A gathering of the past -- weekend links

Professors & 4th-year graduates of philosophy at Lviv University (1904)

Source. Antoni Łomnicki is standing 3rd from left. (He was killed by Germans in the Massacre of the Lviv Professors.) Here's an article (pdf) about the people in the pic. Seated at the right is physicist and mathematician Marian Smoluchowski.

Anthea Bell's translation of Friedrich Torberg's Young Gerber is out from Pushkin Press (an excellent publisher whose website is not excellent). Here are two reviews. The book is about a tragedy in an Austrian school.

Speaking of which, Duncan Richter has a couple of posts on Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless. The novel was also the springboard for some reflections on value and culture.

Mr. Waggish has an essay on Musil's Man Without Qualities.

An interview with Susan Bernofsky, conducted while she was translating Gotthelf's Black Spider. David Auerbach (aka Mr. Waggish) says via Twitter that the book's release date is Oct. 8. It's strange that the NYRB site has no info about the book (neither does their Tumblr). The book (as Mr. Auerbach says) is on Amazon. Is it just me, or does the right half of the face on the cover look like Margaret Atwood?

Bookslut's review of Frierich Reck's Diary of a Man in Despair. It's also reviewed at the Guardian, by Common Reader, Futile Preoccupations, and Mookse and Gripes. This time, NYRB does have a site for the book. Reck, aka Friedrich Percival Reck-Malleczewen, died in Dachau. Here's a lengthy piece on him in German.

A review of Eduard Habsburg(-Lothringen)'s novel, Lena in Waldersbach.

Webern is 3rd from right

Source.

From David Wilson's review of Alain Badiou's Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy: 'Badiou’s bombast finally testifies in defense of Wittgenstein. Not that Badiou admits that Wittgenstein might be right. But this uncharitable and incomprehensible critique shows it. For silence would say so much more.'

Wuthering Expectations has several posts on Austrian writers, on Bernhard, Broch, Hofmannsthal, and Stifter (twice).

On the death of Anton Webern.

On James Joyce in Trieste.

Here are some nice old and new photos of the country houses that Patrick Leigh Fermor came across in Transylvania and Fermor's postcard from Cluj.

Neglected Books Page has an entry on You Still Have Your Head, a book by Franz Schoenberner.

Review of a newly translated French biography of Émile Durkheim.

Llosa on why Proust is important for everyone.

A podcast of John Marenbon on Boethius.

This strikes me as depressing. The Journal of Happiness Studies published this paper, 'Arthur’s advice: comparing Arthur Schopenhauer’s advice on happiness with contemporary research'. According to the Abstract, 'We summarize [Schopenhauer's] recommendations and compare these with conditions for happiness as observed in present day empirical research. Little of the advice appears to fit current research on conditions for happiness. Following Schopenhauer’s advice would probably make us unhappier, even if we had the same neurotic personality.' It's open access.

Funny Firbank, Hamilton's plaque, and a little flower girl

Ingeborg Bachmann

From Christopher Fowler's list of nearly forgotten but good authors: 'Asked for his opinion of literature, [Ronald Firbank] admitted that he adored italics; a typically oblique Firbankian remark. His books contain party chatter consisting of disconnected words and phrases, much as we actually perceive them. Infamously, one chapter consisted of the exclamation “Mabel!” repeated eight times.'

An NPR segment on Patrick Leigh Fermor's Time to Keep Silence AND Werner Herzog reading Roger Ebert's review of the animated movie based on J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip

Patrick Hamilton gets a blue plaque in London but it isn't on a pub

Some Anglican evangelicals in literature

Sir Isaac Newton's alchemical forays 

A short piece on Friedrich Torberg and Vienna café writers

Five questions for Jenny Erpenbeck

Mooks & Gripes reviews Gert Hofmann's Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl 

A neat-looking British horror anthology from 1969

Tess Lewis on Victor Serge's novels

F. R. Leavis remembers Wittgenstein

Steven E. Aschheim in Mittelweg: 'The critique of liberal-bourgeois instrumentality and mass modernity invariably informed the nature of their projects and the political positions they adopted – conservative, Zionist, Marxist, or religious. These sentiments were very much in the mould of Weimar intellectuals. ... Now, I want to compare them to another intellectual who ... occupies a remarkably iconic position precisely because he is a liberal. I am referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin.'

