Robert Musil: "Attempts to Find Another Human Being": Invitation to a Reading & Book Party

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Invitation to a Reading & Book Party

Greetings Readers,

There will be a party and reading to celebrate the release of my book The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil's 'The Man without Qualities': Possibility as Reality, in New York City, if any of you are in the area. The event will be held at the Zinc Bar at 82 W. 3rd Street on Sunday the 20th of January from 5:30 to 8:30 and will feature a reading by me from my book and a reading by Burton Pike from his brilliant epoch-making 1995 translation of some of the Nachlass portions of The Man without Qualities, followed by rejoicing. This reading is part of the Lungfull! Sunday Reading Series and will be free and open to the interested public. I would love to meet you!

1 comment:

UnknownJanuary 20, 2013 at 10:15 AM
Hi Dr. Grill and fellow IRMG member. Your book, the pages I was able to read of it on amazon, introduces a new statement into the MoE/ Musil conversation -- incompleteness is not failure but desired outcome. I'd be interested in reviewing it for one of the american German Studies journals. Why don't you contact me at cesarat@miamioh.edu if you are interested. Since this is a public post, I prefer not to go into my credentials on your blog (I couldn't figure out how to contact you directly -- maybe if I join the site?)...
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Attempts to Find Another Human Being

Around 1923 Musil planned to publish a collection of his essays under the title, "Versuche einen anderen Menschen zu finden" (Attempts to Find Another Human Being). In his notebooks he wrote:

"In fact, this could be the title for everything that I have ever written. I can think of no other excuse for spending one's whole life at a writing desk to become a beggar. [...] I can only imagine another duty with great difficulty. I have always been a writer, always pursued writing.
It has come to pass in my life that people have scolded me for it and have called me a sick human being, an intellectual, an unmoral human being, a scientist, in short, everything that I am not, and only with resistance, under the pressure of a few, people have become accustomed to thinking of me as what I believe myself to be, and want to be: a writer."