Frankfurteriana
Oct. 10th, 2012 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakNew Zealand pavillon: still awesome.
Book Fair 2012, first day: like all Wednesdays, this is traditionally the most quiet day of the fair, compared with all that's to come. (Thursday is when all the bookstore interns and apprentices show up, for example, and the weekend is open to the general public.) This makes it ideal for browsing. And meeting friends and acquaintances, sharing gossip, etc. Yours truly did all of this and avoided this book fair's winner for "most publicized trashy celebrity autobiography", who is, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Today he did book signings and interviews, while his bodyguards according to my source expressed irritation nobody calls him "Governor Schwarzenegger" here, and that everyone says "Arnie" instead. When those are POLITICAL memoirs. Well, sorry, and I freely admit that in the age of Silvio Berlusconi, Sarcozy and our own former president C. Wulff the lines between trashy celeb and politicians are more fluent than ever and interchangable often, but if you are a Carthinian writing that you introduced yourself to the mother of your intended by telling her her daughter has a great ass, you're an Arnie and not a Herr Ministerpräsident Schwarzenegger.
In other German pulp/American pulp news, seems the scriptwriter of Dances with Wolves who was charged with turning our Karl May's Wilhelminian Western into a film despite not speaking a word of German and not having read the novels delivered something so ghastly the Constantin (the late Bernd Eichinger's production firm) turned it down at once and the whole project is in limbo once more. My pal the Karl May publisher has extremely mixed feelings about this, because on the one hand, ghastly script, but on the other, films mean money, even if they're not successful, and if your one and only star author is someone from the 19th century, you need it.
By contrast, Klett Cotta, which has the German rights to all things Tolkien, looks exceedingly smug (and has placed gigantic Hobbit standups everywhere, along with feeling sort of proprietary about guest of honour New Zealand). So does Carlssen, which once upon a time was a tiny tiny children's publisher mostly doing comics but the only one in Germany willing to buy all seven Harry Potter novels at a time when only two were already published in Britain (and JKR only sold as a package, smart woman). These days, Carlssen is of course a giant because of this, even if on this book fair they are in the weird situation of still being a children's book publisher and having their big stand in the children's book section yet featuring a book decidedly not for children, i.e. The Casual Vacancy (since they in turn had been smart enough to secure themselves exclusive rights to any German Rowling publication back in the day.
Most interesting book originally written in German I've browsed through so far: "Odysseus, Verbrecher" (Odysseus, Criminal), a play by Christoph Ransmayer. Modern writers being troubled by the conclusion to the Odyssey (specifically the hanging of the handmaids) are nothing new, see Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, but Ransmayer comes up with an intriguing twist which uses the prophecy/advice Odysseus had before his return to Ithaca received in the underworld - about reconciling Poseidon by leaving Ithaca once more, carrying an oar far away to a country where people think it's shovel - in a way that I hadn't seen before. The play takes place entirely in Ithaca; Odysseus is the returning war veteran who because he's damaged can't do anything but repeat old patterns. The killing of the suitors and the handmaidens - the youth of Ithaca, after all, who don't respect him - is equated by Penelope with bringing the destruction of Troy here and repeating it. Telemachos who was at his father's side is sickened by the reality of the slaughter, the reality of death he hadn't experienced before, and throws up before rejecting the heroic ideal. Penelope tells Odysseus to leave until he can truly return to Ithaca as opposed to bringing the fall of Troy with him wherever he goes; the oar he carries is symbolic of that.
And in conclusion:
Book Fair 2012, first day: like all Wednesdays, this is traditionally the most quiet day of the fair, compared with all that's to come. (Thursday is when all the bookstore interns and apprentices show up, for example, and the weekend is open to the general public.) This makes it ideal for browsing. And meeting friends and acquaintances, sharing gossip, etc. Yours truly did all of this and avoided this book fair's winner for "most publicized trashy celebrity autobiography", who is, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Today he did book signings and interviews, while his bodyguards according to my source expressed irritation nobody calls him "Governor Schwarzenegger" here, and that everyone says "Arnie" instead. When those are POLITICAL memoirs. Well, sorry, and I freely admit that in the age of Silvio Berlusconi, Sarcozy and our own former president C. Wulff the lines between trashy celeb and politicians are more fluent than ever and interchangable often, but if you are a Carthinian writing that you introduced yourself to the mother of your intended by telling her her daughter has a great ass, you're an Arnie and not a Herr Ministerpräsident Schwarzenegger.
In other German pulp/American pulp news, seems the scriptwriter of Dances with Wolves who was charged with turning our Karl May's Wilhelminian Western into a film despite not speaking a word of German and not having read the novels delivered something so ghastly the Constantin (the late Bernd Eichinger's production firm) turned it down at once and the whole project is in limbo once more. My pal the Karl May publisher has extremely mixed feelings about this, because on the one hand, ghastly script, but on the other, films mean money, even if they're not successful, and if your one and only star author is someone from the 19th century, you need it.
By contrast, Klett Cotta, which has the German rights to all things Tolkien, looks exceedingly smug (and has placed gigantic Hobbit standups everywhere, along with feeling sort of proprietary about guest of honour New Zealand). So does Carlssen, which once upon a time was a tiny tiny children's publisher mostly doing comics but the only one in Germany willing to buy all seven Harry Potter novels at a time when only two were already published in Britain (and JKR only sold as a package, smart woman). These days, Carlssen is of course a giant because of this, even if on this book fair they are in the weird situation of still being a children's book publisher and having their big stand in the children's book section yet featuring a book decidedly not for children, i.e. The Casual Vacancy (since they in turn had been smart enough to secure themselves exclusive rights to any German Rowling publication back in the day.
Most interesting book originally written in German I've browsed through so far: "Odysseus, Verbrecher" (Odysseus, Criminal), a play by Christoph Ransmayer. Modern writers being troubled by the conclusion to the Odyssey (specifically the hanging of the handmaids) are nothing new, see Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, but Ransmayer comes up with an intriguing twist which uses the prophecy/advice Odysseus had before his return to Ithaca received in the underworld - about reconciling Poseidon by leaving Ithaca once more, carrying an oar far away to a country where people think it's shovel - in a way that I hadn't seen before. The play takes place entirely in Ithaca; Odysseus is the returning war veteran who because he's damaged can't do anything but repeat old patterns. The killing of the suitors and the handmaidens - the youth of Ithaca, after all, who don't respect him - is equated by Penelope with bringing the destruction of Troy here and repeating it. Telemachos who was at his father's side is sickened by the reality of the slaughter, the reality of death he hadn't experienced before, and throws up before rejecting the heroic ideal. Penelope tells Odysseus to leave until he can truly return to Ithaca as opposed to bringing the fall of Troy with him wherever he goes; the oar he carries is symbolic of that.
And in conclusion:
