# 9 SENDING RE MCDONALD-HANDKE: INTRO TO SCOTT ABBOTT'S LETTER TO THE AMERICAN SCOLAR

# 9 SENDING of 12
Below you will find Professor Scott Abbott's [Princeton/ University of Utah] letter to The American Scholar apropos its calamitous publication of M. McDonald's utterly ignorant piling on Handke for his association with the Big Bad Wolf from Porogavic.
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.html
Abbott's missile also appears at the blog of record for this controversy:
http://www.handke-discussion.blogspot.com
I would think that Editor Wilson, who has so besmirched this once lustrous journal, is ruing the day that he hooked up with McDonald. Well, let him rue it longer than the 15 yard penalty that you get for "piling on" in American futbol! And in doing so when much of Handke's work exists in translation; and controversy was accessible in great detail on the web either at the Spiegel/ Perlentaucher site:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/809.html
or in my by no means uncritical evaluation of its complicated and contradictory nature at:
http://www.artscritic.blogspot.com/
or at:
http://www.kultur.at/lesen/index.htm [dem handke auf die schliche/ prosaa book of mine about handke, on line, in German]
not to go even more deeply into it at:
http://www.handkeyugo.scriptmania.com
as someone writing for "The American Scholar" might have done.
Sing sorrow!
Do not hesitate to pass on this communication, or to write to Editor Wilson [address in cc field] and the board of The American Scholar, or to comment at the blog, if the spirit so strikes the fingertips.
yrs. v. truly, Michael Roloff, Nordic Totem Animal.

Of the seven Handke texts that deal with Yugoslavia, four of them of some exertion, only a one is in English, but also, in part, on line. If I were still a publisher, I would put all seven out as one volume, of about 500 pages, and have them annotated, and with an holographic appendix of the disintegration, with time line, of the disintegration, of the federated Balkan states, what an interesting publication that would be! Unfortunately, on the heels of J.S. Marcus/ NYRB
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=13838
a point by point decimation of J.S.Marcus' utterly superficial idiot take on Handke's writing can be found at
htt://www.handkeprose.scriptmania.com
But Marcus was the originator, in this instance, of disavowing a writer's political stance, and then using it to try to destroy him as a writer. In that respect, the NYRB is not one iota better than any other hatchet mag. The will protect their own - Sontag, Mailer - even when, in the latest self-advertising instance, Viagra produces the dregs of the once hopped up.
Not one U.S. publisher, scholarly or otherwise, has the courage or imagination to pursue such a venture. Translated by Scott Abbott & with and essay by him, but edited by someone less under the sway of the sharpie from Griffen. Scott's commentaries , for once, do not commit the usual deadbeat taxidermy, in this dire post-menstrualist age...
NOW HERE SCOTT ABBOTT: