Mach nichts
With great equanimity, Jones replies to Smyth.
What late? Mach nichts, as the Old Man used to say. The calendar isn’t our master. This blog is a duty-free zone. No work performed under obligation is welcome here.
Speaking of the Old Man, I painted the walls of my office this weekend, and in the process of moving the bookshelves I discovered something I must have hidden away: a portfolio of color photographs by Kurt Peter Karfeld, Aus den Deutschen Alpen, published by Bruckmann Verlag in the 1940s. Capt. P. A. Jones, aka the Old Man, received these as a gift while he was working in the military government after the war.
Funnily enough, these photographs (I uploaded a few more at Flickr) were taken only a couple hundred miles from where Walser and Seelig’s walks took place, and probably show a landscape not too different from what Robert and Carl saw, albeit in the foothills of the German Alps rather than the Swiss.
December 24th, 2006 14:50
I love your Walser coverage. Have you read Guy Davenport’s story, “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg”? It was my introduction to RW.
December 27th, 2006 22:12
Thanks for the good words, Jaime! Yes, Smyth and I are both big Davenport fans. You’ll note that my link on the word “stories” in this post leads to the Davenport book that “Field of Snow” appears in:
http://goldenrulejones.com/?p=935
Actually, I haven’t read it in quite a while – it would be cool to read it again and see if any of the details in Seelig show up in the story …
Sam
January 15th, 2007 12:48
[...] Jaime’s comment to this post below caused me to take Guy Davenport’s Da Vinci’s Bicycle off my shelf and reread his lovely Walser-inspired story, “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg.” When I opened it up, I discovered an article I tucked into the book from the cover of the July 21, 1961, issue of the TLS. I was three years old in 1961, but somehow despite my rudimentary reading skills this paragraph leapt out at me: Improvisation, in Walser’s and Kafka’s sense, must be distinguished from the deliberate experiments of a self-conscious avant garde. What is particularly striking about many of the most genuine innovators of that period, including Joyce also, is that their dedication to a highly personal art involved not only a revolt against accepted canons but the complete rejection of literature as an institution; not rebellion but self-imposed exile. Each in his way, these highly skilled writers aspired to the status of amateurs. [...]
June 17th, 2013 21:28
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