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 to the various subsites: http://www.handkedrama.scriptmania.com and is 'LYNX' PAGE to access the 12 other subsites.
2010 first half 
go to http://www.handkelectures.freeservers.com for the handke drama seminar an index to the entire handke.scriptmania complex can be found at the bottom of the LYNX page of this site below you will find the opening ten pages or so of what will be a 50 page summary piece on Handke's works as a dramatist, on the Subday Blues/Cuisine page you will find Kyle Gillette's piece on his production of Kaspar; @ http://handkedrama2.scriptmania.com you will find my attempt to come to difficult terms with Handke's latest play, Subday Blues/ Untertagblues Voyages of Discovery: Around the World with Peter Handke A Ramble through the Theater Work from 1965 to 2003* If the doors of perception are cleansed everything will appear to man as it is, infinite." William Blake =I==I=
The first time I set eyes on Peter Handke, whom few people outside of Austria had heard or heard of ever, though I was working as a scout for his publisher, was in May 1966, at the meeting of the German post World War II writers group, the Gruppe 47, and it happened to be his back. At that desultory meeting, one of the by then overly successful and somewhat hermetic groups last, I however entirely the eager beaver, Handkes launching a general attack on descriptive impotence, in lieu of the discovery of a great text, became the most memorable event. Although the uproar at the transgression has lasted to this day, I, who * Among which I include everything from the 1965 Prophecy, Public Insult, Self-Accusation, My Foot My Tutor, Quodlibet, Screams for Help, Kaspar, Ride Across Lake Constance, to that oddity, the equivocating 1973 portmanteau, They Are Dying Out. The more recent plays discussed are: Walk About the Villages, translated and with a postscript by Michael Roloff, Ariadne Press, 1996; The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other & the Art of Asking, translated by Gitta Honegger, Yale University Press, 1994; Zuruestungen fuer die Unsterblichkeit [Preparations for Immortality], Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992; Die Fahrt im Einbaum: Oder das Stueck zum Film ueber den Krieg [The Trip in the Dugout Canoe: Or the Play about the Film About the War], Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999; Pourquoi la Cuisine [Textes ecrit pour le spectacle La Cuisine de Mladen Materic], Edition Gallimard, 2001; Untertagblues, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003. had attended American creative writing classes and who had familiarized himself with postwar literature in German during the past half dozen years, and so had a sense of what the long-haired fellow was talking about [say Guenter Wellershof, and a lot of interesting, somewhat journalistic realists], was not unduly roused by what he said, or rather read, twice as I recall. And perhaps what he said would not have become as notorious, and such a characteristic debut, if the master sergeant type, Hans Werner Richter, who was in charge of this collection of democrats that, with the onset of the Cold War in 1947, had formed in opposition to the clampdown that ensued, also in the west, had not stopped Handke short, because wholesale attacks of this kind, of which the fellow had just delivered himself, with some heat but also a certain, more interesting, tentativeness [which I may be the only one to note], contravened the associations democratic rules; no matter that Peter Weiss and Guenter Grass subsequently encouraged the upstart for his affront, and not the first by any means once you delved into his brief-lived Austrian past; but certainly a fine beginning for someone who became the news medias darling for controversy copy for decades to come and one of whose childhood dreams had been to appear on the cover of Der Spiegel. And Handke used to give very good interview, too; that is until 2003 when, perhaps coyly, he said he would withdraw his idiocy from the public realm. Yet, slow as I am in these matters, it would be some years before I began to appreciate the degree to which Handkes hunger to be seen and to display himself, to perform, and to be well-regarded, and to dominate, if from afar once he had withdrawn, was one of the driving forces that helped him to try to realize his twelve year olds dream to become an heirloom writer and to harness his talent as it is most famously exercised on the ground of his chosen field of literature, the page, and the world stage on which his mostly well-calibrated grandiosity has set his plays since the very beginning. However, I would not have thought on the basis of the event in Princeton, or on that of my second encounter, that that same person was going around saying I am the new Kafka, who has meanwhile turned into