Der Zuschauer

Sirs, There are new biographies of Leon Trotsky and reviewed in the TLS (October 23, 09), one is Bertrand M. Patenaude’s Stalin’s Nemesis,The exile and murder of Leon Trotsky and Robert Service’s Trotsky at 600 pages. Both are to be reccomended, even for those who have read the three volumes by Isaac Deutscher. Two points in the review struck us. Donald Rayfield writes, “Trotsky had qualities, however, which emerge in both these books. First, his passions were sexual as well as political. A man who can, when sick, tired and sixty, write a love in terms obscenely primitive as Trotsky’s cannot fail to arouse admiration.” We certainly agree. he continues, “Secondly, Trotsky was a genuine writer: when he set aside party doctrine or factionalism and wrote about his and others’ lives, he wrote as vividly as the classics of Russian literature…” You will find more on Trotsky in It Is I, Ekaterina Degout.

Dear Readers,
I am in the Fares Tower of the Tisch Library of Tufts University and have an Oxford Duden German Dictionary and a copy of Georg Heym’s Dichtungen und Schriften, of which I am to translate various poems for Max Klinger and Der Zuschauer. I have also been asked to review a copy of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 4: 1790-1900. I am now walking with a cane as much for balance as the left ankle, and I am also very interested in this question of Samuel Beckett and Karl Valentin that Klinger has raised. The autumn season here in Somerville/Cambridge has been gorgeous, and good theatre goes on all over the place. It is good to be out of hospital capitivity and see daily such things as hopping sparrows and harrier jet squirrels. These are days to be envied by those living and working on Guam Island. There are new biographies out on Leon Trotsky and I suppose Editor Degout is working on that. I have been thinking about how Henry James essays On the Art of Fiction (e. Edel) are of great value to the interst of all working dramaturgs. I am unsure if I am in any way a 21st century writer but at least it is clear I shall die one. We hope you enjoy your Turkey Day and all the trimmings.

Stanley Richardson
for Der Zuschauer

Dear Readers,
I have great piles of publications to review, many of them the spent condoms of tedious minds; I did enjoy Samuel Beckett’s Letters, and Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose.I can say little of
The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (2009), ed. James Chandler. We had initially invited Isaiah Berlin to review the book from beyond the grave but he is off table-knocking somewhere. Why can’t Yugoslavians all just get along? I should also like to alert readers to the fact that I have never ridden on the surface of the water, with planks of laminated wood, beneath my jaunty thighs. Sometimes at editorial meetings I find it necessary to remind everyone “we are all just another asshole.” By the way, the one instance, or instances, that struck me most about Beckett’s Letters were his encounters with the caberet artist Karl Valentin. Has anyone looked into this or written on this? i do appreciate your general laudation of our titalia and illustrative pubic photograhps. Some people just don’t seem to know how to get a bone on. See Victor Serge’s Memoires of a Revolutionary 1901-1941. Why is Christian Grabbe trying to sell me on an article on Tsunamis in Mongolia?” Are people out of their minds? And if so why?

Yours in Guam and Higher Education,
Max Klinger, Editor in Chief
Der Zuschauer

Karl Valentin

From all of us here, serving drama on Guam, to you, where ever you are. Keep hope alive.
The Editors

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

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

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

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.