tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8494024784324680939.post2660599886345162877..comments2024-02-25T02:53:17.882-08:00Comments on The Goalie's Anxiety: Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": ReligionScott Abbotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01782322856303315648noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8494024784324680939.post-46318969854085498822011-07-30T15:50:29.094-07:002011-07-30T15:50:29.094-07:00Scott asked just the right question to focus my mi...Scott asked just the right question to focus my mind: "tell me<br />why you like Chapter 9 so much?" and my response, equally brief,<br />was "because it is so emotionally honest." So open, so emotional,<br />for once behind all the showiness there is vulnerability. Which is why I want to focus on one detail about the opposite and tell a story about it. <br /><br />"In Alaska a woman mentioned to me [the actor says] that I had an ocean of tears locked inside me." <br /><br />My first encounter with an autist, a word that<br />would not have meant anything but puzzled me into thinking whether it might have something to do with the German expression "au" [which<br />is what you say when something hurts], if the word autist even existed in 1942, and if it existed if anyone in my immediate surround, my governess, Elisabeth Gluesing, Yola Duisberg and her Husband, whose first name I do not recall, and their two sons Constantine, my age, first friend ever, and the younger SVEN... who could not cry, no tears! The sort of matter that catches your attention, perhaps especially at age five, a kind of aberration that makes him as odd as a Giraffe. When Yola's son Constantine died, she went mad, a very beautiful actress once, the trophy wife of an heir of the IG Farben fortune, who had appeared at their wedding night dressed as a maid! My intuition tells me that that had something to do with Sven's autism. That he had absorbed his mother's grief, as Handke absorbed, already intra-uterine, not only his mother's joi de vivre but her grief. Handke mentions to Herbert Gamper in their book length conversation http://www.suhrkamp.de/suchen?s=Gamper&x=19&y=12 ABER ICH LEBE DOCH NUR VON DEN ZWISCHENRAEUMEN that he continues to suffer from occasional autistic episodes. I believed I witnessed at least one of what would puzzle me less now. In WEIGHT OF THE WORLD Handke recounts how the therapeutician he saw mentioning that he was out of contact with his feelings, a matter with which Handke agreed. Indeed, the pain of those years made him a more emotional writer, as in WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, the pathos throughout that period. With the 9th chapter of DER GROSSE FALL I feel that we have a man in full not just an actor.<br /><br /> http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/SUMMA POLITICOhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11214697505465094305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8494024784324680939.post-42031631949674718002011-07-30T08:54:59.311-07:002011-07-30T08:54:59.311-07:00For: http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/
The for...For: http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/<br /><br />The form of Ch. # 9, another roundabout<br />inspires me to think about the form of the book<br />as a whole. Sudden irruptions as in the beginning,<br />a thunderclap, but then a halting, a tarrying,<br />a flaneuring, not straightforward, especially<br />once our Actor, our "Schau Spieler" [someone who<br />plays, plays at showing, to explore the meaning<br />of that word just a tad], resolves to go<br />straight forward, occasionally he obeys.<br />But a lot of halting. Once we get to the metropolis<br />proper we round a lot of plazas, round and round<br />it goes, and I got the eery sense that our "representer"<br />was putting the metropolis and me the reader on to<br />a revolving stage, which brought to mind Handke's<br />purest genius text THE HOUR WE KNEW OF EACH OTHER<br />that aside freshening our senses better than any<br />Billie Goat ever did creates a fabled world... as<br />the metropolis becomes, in every sense of the word<br />fabled. Aside the FILMIC in other words, Handke<br />introduces the THEATRICAL. Our "Gesamtkunstwerkkuenstler"<br />the Count of Griffen! More than just a small slice<br />off the Bard of Avon.... amazing amazing amazing.<br /><br />I have read the book<br />slowly over a period of weeks, reread quite a few<br />sections, next comes a straight through read, at<br />which point I may have a few other observations.<br />Next also may be a take on the assembly of reviews<br />at: http://handke--revista-of-reviews.blogspot.com/2011/03/der-grosse-fall-major-case-handkes.html<br /><br />Up earlier than me birds at 3:45. Sparrows out<br />in full force now. Next observations on a handful of<br />details in Chapter # 9<br /><br /> http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/SUMMA POLITICOhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11214697505465094305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8494024784324680939.post-39835277893453288082011-07-29T21:47:28.429-07:002011-07-29T21:47:28.429-07:00[I]
For http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/
the...[I]<br />For http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/<br /><br /> the first of probably 3 comments on chapter 9.<br /><br />Let me way right off the bat that Chapter 9 of DER GROSSE FALL<br /> P. 256-279 is perhaps the most extraordinary chapter or<br />whatever that Handke has ever written! I feel like translating it<br />at once so that you won't have to wait so many years because Farrar,<br />Straus is so backed up and his prose translator Krishna Winstom may not even have started translating the 2007 MORAVIAN NIGHT, and then there is the extraordinary THE CUCKOOS OF VELICA HOCA which I think I managed to shame them into doing. Whether they reversed course and are doing the 2008 KALI now despite the fact of the I G N O R A N T translator Krishna Winston telling them that it was like other of Handke's things, that I do not know.<br /><br />But it is not often that I feel like wanting to share the good news at once to that extent! Although I am making real progess in turning people onto checking out the great Handke collection at the Seattle Public Library at my chief place of work and coffee with dozens upon uncountable dozens of sparrows as fans when I sit at the table outside.<br /><br />Prior to the justification and itemization of the above claim and a slew of individual comments, however, let me confess to some puzzlement in matters of logistics and detail.<br /><br />Our "actor" tarries in bed as his paramour departs to work in the big city. It takes him a whole day to walk, most adventurously, to the middle of the metropolis, ostensibly to celebrate a very carnal midnight mass with what I thought was yet the womanizer's main squeeze, a different chick altogether.<br /><br />Once he himself gets there, at a brasserie, he espies the woman he had spent the previous night with, regrets what a prick he has been to her, and I was brought under the impression at that point that the main squeeze and the woman of the previous night were one and the same.<br /><br />Around midnight, at the end of that fabulous [in every sense of that word] chapter he meets with the woman at a bar called "Destiny" - if she is the same woman who took off early in the morning to go to work she has been working a double shift! It may be I who is missing something in that mundane respect.<br /><br /> Also, it is not absolutely clear that the "actor" will turn down the part to play "amok" in the film the following day, although he thinks at one or two points that he won't. We, the reader, have seen him going literally amok over an elusive lemon pit that falls under a pantry, and also "playing amok" as he is in his film mind as he enters the city. Not everyone knows that Handke once said in an interview, and I know how irritable he is and liable to become violent, that at least three times a day he has the impulse to "run amok" and that is a famous line in one of his NONSENSE & HAPPINESS POEMS [in ALS DAS WUENSCHEN NOCH GEHOLFEN HAT + GESAMMELTE GEDICHTE] and so one hopes that by joking about "running amok" he might be cured of that impulse. It is not a bet I would make or give any kind of odds on at Vegas, not unless the kind of deep understanding that is the chief benefit, can be, of having truck with what he calls "psycho-physicists" reaches those reaches in his being. His hatred of the president of the republic who is to hand him a medal for great achievement is made clear during his walk through the city. mas anon.SUMMA POLITICOhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11214697505465094305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8494024784324680939.post-32839840308587267802011-07-29T16:58:33.666-07:002011-07-29T16:58:33.666-07:00[Posted for Michael due to some technical problems...[Posted for Michael due to some technical problems]<br /><br />My first comment on Chapter 8 ended with the anything but rhetorical question:<br /><br />" is "the actor" still the same distraught person [as the Keuschnig of the 1974 A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING - or is he just "acting" as though he<br />is? However, on what we have read so far, four fifth of the book, one might conclude that if anyone needs "saving" it is our actor???"<br /><br />My third comment on Chapter 8, which precedes this comment, ended by questioning the seriousness of the manner in which our author proceeded in a kind of Austrian SCHLAMPIGE manner for the once, happy go lucky, make it up as you write, with some wonderful portraits and love of nature and what not along the way.<br /><br />However, as the book's signature, GREAT FALLS, MONTANA SEPTEMBER 2011, indicates, we no longer take ourselves and our CASENESS - say Loser's in ACROSS/ CHINESE'S DES SCHMERZENS or that of AFTERNOON OF A WRITER - we don't take it all that seriously any more, we are less depressed, we<br />have found the woman of our life, we got religion, although it doesn't seem to be the "old time relidchun", the woman indeed must be "gut zu<br />ihm", and for once he dissembled when he told her, twice, that he "did not love her," she knew the sadism was fraudulent too, at this point, she has our man by the cojones, she is his altar and he knows it!<br />Besides, he makes her "feel like woman"... he goes to his office in the woods to write, but comes home at night, and always brings a few Pfifferlinge! We are a millionaire, the world's ugliness, it its cities and smutty skirts still irritates the hell out of our hypersensitive nerves, but now we only play "running amok" in our fantasy films, we spend a lot of time with the "grosse Tiere" [animaux majeure], exert a<br />certain beneficial influence on them, but too few of the KLEINVIEH is reading us, they do not seem to appreciate http://www0.hku.hk/philodep/ch/lang.htm [Crudeness in linguistic theory stands as one of clearest signs of the philosophical "Dark Age" that<br />followed. ]<br /><br />Thomas Mann wrote Felix Krull a the end, Handke writes a kind of half-serious clown actor book, although I very much doubt that this is<br />his swansong! Handke always had "einen Jux will er sich machen" in him from the very first: what are the insults at the end of PUBLIC INSULT but a drum roll from Haydn's SURPRISE SYMPHONY. Or the Milena<br />Findeisens of this world http://www.zeitzug.com suffer serious cases of Gefuehlsduselei, and then there is the vaunted SERBIANA<br />http://serbianna.com/ for whom St. Peter has been resurrected as Pyotr Sivec! Alas. And then there is Scott and his http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/<br />and there is I and my http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html<br />complex who has approached the bastard child from every which angle and finds the angelic wings a bit besmirched yet thrives on the angelic writing. What I miss so far in DER GROSSE FALL is the to be expected chorus of http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Erinyes.html and<br />http://tinyurl.com/3uygc7w But there is a final chapter, # 9 to come!Scott Abbotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01782322856303315648noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8494024784324680939.post-8091221501051060922011-07-28T14:31:25.378-07:002011-07-28T14:31:25.378-07:00the sheer
sensuality of Catholicism as it affects ...the sheer<br />sensuality of Catholicism as it affects every sense<br />would have been imprinted on me as by Mother Goose.<br /><br />oh how I love to be hit between the eyes and heartmichael morrowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18410891595453473987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8494024784324680939.post-5437873910314570572011-07-28T14:07:00.465-07:002011-07-28T14:07:00.465-07:00I'm beginning to see why I would make such a b...I'm beginning to see why I would make such a blind comment like "language is archaic". communication at the speed of thought, at my level of inability to describe personal feelings and objective observations is at best a philosophical cop-out. Thank you for conducting and continuing this exceedingly informative discussion..... <br /><br />I am getting graduate school experience without the politics...another short-sighted observation about experiences I have shied away from for fear of over exposure.michael morrowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18410891595453473987noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8494024784324680939.post-31240845380990025892011-07-27T19:33:39.019-07:002011-07-27T19:33:39.019-07:00http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/
[July 27 - the...http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/<br />[July 27 - the discussion started more than a week ago<br />and there are postings each day, right hand column leads you there]<br /><br />Scott's LEFT HANDED WOMAN essay ctd. at: http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/54/<br /><br /> Everyone experiences the biblical stories, but without the events; everyone travels at some time to Emmaus, but nothing approaches one except -- powerful emptiness Peter Handke (Phantisien der Wiederholung) indeed, and DER GROSSE FALL mentions that<br />God is everywhere in his absence! I myself hold with Paul Celan who noted the disappearance of God,<br />taking recourse the same mystical tradition but one where Jewish and Christian mysticism overlap. My own<br />"psycho-physicist" - Handke's derisive term for psychology as it has become as refined as physics, probably<br />including sociology - that is, his anti-enlightenment stance - is of course not shared by me, and I regard<br />that position on the part of someone who then claims to have been a life long curious student as making<br />him, how shall I put it, anything but Goethean, who, although he was in error in trying to dispute Newton, at least<br />came up with an aesthetically pleasing color theory, and also was interested in the morphology of forms.<br />Handke in his relationship to Wittgenstein's and the philosophy of language, however, also has a positivist streak.<br /><br />I once had dinner with Barnett Newman, my much older friend, the German emigre writer Ruth Landshoff<br />York took me along, in the early 60s, I recall a particular basement restaurant in Chinatown [NY], where I then went many times,<br />I recall Newman as a bulky man this photo does not bring him back to mind:<br /><br /><br />and then I looked at a lot of his work, don't think I ever saw "the stations<br />of the cross"<br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkl1erbB9-Q<br /> and if it had not that name would your response be<br />anything resembling, both aesthetically and empathically, and then<br />philosophically as to say:<br /><br />more el greco at: http://tinyurl.com/3equ3ur<br /><br />and the topic renaissance depictions of the station:<br /><br />http://tinyurl.com/4yhq2d6<br /><br />I happen to like Newmann's work, although Rothko<br />feels more kindred with his color poetry,<br />but I really cannot name or maybe do not want<br />to then give words to what they evoke in me.<br /><br />It once occurred to me, at a todos santos mass in the Cathedral<br />at Burgos, the heart of Spain, that if I had been a choir boy<br />there, or perhaps merely attended services there, the sheer<br />sensuality of Catholicism as it affects every sense<br />would have been imprinted on me as by Mother Goose.<br /><br />As it was not, I have an easier time in finding the<br />enshrinement of this story as representative of human<br />existence, abhorrent, with a lot of hokum, such as<br />the resurrection and miracle - probably as strongly<br />as Nietzsche is how I feel. Handke was meant to be a priest<br />and he has become a priest of language and what would<br />I do without him in that respect? You seem to be right<br />in finding a formal organizing use of the stations of<br />the cross in LEFT HANDED WOMAN, and it looks a lot like<br />"the actor" is going through some of these stations too<br />or other Catholic stations, but seems to want to have<br />the cross and eat it too! As a text for Catholic children<br />it would seem to contain a few fire crackers!<br /><br />I have no problem with Handke's aesthetic with is not some<br />kind of abhorrent aestheticism a la Ernst Juenger or X<br />because I am aware only too keenly of what PAIN he suffers<br />from the aesthetically ugly, to the point of nausea at one time.<br /><br /><br />With Handke's IMMER NOCH STURM premiering at the Salzburg<br />Festival on August 12 I wanted you to know that I will initiate a<br />discussion of that PLAY AND NOVEL AS PLAY at the handke-drama.blogspot<br />on or about that day:<br /><br />http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2010/05/index-page-for-this-and-all-other.html<br /><br />http://www.nachrichten.at/nachrichten/kultur/art16,677642SUMMA POLITICOhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11214697505465094305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8494024784324680939.post-34031490545656178802011-07-26T20:15:00.248-07:002011-07-26T20:15:00.248-07:00I will reply at some length after re-reading our e...I will reply at some length after re-reading our essay. Certainly Handke finds new forms for each of his books, corresponding to the stages in his life - as I tried to point out: our nameless actor is no longer the KEUSCHNIG of A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING who comes on a few items that remind him of his child - sentimental objects - and love burst through and his suicidal state of mind, which his text conveighs so powerfully to its reader disappears, the rage wanes. Here, at the outskirts of Paris, caught in an imagined film of complete mayhem in which he sees himself running amok, he finds the only solace in a church: the tolling of a church bell leads him there, and when he leaves after the most ordinary kind of earthly sacred meal with the priest, in which he he has become an earthly priest [in the imagined film in which he lives]... if you follow me... it is a film... it is a proposition, as all of Peter's books are, they exist the aesthetic realm of the "as if".... the craftsman lyric narrator's job is to make you and me experience the proposition as authentic... that is why I find this neighbors beating up on each other unsuccessful, it reminds me why the suggestion and that was all it was in NOMAN'S-BAY that the Germans were at war was merely puzzling enough for now. x m.rSUMMA POLITICOhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11214697505465094305noreply@blogger.com