the anti-Kafka, whom he regards as the best of the many fleur du mal of that fien de siecle, but who on the basis of some of his early work Der Hausierer, Radio Play I, the play My Foot My Tutor, also Kaspar - certainly gave ample evidence of being born to terror as he put it, although the terror appears to have set in only around age two, and has fairly dissipated now that he has also become one of the greatest European walkers [all of Spain, most of Yugoslavia, who knows how much of France?] since the disappearance of the traveling stone masons that used to build cathedrals, as has his once so characteristic nausea, at least until 2003 when, based on the evidence of Subday Blues, his newest play, it may be redominant, or perhaps hes off his meds. Until the onset of the terrors at age two, this nearest approximation to Goethe to appear in German literature during the second half of the 20th century, appears to have been the exclusive love child of an exquisitely beautiful woman; isnt it always like that!Anyhow, the fellow from Griffen, Carinthia, that interesting ethnically fractured Austrian province that has given the world the notorious Haider, and this country the current governor of California and the best chef in Los Angeles and Ingeborg Bachman and Werner Schwab and slews of experimental writers of all kinds who are groomed in its cultural capital Graz, and where like driftwood you may still find some absolutely authentic old-time Nazis, has achieved what he said out to do, to become a kind of living classic. Half Slovenian, half Austrian, very much a person of the borderlands and conflicted national allegiances, with a German father and German stepfather, as prose writer he began, for Austrian experimental literature of the 60s, as a rather typical deconstructionist, but for a variety of reasons, which also apply to the changes that his dramatic oeuvre has undergone, has reacquired the classic tradition, and to a degree that he often puts the past to shame. Handke writes on the dream screen, and has managed to integrate film and writing in his prose. - I put this with Aristotelian matter-of-factness, try doing it some time!Deriving from an immediate family background that was pisspot poor, it would be an easy matter to construct a log cabin, or in his case a peasants hovel type of legend, about his career, and with his fine share of hideous childhood trauma, it would have been more likely for him to have become a petty criminal like his half-brother, who did not have the good fortune to be his mothers exclusive love child, or rather a major criminal I suppose, had the good fortune of the village priests discovery of his intelligence not sent him to the kind of Austrian seminary that prepares the replacements for village priests. There he began to make the acquaintance of Latin and Greek, whence now that he is also a much less controversial translator from half a dozen language - he has recently translated Oedipus at Colonus & Prometheus, but after four years, and a fight with a teacher, moved to the kind of school that prepares you for a university career. This career Handke pursued evidently in the hope that in the event that his hopes for quick money through writing did not pan out he would at least have the sinecure of one of the Austrian Foreign Services excellent Cultural Attaches. As such an attache we encounter Handkes, nicely dissociated, troubled alter ego Keuschnig in A Moment of True Feeling in 1974 as well, less troubled by now, as the occupant and writer, among a slew of other alter-egos [country priest, painter-filmmaker, reader] etc. of the No-Mans-Bay in the great carpet that Handke stitched himself in 1991. If we are to believe No-Mans-Bay it was the distinctions that the declensions of legalistic Roman law introduced into his linguistic mind that helped clear out some of the cobwebs from his unusually angry adolescent noggin his Assaying of Tiredness [1989] provides a fine long list of the near endless matters that enraged the young Handke. Wittgenstein no doubt helped, too. However, on the face of Handkes first novel Die Hornissen, unless it be the mere completion of this book, you would not think that he should have forgone the foreign attache option quite that easily. Nor does it give evidence of unusual descriptive powers, albeit of a consciousness that may be an improvement on the seismograph. But that confidence he did have nonetheless, and so after all these years I have the confidence to be confident that my mans confidence is justified!However, what is surprising is that such an arriviste, as Handke rapidly became from early on [I recall a princes apartment in Berlin in 1969, only the best hotels would do, a small Gruenderzeit castle in Meudon] has continued as much as an irredentist as he has; has never been satisfied to repeat himself, or ring easy changes on a past