Archive for May, 2009

‘Go, kill yourself.’

An excerpt from The Tanners, now online at the Brooklyn Rail:

I was liking my dream at the beginning, but now I see it’s starting to degenerate, and this doesn’t suit Hedwig at all; for Hedwig is gentle, and when she suffers, she suffers in a more beautiful, silent way. She’d no doubt just laugh at my man there in his shaggy beard if he attempted such insolence. The landscape I sketched out was quite nice all the same, but only because it was mostly borrowed from the countryside that surrounds me. One should never lose the natural ground beneath one’s feet while dreaming, especially about people, for otherwise one soon arrives at the point of making one’s characters utter words like: ‘Go, kill yourself.’

Sam :: May.07.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Odds and Ends

Assorted items of interest, some of which I gleaned from my shoulder-rubbing with the in-crowd last week in New York:

The Tanners, scheduled for a June 23 release, has been delayed until August. The Sebald introduction apparently isn’t ready yet.

The parallel edition (microscripts + English translations) of Walser prose pieces being produced by the Christine Burgin Gallery is scheduled for Spring 2010. If I remember correctly, the publication will coincide with an exhibition at the gallery.

The Brothers Quay mentioned Walser in a Boston Globe interview last week: “It was a much more sophisticated language which had to be really read,” he says. “It made us feel that you could really multi-layer a realm, and it’s not comedy, it’s not science fiction: It shifts. You read Walser or you read Schulz, and you realize it’s a deep language, and you just try to approximate it [in film] with the same depth and density that you see in their work.”

Class is in session at the Market Snodsbury Grammar School, and the subject is Robert Walser. Among other things, headmaster Thomas shares some enticing images from Robert Walser: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten (Robert Walser: His Life in Pictures and Texts), recently published in German. Thomas is certainly a FOW extraordinaire, previously unknown to me. I’ll add him to the list.

Sam :: May.05.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »