| Subject: | |
|---|---|
| Date: | |
| From: | |
| To: |
just a little excerpt - re ..MCDONALD - from the round-up on American reviews of Handke's work to make it a better Sunday all around... cheers from a muggy seattle. xx m.r
Handke Reception in the U.S. 1970-2008
[part of my long piece on De Gredos contains a round up]
Let me work my way up from the abattoir. Unfortunately it is extensive, but this finds me in a stable cleaning mode.
There, in that pit of abysms, resides a certain Michael McDonald "literary counselor" to "The American Interest" .. whose America whose "interest" one might ask, and you would get the reply "America First" but an America that consists of an military-industrial complex that has the genius of knowing that permanent conflict and making ever more enemies that will attack it so as to keep attacking them is the way to keep the ultimate sacred cow "the economy" going: "the ee-coo-nu-mee it lives for me, I lives for thee." American rapaciousness, and once I have robbed it, it is mine, and I dare you touch it to get it back! Ah, I've murdered the Cherokee now I drive a Grandee! Same old tribal murders and acquisitions, age old.
The "American Interest" is certainly in need of "literary counseling," if it has the right one in McDonald I doubt. Back in early 2007 in the American Scholar McD. charged Handke with committing Robbe Grillet in his 1974 novel A Moment of True Feeling without having even read the book, if he even know how to read, to which he thought the charge applied, taking recourse to what he thought might be "authority" in the intellectually utterly lazy John Updike who otherwise has claimed that Handke is the best writer in German, whatever "best" might be in this moron world of appraisals of steers for slaughter. First of all McD. with several hundred books and theses on Handke to avail, and one precisely on the subject of Handke and Robbe-Grillet, misses the one book where Robbe-Grillet's grid actually served as a holding mat for a consciousness' phenomeonlogical registration, Der Hausierer. Handke needs RG like a hole in the head for AMTF which seeks and succeeds in inducing in the reader's mind the protagonist's suicidal dissociated state of irritated narcissistically injured mind [which so famously comes out of its injuries with love shooting through at thatMOMENT, whereupon Handke's work would never be the same, well, the world has been getting to him a bit again after so many years of finding it beautiful despite itself.].
So we have as a "counselor" someone who takes recourse to someone he mistakes for an authority, ignores the literature on his subject, doesn't actually read the book on which he tries to tie his charge... and we end up where: in the world of the "american interest" where we "make our own reality" as the Bush administration so famously said. And why do we do it? Oh, to hang Handke by the petals of yet another of his acts of exhibitionism, to pile on a scandal, as does the American Scholar which, properly speaking, if worthy of that name under its new editor Wilson, would have commissioned a real piece on Handke, who by that time, in 2007, had written 65 books [he came out of his mothers melancholy womb clutching his first ms] was writing like a hybrid of Flaubert-Stifter-and-Goethe, once recourse to RB of 40 years ago long passé, if only McD could take recourse to just a thimble full of RG, what does it take "to be influenced" ??? but McD. even lacks the talent to be so. He is a swine that gives true meaning to a word that only humans can be, as does Wilson, as does that soft-core Neo-Con, the sly censor for the Artsdaily under its aegis the Chronicle of Higher Education, Muouton Denis Dutton off there down under with his New Zealand Sheep. What an age of darkness we live in!
McD. shows up again, of course, in the "Weekly Standard" the sheet that allows the US to commit crimes by the millions while claiming human rights standing and once more tries to hang Handke by the petals of his exhibitionism, this time using his Del Gredos composite for a hook. Has ignorant hypocrisy ever been that deep that cheap, that dark. Probably yes. And with his mind bulloxed up by "post menstrualism" accuses Handke of the same. The lower reaches of the Weekly Standard are comparable of Der Stürmer, that the higher reaches avail themselves of such stileto folk shows where their real interests lie.
The catholic seminarian, Greek and Latin trained and law student Handke has from the start been radically conservative in his use of language and form, he is successor both to Wittgenstein and Orwell and knows at what level syntax works, more intimately than the great Naom, the conscience of the king has been his testing ground for language, and has taken it deeper; it is thence that real so-called "experimentation" might begin. His failings are entirely personal, all the usual sins and then some! However, he has the nose of a bloodhound, the eyes of an eagle, the sonar of a bat....and what his senses have been reporting all these many years can sharpen all of ours
The next moron non-reader reporter of what he reads then proceeds to accuse Handke of committing Saussure. And this claiman of teaching realism, no less at the New School, shows up under "oh Tannenbaum's" editor ship....
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp07/theapologist-mcdonald.html
http://www.weeklystandard.com/check.asp?idArticle=14548&r=fgpba
HANDKE LINKS + BLOGS
SCRIPTMANIA PROJECT MAIN SITE: http://www.handke.scriptmania.
and 12 sub-sites
http://www.handkelectures.
http://www.kultur.at/see/
[dem handke auf die schliche/ prosa, a book of mine about Handke]
http://handke-discussion.
http://www.artscritic.