success, and much of an assembleur, packrat of impressions and images, and quotations, cobbler carpenter and monteur in poverty stricken times, say like a Mexican car mechanic, in that respect does not do anything different than composers have always done. Moreover, righteous, ill-tempered, misanthropic as he can be, overly grandiose, as well as the opposite of all those less admired qualities [i.e. generous beyond fault, struggling to understand the oddest of productions, ultra-sensitive ear to everyones homesickness choir], I cannot say that I have found signs of smugness; pleased at some of this work, and why not, yet considering the state of criticism, generally his own severest and best critic, occasionally in need of an editor at his level. Perhaps one reason for Handkes continued irredentism is that, tiresomely, for years and years and years, he expressed fulsome hatred both of his stepfather, as well as real father once he came to know him, and that the internalized father figure compass became his Slovenian grandfather, Sivec, who dreamed of the Yugoslav federation of 1921 as a successor to the then disintegrated Austro-Hungarian one. Or perhaps that Handkes origins in the experimentalism of Austrian literature, especially of the Stadtpark Forum in Graz, the first place where he took measure and where he had to measure up, has had such a lasting influence, and all those high cultural aspirations that go with being of culture in Austria. There is money in culture in Austria, or at least a subsidy, though not yet for readers of its overly rich literary productions. Handke, now rooted in the Gilgamesh and in every other great archaism, keeps moving forward, as few others have. However, while learning his trade the young Handke was already working for radio, writing adaptations of Crime and Punishment, and such, and so must be considered a pro with all the pluses and minuses that go with that. No wonder that he likes Raymond Chandler so much. Yet the shadows of the commercial that Adorno so famously says marks all literature of the bourgeois era cannot be said to cast much darkness on his work; rather the opposite, the sequence of great plays that he wrote from 1981 to 1999, the sanely realistic Handke, knowing how rarely they would be performed, designated Lesestuecke [plays to be read] as opposed I imagine to the earliest plays which were called Sprechstuecke [plays to be spoken].#A day or so after the Princeton meeting, at a party that Jakov Lind, Pannah Grady and I were hosting for the Gruppe to meet some American writers, intrigued by Handke, I made two attempts to engage him in conversation. One thing that could not help but catch my attention was that he was wearing sun-glasses even in the so very harmoniously lighted surroundings of Pannah Gradys splendid apartment in the Dakota whose very inch of polished wood oozed doubloons, perhaps the very one that one of Handkes beloveds, John Lennon, then took some years later, and in whose courtyard he would be murdered by a boy from Georgia, while I was on one of the islands off the Georgia gold coast. - No, the glasses apparently were not an affectation, say of being a NY tough guy, or another Beatle appurtenance, he had eye problems the fellow said. Although, it would be about seven years before I translated Handkes line, nausea of the eyeballs, I did not yet connect that line with his wearing glasses; not until I came across his admission, in The Lesson of St. Victoire, that he suffered from bouts of color blindness; and another fifteen before, as part of a psychoanalytic monograph on Handke, I would delve into the ultra-sensitivities of someone who, occasionally autistic, sees black at what strikes him as ugly, or into the host of other nauseas, including at language, that beset Handke until he became a lover of language, a Wortklauber, a term I much prefer since I came on it in his work to the idea of mot juste. Withdrawn into enviable bucolic semi-isolation as he lives and writes, or translates, which he regards the same as writing, and does from half a dozen languages, meanwhile.The second attempt, that evening, to talk to the man, who aside sunglasses, a Beatles type haircut, was dressed in a black and yellow checkerboard shirt, with [a carnation was it?] in the shirt pocket [a festive Slovenian touch I expect] we were now in the splendid main room - I must have wanted to delve more deeply into Handkes views about literature - we were near instantly interrupted by Alan Ginsberg who, without introducing himself [I was still brought up overly well then!] told me tell him I want to fuck him, translate,ÃÆ’Æ’‚ÃÆ’‚ which certainly got my attention, so that I now looked directly at the bearded visage that had intruded from my right. Failing to heed his command, Ginsberg repeated it, thus becoming the object of the intense steely blue gaze part of my heritage