“If you look straight up, there’s a sky, and if you glance right in front of you, the face of an average person—though we don’t speak of average days and nights or an average nature. But isn’t the average actually what is solidest and best? I have no use for days or weeks of genius, or an extraordinary Lord God.”

— Robert Walser, Berlin Stories, trans. Susan Bernofsky (via differenceetrepetition)

Quay Brothers and Robert Walser

If you don’t the work of the Quay Brothers yet the Museum of Modern Art in New York has the perfect introduction to them in the current exhibit ”Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets.” They are very literate filmmakers, in particular Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser serve as inspirations, and they made a movie of Walser’s Jakob von Gunten called Institute Benjamenta: Or This Dream People Call Human Life, starring Mark Rylance and Alice Kriege. Sanford Schwartz, in The New York Review, explains their interest: “They have, moreover, made clear their allegiance to different forms of what they call, in a statement in the Modern’s catalog, ‘the marginal’…. The Quays may have been attracted to Jakob von Gunten because Jakob, who narrates, personifies Walser’s rejection of the grand. Jakob’s ever-changing voice is what this rich and intense short novel is about. He is as impudent, and at sea about what to make of himself (and of his infatuation with his fellow student Kraus), as he is confident that, as he says, thinking of his future, ‘Me, I shall be something very lowly and small.’ An occasional realist as well, he is capable of recognizing about himself that his ‘modesty knows no limits, as long as one flatters his spirit.’”

During the class, we pupils sit there, gazing rigidly into the fore, motionless. I think one isn’t even allowed to blow one’s personal nose.

—Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten, translated by Christopher Middleton

Wal-Zyr photograph by James Yeh of Gigantic magazine, who encouraged us to read the name of this allergy remedy with a Swiss accent.

“How difficult it is to give living expression to that which is fine and good!”

—Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten, translated by Christopher Middleton. A pretty good summation of Walser’s writing we think.

“That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.”

—  Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser (via bestreadamerican)

“‘May I’ I asked with diffidence, ‘take a moment to acquaint myself with, and taste the fine qualities of, the most sterling and serious, and therefore of course the most read and most quickly acknowledged and purchased, reading matter? You would pledge me to unusual gratitude were you to be so kind as to lay before me that book which, as certainly nobody can know so precisely as you, has found the highest place in the estimation of the reading public, as well as that of the dreaded and thence surely flatteringly circumvented critics, and which furthermore has made them merry.’”

— Robert Walser displays the correct way to approach your bookseller. From The Walk, out June 5th from New Directions in a newly mulled-over translation by Susan Bernofsky.  (via mcnallyjackson)

This is tonight. We’ll be bringing our Middleton-translated Walser book, Jakob von Gunten; and Susan Bernofsky who translated the recently published Berlin Stories for us and The Walk for New Directions (along with Microscripts, The Tanners, and The Assistant) will be there as well. If you’re a Walser fan, this is an event for you.

slippycup:

Billy Childish - Robert Walser Lying Dead in the Snow (In Yellow Suit)

More on Childish’s art here.

unypl:

“Jakob von Gunten”, by Robert Walser; Translated by Christopher Middleton 

Read Jakob von Gunten

todgeweiht:

“What a terrible dream I had a few days ago. […] To the knives and forks clung the tears of enemies I destroyed, and the glasses sang with the sighs of many poor people, but the tear-stains only made me want to laugh, while the hopeless sighs sounded to me like music. I needed banquet music and had it.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

Walser’s ‘Berlin Stories’ in The Guardian

How artless or artful he is is a judgment that each reader can make for him- or herself, and I suspect that much depends on the serenity of one’s own disposition. Sontag called him an ‘anti-gravity’ writer, both in that he is against seriousness as well as being unbound to the ground. And in this unbelievably delightful and timeless collection of short pieces, we can recover the delight of ordinary, uncondescending appreciation, places where the vacant-minded stroller can take ‘peculiar pleasure’. The tram, the theatre, the train station, the park … (‘Beautiful park, I think, beautiful park,’ is how he ends “The Park”.) One thing and then another. Isn’t that nice?