Vince Taylor, on whom the character of Ziggy Stardust was partly based:

Cafe Parsifal

"As to the Parsifal, while it was generally known as the coffeehouse favoured by members of the philharmonic orchestra ... there also sat -- in a reserved niche at a table usually strewn with newspapers -- Karl Kraus" (whose tirade against the Young Vienna authors provoked a physical assault by Felix Salten) (Friedrich Torberg, Tante Jolesch, or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes [Ariadne Press, 2008; 1st published in German in 1975]). The Parsifal was in this building on the northeast corner of Josefstadter Strasse and Albert Gasse, which has been home to the Cafe Hummel since 1936.

Viennese Cafes

I was in Austria for about ten days and spent about half that time in Vienna.

Here are some nice descriptions of the ethos of Viennese cafes which suggest why they were so attractive and stimulating for artists and intellectuals (a feature which has prompted at least one academic conference about Viennese cafes).

1. Alfred Polgar wrote an essay about Café Central ('Theory of Café Central'). His article is included in H. B. Segel's collection Vienna Coffeehouse Wits. Polgar writes, “Its inhabitants are … people whose hatred of their fellow human beings is as fierce as their longing for people, who want to be alone but need companionship for it” (Segel, p. 267). Polgar adds, “There are writers … who are unable to carry out their literary chores anywhere but at the Café Central. Only there, only at the tables of idleness, is the worktable laid for them, only there, enveloped by the air of indolence, will their inertia become fecundity” (Ibid.).

2. Here's an observation by Stefan Zweig: "The Viennese coffeehouse is a particular institution which is not comparable to any other in the world. As a matter of fact, it is a sort of democratic club to which admission costs the small price of a cup of coffee. Upon payment of this mite every guest can sit for hours on end, discuss, write, play cards, receive his mail, and, above all, can go through an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines" (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday [University of Nebraska Press, 1964; 1st published in English in 1943]).

3. Here's a more recent blurb from Friedrich Torberg in his Tante Jolesch, or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes (Ariadne Press, 2008; published in German in 1975): "The classical attitude of a true habitué was possibly demonstrated even more convincingly by District Court Judge Reiter. Judge Reiter appeared each day -- for decades -- at Café Colosseum at four o'clock in the afternoon, sat down each day at the same table, was served a Melange with whipped cream and two horn-shaped shortbreads, received the evening papers first and then successively all other national and international newspapers, read them, paid, and did not have to utter a single word during this entire procedure." (p. 98 of Torberg's Tante Jolesch).

4. From Peter Altenberg's 'Coffeehouse': "You've got troubles of one kind or another -- get thee to the coffeehouse! ... You make four hundred Crowns and spend five hundred -- coffeehouse! ... You're a paper pusher and would've liked to become a doctor -- coffeehouse! ... You loathe and revile people and yet can't live without them -- coffeehouse! No place else will let you pay on credit -- coffeehouse!" (Telegrams of the Soul, trans. Peter Wortsman [Archipelago Books, 2005], p. 13)

5. In her article 'The City as a Context for Scientific Activity' (Endeavour 28 [March, 2004]), Maria Rentetzi writes: "The role of coffee houses as locations of scientifc exchange, as sites of learning ... has recently become the interest of historians of science. For Vienna, coffee houses have been associated with the city's cultural pre-eminence at the turn of the 19th century, and have been portrayed as clubs of philosophical, political and artistic circles." [Rentetzi here cites U. Heise's Kaffee und Kaffeehaus (Insel Verlag, 2002), which has been translated into English.]

6. In a book published just last year (Sacred Spring [Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmanns Publishing Company, 2007]), Robert Weldon Whalen writes: "Vienna's coffeehouses were highly specialized. Journalists could be found at one cafe, artists at others. While artists frequented the Scheidl, and the Fenstergucker, actors tended to congregate at the Dobner or perhaps the Café Stadtpark. Café Gabesam was a good general place for middle-class people. ... Public places with a strong sense of privacy, open businesses with intimate charm, they were the Viennese equivalent to public squares. Landsdale, in her turn-of-the-century guide to [Vienna], noted that 'the café is the centre of social life; there business is discussed and bargains concluded ... it corresponds to the Forum of the ancients.'" [Whalen here cites Maria Horner Landsdale, Vienna and the Viennese, (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1902), p. 146.]

One of the above-mentioned artists' cafes, the Fenstergucker, is now a Starbucks.