that is definitely Prussian, while the peripheral vision of my left eye gathered what is called a shit-eating grin spread over the faintly mustachioed face of the guest whom his host was protecting from such uncouth advances. Ah, twenty-five years in New York, from uptown to downtown, and many a beatnik and change in life style, and not just in New York, but also on the road; and which fierce look may have been what put an end to that importuning, at any event it ceased, though some vases, no doubt precious, were then smashed by Pannahs beat friends. However, I realized right then and there that my guest protectorate was a village sadist, if not an idiot; savant as he is for sure; and sure enough, he turned out to be all these things; idiocy is one of his major themes, idiots are some of this best stage creatures, from Kaspar to his more recent incarnations as the gibberishing Parcival in The Art of Asking and The Forest Madman in Dugout Canoe, and if the world doesnt near drive the Woyzecks of this world mad, you are not paying the world the respect that is its proper due, in which case... The Ginsberg matter was not cleared up for another fifteen years when my man, now a ÃÆ’Æ’…“big animal, as the common folk in Salzburg call those who live on the former bishops residence, the Moenchsberg, fortress that towers over all, confessed that he thought I was the one who was being propositioned, not him, which made the shit-eating grin even less pleasant in retrospect. As Handke writes in his great dramatic poem, Walk About the Villages, which can also be read as transfigured autobiography, and the smell sticks.= #Intrigued by these discrepant impressions, I, however, would not have thought, if I thought of matters of that kind in those terms, that Handke would be the nearest figure to Goethe that literature in the German language would produce in the second half of the 20th century and a dramatist on the order of importance of Becket, Chekov, Brecht, Pirandello, oNeill. But of whom do we know this on brief acquaintance, unless you happen to have gone to school with them? The first thing I did, when it became available, that year, was to try to read that first novel Die Hornissen, which Handke, has mentioned, (X) instilled him with the confidence to write his first word plays [Sprechstuecke] for that is what they are, pure word plays, Prophecy, Public Insult, Self-Accusation - identical only with themselves, representing no reality outside that of themselves and the spoken texts, only indirectly reflecting the world as it deposits itself in words, projection screens for what the audience reads into them, dissociations, producing health in the audience, although Kaspar, abstract as it is, certainly has an allegorical every human core, and operating on the world stage as Handke does, his allegoricalness repeatedly skirts danger of crashing unless sufficiently materialistically anchored in language and image. Hornissen, which actually was turned down by Handkes preferred publisher, Luchterhand Verlag, proved problematic for me, who had by then cracked some very difficult texts as a translator/editor/rewrite man, say Uwe Johnsons first two novels, the work of a fair number of other Austrian writers, Konrad Bayer, Okopenko. Not that I knew that much theory, but I had a sense that the telling of the tale needed reflecting upon.It were these early texts for the stage and Handkes second novel, Der Hausierer, that led to convincing my colleagues at Farrar, Straus, where I now worked, with Susan Sontag as my second, to make an offer, via telegram from Europe, for Handkes Sprechstuecke, to which Kaspar was then added, making for his first publication in English, Kaspar & Other Plays [including Self-Accusation & Public Insult, as I now called Offending the Audience]; the difficult but extraordinary and, compared to Die Hornissen, so extremely perspicuous Hausierer [but seeming to me so difficult to translate because of the legion of quotes from Handkes reading in German of American crime thrillers in this essence - that is what it is - of containing as in the psychoanalytic sense of con-taineÃÆ’Æ’‚ÃÆ’‚ÂÂÂÂÂ, - formalizing, in the sense that repetitions still and slows down the anxiety - a primal scene exposure] was replaced by Goalies Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which, too, is the story of a linguistic consciousness as it registers phenomenologically, albeit with the semblance of a story that is more easily projected into it; and one day, puzzling whom to enlist as the translator of the plays, I started to play around with translating Self-Accusation, which proved even more delightful and interesting than just reading; serious and playful; it was right up my alley; at which point I became hooked, if not to the person, at least to his work. (X)Yet if you leaf around the 1965 novel Die Hornissen (X) - this