regards,
Christian Grabbe
Der Zuschauer
Intellectual Life on Cape Cod Summer 09
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
Herr Doktor Berryman
All Our Best on May Day
Addison and Steele et al
We are pleased to announce that two substantive links been recently made. One, in German, is Ayckbourn, and the other is The Spectator of Addison and Steele.
Sirs, We would like to remind you of the vast number of plays available to you at our link to Elizabeth Inchbald’s British theatre.
Max Klinger
Max Klingerr
Trotsky on Women
We are pleased to announce that a considerable section of Trotsky’s writing on women and the family has been added, along with a montage of ripened female intellectuals, to the It is I, Ekaterina Degot page, entitled Breeder Reactors, or, the Knocking Shop. We trust you will take due note. Our Best to you.
Degot, Grabbe, and Shadewell
Tranche de vie
Dear Readers, We have had more than our fair share of Flegeljahre in the air hangers here on Guam Island. I am relieved, firstly, to let you know that both Max Klinger, here, and Stanley Richardson, back in New England, have returned to their domestic quarters after their seperate hospitalizations. We hope to publish articles from both of them shortly. The real reason for Klinger’s 2nd heart attack was the following as related by himself.
“I felt a unsettled heart throb as I was reading Samuel Beckett’s Watt. There is a stinging rebuke to hope and faith in the novel which is hard to ignore.”
And yet it is uselss not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. The gluttonous castaway, the drunkard in the desert, the lecher in prison, they are the happy ones.
“Now this is heartbreaking but hardly life-threatening. Pessimism I can bear but fastidious repetition to what point can drive one to madness and death. Following hard upon the above is the lethal passage begining:”
And the poor old lousy old earth, my earth and my father’s and mother’s and my mother’s mother and my father’s father…
“After a further 13 lines of more father/mother variations we get finally to:”
Father’s father’s fathers and mother’s mother’s mothers…
“The finale of the first aria is: An excrement”
“At this point I felt I had had a stroke; my face grew dark crimson, then purple, my nostrils flared wide. I was barely able to comprehend the fineness of the following sentence:”
The crocuses and and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep’s placentas…
“It was at then that I suffered a massive heart attack.”
“Stanley Richardson, thousands and thousands of miles away in the Commonwealth managed to keep his mind sound enough to read further…”
And the long summer days and the newmown hay and the wood pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and corncrake in the evening and the wasp in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the apples falling and ithe children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others…
“…assuming more about uneaten sheep plaacentas would follow and ggetting instead…”
…howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy…
“He too, Richardson, lost consciousness and suffered arrested cognition. That is all I have to say at the moment.”
I can tell you, Dear Reader, that Klinger will never touch Watt again and I would doubt whether he will venture upon any Beckett at all. Richardson says he will give Watt a third try. And thus the calumny against Grabbe and Degot has been withdrawn and we all continue to live in history.
Klinger suffers further heart attack
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
City of Trees
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.
