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evengayerpanic · 4 years

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Halloween Party [Spookstober]

Day 11 of 13 Days of Spookstober: Carmilla.

A Vampire, a Werewolf, a Mad Scientist, a Ghost and a Girl throw a party on Halloween Night in a Haunted Castle. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but for Carmilla and Laura it's their yearly tradition with their friends.

_________________

“Do we have enough kale for the Kale-Apple-Banana smoothies that Perry drinks?” Laura goes down her list slowly, with a trained eye, crossing each item off with the most meticulous of pencil strokes.

Carmilla wants to tell her that they have enough kale to eat nothing but the leafy green for the next month and a half... However, Laura is in the zone, the do-something zone and Carmilla knows better than to tease her when she’s planning.

She’ll save all kale-related taunting for when Laura has put the pen down, and is no longer fretting all of the details of their little Halloween bash.

Laura gets nervous around planning, her head swarms with what ifs and what to dos that she can’t focus on anything for very long. So she makes the lists, she makes them elaborate and detail-oriented, leaving nothing unwritten. This way, she won’t forget anything or worry about the last minute details.

Carmilla is the exact opposite.

She doesn’t get phased in the same way that Laura does. If there’s a problem, if there’s anything at all that goes wrong, it can be fixed. And if it can’t be fixed?

Well it could always be worse.

Still, Carm would never want to make Laura feel bad about her need for things to be perfect, if it makes Laura happy, Carmilla has no problem with it.

So she stays quiet, and she nods her head yes, listening as Laura goes through every thing on her list. She smiles, watches her girlfriend with amusement, and tries her hardest not to mention that it didn’t matter if they had enough Kale anyways, because Perry is the only one who drinks those smoothies... and as a ghost? She can’t drink them anyways.

Still she is quiet, and supportive, and respectful, and some would even say helpful... if only just slightly.

_________________

The party, like always, is a hit... Between Danny and Kirsch, there’s enough rivalry to fuel enough hijinks to last a week worth of laughs, much less an evening.

Perry, as usual, brings enough food to combat just how much Laura has already put out, and the two spend the first hour talking recipes and baking and what dish to try first and what pairs with what.

Mel has brought weapons, just this time it’s nothing terribly dangerous, only darts... something which is a lot of fun for a few rounds until Carmilla discovers how funny it is to ping the darts off of the back of Kirsch’s head, turning to LaFontaine and pretending to laugh at something they’ve said whenever Kirsch turns around to figure out what keeps hitting him.

LaFontaine, after thorough warning from Perry, has managed not to blow anything up in Laura and Carmilla’s little apartment, the first year they’ve accomplished not doing that since the two lovebirds first moved in... four years ago.

The first year was a microwave. The second, a television... and the third? Kirsch’s phone... while he was using it to order a pizza because “Kale is totally gross, man.” That one may have been intentional.

They manage to play an insane game of Cards Against Humanity, though it takes forever after the ‘sweet and innocent’ Perry keeps taking round after round and they start having to pick their jaws up off the floor after hearing some of the really raunchy things that leave her mouth.

They have a costume contest; Carmilla and Laura winning it for their well-crafted Gomez and Morticia Addams looks... though Danny has to remind them every few minutes that they aren’t the real Gomez and Morticia, and she didn’t come over only to watch them make out every three minutes.

(Danny came as a cute Cookie Monster but quickly became Oscar the Grouch after seeing that.)

They eat food, like a ridiculously large amount of food. It’s Perry’s Spinach Dip, and Laura’s Chocolate Chip Ghost Cookies, and a lot of assorted candy plus more... They eat until they all pass out on the couch, curled up so tightly that you can’t quite be sure where one friend starts and the other ends.

And then they watch a movie, usually something with a serial killer, or a zombie (they decided no vampires, werewolves or ghosts are allowed to be portrayed poorly during the party), until they fall asleep.

Carmilla is the last one awake, moving only enough to flick the television screen off, and glance around at her friends - no, her family around her.

LaFontaine and Perry are curled up on the loveseat, Perry resting between Laf’s legs, her head on their thigh and arms wrapped tightly around their hips.

Mel is on the floor with Kirsch, for all the fighting they do (it’s almost as bad as Danny and Kirsch), they always end up sprawled together, his legs crushing hers and her hand smacked across his face in a way that’ll be painful for both in the morning.