interesting and touching attempt to make good on the twelve year old Handkes dream-wish (X) to be as admired a writer of heirlooms as was, then, his dead Slovenian soldier uncle for having written his Slovenian mothers, the Sivec families, cherished wartime letters - a retrieval theme that is recapitulated in more accessible fashion once Handke has made whatever peace he ever will with the realistic tradition, in the 1986 novel The Repetition - you might be struck, first of all, by how awkwardly the writer of Die Hornissen goes about the business of trying to write a novel - in the subjunctive mode for gods sake for much of the time! while abiding, rather myopically, by some kind of deconstructivist intentions; how touchingly he fumbles his way around, in a way that only a mother might have patience with such sincerity and the artifice to put these matters into as if mode, to overcome naturalism. And you would scratch the scalp off your head trying to figure what Handke was talking about Die Hornissen being the source of writing of dramatic texts; that is, you would until you had worked your way toward end of the novel, at which point you notice a more playful mode. Yes, indeed, the writer has discovered a more confident way of handling his material. (X) However, it is when you look at Handkes first set of prose experiments, which are collected in Die Begruessung des Aufsichtsrats, whose composition precedes the first novel, that you notice that he [and all the formalists in Graz and all of Austria I suppose] had been impressed by certain procedures that proved suitable not only for prose pieces of a certain length but also for the staged presentation of texts, knowledge or access or memory of which ability he seemed to rediscover only towards the end of Die Hornissen. Some theater troupes enamored of Handkes early performance pieces have, in the meanwhile, even started to perform some of these early prose texts as though they, too, were Sprechstuecke. (X) Yet I think that there is more to be said regarding the as if mode as a source for Handkes art, if not art in general, and I shall in due course.If you look at these early plays, they have an amazing finish. Total confidence pervades them, unsureness about how to proceed in that field will not overcome Handke for about seven years, in the equivocal [1973] They Are Dying Out. However, if you want to speculate why Handke became a dramatist, as he might not, as Dylan Thomas used to say, "it is unlikely that I would have become a poet if I had been born an Eskimo," the following sources, since I think intra-psychic family and power arrangements are more significant than ethnicity, come to my mind for an explanatory model. Obviously, a culture where the stage affords representation of self, in Austria/Germany/Europe, a culture with a tradition with which you can familiarize yourself. An imagined perfect audience. The need, the drive to represent, which Handke had in over-determined fashion, I suggest, with the onset, dumbfounding, enraging, as they were, of the exposure to the primal scenes, competitiveness, and of a phallic kind, which complicated his whole life, which I suggest is the wound out of which he claims to so fruitfully produce, though vitality, and all that that implies, appears to be a requirement, too; the need, the hunger to be seen one major aspect of autism. Somewhere in that region can be found the equation that answers that question which I will not address in greater detail here.Despite whatever playfulness is to be found in Die Hornissen, judging on the basis of most of Handkes novels [where he has, only in the 90s, begun to employ some of his definitely hard-earned playwrights ways say, the retrieval of Goethe & the Greeks alternating discourse in lieu of hideous tiresome dialogue], (X) you would not think that Handke, no matter how driven to represent and exhibit, and to be a classic in his own life-time, or how anxiety ridden he may be [unless he holds pencil in hand], is what is called a born dramatist, say a Sam Sheperd, who for a long time could write nothing but dialogue, whereas in the play of Handke's that I find least successful and weakest of the later work, Zuruestungen fuer die Unsterblichkeit, I prefer to read the wonderful stage directions instead of certain sections where the alternating discourse and the architectonic of Handkes playwriting strike me as having become as hollow as iambic pentameter once did. # In 1972, in his book The Making of Modern Drama, (1) Richard Gilman devoted essays to xx x and, initiating the American reception, to the early plays of Peter Handke. With so much snow meanwhile, and for a host of reasons, this, then, seems a good but necessary as any near posthumous time to check to what extent Gilmans placing of this uniquely different dramatist was justified. A reassessment, perhaps even a reminder