Koestenbaum, Wayne
from Six Reasons for Loving Robert Walser
1. I love Walser for embracing nobody status, transvaluing the state of dwelling on the bottom.
2. I love Walser for his quick changes of tone, instantly shifting the scales of self-image (and of objective reality) from grandiose enlargement to abject diminutiveness (like Emily Dickinson’s oscillations of scale).
3. I [...]
Delirious Charter
By dint of reading, you are a member of the Robert Walser Society of Western (and west of) Massachusetts. Not to be confused with the insurmountable Robert Walser Gesellschaft (a Society, which wonderfully offers reduced dues for students and vagabonds) or the Jewish Historical Society of Western Massachusetts, with which it happily shares an old firehouse, the RWSWM is the umbrella under the arm of Walser & Company, a future bookshop; until then, the Minutes of the Robert Walser Society of Western Massachusetts, a book catalog that is also a book, will serve--under its auspices--in its stead. (See letters, links.) By dint of declaration, a reading of the inaugural Minutes will take its place at Schoen Books (see links above and below) on January 25, 2009 (time TBA, possibly all day, probably 6 p.m.), 80 years after Walser entered Waldau, on Virginia Woolf's 47th birthday. (She too was recuperating, having just returned from Berlin, where she had prefigured Walser's encounter with Lenin.)
