re: DON JUAN REVIUEW AT: http://bookforum.com/review/5350

Here my comment to the Bookforum review:

http://bookforum.com/review/5350

which I also sent to the reviewer at Faster Times, he is an editor at the sorry publication.

"This is an atrocity!

1]
Let me address the Yugoslavia/ Milosevic/ Serbia canard first.
Your reviewer appears to be medianized and not be able to think on his own.
Yugoslavia became a tinderbox, in part because of some Reagan are
National Security directives to commit economic warfare against the East bloc; in part because Socialism, also the kindlier one in Yugoslavia, was being hollowed out; it was being replaced by resurgent nationalist tribal identity formations of all kind; and then the German foreign minister Gentscher  recognized the Croatian fascist successor state under Tjudman; andTjudman made the Serbians into 2nd class citizens - that was the signal for all the murderous ghosts of WW II and older to come out of the closet: the blame game gets no one anywhere; understanding might. Handke for
personal reasons was always close to Yugoslavia as a whole, especially because he is half Slovenian: he was absolutely correct in coming to the  defense of the Serbians once they started being blamed - it is hard to say who is to blame more: everyone became murderous. The U.S. supplied Croatia with arms, the Bosniak Muslims with 300 mujaheddin and also with arms. Handke can be said to have behaved like a crazily  wounded love child, not attractive at all. The only matter that can be held against him in his extraordinary act of exhibitionism is that when asked by Milosevic to testify as an expert witness at his trial in Scheveningen, that he then blinked. That is bad enough as far as I am concerned and I will neverbe again in a position where I might have to rely on him - not that Handke's testimony in Milosevic's case might have made an iota of a difference in the foregone conclusion of a guilty verdict on the
part of a kangaroo court that might more usefully have put various US  generals and statespeople on trial. If you and your reviewer are interested in more detailed version of the above, I suggest that my  http://handke-discussion.blogspot.com/ you where I will also post
2] a long piece on Don Juan. The reviewer is  40 years behind in his Handke. Even if he weren't I doubt that he would catch on to the
game that Handke is playing. As a former New York publisher I wouldn't hire him to read and evaluate a single book! He doesn't understand either the game, nor the form, nor the underlying sorrowful tone on which the artist plays so merrily. He is also wrong on the details he mentions - such as Don Juan not exchanging glances with his various lovers; sometimes it is just a glance where both parties are set aflame; sometimes it is a mating; his sidekick chauffeur with whom he reverses roles at moments is a wonderfully gross Caliban type; there is also a Juanita at one point.
This is such a hopeless review, one is then glad of the philistine job
that Joel Agee did in the New York Times Book Review http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books/review/Agee-t.html?scp=1&sq=joel%20agee&st=cse

I have a page devoted to Don Juan at:

http://www.handkeprose2.scriptmania.com/photo5.html]

.MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name

Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html 

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

"Degustibus disputandum est." Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James  Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." [von Alvensleben]
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/ 
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/.
http://seattle-vistas.blogspot.com/

A ;POSTING AT http://crosscut.com/2010/03/07/crosscut/19650/ WHICH WAS THERE BRIEFLY ENOUGH

TO DRAW A FEW COMMENTS ITSELF, BUT THEN PROVED A BIT TOO TOUGH FOR THE GENTLE FOLKS THERE!


http://crosscut.com/2010/03/07/crosscut/19650/


I tried completing that monstrous poll you guys sent
 out some time ago and when i was done with page 2
it said i had failed to answer something on the first
page; going back to the first page all previous
answers were erased, nonetheless i ploughed through the idiocy
once again only to see that the answers on page 2... and so i said fuck this, and anyhow you need a far simpler questionnaire.
to wit:
[1] how often to you click through from our e-mail;
[2] do you think we contribute anything? yes - no - sometimes-
[3] are we or are we not infinitely boring
[4] what if we ceased publication, would you miss us, and for how long?
[5] suggestions

that would have done the trick - besides, you can fathom the answers from the number of comments and hits you get; so the questionnaire is/ was fundamentally superfluous except
to indicate a kind of hypocritical interest in the readers and as a form of self-advertisement, and for that you avail yourself of a questionnaire that a big time paper might send out!

i click through maybe once or twice a week, it is certainly not
essential to my news needs in seattle that I dont' feel sufficiently
served by the local paper and the PI's life as a blog,
or the two weeklies, the Stranger being the only one with
some  pizzass. Crosscut is a soporific.
It has Seattle's most boring writers, the only thing it is a cross section of is of the the most boring part of the middle class,
with the exception of mossback, except when he is riding his land use hobby horse. the art coverage does not really supplement or improve on the lack or lousy nature of a in a city without critics or a tradition of critical discourse, again the Stranger at least has sprouts that might yet flourish.

crosscut is not only a repository of intellectual laziness,
it is so day  in day out in not linking to possibly interesting
matters in regional rags of all kinds. it is entirely seattle based and basically moderately republican in as much as that term has meaning.once in a blue moon it ventures to Portland and Vancouver.
probably most folks who take the time to visit crosscut also read orat least glance at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal
and the PI, for reasons that are beyond me your link collection is pretty much confined to Joel Connolly who recently tied for second place among the most boring national pundits, with Roger Cohen winning first hands down, and to David Brooks a truly insidious purveyor of  intellectual treacle whom you must evidently admire!
that is of the wealth of material to which
one can link both regionally and nationally and internationally.
ted van dyke is a perfectly nice pundit, but pundits of that
kind are a dime a dozen on national affairs, and when you do stories of that kind like today's on healthcare, not even "johnny come lately" would seem to be the proper description
for such laggardness.
  i have enjoyed one or the other piece of yours about the farts
in seattle. you yourself came to my attention sometime in the  mid-90s when you sought to keep downey from reviewing plays at ACT because your wife was on the boardthere or something like that. ACT at that time was even a worse
outfit than it is now. here a link to a piece of local interest
that you might have found on your own:http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/09/starbucks-midlife-crisis
I'll get back to you anon on some other gorier specifics,
as to joining crosscut, i doubt that you have the funds
to pay me to attend your functions to be processed there.
Sincerely,
.MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name