of Handkes continued existence as a dramatist, a re-introduction - where yet unaware of the generational forgetfulnesses none I had thought would ever be needed - might be in order in the English-speaking world; for Handke has written extraordinary plays since the 70s,* little as these, some not even translated (2), are known in the English-speaking world, or the earlier ones remembered except by the few, as so much else that only transpires in the as-if-world of serious theater of little real consequence except in its Neo-Platonic heaven. (3) Chief reason for a re-view, is to cover what Handke has done since his work as a playwright went underground in the English speaking world (5); immediate reason for a re-view the publication, in 2003, of Untertagblues [whose allusion to the Bob Dylan song might lead one to give it the English title Subday Blues (4)], which is Handkes fifteenth play, not counting radio or screenplays, or the novel Absence, reading which resembles the experience of watching a film - mingling mediums and senses, putting his readers into states of mind, the deepest understanding his media, has been a forte of the sleight of word capacities of this particular artificer for many decades now Subday Blues is a performance piece of sorts, nearly entirely for solo speaker where Handke returns, with surprising vengeance, in the form of a pitter patter of in-hate insults, addressed at subway passengers, to the consciousness-unsettling methods of his early Sprechstuecke, especially of the most famous of them, the self-conscious-making, and, ultimately, humorously confrontational Public Insult. The ending of Subday Blues, however, is considerably different, and I think the only one having a laugh is its the author; the audience, which is subjected to the critique, via surrogate echoes as it were, I expect ought to be stunned. Between the early plays among which I include the dozen plays from the 1965 Prophecy, Self-Accusation, Screams for Help, My Foot My Tutor, Quodlibet, Kaspar, Ride Across Lake Constance, to that oddity, the equivocating 1973 portmanteau, They Are Dying Out and the 2003 Subday Blues, fall the great ventures of what I call Handkes mytho-poeic period. These plays, which extend Handkes dramatic treatment of the archaic, as well as give evidence of a great linguistic enrichment, while yet connecting in less immediate fashion with issues of the day and Handkes personal problematics than did the early dramatic oeuvre, are: 1] great dramatic poem, which re-introduced alternating discourse into drama, Walk About the Villages, altogether Handkes richest piece of work; [2] the eternal road picture of the human family The Art of Asking which can be regarded as the return both of Lake Constance and Kaspar by other, far more elastic means; [3] The Hour We Did Not Know Each Other, which, technically and thematically speaking, is a summa of the early as well as the later work; [4] as well as the 1994 Preparations for Immortality, which as far as I am concerned screams to be written in Shakespearean verse, and by which time the alternating discourse, the declarative mode of his speakers, and the requirements of s formal architectonics occasionally begins to be as repetitious and hollow as iambic pentameter once became, and which, though Immortality starts off with a bang, presents me with greater difficulty than any of the others; and [5] that truly great concept whose execution, so I judge, leaves something to be desired at certain moments, and not by any means for its politically contentious nature at the time of its premiere in 1999, The Ride in the Dugout Canoe: Or the Foreplay to the Film About the War, as well as, [6] that delightful toss-off that Handke did in 2001 for Mladen Materic, Pourquoi la Cuisine. (X) What strikes me as most important at the beginning of a nearly posthumous roundup of this kind are certain matters that establish Handkes claim to our continued attention, and these I want to try nail down first, before discussing the later works in greater detail:
THe DEVELOPING DRAMA SITE
handkedrama.scriptmania.com & handkedrama2.scriptmania.com
[devoted to the post 70s work: HOUR, WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES, IMMORTAL, CANOE,THE ART OF ASKING, LA CUISINE]
GO TO THE NEWS PAGE FOR RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
are OFF-SHOOTS FROM THE DRAMA PAGE OF THE MAIN HUB
handke.scriptmania.com
AND WILL TREAT HANDKE'S INDIVIDUAL PLAYS AND PHASES SEPARATELY AND IN APPROPRIATE DEPTH....
ACT I [handkedrama.scriptmania.com] WILL FOCUS ON THE WORK FROM THE MID SIXTIES TO THE EARLY 70;
ACT II [which will split off from this site in June] WILL TREAT THE WORK FROM THE EARLY 80S WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES TO THE PRESENT. "The Hour We knew nothing of each other" will be the 'transitional play" , for a variety of reasons.
