It is with remorse that we have received your recent concerned correspondence regarding definitions of the above as well as speculation and debate. I have addressed the issue with our entire dramaturgical staff world wide. We admit to a Coleridgian waywardness and promise to get back on the ground. I have pushed for articles, letters, definitions etc. We invite your contributions. This ongoing work will appear on our Dramaturgy: Definitions page.

Sincerely,
Christian Dietrich Grabbe
Der Zuschauer

“…Coleridge wanted to write as an opinion-former, to create a philosophical intelligensia in a new way. His work was to be deliberately elitist: exclusive and intellectually demanding. He made no apology for this. He was not producing a set of Labourers’ pocket knifes for cutting bread and cheese, but a Case of Lancets for dissecting the anatomy of a national condition. His target was what he came to call the Heresy of expediency, of short-term aims, superficial thinking; it was also the intellectual partianship of…journalism itself.”

From Richard Holmes’ Coleridge, Darker Reflections: 1804-1834

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“Oh, qui, me dis-je, bientot tout sera termine…auf!…assez nous avons vu…soixante-cinq ans et meche que peut bien vous foutre la plus pire archibombe H?…Z?…Y?…souffles!…vetilles! seulement horible ce sentiment d’avoir tant perdu tout son temps et quelles myriatonnes d”efforts pour cette hideuse satanee horde d’ alcooleux efiates laquais…misere, Madame!…”Vendez vos rancoeurs, taisez-vous”!…bigre, j’accepte!…je veux, mais a qui?…les acheteurs me boudent, il parait… ils n’aiment et n’achetnet que les auteurs presque comme eux, avec juste en plus, lesere a la couleur…chef-loufiat, chef torche-chose, leche-machin, fuitets, beni-tiers, poteaux, bidets, couperets, enveloppes…que le lecteur se retrouve, se sente un semblable, un frere, bien comprehensif, pret a tout…”

From Celine’s Nord, we apologize for the lack of accents, etc. eds. Klinger, Grabbe, Degot.

“Es ist kein Ort in der Welt, wo die vergangene Zeit so un mittelbar und mit so mancherlei Stimmen zu dem Beobachter sprach, als Rom. So hat sich auch dort unter mehreren Sitten zufalligerweise ein erhalten, die sich an allen andern Orten nach un nach fast gangzlich vorloren hat.

Die Alten liessen, wenigstens in den besten Aeiten der Kunst und die Sitten, kein Frau des Theater betreten. Ihre Stucke waren entweder so eingerichtet, das Frauen mehr und weniger enbehrlich warren; oder kie Weiberrollen wurden durch eine Akteur vorgestellt, welcher such besonders darauf geubt hatte. Derselbe Fall is noch in dem neureren Rom und dem ubrigen Kirchenstaat, ausser Bologna, welches unter andern Privilegien auch der Freiheit geniesst, Frauenzimmer auf seinen Theatern bewundern zu durfen.”

From Goethe’s Schriften zur Literatur.

As correspondent for the Northeast Corrider, I am writing to alert playgoers of The Slutcracker: A Sexy, Freaky, Holiday Zeitgeist Spectacular, to be presented at the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square. December 10-13, 8PM, December 17-20, 8PM, and Sunday matinees on December 13th and 20th, 2PM. Come one come all.

Respectfully,
Stanley Richardson for
Der Zuschauer

After watching Ekaterina Degot stomp about the editorial offices in her amply filled out two-piece bathing suit and parachute-jump boots, I took off all my clothes, climbed into a hammock, propped an Everyman Library Selected Essays of Leigh Hunt on my yogurt cannon and read myself into sleep and oblivion. I had been out earlier for a giant tortoise ride and so quickly went away to dreamland, which is to say Twat Land for me.

In all due sincerity,
Christian Dietrich Grabbe

PS. Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

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 letter 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 nice 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 (ed. 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