fwriction

Asymptote is a fantastic new journal, focusing on translated works. I was delighted to find Thomas Bernhard here, and I hope you are, too. Check out this exciting journal, submit, and enjoy some good reading.

from “Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?”:

I haven’t been to the theatre any more for eight or ten weeks, I said to myself, and I know why I haven’t been to the theatre any more, I despise the theatre, I hate the actors, the theatre is nothing but a perfidious impertinence, an impertinent perfidiousness, and suddenly I’m supposed to go to the theatre again? To a play? What does that mean?

You know that the theatre is a nasty business, I said to myself, and you are going to write your study on the theatre, which you’ve got in your head, this theatre study, which will hit the theatre where it hurts once and for all! What the theatre is, what the actors are, the playwrights, the theatre managers and so on…

I was more and more dominated by the theatre, less and less by pathology, a failure in my attempt to ignore the theatre, to forge on with pathology

A failure! A failure!

I dressed and went out into the street.