An interesting essay by Kyle Gillette on the Linguistic of KASPAR has just been posted - Fall 2003 - on the Kaspar Page of this site
CONTENTS FOR THIS DEVELOPING, PRESENTLY STILL QUITE SKELETAL SITE AS OF early 2003:
ON THE APPROPRIATE PAGES:
I] A considerable amount of material: reviews, fascinating background stuff from Thomas Deichman; a long commentary from yours truly on TRIP IN THE DUGOUT CANOE: THE FOREPLAY TO THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR. ALSO A NOTE ON DIRECTING HANDKE'S 'TRIP IN THE DUGOUT' AS I WOULD GO ABOUT DOING IT IN THIS COUNTRY.AN EXCERPT FROM J.A.MARCUS NYRB SEPT 21 PIECE ON HANDKE+YUGOSLAVIA
a miserable review from a professor at u.c.
>Go to the handkeyugo.scriptmania.com site for further background material on DUGOUT CANOE. AND THE CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING IT
2] A PAGE DEVOTED TO THE PLAYS FROM "Prophecy" [1965] to the late-completed piece in the early cycle, the 1991 HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER; which Handke initially conceived in the mid-seventies. Eg: Pieces on Public Insult, Kaspar, etc.although Kaspar and The Ride Across Lake Constance and HOUR will also have pages of their very own.
RICHARD GILMAN JUST E-MAILED ME IN HIS JAPANESE INCARNATION THAT I HAVE HIS PERMISSION TO PUT THE ENTIRE HANDKE CHAPTER FROM HIS "MODERN DRAMA", WHICH YALE U.P. IS JUST RE-ISSUEING, ON THIS SITE, AND IT WILL APPEAR ON THE 'DRAMATURGY'PAGE AS SOON AS I HAVE EITHER SCANNED IT IN OR RECEIVED IT IN ELECTRONIC FORM....
SOME PHOTOS FROM FRAUDULENT PRODUCTION'S HANDKE PRODUCTIONS NOW APPEAR ON THESE PAGES....
ALSO REVIEWS OF THE FRAUD PROD FROM THE WASHINGTON POST, A REVIEW OF A YEAR 2000 PROD OF PUBLIC INSULT IN BERLIN...
ALSO THE YALE DRAMA SCHOOL JUST E-MAILED THAT PHOTOS FROM THEIR 1979 PRODUCTION OF they are dying out WILL REACH ME TOWARDS THE END OF SPRING...
The discussions of these plays will necessarily spill over into the production photo pages.
My SEATTLE ORGANON FOR HANDKE DIRECTORS
A NOTE ON PERFORMING "RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE"
>
3] A LARGE VARIETY OF PIECES ON HANDKE'S MID 90S PLAY "ZURUESTUNGEN FUER DIE UNSTERBLICHKEIT" [PREPARATIONS FOR IMMORTALITY]
4] A LARGE VARIETY OF PIECES ON HANDKE'S LATE 80S PLAY "THE ART OF ASKING" which would have replaced the miserable meanwhile utterly reactionary and neutred ENDGAME if what is the Arts Establishment in this country weren't as lacking in ideas as the body politic. Psychoanalysts of my acquaintance here in Seattle like it: not that that will help it be put on; they too are going a bit hat in hand.
5] A long piece on "Kaspar".
6] A PIECE ON THEATER IN IN SEATTLE WHICH EXPLAINS WHY ANYTHING SERIOUS ALONG THOSE LINES IN THE PROVINCES WILL, IF LUCKY, FIND SOME REPRESENTATION AT THE UNIVERSITIES... PETER BROOK SOLD THE FOLKS HIS "HAMLET" AND THEY HAVE PUT ALL THEIR BREAD INTO ONE COLLECTION PLATE.
7] A NOTE ON SEATTLE, SO AS TO LOCATE THE READER IN THIS AUTEUR'S STATE OF BEING...
EXCERPTS FROM 'CANOE' & SOME OF THE OTHER PLAYS...
BY THE END OF MARCH THE NUMEROUS REVIEWS COLLECTED HERE WILL APPEAR ON THE APROPRIATE PAGES AND NO LONGER BE SCATTEREDD ALL OVER THE SITE AS THEY ARE AT PRESENT.
PERFORMANCE PERMISSION FOR ALL HANDKE PLAYS IN ENGLISH, except RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE [sAMUEL fRENCH] needs to be obtained directly from
ForeignRights@suhrkamp.de
Go to the suhrkamp.de website to ascertain in which parts of the world Suhrkamp has resident representatives. In all other respects the Suhrkamp Verlag site is paltry compared to equivalent houses elsewhere in the world, say Gallimard, Random House/Knopf, Garzanti, Feltrinelli, etc. etc.
michael roloff july 01
this link will take you directly to the main site handke.scriptmania.com
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Spiele das Spiel.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fuer die Therapeuten, von Peter Handke
Gefaehrde die Arbeit noch mehr.
Sei nicht die Hauptperson.
Such die Gegenueberstellung.
Aber sei absichtslos.
Vermeide Hintergedanken.
Verschweige nichts.
Sei weich und stark.
Sei schlau, lass dich ein und verachte den Sieg.
Beobachte nicht, pruefe nicht, sondern bleib geistesgegenwaertig bereit fuer die Zeichen.
Sei erschuetterbar.
Zeig deine Augen, wink die anderen in die Tiefe, sorge fuer den Raum und betrachte jeden in seinem Bild.
Entscheide nur begeistert.
Scheitere ruhig.
Vor allem hab Zeit und nimm Umwege.
Lass dich ablenken.
Mach sozusagen Urlaub.
UEberhoer keinen Baum und kein Wasser.
Kehr ein, wo du Lust hast, und goenn dir die Sonne.
Vergiss die Angehoerigen, bestaerke die Unbekannten, bueck dich nach Nebensachen, weich aus in die Menschenleere, pfeif auf das Schicksalsdrama, missachte das Unglueck, zerlach den Konflikt.
Beweg dich in deinen Eigenfarben, bis du im Recht bist und das Rauschen der Blaetter suess wird.
Geh ueber die Doerfer, ich komme dir nach.
{c} Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982
| | | | LINK OF LYNXES TO MOST HANDKE MATERIAL
AND BLOGS ON THE WEB:
-
and 13 sub-sites e.g.
http://handkedrama3.scriptmania.com/
[dem handke auf die schliche/besuch auf dem Moenchsberg, a book of mine about Handke]
[the American Scholar caused controversy about Handke, reviews, detailed of Coury/ Pilipp's THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE, the psycho-biological monograph/ a note on Velica Hoca/ ]
[some handke material, too, the Milosevic controversy summarized]
MICHAEL ROLOFF
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS:
"MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" + MAY THE FIREPLUG OF FILIALITY REINSURE YOUR BUNGHOLE!"" {J. Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhor LINK OF LYNXES TO MOST HANDKE MATERIAL
AND BLOGS ON THE WEB:
-
http://handkedrama3.scriptmania.com/
[dem handke auf die schliche/besuch auf dem Moenchsberg, a book of mine about Handke]
[the American Scholar caused controversy about Handke, reviews, detailed of Coury/ Pilipp's THE WORKS OF PETER HANDKE, the psycho-biological monograph/ a note on Velica Hoca/ ]
[some handke material, too, the Milosevic controversy summarized]
MICHAEL ROLOFF
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS:
"MAY THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" + MAY THE FIREPLUG OF FILIALITY REINSURE YOUR BUNGHOLE!"" {J. Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhor | | | | |
THE COVER OF METHUEN'S VOLUME ONE OF HANDKE'S COLLECTED PLAYS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH
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text to come
this link will take you directly to the related site HANDKEDRAMA2/.SCRIPTMANIA.COM
THIS SITE IS CURRENTLY HOSTED BY MICHAEL ROLOFF, WHO TRANSLATED HANDKE'S PLAYS & POEMS UNTIL AND INCLUDING 'WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES" [ueber die doerfer] 1981/95. For approximately ten years I have been working off and on on a project entitled PETER HANDKE: THE MASTER OF SYNTAX, parts of which have appeared in a variety of publications; and some excerpts of which I take the grandiosity to include also on this as well as the "mother" site, handke.scriptmania.com.
I first set eyes on Handke in Princeton in 1966, talked to him briefly a few days later at a Party in N.Y.; started to translate him in 1968, and that aspect is covered in one of the pages here. At any event, my familiarity with the work is deep, for excuses for possible misreadings Harold Bloom has written his essay on the fruits of misprision.
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