Der Zuschauer

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

Dear Reader,
This is a photograph of a recent editorial meeting of our dramaturgical staff. The discussion seems to be about the term realism.

Christian Grabbe

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.

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

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

Grabbe, here, Well, one thing that is being bruited about in the editorial offices heeeeeeeeeeeere on Guam Island at Der Zuschauer, is why do so many suspension-bridge engineers so often collapse into bra construction and design as a way to keep body and soul alive? Can Fichte help us on this question?

Dear Readers, We ask for your help? Christian Grabbe.

“On its recent revival in London [The School for Scandal of Sheridan] was remodeled in accordance with modern notions of symmetry, and to this version the Museum [MFA, Boston] has apparently conformed. It is a very good one, and the only liberty it takes with the text is to transpose certain scenes and run others together. We have a great deal of tolerance for all audacities based on a desire to resolve an act into a single picture. Visible changes of scene is rapidly becoming a barbarism, and we strongly suspect this circumstance will end by giving a deathblow to Shakespeare as an acting dramatist.”

Oh, the blindness of historical prediction.

The Editors, Inchbald, Shadewell, et al.

“Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge.”

John Locke, Epsitle, Essay…7. Pringle, Pattison.