yes a page of handke a day with your apple....

I am finally finding, making the time to catch up on some recent Handke publications, the prose text KALI [note Lothar Struck's take @ his http://begleitschreiben.twoday.net/topics/Peter+Handke/ ] which struck me, at once, as yet a new departure with a music I had not heard before. I read quite a few reviews about a year ago, one particularly stupid and condescending one from an idiot by the name of Hubert Spiegel of the FAZ , but I will not have an own opinion until I have read the text several times. The next prose work, once called Samarra, but now "Morawische Nacht"- [although the Suhrkamp on line catalog doesn't know this] http://www.suhrkamp.de/_download/vorschauen/Suhrkamp_2Halbjahr_2007.pdf is nearly upon us. 500 plus pages. not such a big deal for someone who needs to write one good page a day to stay well in this world!I read around the correspondence between Handke and H. Lenz, especially the 1985-1987 period, it provides an interesting view of Handke as the "ewige Sohn" [eternal, a forever son] and is quite lovely. In the matter of Lenz, Handke and Thomas Mann are of the same opinion, perhaps that will make our man relent on thinking Mann a "very bad writer" on the basis of Mann's book about a man and his dog. I first read a Lenz in the late 50! but it did not become a habit. Handke rescued him from total neglect. Among the secondary works of whose existence I was unaware of is
Die narrative Performanz des Gehens : Peter Handkes "Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht" und "Der Bildverlust" als Spaziergängertexte
by Volker Georg HummelI browsed in it, a worthy and appropriate aproach recalls this once slow walker in the chapparal of the St. Monicas as he was synchronously reading, being exposed to the slowing paces of The Repetition, and felt as close to being as he has ever, halfway consciously, and will read the Hummel in it's entirety.http://uwashington.worldcat.org/search?q=handke%2C+peter&fq=&sd=desc&start=161&qt=next_pagegives you a list of the entirety of their collection and also access to published reviews etc.I would have you note that though these two new Handke books have been at the UW, where I was visiting scholar for a decade, no one has as much as cracked a page, much less checked them out of the library. This of the one of the few living writers in the language whose course is worth following from decade to decade. What a departement it is, claiming to be the 10th best in the nation! If they are tenth and make bones about it... what a discipline ... but let me stop right here.I just completed a good rough of a screen play [in one month] and am quite deep into a novel THE DARLINGS AND MONSTER SPIRAL,but will complete my commentary on Coury /Phillip, I promise.As you may have heard, a French court awarded Handke a judgment against the Nouvelle Observateur for defaming him in claiming that he had denied the massacre of Srebrenice, etc. Nonetheless, the righteous humanitarians have done their damage... The National Theater in London is mounting a performance of THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER [in a new translation ! where no text is spoken!... someone must want Gitta Honegger's royalties; after all, though not up to snuff as a reading text, as it ought to have been in this case, it certainly suffices to give a director proper directions what to do. What is needed is a reworking of her attempt to translate THE ART OF ASKING... where the spoken language makes all the difference. Here in Seattle in the late 90s Steve Pearson worked from a translation of HOUR by the hideous but bright Roger Downey, who knows why, I didn't ask.OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE / PUBLIC INSULT is having its [hear hear] New York City Premiere in January I worked it there for many months with a small troupe in the the late sixties, Michael Locascio was part of that, now of La Mama, but it was never officially reviewed; nor was Herbert Berghof's and my work at the HB Studio where I also first worked with E.G. Marshall getting Kaspar into Amurrican shape. SELF-ACCUSATION is having performances in D.C. , starring bush/cheney in true christian mode! self-flagellating until the Potomac turns blood red.Note my essay on these translations at http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com
MICHAEL ROLOFF

NY TIMES MURDERS HANDKE ONCE AGAIN

Over the Hills and Far Away
By NEIL GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/books/review/Gordon-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=books


It is time readers of the New York Times Book Review were made aware
of Handke, the prose writer, having gone through something like half a
dozen changes. Starting of as a supremely playful demonstrator of the
quelling of anxiety in his first three novels, only the third, GOALIE
[1969], exists in English [in my translation], his nausea, once
including words [he now fondles them] is not like Sartre's idea-driven
kind, but has psychosomatic origins; is the nausea produced by what
for him is "the ugly;" no matter that it hits the same nerve. And that
his hyper-sensitivities are uniquely his.

If Mr. Gordon were as exacting as he says Handke is, he might have
noticed that Handke already shifted to a more open hearted
mytho-poeic, but equally if not more exacting, position in the 1975
LEFT HANDED WOMAN, [whose personae resembles that of the woman subject
of the current DEL GREDOS] the book just preceding A SLOW HOMECOMING,
whose Alaska section must be one of the most articulated responses to
nature in world literature for its selectivity in naming.

What entered Handke's writing shortly after HOMECOMING, in THE
LESSON OF ST. Victoire, was the pictorial Cezanne re-arrangement of
reality {"Close your eyes and see the world arise anew", the opening
sentence of his 1984 Salzburg novel ACROSS, provides a hint.}

With THE REPETITION [1987, "retrieval"] a book fabulously praised
in The Guardian, the promised re-write of both his first novel, DIE
HORNISSEN [1966], and of SORROW BEYOND DREAMS [1972 – Gordon even
manages to find a negative take on Handke's emotionally most
immediately accessible highly praised book], Handke's search ["I want
to be someone like somebody else was once" KASPAR, 1968; OBIE 1972]
rearranged his roots in his Slovenian grandfather and uncles' region;
which provides a hint to the unnecessarily baffled Professor Gordon
why Handke might prefer a continuous existence of the Yugoslav
Federation over its decimation into small consumer entities; his
defense of the Serbs and Milosevic against the more customary "one
devil" theory of history and journalism.

With the three narratives in THREE ESSAYS [especially ON THE
JUKE-BOX, 1989], culminating in the six-sided weaving self-portrait of
himself - as the once nauseated ex-cultural attaché Keuschnig [of 1974
A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING], as writer, painter-filmmaker, priest, stone
mason, super-finicky misanthropic restaurateur, and reader, in the
1994 magnum opus ONE YEAR IN THE NO-MAN'S BAY, Handke demonstrated for
stretches – he is the greatest of exhibitionists – the capabilities of
narrative as pure writing music image, as he did already in the 1986
ABSENCE, a narrative that a reader experiences like film.
Subsequent to NO-MAN'S-BAY he then demonstrated that you could zoom like a camera, in the 1996 ONE DARK NIGHT I LEFT MY SILENT HOUSE, into the mind of an apothecary, in the improbably named, Salzburg suburb
Taxham, and make that fellow's dream syntax absorb the readers'
projections, a feat worthy of the Joyce of FINNEGAN FUNAGAIN; and in
his 2005 DON JUAN, the fugueing novella that followed the 2003 GREDOS
he showed that you could write both forward and backward in time while
standing in one place. - I know it is all a little much, the fellow
just turned 65 and has published 60 books, and sometimes I wish I'd
never set eyes on him, but he can't help it, he must write to stay
healthy; his symptom is his salvation. And it is that of real readers whose minds his self-state inducing work opens up.