    -  so says Nicholas Lezard in his review of Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories for The Guardian. And we completely agree with his last sentence; if you read on the train, or any form of public transport, this is a book for you.

We can’t decide, Good ’80s book cover design or awful ’80s book cover design?

(Either way, it’s kind of great.)

So, we were going to collect photos of Berlin spots mentioned by Walser in Berlin Stories, but then we saw this, and figured ours wouldn’t be nearly as nicely done. Thanks Mike Dressel!

mikedressel:

Berlin never rests, and this is glorious. Each dawning day brings with it a new, agreeably disagreeable attack on complacency, and this does the general sense of indolence good. An artist possesses, much like a child, an inborn propensity for beautiful, noble sluggardizing. Well, this slug-a-beddishness, this kingdom, is constantly being buffeted by fresh storm-winds of inspiration. The refined, silent creature is suddenly blustered full of something coarse, loud, and unrefined. There is an incessant blurring together of various things, and this is good, this is Berlin, and Berlin is outstanding. —“Berlin and the Artist.”

I’m not even quite halfway through Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, translated by Susan Bernofsky, and it is all I can do to stop myself from blogging nearly ever single sentence. First, “noble sluggardizing”! Then, throughout the “prose pieces,” as they are designated, there are phrases like “that blue-eyed marvel, the early morning” and “magnificent restlessness” and “where poesy can be felt, poetic flights are superfluous.”

The book is one of my favorite types, the musings of a flâneur and metropolitan chronicler who observes the whirling city from its bars stools and park benches, its opera boxes and streetcars. It is the kind of book that affords the reader the eerie delight of life explicated just as it is. It is poetic and deeply felt even in its flippancy. 

Even though Walser was writing about Berlin in the early 1900s, it is hard not to draw parallels to New York, for a certain type of person who has moved to the city to live a certain type of life, no matter the decade or century in which they arrive. That is, for me, both a help and a hindrance as I am trying, after a five month absence, to fall in love with this city again. 

But! This post is mostly in service of encouraging you to pick up the slim volume, if you are certain type of person who is drawn to a certain metropolitan life; if you ponder, like Walser, “what plays will be put on this winter,” if you enjoy long, contemplative walks smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and if you find the thrum of urban life to be a source of endless fascination. 

McNally Jackson will give you your money back if you don’t like Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories. Not really, but we’re not to worried about that happening.

mcnallyjackson:

WEEKEND NEW BOOK ROUND-UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Books: So easy to acquire, so hard to read. We are not making things any easier for you. 

In paperback:

Varamo, Cesar Aira. The great Bobby Bolano says that Aira is “One of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.” Granted, he’s said that of more or less all the writers working in Spanish today, but Aira is great, and you know that.

Berlin Stories, Robert Walser. Money-back guarantee: The first section of this book will make you love your city again. Just kidding. About the money back. But everything after the colon is true. 

Other People We Married, Emma Straub. Sadly now French freedom flap-less on the outside, but still as great as it ever was on the inside. 

House of Holes, Nicholson Baker. Old weirdy beardy Baker is still the best living American prose stylist working today. (Claims: I will make them.) 

The Fallback Plan, Leigh Stein. Ah, youth! Ah, moving back in with your parents!

The Lifespan of a Fact, John D’Agata & Jim Fingal. I just started this, and it’s enraging. We recommend. 

In hardcover:

Thinking the Twentieth Century, Tony Judt. Maybe you heard Salface “The Big Cheese” McNalface talk about this on WNYC. If not, you should.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank, Nathan Englander. Expect a lot of reviews to take advantage talking about whatever it is we talk about when we talk about whatever—the title, Anne Frank, some aspect of the book. Impossible to resist!

Can you find Robert Walser on or around Mr. 50 Watts’s desk?