It matters little that the so other-opinion-oriented Mr. Brown's
search for "opinions" yields so little of note; or that Handke is the
whipping boy of miserable reviewers chosen by overly busy editors.
Gordon has searched poorly. REPETITION and NO-MAN'S BAY are regarded,
rightly I think, as two of the great novels of the past hundred years,
e.g. William Gass's estimate of them. Since Gordon cites the Book
Forum review

http://bookforum. com/inprint/issue=200703&id=264

I would like to point out that as a professor of literature he might be
aware of the classical tradition of Goethe, Stifter, Flaubert, Hermann
Lenz and Bove in whose steps Handke, the last great walker on the
earth, exerts himself as someone who is so infinitely of his medium's
contemporaneous possibilities; and to sensitive responses in the

1] LA TIMES/ Thomas McGonigle

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-mcgonigle8jul08,0,2189379.story?coll=la-books-headlines

2] Washington Post/ Guy Vanderhaegen

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/26/AR2007072601638.html

3] San Franciso Chronicle
Crossing the Sierra de Gredos
San Francisco Chronicle - CA, USA

as well as to sites and blogs I and others run on Handke, accessible

via: http://www.handke.scriptmania.com

These not only contain a wealth of material, but there Handke, his
own severest critic, also is critiqued on his own terms; and flinches
at every lash of the whip!

Gordon's reading of DEL GREDOS shows me that he is the wrong
reader, that is a non-reader, responder for this book, written in large part to memorialize, salvage a landscape. He bristles at being shook up.

Andrea GCOURY/ PILIPP # 6 Andrea Gogroef-Voorhees on HANDKE/ NIETZSCHE

Andrea Gogroef-Voorhees piece on HANDKE/ NIETZSCHE now posted @: http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/
http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/

========================

COURY/ PILIPP # 6.

I am skipping ahead – leapfrogging the detailed comments for 5-b Pilipp - to Andrea Gogroef-Voorhees’ piece on HANDKE/ NIETZSCHE.

Comments on [1] Handke/Nietzsche; [2] Narcissism; [3] “The Child”;

[4] Fragmentariness, etc.

==============================

First of all LYNX to the few worthwhile reviews that ACROSS THE SIERRA DEL GREDOS has achieved so far in the USSR. I am just wondering whether someone in Krautland noticed that GREDOS is a hugely expanded version of LEFT-HANDED WOMAN?? Certainly no one here has.

1] LA TIMES/ Thomas McGonigle

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-mcgonigle8jul08,0,2189379.story?coll=la-books-headlines

2] http://bookforum.com/inprint/issue=200703&id=264

3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/26/AR2007072601638.html

4] Crossing the Sierra de Gredos
San Francisco Chronicle - CA, USA

More perceptive in some instances than I had anticipated, but hugely ignorant of context and form and Handke’s development as prose writer.

ASK COM HANDKE SITES

http://es.ask.com/web?q=handke&l=dis&o=1089&qsrc=999&qenc=ISO-8859-1

THE COMPLETE REVIEW HANDKE REVIEWS

the Literary Saloon - http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm

A HANDKE FESTIVAL

http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2981967

http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2980214

=============================

Let me say right off the bat that I am astounded Ms. Voorhees doesn’t know Handke’s ZARATHUSTRA, Ueber die Doerfer!!!! [WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, ARIADNE PRESS*] The culmination of his “Homecoming” quartet, his Goethean/Eurepedian/ Hoelderlin/ Shakespearan summa of his abilities at that point! A TRUE apotheosis! And that Ms. Voorhees didn’t have an editor to point this out! “Sweet and delicate is the cadence of their speech” or however its quote from the otherwise so ressentiment-filled Ecce Homo. Handke’s most generous work, his paean to his “village”, his Credence Clearwater Revival song to the aristocracy of the working class, and then some! The work that can also be regarded as consisting(*) [The reason that this publication is practically unknown has to do with the fact that Ariadne Press, promises to the contrary, never even sent review copies to Publisher's Weekly or Library Journal. Only petit-bourgouis academics can be both that spendthrift, arrogant, and cloistered, such deadbeats. Nor render royalty statement, whatever they may amount to; and take 10% from the Austrian translation grants to help defray their spendthrift ways. http://www.ariadnebooks.com/

http://www.ariadnebooks.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=1572410000

]
as entirely of a series of haikus,

the work that consists also in some sense entirely of quotes as those poor Benjamin scholars are probably still trying to imagine from Benjamin’s dream of such a thing. The work of which he feeds even in Sierra del Gredos.

Ms. Voorhees heart is in the right place, and her essay is worth reading, though I can’t say I learned anything new from it, but it contains a lot of fine reminders. Yet how is it possible except in Germanistik to write in such a pedestrian fashion about two writers of this kind! Also, her piece is by and large part of the non-productive yet incestuously referential daisy-chain of Handke studies.

Now a few pointed comments.

1] You could also do a Handke/ Stifter monograph; or Handek/ Stifter and Eichendorf or, preferably, a Handke + the German classics on the part of someone who wanted to be a living classic during his life time and thus redeem the classics in the postwar WW II German language, and found the kind of publisher with similar ambitions. The Celan connection isn’t immediately present to me, but I am always glad to be enlightened. Yes Handke revivifies them!

In the mid-70s Handke wrote me, as part of a letter, to the effect: “I am able to do anything now as a writer.” Which without giving it the requisite thorough thinking through that such a statement required, I nonetheless understood to mean, if he were composer he felt capable of achieving every effect, had control of all formal possibilities. Nonetheless, what then followed, starting with the more mythic and openhearted [1977] Left-handed Woman which was his way of working his way of the crisis-ridden Paris Period [1971-1975, Weight of the World, Nonsense and Happiness, A Moment of True Feeling, that “moment” yes is the “Wende” which Ms. Voorhees keeps mentioning without understanding how it came about] from 1979 Langsame Heimkehr to W.A.T.V and The Repetition to The Art of Asking to Absence the Three Assayings to No-Man’s Bay to the 2005 Don Juan pretty much takes my breath away, its breadth and depths do. So I regard the various writers from whom Handke has learned, whom the word needy has absorbed – and it is an immense list – as having been amalgamated within his capacities as a writer/ dramatist/composer. So what is interesting is the process of amalgamation, that would be a major dissertation, and for that you need to go down into the dream mine.

Ms. Voorhees does fine work in tracking down Handke’s statements about his relationship to his now companion Nietzsche, except of course for the huge W.A.T.V. lacuna, which is like knowing a ship but not its engine. In tracking the affinities, she forces the issue occasionally without proving them; yet fails to note the immense differences, i.e. what trans-valuation occurs in the upwardly mobile classic Handke? Well, yes, he finds priestly love of the world in himself, the old derisiveness, by and large becomes balanced, but Loser of Across and the writer of The Afternoon of a Writer are pretty much the same unhappy consciousnesses of A Moment of True Feeling with the huge difference of what better writers they become! The second “Wende” [major psychic turn] really occurs with the research and writing of The Repetition, Handke’s rewriting of both Die Hornissen and Sorrow Beyond Dreams, his installation of his Slovenian grandfather, the eternal cusspot Sivec, as the the internalized father figure/ compass which compass he would follow all the way to the defense of the Yugoslav Federation. Meanwhile, Spain has become the home away from no-home, and I gladly follow him there from the decimated republic.

What relation if any does Handke have to the Nietzsche whose “es” inspired Freud’s “id”- “es lebt mich”?

The reason Handke is so important is that there may have never been a writer who understood his medium as well as he does, who is able to combine the medium of dream and writing and, in this historical period, film, dream films, and their syntax; who makes us experience and see anew, the way Nietzsche merely called for. His verbal actionism – it occurs during the duree of reading or experiencing some of his plays and in that sense is a realization. Who, as a dramatist, fulfills the promise of a non-Aristotelian catharsis? And does it so surreptitiously.

2] Narcissism

Which is neither healthy nor unhealthy, as Ms. Voorhees has it,

and the bloody discipline needs to get up to speed of Kohut and everything that has transpired in Self-Psychology since about 1975.

http://soldzresearch.com/PsychoanalyticResourcesOnline.htm

Handke - in adolescence he dreamed of appearing on the cover of Der Spiegel - is hugely dependent on response from the “mirror”, mirror response-deprived, surprising in a love child who was eyed with such love and approval until age two; hugely assertive before the mirror. So representationaly oriented! Look at the way his mode of dress has changed over the years. From Rock star hippie to Count zu und von Griffen.

Thus if the word narcissism is used, either in the pejorative sense, as so criminally by Durzak, or healthy: stop, take the time to learn what can be learned even without doing an analysis! Thus Handke’s feeling that Nietzsche was more troubled by a lack of response than the cerebral injuries and quite productive unloosing caused by progressive syphilis, ought to be understood as a projection [and I admit that I do not know to what degree the prophet in the wilderness was troubled by a lack of response.], Handke is so self-involved he nearly always projects - and talks about himself [yet in works such as W.A.T.V. and ART OF ASKING we sense that his SELF, when he writes, can contain a world. Our great author is translated into about 30 languages has had thousands of photos taken of himself, given hundreds of interviews and injects himself in front of any camera in sight! And yet manages to have himself portrayed as “media shy.” The desire for a mirroring response is huge and insatiable, and of course joyous when he is, so rarely, understood.

“Stay in the picture” as the mythical Oracle of Dordonna advises so multi-ambigously in the epitaph at the beginning of W.A.T.V.

What was the latest episode in the Handke media saga all about?

http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com [some handke material, too, the Milosevic controversy summarized]

Showing himself in front of a photo of Milosevic at the funeral! A statement from Paris would have sufficed. [And I happened to agree with Handke that M. at the time of his death had not been proven guilty and that to lay all responsibility at his feet was ridiculous.] With unfortunate and stupid consequences for a very great play, THE ART OF ASKING. Then the Heine Preis for someone who said just a year before that he did not want to accept any further prizes. And a couple of years further back that he would remove himself from the public stage, a statement that itself made news, and that did not really need to be made, it’s something you just do. [Fat chance, Handke will make sure that Handke in his death throes will be turned into a public spectacle like the death of one of his medieval kings!] Whenever a just cause comes to the fore, there is Herr Handke “the gnat in the navel of the economy!” [They Are Dying Out, 1973]

He needed the money to invite his translators to Spain! And Siegried Loeffler persuaded the jury. Then the to be expected outcry. And Handke could afford the grand gesture of refusing a prize the money for which he was not going to get anyway. Then pal Klaus Peymann creates a Berlin Heine Preis for our man. And not long ago Handke and Peymann and a troupe of journalist go to Kosovo where Handke, so he said, was “itching to get rid of some money” [50 K Euro], a pure media show! But then seems to have really enjoyed his time with an entirely male group from that Serbian enclave and their cheese and wine. “Play the Game,” as it also says in W.A.T.V. Except that Handke is insufficiently playful for me.

Handke is a media star and has the kind of publishing firm, the Unseld Verlag [a.k.a. Suhrkamp] that now needs him desperately, they don’t want him to leave as so many other authors have, to the extent of awarding him, who has written devastatingly about his Obergaunerleiter of a publisher,

[I worked for him and mince no words at http://www.roloff.freeservers.com/about.html ]

the first recipient of the 50 K Euro Unseld Preis. I, who really could use that kind of money, wouldn’t accept anything so named unless under extreme state of rendition. And Handke is smart enough to keep one egg warm in Austria, first with the Residenz Verlag, now with Jung Verlag that is led by Residenz’s once editor in jefe. This is not Nietzsche! This is someone who is a modern writer within the capitalist system who, however, makes few concessions to the commodity system, and is, perforce of what he is condemned to, immensely productive, 60 some books in about forty years, hundreds of books and dissertation, an industry in the making. An author, like Hesse, on whose work you can support an entire publishing house, and restart a culture.

None of the above lessens Handke’s extraordinary importance as a writer and dramatist. As do none of his personal failings, most of which he has no control over anyhow. Say his Tourette-like cussing, a frequent adjunct to autism.

Kohut is known as the savior of Psychoanalysis for the reason that he was willing to venture where Freud refused to. Freudian analysis is to Self-pschologically adumbrate analysis as Newton is to Einstein and Quantum Mechanics. You enter the world of psychic fission and fusion, and enter world of narcissistic rage and complicated vulnerabilities, of the injured grandiose self, that still characterizes Handke, but is that the wound whence he writes? Does he write out of a wound at all when he writes cradled in a the hollow of a fallen tree in some forest? “Your art is for the healthy,” he quotes N. in W.A.T.V. – and most fail to heed the ambiguity of this quote. The fruitful regression!

Let me give some examples of Handke’s narcissistic problematics aside the multiply motivated, driven need for mirroring and assertion. Even if Handke lacked his extreme autistic sensitivities [and the absence of modulating functions that go hand in hand with them] and had not had his decade long exposure to violent primal scenes as of age 2, there would be the motivation of knowing that he is a bastard child and of his lowly class and minority origins. Yet there he is with the taste of the most highborn staying only at the best hotels, more power to him I say who escaped those heights, rather equivo and uncertain-ly and insecurely into warmer regions already as a child. Handke wants to be the top dog, and has since early childhood, and all those who seek to take some of his limelight are regarded as “space displacers” [ZURUESTUNGEN FUER DIE UNSTERBLICHKEIT] a wonderful formulation though he may think that it is perfectly all right for him to displace so much, attract so much of the light and space in newspapers and magazines.

Handke has done much good through the Petrarca now Lenz Preis which he persuaded his friend the media billionaire Herbert Burda to finance: but none of the recipients are of Handke’s stature, even approach it. Handke notes how blood-filled [blutruenstig] the ocean seems when writers are together in the water vying for the prize. Recently, during the Grass brouhaha Handke, from Spain, not having read the book Peeling the Onion, let loose a patented righteous broadside against the wounded big shark Guenter Grass, “una vergenza”… to get his own name into the papers! I know whereof I speak since I was once in the belly of the beast and each of my scars is a novel.

It is evident that the 10 year exposure to violent drunken primal scenes had a permanently disfiguring effect on someone with his autistic sensibilities. Again, I suggest to look at the sequelae as he enumerates them in The Essay on Tiredness. It is within that crucible that a life long compulsive writer is born: insomnia, anxiety that is calmed by holding a pen, the need for a somewhat transfiguring cover, the in and out of dreams, THE WRITING ON THE DREAM SCREEN [Bernard Lewin] that accounts for Handke’s tweaking of reality “Close your eyes and the world appears anew”, the opening sentence of ACROSS/ CHINESE DES SCHMERZENS is nearly programmatic and points to the kind of “realistic” writer Handke has become. Written on a dream screen in a cool dissociated dream state he indeed can produce the finest pure writing this side of heaven - but violence keeps breaking in and through - especially in books such as Absence or Don Juan or The Essay on the Juke Box or long stretches of Del Gredos or No-Man’s Bay. And that he is then pleased when he regards how well done his books are is not some kind of narcissistic excess, since this finding involves a reflexive critical function, and so is healthy and sound. Right: how can one be certain that one hasn’t fooled oneself during the writing? There are no absolute standards except one’s own gods. This regarding of the then printed text is also an act of self-reincorporation of something, if it was prose, that has been written in pencil for decades now. Only the plays are typed, one other reason I imagine that they also make a more objectified impression. The prose is extraordinarily intimate no matter how objective seeming. Handke scarcely revises his manuscripts, although, like Proust, he now revises and adumbrates his galleys [Fahnen].

Handke’s effect on the reader I think can be best understood in terms of the “states of mind” he creates, both in some of his plays, [the shearing away of all opinions] and his prose texts. Again: Self-Psychology can account for that. He manages to make his readers, his audience see afresh; but as compared to Nietzsche, Handke is also a positivist in the knowledge of the effect that his effects will have. “Nothing but a writer.” Indeed

Narcissism [b]

A hunger for acknowledgement before the mirror, a clothes horse, modish, someone who vets all collections of essays about him done by his publishers of anything critical or derogatory: the wish to be, appear immaculate, uninjured. And then in his public explosions brings no end of obloquy on himself! There is the Handke with the pen, and there can also be Handke the loudmouth. W.A.T.V. most likely will be the most complete account he will give of his multitudinousness.

Now let me turn to an instance of injured narcissism in the life of the writer. In the early 70s Handke wrote a pretty devastating and funny piece on the critical procedures of Reich-Ranicki which can be found on one of the http://www.handke.scriptmania.com sites; anyhow, it is on line.

RR, who has his points, except especially when it comes to Handke, and is sensitive, too, repaid the derision many times over, especially in an unusually obtuse review of the so wonderful LEFTHANDED WOMAN, I think he said it was a rewrite of an Ibsen play, Nora. The Lecon of Saint Victoire contains a famous passage of a bulldog shitting all over an air field runway and barking through a fence. I must say, I was rather surprised to see Handke say that everyone knew that he had RR in mind. RR had gotten to Handke to the extent that he committed an act of what is called “projective identification”: that is, he had expelled what he hated most in himself [hateful things having to do with the anal sphere, oral aggressive matters, on the part of someone who is afraid of dogs! And in general is easily frightened, that is, afraid of his own violence.]. It is an instance of the kind of rage that Handke commits rarely in writing, a true dream moment, endlessly in his tirades during the Yugoslav controversy, and which he permits himself, calling his rage sacred! And the greatest controlled and counter-posed literary examples can be found, you guessed it, in W.A.T.V.!

Thus one could say that Handke is the kind of fellow who can’t stand the heat in the kitchen and so ought to stay out of it. Analytically speaking it points to the fury unloosed at an attack on a text with which he has totally identified himself, i.e. on his self. That fact that he is utterly justified in attacking the so obtuse [when it comes to Handke] Reichs-Kanickel unlooses the fury with the ease of dia or I ought to say logorrhea. RR of course is smart enough to know this, and so keeps waving the red flag [“I am no longer working as a full time reviewer and I will spare myself reading 800 closely printed pages of the Del Gredos monstrum, I never thought Handke was all that important.” And the Handke bull dog kept charging; also a lot in NO-MAN’S BAY where his smart publisher Unseld is taken to task for using media star RR as an anthologizer. Now RR has invaded his own publishing house! Is given star treatment!

Handke himself - in reflecting on narcissism - is stuck at the Freudian / Newtonian stage as we can read in the short recit he introduces on the subject in ONE DARK NIGHT: if no one loves you, you can at least love yourself. His texts all have a letter in a bottle quality to them. Actually Handke’s texts drew more love out of me the past 20 some years than anything else!

3] Ms. Voorhees approvingly cites Handke’s objecting to some women objecting to his upbringing of the first of his two girl children. Ms. Voorhees is apparently obtuse to the entirely defensively aggressive nature of that passage. Well, let me tell you all something.

This child was presented to me in Spring of 1969 in Berlin when I had come to go over my translation of Kaspar with Handke, and I always felt glad that I went goo-goo eyes with babies, and was not an overly busy revolutionary. And I thought it perfectly normal and unobjectionable to be shown the fruit of the loin of someone whose work I was translating. [But utterly weird to be told after I had outplayed him at Taroq in 1980 that he would withhold showing the briefly retrieved runaway wife! Handke the forever petulant child –itself a matter that makes the analytically aware of a troubled childhood.]

The next few times that I saw this child she was perhaps 5 and 6 years old, and you couldn’t help but be struck how dumbstruck, intimidated she seemed. If you read Child Story and Weight of the World and Nonsense and Happiness, focusing on this subject, you will be less surprised. Handke may deserve every literary prize in the world, he will never win for being a father or husband. He is lucky, it gives him more time to write. The injury that produced the crisis during the first Paris period was being left by a neglected wife: “The worst thing that ever happened to me.” Well no, far worse was the decade long exposure to violent primal scenes.

Later then, in the late 80s, “the child” suddenly entered Handke’s poetics as a subject, as though no one in the world had ever given “the child” a thought! Handke can be so daft. The Child knocks its stick peremptorily on the floor of the stage at the end of W.A.T.V. Later then, Handke expressed severe regret at how severely, how neglectfully he treated his first child, writing was easy by compare, “if only.”. But at the time of writing A CHILD STORY [1980] he didn’t want women friends criticizing him. He is defensive as hell. Meanwhile, he has become the typically compensating dad with girl child # 2, Léocadie Handke-Semin That she may not be another space cadet! See the 2001 “fairy tale” Lucie in dem Wald mit den Dingsbums, which reads like a left out chapter from No-Man’s-Bay.

Handke also deserves the prize for having contradicted himself more than anyone else in a long time. So if one writes on matters of this kind, as Ms. Vorhees does… you need to regard all the texts from the first Paris period; no inside dope, just reading the contemporaneous books, it is all there for the obvious inference. The great exhibitionist does not withhold much.

4] Handke as unsystematic thinker…

I read the Puetz about 20 year ago now, and am drawing a blank, but feel sufficiently confidant that I don’t think I need to go look up his book again now.

First of all, I don’t think, which means that I do think, that Handke will not go down in history as an epecially good “thinker”, no matter that, at times, he fancies himself a philosopher, but then who doesn’t.

However, as someone who has formal control of texts of between 30-40 K words, of 8^th Symphony like productions, he will. Or as someone who near systematically explores the formal possibilities of a discovery, say of the Sprechstuecke, during his avant garde period. I think my enumeration of how these possibilities are then amalgamated, absorbed and retained if transformed in THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT EACH OTHER is on-line already at

http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com [the drama lecture]

As a formalist, however, Handke is quite rigorous if imaginative throughout, even in the so misanthropic, SUBDAY BLUES [see

http://www.handkedrama2.scriptmania.com for a 3 k word explication of this exploitation of that side of our man]. The most lucid recent example is his DON JUAN which moves simultaneously forward and backward in time and space as it keeps tightening the narrative noose.

Die Geschichte des Bleistifts…[“L’histoire de crayon” for those of you who have French but no German] shows the kind of thought that the forever developing Handke gives to his writing… and so it is as a philosopher of language and what it can do that he has entered the pantheon. Ganscher in his famous interview points to a certain linguistic naturalism; true, it has been there since the beginning, the word become earth.

And I think I will stop now. Next, either my detailed take on the so energetic Pilipp, but I am also itching to get to friend Thomas Barry’s two pieces on Handke early work and his the short non-fiction.

Michael Roloff, August 10, 2007

-- MICHAEL ROLOFF 714-660-4445Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS:
http://www.roloff.freeservers.com/about.html

"MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce}

"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben]

COMMENT # 5-A ON COURY/ PILIPP

COURY/PILIPP "WORKS OF HANDKE" COMMENTS # 5-A Inbox HANDKE

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# 5-A] of sequential, ultimately complete commentary on Coury/Pilipp's THE WORKS OF PETER [PJOTR] [SCHOENHERR-SIVEC] HANDKE!

now posted at

http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/

Apologies for the delay if noticed. First there was the American Scholar infamy

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.html

that I made every attempt to punish. This, too, can be accessed at the above blog. [1]

The first reviews of the SIERRA DEL GREDOS monster are coming in:

first review on-line at ArtForum:

http://bookforum. com/inprint/issue=200703&id=264

'Crossing the Sierra de Gredos' by Peter Handke
Los Angeles Times - CA,USA
Lost memories and loved ones, ethnic conflict and Don Quixote -- Handke's new novel is anything but skin-deep. By Thomas McGonigle, Thomas McGonigle is the ...
See all stories on this topic

Nothing of the requisite length and depth; it in the works here.

========================================================

Since few if anyone but the contributors have read the Coury/ Pilipp collection The Works of Peter Handke, let me begin by quoting Professor Pilipp's chief points, from his long essay The Quest for Authenticity, so the reader will have reference before, I hope, turning to the collection itself and to reading Handke and the three titles on which Pilipp focuses...

HERE Professor Pilipp's summary: "In The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Handke exposes the process of identity formation on the basis of a systematically linguistic world as arbitrary as yet inescapable and shows how individuals are enslaved by a confining, one dimensional system of normative significance. In A Moment of True Feeling, he illustrates an individual's attempt to rid himself of a thus constructed identity and the ensuing search for an existence beyond universally accepted conventions. Keuschnig's self-discovery is seen to succeed by his withdrawal into the realm of the subjective, aestheticizing and poeticizing the objective and rejecting the conventional in terms of moral, ethical, social and linguistic parameters. In The Left-Handed Woman, freedom from systematic definition and personality defining forces also proceeds from finding sanctuary in a solitary and meditative state where one detaches oneself from any external encroachments to achieve and preserve personal integrity."

Those who read these three wonderful progressively more seriously playful projection screen assemblages didn't imagine, did you, that they could be so klunkily described! Well, it's a profession that can turn Dante into heavy metal. I can't say that Pilipp is wrong in this take on GOALIE, "I am only accidentally I", after all, was KASPAR's last sentence prior to was it Martin Walser disabusing a youngish Handke of such programmatic statements. And I can't imagine that Handke seriously studied paranoid-schizophrenia, especially its linguistic consequences, to arrive at that conclusion, for this famous title. I don't think that platitude was what heated his imagination. But Pilipp is more interesting in detail, and I will come to that. And the disagreements become more interesting at that point, too.

First let me address the issue of authenticity. When I did the translation of the so central text to the great change in Handke, of WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, I felt that scarcely if ever had I come skin-close to as authentic a text. Every paragraph seemed shot through with dried chicken shit – the means employed to age, say, Spanish furniture into something saleable as having been worm-eaten for several hundred years! At no time, either, has Handke been that directly and explicitly truthful and complete about who he is, because he could transfigure and poetize it, make the grim story of his family life appear more digestible – one way of reading the text. W.A.T.V. contains a recollection of his first heart beat intra-uterine, of being struck dumb, as only the autistic can be ["the bull of silence on the tongue"], and W.A.T.V. is sufficiently objectified to be accessible to the emotional response not just of its translator but of real readers, those who have not gone dead, those who are open. W.A.T.V. became my heart test, few passed it over the years. Yet another way of regarding W.A.T.V. is as the work that the poor Benjamin scholars are still seeking to imagine, a work consisting entirely of quotations, for W.A.T.V. elicits worlds of references to the well read, yet without being literary in the unpleasant sense of that word; that feature, of being anchored, deeply within human literary history {e.g."The children run under the wind." Kafka], drenched, is something that marks Handke's work from as early on as the truck that Handke has t with quotes form American black mask writers Der Hausierer's, to deepen the dread and terror that the book shows such a masterly way of overcoming… by literary means… I understand the notion of meta-fiction in that sense only. Even then Handke was trying to write "all our story"… and fortunately the allegorical backbone of has always been concretely anchored, no matter the high and strong level of conceptual abstraction he shot for, say, in KASPAR, or DER HAUSIERER, or RADIO PLAY ONE, where he plays the scalas of pure anxiety like a virtuoso.

The impression of authenticity also infuses the works of the less emotional, early period of Handke's production. And if we did not have that impression, a purely subjective, though also then consensual one, I doubt we'd all be all that interested in our man.

Interesting, from the aspect of falseness, are those who suffer false selves, who are inauthentic, and who are unaware of it. The outright hypocrites, live lives successfully split, and suffer few agenbites of conscience. For this see D.W. Winnicott. They are boring, whether terminally or not becomes the criterion of taking them into treatment.

Yet there is the impression of authenticity, and there is an author's truthfulness: after writing A CHILD'S STORY, a book that managed to avoid mention of the child's mother, Handke said he looked forward to lying a little again. Save for the absent mother, A CHILD STORY strikes me as utterly truthful, a period during which I would see Handke occasionally.

Those who know how to read and read in the dozen ways that you learn to read psychoanalytically may recall the item from WEIGHT OF THE WORLD where Handke agrees with his therapist that he is at a remove from his feelings - from there my mind leaps to that MOMENT in A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING [later recalled by Keuschnig in NO-MANS-BAY] where K. catches sight of "a broken piece of mirror, a comb… a lock of hair." - Pere Handke not giving in to his suicidal impulses, that he used to say had pervaded his life, at the sight of some sentiment eliciting objects, what if there had been no daughter in Handke's life at that time? Well, he would not have felt so tied-down, as the departure of his first wife, from being the child's chief care taker, left him. Also, WEIGHT makes note of a brief stay in a Paris hospital, allegedly for heart valve problems. No, it was for tachycardia! And it turned out not to be a big problem, as he notes there; which a valve problem would be. And some Valerian derivative would make all the difference. Why was our man so upset? Why does the analyst Tillman Moser, whom none of the contributors appear to have read, treat A MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING under the rubric of ROMANE ALSO KRANKHEITSGESCHICHTEN, but not come to any definite conclusions as to the psychic crisis that its author detailed not just in MOMENT, but in the three long fugueing poems of NONSENSE AND HAPPINESS, and in WEIGHT, and which we can see pervading the earlier work and then fading as he enters a more mythic, open-hearted way of being in LEFT-HANDED WOMAN. Moser is on the money in detecting a narcissistic injury. It's source [s], its particular configuration remains mysterious to him, also since the autism had not become known at that time, and will until you get the basic configuration right: love child, exposed to depression intra-uterine; no birth trauma; two years of exclusive possession of the mother; first exposure to future internalized father figure, his mother's father, grandfather Sivec; inception of ten year exposure to violent drunken primal scenes upon the mother's re-joining her husband, Herr Handke, the forever hated stepfather; autism, which means ultra sensitivity of all senses which nauseas of all kinds; inception usually at age 2 to 3, ["nausea of the eyeballs", for God's sake!]; gauche public behavior; anxiety that ceases as soon as he starts to put pen to paper, or gets hold of the pen!; on the page exquisitely calm; withdrawal under the blanket and then into language… I think that's about as simply as I can put twenty years work on the case of Peter Handke. He enumerates the consequence for us in The Essay on Tiredness.

Handke learned to control the terror in his bed, and language becomes both blanket and control mechanism… exhibitionism, manifest of performance strength. Competitiveness.

Thus, authenticity is not to be confused or thought of identical with truthfulness – truthful would be the kind of factuality enumerated above which can make for a psychoanalytic monograph that needs to be written as empathetically as possible.

For Handke who is a pretty truthful writer even when he confesses it would be nice to lie a little again conceals the unhappy fact that the chief injury was the departure of first wife Libgart Schwartz, readers of SHORT LETTER could see it coming in that text! The wife's attempt to emotionally connect is translated into a physical haunting! So it isn't as though Handke were unaware of the removedness, however his autistic state prevents him from making the requisite contact. It would happen to him again about 25 year later with wife # 2. Besides, there is the being condemned to write to alleviate the basic anxiety.

Understanding becomes easier in retrospect if you happened to see the Wife # 1 and Handke together during that period. As a matter of fact: what took her so long! Left and for cause, for multiple causes. Not just because of her husband's extreme typical autistic emotional withdrawal either. Any mention of the child's mother in any of these texts? Well, in WEIGHT there is a negative comment about "L.'s" facile lyricism! CHILD'S STORY mentions the intercession of women acquaintances who complain about his treatment of his daughter. I myself would only have if I had seen him hit her. But I sure noticed how oddly subdued the girl was as a six year old.

WEIGHT notes how the girl approached her father, telling him she needed to pee. Our author mentions, "well, let's see what happens now!" The sadist persists when he doesn't happen to be engrossed in one work or the other.

Herr Wagner in this collection is then appropriately appalled at the violence wreaked on the daughter in CHILDS STORY. Well, not too surprising in the instance of someone who saw his violent stepfather violate his mother for an entire decade, from age 2 to 10, and who is so easily irritated. Psychoanalytically speaking, these are pretty simple matters. What is unusual is the great pathos with which Handke seeks to contain the ever-present violence in himself. There is the Salzburg girl friend who went public about Handke's violence towards her. Again: CHINESE DES SCHMERZENS leaves Loser's relationship, his breakup with the g.f. in the realm of the mysterious. That is appropriate to novels of course where explanations do not suffice, where intimations leave the mind, the projection screen room to roam.

What I want to say is that the impression of authenticity that a well wrought powerfully conceived and executed work of art conveys is, first of all, an impression on the part of the reader. A text may put you in a depressed state [as many Handke texts do] and you can even trace this state of mind back to Handke's intra-uterine existence, since his mother had to be depressed, losing the love of her life, marrying a surrogate, though using Handke texts as a homeopathic would be an unusual suggestion to make to the mildly depressed. Mild depression makes you a bit more realistic I think.

STATES OF MIND or SELF STATES as they are called, how he induces them may be the chief reason why Handke is worthy of our attention, how he makes us open to the world.

Handke may elicit, as of A SLOW HOMECOMING, great love for the author. You may make inferences about those elicitations, but also give thought to which if any of your own emotional components, Anlagen, come into play. So the issue of "authenticity", au courant as it may be, is not of paramount concern, I don't think. Whether we are we authentic reader responders might be.

What is the most authentic moment in GOALIE? I would say it is when Bloch sees those drops of water scurrying like ants on the hotplate: his state of rage, which anything can trigger into an explosion. A perfect metaphor for inexplicable rage.

When we come up with an answer for what elicits the rage - such as the Prater girl's asking him whether he is going to work today - we are only projecting ourselves into the projection screen that the author has devised. To catch the conscience of the king. That goes from the git-go of Goalie's opening whose grammatical sleight of hand puts the reader into an inescapable paranoid schizophrenic position of its protagonist. Authentic as hell! But devised by a cunning artist! An extremely confident artist by then who has learned to play as a virtuoso with his deepest and nastiest determinants. Free with pen at hand at his desk, or in the hollow tree trunk cradle in NOMANS BAY. An artist, as I realized some twenty years ago when taking apart the screenplay for Der Himmel ueber Berlin who is a great carpenter, collage artist, as he himself tells us - via his sometime woman traveling companion's quiltmaking - in The Lesson of St. Victoire, his great weaving of the sides of his self in NO-MAN'S-BAY: there may be an over-riding concept behind these productions, but its individual components – the wife haunting the protagonist of Short Letter, the woman personae of Left-Handed – all these protagonists, be they male or female are Handke personae – are inversions, the opposite of the state of affairs, and I think that it is best to approach an interpretation of Handke's "fiction" as though they had undergone the transformative process of the dream work. They might be regarded as the final formulation, the secondary revision where the dream is made socially acceptable and pretends to make sense to its creator and to us. These works, at that time, were all written within three months at most. They are post-experiential from an autobiographical perspective, they are the last working through, after the text is done the author can move on… DEATH MASKS … as to the autobiographical components, they are inverted, transposed. I see no need for any of the instrumentalities of what I call post-menstrualism., which shed so little light. Handke is scarcely unique in utilizing personal experience and immediate life stories and states of mind as the basis, source for generalizing communicative works of the imagination; each work is a self-cure! An abandoned husk of the self. However, he is especially confined to the immediately personal because his autism deprives him of large and I would say superfluous swaths of social experience that really are only useful if you become a social novelist or playwright. Yet Handke is scarcely lacking in the requisite empathy, but from a remove, for the entire world.

==================================

The three titles span approximately a six year period 1969-1975. GOALIE is pretty much the final product of Handke's demonstration how this second coming of Kafka is able to master, be victorious over anxiety, born to terror [as of age two, see more of this anon]. Yes, what with its frequent quotation: have any of these scholars ever pursued the significance of Handke's saying: "I am so anxious, but everything I write is then so calm," ??? A clue: might this be an instance of the heart of Breuer/ Freud's conversion hysteria, but it's reverse??? Might this be yet one major component of Handke's extraordinary productivity? Since the symptom keeps so victoriously being overcome, yet also asserting itself?

GOALIE is but a slither from DER HAUSIERER, and it is a far less "pure" work. It is not purely phenomenological, registering as are the "experience" parts of Hausierer, devoid, of course of their framing within an analysis of how a crime novel proceeds, the abstract literary distancing of the pure experience, which I would say is that of a child, a consciousness exposed to violent primal scenes; that's what lies in back of it, but of course does not "explain" the work. However a consciousness is always more than a consciousness once you allow of the unconscious and what may be transpiring in its realms. GOALIE is impure in the sense that it takes recourse to expressionistic directly telling sections, as Pilipp enumerates, it has a semblance of a story on which the reader can hang the coat of his self: It leaves less to the imagination than HAUSIERER. [more anon]. At it's end, where Bloch's surrogate goaltender, at one remove from himself, gets fucked, I always felt, projected that that was the moment when a policeman put a hand on his shoulder and said "You are under arrest." Doubly fucked. It certainly is one of the great arresting moment in literature! Bloch may even be based, as so many Handke characters are, day residues of a dream, on some acquaintance back in Griffen; after all, he returns in W.A.T.V. [where the three worker clowns are supposedly modeled on Griffen acquaintences] as Albin, who has spent time in jail, an ex-goalie monteur, who goes to porno houses [just as Handke did during the writing of the so self-chastening LEFT HANDED WOMAN], tosses fire crackers into crowds, and frightens passersby in the woods: the village sadist that I smelled on Handke at my second attempt to strike up a conversation in 1966, and as our village genius has it: "A smell sticks." Thus I propose that The Interpretation of Dreams be your guide to the complicated business of taking apart texts that were composed in dream states, which are anything but dreamy! That required the dissociation that Handke learned so well during his exposure to the primal scenes, if anyone, since Joyce, has been that powerful a dissociating artist I have yet to hear of him or her.

As a matter of fact, the very interesting psychoanalyst and historian Peter Lowenberg has proposed psychoanalysis as a proto-post modernist approach. Here is the link to his paper

http://www.etatsgeneraux-psychanalyse.net/archives/texte208.html

As to the arbitrariness of the signifiers: well, Bloch lives in a language world that misinterprets, he is the Handke of that period who is nauseated by language, and his chief difficulty really is that every sense perception signifies, he mis-filters or lacks the appropriate filters. It is a purely neurological condition that leads him not only to make impulsive misjudgements but puts him into psychotic states of mind. Handke play's a language game with one inverted letter, it all goes wrong. I am not sure that one derive a general proposition about the generation of syntax in all languages from this.

=============================

MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING is the prose text that follow SORROW BEYOND DREAMS, an account of his mother's life, written near immediately upon her suicide; a book he later called a projection, overstating matters a bit. Recall, that the onset of the mother's pains occurred during a period of its least likely period; for, her amazingly successful son was taking care of her financially, the dreadful stepfather husband was away at TB hospital, her pains were regarded as medically unspecified. "Born to be suicidal" is another of those Handke statements of that period. Indeed, if the cheerful face from 1966 to 1971 seems improbable in light of his Kafkaesque confessions, MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING derives from a genuinely suicidal state, the most interesting and complete, but not entirely, document of what I call the first Paris period being the collection of spontaneous notions collected in THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD. Indeed, one wonders, reading MOMENT and the three long fugueing poems in NONSENSE AND HAPPINESS and WEIGHT, what might be bugging the fellow. It isn't just the mother's suicide. Reading Handke as leaving ample traces of his autobiography - though it may be of states of mind we can see the crisis coming in SHORT LETTER LONG FAREWELL. There the protagonist's wife is haunting him, an emotional state translated into physical acting out. The chief trigger for the suicidal state that manifests itself is the being left by his first wife and finding himself confined by the responsibility of needing to parent his first daughter. "The worst thing that ever happened to me;" [well, no!] that is the agent for the crisis during which the ghosts, the consequences of Handke's early childhood trauma [the love child's decade long exposure, as of age two, in Berlin, to violent drunken primal scenes] take their toll; the being left and being left over and over by wives. {Read SORROW BEYOND DREAMS, read it closely and imagine what transpired in the psyche of its author during that period, there is an entire literature on the subject.] H.'s way of dealing with the childhood horror was to cover his eyes with a blanket! Lifelong hatred of the step father. Of Germans, of Germany. Rage. Handke's rage of that period does not strike out of the blue. And read his own excellent enumeration in THE ESSAY ON TIREDNESS of what are called sequaelae in the field I am most versed in. Insomnia is the only one of benefit to a writer I suppose, the ability to dissociate is another.

Readers of WEIGHT will recall that Handke had a brief hospital stay, for heart problems, tachycardia I believe, though he then propagated the fiction that he had congenital heart valve problems. Unlikely in light of his passing admission to the Austrian Army [see St. Victoire, where that achievement is the only thing the hated stepfather is ever proud of]. Libgart Schwartz, from what I was able to observe, left "for cause." Multiple causes. Thus, if Handke were to write an astringent autobiographical account of that difficult period, he would not formulate it as "Libgart Schwartz decided to resume her acting profession." [which she had never left, e.g. the film that Wenders made of GOALII] Reflections on one's own contribution to these breakups don't necessarily alleviate the injury, but Handke' lack of any kind of reflection on the fact that it takes two to tango… In WEIGHT Handke notes how he feels like a faggot with his ass stuck out in the air, an apt metaphor for the emasculating effect of an injury the leaving of a beloved can have on a male. In LEFTHANDED [an inversion of actual events, an imagined], we have the notation that her husband is peeing against some wall in company with his buddies. A regression, if you like, to male company. So it isn't as though the truth were entirely concealed, but it sure isn't foregrounded! The same goes for some matters that seem so mysterious in ACROSS [CHINESE DES SCHMERZENS] and THE AFTERNOON OF THE WRITER. None of which, I think, takes away from whatever conviction of their authenticity we take away from these texts.

Yet there is more: Handke doesn't just still suffer from occasional autistic states as he told Ganscher. Socially he continues to behave as awkwardly as an autist. The closest friends are instantly on mushroom rambles in the Chaville forest – however, restaurateur par excellence Handke will cook and display himself and his house to the media! Otherwise, he cannot suffer to have another, especially man, in his house. The uses of misanthopism – productivity for the possessed.

Autism is an exceedingly painful condition because autists, especially those on the high end, in the case of Handke on the genius scale, are sensitive on an entirely other order than what is usually accounted for as "hyper sensitive." If any of the Germanisten have given thought to expressions such as "nausea of the eyeballs", "so nauseated as to turn myself inside out," etc. etc. during that period I have failed to note it. These are cris de coeur. If you followed the most recent controversy, you may have noted Handke defending Milosevics against having the expression "autist" being used as a pejorative. Handke comments on the painfulness of that condition, he knows whereof he speaks. For sake of efficiency I have devised the shorthand, in this instance, of thinking of Handke as having the nose of your best hunting dog, the eyes of an eagle, the sonar of a bat, the antennae of... you name the creature… but lacking the processor for the sheer quantity of incoming [also from inside] information. You may recall Merseault' disgust in Sartre's LE NAUSE: that nausea is elicited by the profusion of an unending vegetative root system: Sartre, there, is made nauseous by an idea, although I have read that he also suffered from great disgust at sliminess and the like. Handke's nauseas, which began to cease with the taking of valium, and who knows of what other medications [you notice the gradual lightening of the once protective dark shades that he wore early on in his career, in the thousands of photos the exhibitionist has had taken of himself, or for which he has posed], his nausea is of an entirely different kind: and the most important thing about nauseas is that it is one of the organisms chief means of protecting itself. I was with Handke in the presence of three physically exceedingly unattractive people – his physical disgust was intense, and it was a healthe aversion also who these people were aside their looks.

A follow up to this sending in another week or so:

=========================================================

[1] It is scarcely that Handke, either as person or some of his products, is beyond critique; it's just that primitive, utterly ignorant obloquy, especially when published under once or supposedly august auspices need to be decimated. The authors as well the editors of such infamies - it also includes the McCain and General loving NYRB - need to be cut to the quick, their narcissistic injuries may act as reminders, don't bet on it, as they proceed in their shock and awe imperial ways where reality consists of their devising.

Then I am trying to finish a couple, too many very different books; there's a review of the SIERA DEL GREDOS BOOK in the works,