Danny is face down on the couch, the line of the couches seam already engraving itself into her face, her one hand reaches across to Kirsch almost lovingly, the brother she never had.

Carmilla is underneath Laura, the tiny blonde curled up in her lap as they spoon in their favourite chair, Carm’s face is tight against Laura’s neck, cheek pressed into her girlfriend’s shoulder as she holds her.

This, Carmilla thinks, is what it truly means to be alive... and she is so grateful that she got that chance.

Even if they all have to go their separate ways again the next day, even if life catches up to them hard and they get too busy to see each other until Christmas, this is still what it means to be alive.

Even more, it’s what it means to be loved.

Carmilla would give every bit of her immortality to continue to feel this for the rest of her human life.

#carmilla #the Carmilla movie #carmilla karnstein #laura hollis #hollstein #danny lawrence #brody kirsch #kirsch #13 days of spookstober

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dearestpartnerofgreatness · 5 years

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oh also do the one where Monica and Chandler spend the weekend in the hotel and when they get back innocuous comments lead to Joey figuring it out

Kinda did this for Kaoru/Kyoya from OHSHC here and here so let’s change it up and do one of my older ships that gets hardly any love: Zeta Society from Carmilla!

Danny and Kirsch are secretly sleeping together, but finding a place to spend time together is difficult since there’s no plausible reason for Kirsch to be in the Summers’ dorm nor Danny at the Zeta frat house. So, they each make up a fake excuse to get away for the weekend. After fighting like...well, Zetas and Summers the whole time and then making up once they get home, they believe they have gotten away with the ruse. The hotel calls, however, to tell Kirsch he left a sports bra in his room and Lafontaine is the one who answers the call. Later when the group is hanging out, Danny asks Laura if she found an extra sports bra in her room, because she thinks she lost hers. Lafontaine puts the pieces together and freaks out and Danny & Kirsch have to drag them into the bathroom to plead with them to please not tell anyone...of course later Carmilla finds out and tries to mess with them, and chaos ensues. :) Laura, somehow, is the last to know...

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darthbelle · 3 years

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Hola, weeb!

For Victorious, could I get a 1 and a 9?

And for Carmilla, could I get a 16? 👀

And then for whatever fandom you want, 22 and 23?

sigh

Danny, I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but I’m not a weeb. I’m many other things.

1. What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get?

I don’t know if it’s that I don’t get them, but I just...Bade is such an unhealthy relationship, on both of their parts? And I know that Jori isn’t exactly healthy, but they’ve at least demonstrated growth throughout the show. I can’t really say the same of Beck and Jade. They just kinda go through the motions- fight, break up, mope, get back together. Rinse, repeat.

I get why people ship them, but I really do think they’re better as just friends.

Also Tandre, but only because I see them as friends?

9. Most disliked character(s)? Why?

Rex, and because fuck Rex.

16. If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?

whew boy alrighty

So, I love Carmilla, you know this. But I hated the way that Danny Lawrence got treated post-S1. Parts of her arc in season 2 were okay, but they basically butchered her character in season 3. I’m still angry about that. And then she wasn’t in the movie, save for a cameo? Yeah. So I’d change that. I’d make Danny Lawrence have the character arc that she deserved.

(I’d also not leave the movie on that cliffhanger because it completely undid the ending of season 3 and I’m still salty about it because goddamn it, Carmilla and Laura deserve to be happy)

22. Popular character you hate?

Xander from Buffy. I don’t know if he’s even popular but fuck that guy

23. Unpopular character you love?

He’s not unpopular but let’s be real, any character who isn’t Carm or Laura kinda gets left behind so uh, I fucking love Kirsch. (And he’ll always be Brody Kirsch to me, even though canon says otherwise)

any others?

#asks

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frenchfrysplash · 5 years

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Remember when everyone decided kirsch’s first name was Brody lol good times good times

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lovequinn · 7 years

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ok but her name is canonically spelled "elle" can we stop with the "ell" now because i don't want a repeat of the brody kirsch situation thank

#carmilla

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good-and-safe · 7 years

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Prompt! Hollstein and the quotes "Are you drunk?" and "Don't call me that!" ~Fox

i’m doing this as a HMT!verse prompt and it’s set somewhere amidst the events of chapter six. thanks fox!!

You’re at The Roof with the usual suspects - Kirsch and the rest of your squadron - when some drunk college idiots start making a ruckus down the bar from you. It disrupts your group’s conversation, but only for a moment. Kirsch recovers quickly and turns to you.

“So,” he starts with a smile that tells you that you won’t like what follows. “How’s the little nerd?”

“She has a name, you know,” you say, taking a long pull from your drink.

“I know that, but this is more fun for me.”

“Because it’s annoying?”

“Duh,” he shrugs with a grin.

“So how is she?” Carson asks, steering the conversation back to your ridiculous sham of a marriage.

“Uptight as ever,” you say, before motioning to Brody behind the bar. “Another, and make it a double.”

“I thought you were getting along better,” Kirsch says, leaning back against the bartop.

“We are. That’s the problem.”

“I’m… confused,” Billy says.

“Yeah,” Reese adds, “how’s that an issue?”

Just then, Brody sets down your drink and a shot.

“On the house,” he tells you, “to survive this mockery of an interrogation.”

You down the shot quickly and chase it with your drink. Your very strong drink. Brody never disappoints.

Kirsch points to you and says, “See that? That’s Carmilla for” - he puts on a voice that you think is meant to sound like you - “‘she’s making me feel things and I’m Carmilla Karnstein and no one makes me feel my own feelings!’”

“Okay, Wilson, that’s enough.”

“Dude,” he says, voice softer. “At our bar? Not cool, man.”

“Fine - just - let’s drop it.”

Kirsch perks back up. “Chugging contest?”

“Only if you get me the finest German beer this place has to offer.”

Too many beers and not enough minutes later, your arm is being raised in victory. You wipe the beer mustache above your lip away with your free arm and let loose a serious belch.

“Karnstein remains the queen!” Brody announces to the small crowd that’s gathered.

“As if there was ever a doubt,” you say, pushing yourself to your feet, wobbling a little as you do. “Whoa.”

You pat Kirsch’s back as he downs the last of his beer before slamming the stein down on the table in front of him.

“Fuuuuuuuuuck, man.”

“Ditto.”

“Obvs, like totally,” Kirsch adds in his finest Valley Girl voice.

“Okay, so,” Brody cuts in, “he’s done for the night.”

You, however, are not, so while Kirsch sips some water, you continue drinking - albeit at a much, much slower pace - and you both continue talking and laughing with your friends. The Roof clears out a little but somehow gets louder, but that’s probably because those remaining are too drunk to have volume control.

You head over to the jukebox in the corner to switch the music, as you always do on Fridays around this time, when the college guys from earlier call to you.

“What’s new, pussycat?!”

You turn on your heel, which goes more smoothly than it should considering how many drinks you’ve had tonight.

“Excuse me?”

“Come over and play, kitty,” one of them says and you feel your stomach drop.

Your vision blurs and for a moment - a split second - the dark-haired boy’s face morphs into a more familiar one, a more beloved one: Will’s.

That second passes and you see the face for what it really is: a drunk, belligerent assbag.

“Here, kitty!” he says and you stalk toward him, shoulders drawn up. “Aw, kitty’s on the prowl!”

You reach the bar, grab the idiot by front of his shirt, and say, “Don’t you fucking dare call me that.”

Just then, you feel strong arms wrap around your waist and then your feet are no longer touching the ground. If you didn’t recognize Kirsch’s cologne, you’d kick and fight, but you let him carry you a few steps back.

“Breathe, Carmilla. Breathe.”

You don’t realize until just that moment that you’d been holding your breath and you exhale sharply. The back of your throat pangs and Will’s voice seems to echo in your head. Kirsch sets you down and you turn to face him.

“You good?”

“Yeah,” you say. “Whatever, I just - I’m g’nna get some air.”

“Want me to come with?”

You shake your head.

“Thank you, but no. Keep an eye on those fuckers.”

“Roger that.”

Before you know it, you’re in the alley beside The Roof, crouching, back against the cold brick of the building. You’re willing yourself not to cry, but you’ve had a lot to drink and you just - you miss your brother.

You pull your phone from your pocket and before you can think about it, you call Laura.

It only rings twice before she picks up.

“Carm?” she asks.

“Hi,” you say and to your own ears, your voice sounds weak.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, mhmm. I just - I’m at Th’ Roof and some guy - it’s just - Will’s dead.”

“Carm, are you drunk?”

“Very, cupcake. A lot. But ‘m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

You let silence settle between the two of you before you say, “I wanna come home.”

“So come home.”

“I don’t - well - I can’t ‘member how to get there.”

“Carm,” Laura says with what sounds like a mixture of amusement and sadness. “I’ll be there in ten, alright? Stay put.”

You rejoin your friends, if only to tell Kirsch that you’re leaving. They all pretend as if you hadn’t just tried to fight a frat boy and you’re reminded, once more, that you know some of the best people in this city. Laura comes through the door even sooner than you expect and something in your chest settles.

“Hi guys,” she says, bright and sunny as always, regardless of the fact that it’s nearing 1:00am.

“Hey Laura,” the group says, nearly in unison.

She turns to you then and asks, “Ready to head out?” You nod and Laura loops her arm through yours and tugs you gently toward the door. “Have a good night, everyone! Get home safe, please.”

“Will do,” Kirsch says, and you ignore the content grin he shoots your way.

Laura leads you back to the loft, arm still looped around yours the entire way, and when you get to her building, she pulls you up the stairs. The two of you reach the third floor, Laura passes it and continues up the stairs. You resist a little in confusion and Laura stop walking.

“Trust me,” she says, nodding toward the stairs. “I know a place.”

You follow Laura, who leads you to a heavy metal door that you find out leads to the roof. She pushes the door open and then holds it for you.

“Thought you could use some fresh air,” she says, shrugging. “Plus, it’s clear out tonight.”

Your throat tightens again and all you manage is a nod before you pass Laura and walk out onto the roof. The cool air hits you and you pull in the first fulfilling breath since you heard the word “kitty.” You walk out to the center of the roof and you don’t feel Laura follow. She’s right, though, and it’s clear enough to see the night stars, even with the lights of the city shining bright.

You sit down, cross-legged, eyes trained on the sky, focusing on your breathing. Laura joins you then, mirroring your position, her right knee resting on your left. The contact shifts your gaze from the sky to Laura and she’s unfolding a blanket.

“Where did you magic that from?”

Laura nods to her left and says, “Storage closet, for just such an occasion,” as she wraps the blanket around the both of you.

“Thanks,” you say, voice soft.

“Wouldn’t want you freezing to death up here.”

“No, I mean - for coming to get me, but also this - thank you.”

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

You look back up to the sky and start counting stars. You feel yourself gaining a bit of sobriety.

“I miss my brother. I always do, but - there was this guy at the bar being gross and he called me the nickname Will always called me and I just…” you trail off.

“I’m so sorry,” Laura says.

You shrug and say, “It’s whatever.”

“It’s not, Carm. I know you like to act like you’re tough as nails but it’s okay to be upset. It’s also okay to accept help when it’s offered, which you did tonight!”

“Silver linings, huh?”

“Silver linings.”

Shortly thereafter, you and Laura retire to the loft and you head straight for the couch, opting not to even bother changing into sleep shorts. You let yourself fall onto the couch and get situated on your side, back to the back of the couch. Your body feels heavy with grief and alcohol and exhaustion and you’re just dozing off when you feel a dip in the couch near your feet.

You open your eyes and Laura’s there, looking down on you.

“You okay to sleep now?” You nod and she continues, “Okay, just, y’know, come get me if you need anything. There’s a glass of water if you need it.”

“Thanks, Laura.”

She smiles and you think her cheeks redden a bit. Then she pushes herself to her feet and retrieves a blanket from the wicker basket beside the couch. She lays it over you and fusses until she’s content that you’re comfortable.

“Thanks for letting your guard down tonight. You’re safe with me,” Laura says, and you drift off into a peaceful rest.

#answered #fox #hollstein fic #carmilla fic #my fic #gonna post on ao3 too i think #Anonymous

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runawaybun · 7 years

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perrynormalisms replied to your post: just checking but we’re boycotting elle right?

it will always be ell and brody kirsch

signs you been stuck in carmilla hell for way too forever long~

#;out of carrots #(this doesnt count for the only 1 post rule cause its a reply) jove says to herself

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nebris · 7 years

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Ironists of a Vanished Empire

Adam Kirsch June 22, 2017 Issue

Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

by Marjorie Perloff University of Chicago Press, 204 pp., $30.00

Marjorie Perloff is one of America’s leading critics of poetry, having spent a long career writing on the work of avant-garde poets from Frank O’Hara to Charles Bernstein. But though she is the author of many books, she wrote in her 2004 memoir, The Vienna Paradox, “when I see [my] name in print…there is always a moment when I wonder who Marjorie Perloff is. It just doesn’t look or sound like me.” That is because, until she became a US citizen at the age of thirteen, she was called not Marjorie but Gabriele—Gabriele Mintz, the name she was born with in Vienna in 1931. Just seven years old when she came to America, Perloff can be counted as perhaps the youngest of the great wave of European Jewish intellectual refugees who immeasurably enriched American culture. On March 13, 1938, the day after Hitler’s armies marched into Austria to annex it to the Reich, the Mintz family boarded a train for Zurich, and kept moving until they had reached the Bronx, where Perloff would spend the rest of her childhood.

The dramatic metamorphosis from Gabriele to Marjorie, from haute-bourgeois Jewish Vienna to middle-class Riverdale, is the subject of Perloff’s excellent memoir. The Austria where she was born was a rump state, carved at the end of World War I from the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire. But it retained some of the grandeur of the empire’s multinational culture. And none of the empire’s many ethnic groups—Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slavs—did more to create that culture, or held it in greater reverence, than its Jews. The emigration of Jews from rural villages in Galicia and other parts of Eastern Europe to the capital in Vienna had created, before World War I, an intelligentsia of amazing accomplishment, including figures like Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud.

As Perloff writes, Vienna’s Jews were passionate about German culture even though, or perhaps because, they were for the most part rejected as members of the German nation:

The alternative to…nationality was the Kulturnation of German Enlightenment culture—the liberal cosmopolitan ethos of Bildung [development], which had its roots in the classical Greek notion of paideia. Bildung was more than “civilization,” since…it was conceived as having a distinct spiritual dimension. Thus the cult of Kultur was gradually transformed into a kind of religion.

In her memoir, Perloff is alternately nostalgic for this religion of culture and suspicious of it. Plainly, the Viennese Jews’ enthusiasm for art and intellect did not earn them a secure place in Austrian society. On the contrary, fin-de-siècle Vienna was one of the birthplaces of political anti-Semitism, the place where the young Hitler first expressed his hatred of Jews. For all the accomplishments of the German Jews, Kultur could be seen as a kind of lullaby they sang to themselves as the walls closed in.

For a young girl trying to grow up into an American, Perloff writes, her parents’ inherited snobbery toward all things American, their nostalgia for the Vienna they had left behind, was maddening. “As a teenager, I was always hearing conversations culminating in the phrase, Dass ist doch nur Kitsch! (This is merely kitsch!),” she remembers. When Perloff “expressed my enthusiasm for Carousel,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “my mother and grandmother gave each other a look, as if to say, ‘Poor child, she doesn’t yet understand.’” In a sense, Perloff’s career as a literary critic can be seen as an attempt to bridge these two realms of taste and value, showing that American postmodern writers, though saturated in mass media and popular culture, can be as sophisticated and rewarding as the Old World modernists.

In Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, Perloff returns to the world of her birth. She engages in a close reading of six major post-imperial Austrian writers, making the case for the existence of a distinctive and valuable tradition of “Austro-Modernism.” Modernism, in the twenty-first century, is almost as venerable as the Renaissance. When we look for the writers who shaped our world, we are likely to name the titans who lived a hundred years ago—Woolf, Pound, Proust. As these names suggest, however, it is “French and Anglo-American Modernism,” Perloff observes, “that has been the source of our norms and paradigms for the early century.” When it comes to the German-speaking world, too, there is a whole academic industry devoted to the writers, thinkers, and artists who flourished in Weimar Germany—figures like Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Kurt Schwitters.

But Perloff believes that this focus on Germany has cast a shadow over the distinctively different work done by twentieth-century German writers who lived in the territories once belonging to the Habsburg Empire. The poet Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz in Romania; the memoirist Elias Canetti was from Rustchuk in Bulgaria; the novelist and journalist Joseph Roth was from Brody, which after 1918 became part of Poland. But all of these places were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Perloff considers them all as belonging to a coherent Austrian tradition. She reads them alongside three other writers closely associated with Vienna: the satirist Karl Kraus, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Robert Musil, the only one of the six who was not Jewish.

It is a disparate group, but Perloff believes they share a certain sensibility, a way of thinking and feeling, that can be traced to their situation as legatees of a vanished empire. Modernism is usually thought of as being radical in all directions; whether they were politically revolutionary or reactionary, modernist thinkers strove for a new beginning in art and culture. “The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt,” announced F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto in 1909. For the Austro-Modernists, by contrast, the dominant spirit was irony, as Perloff explains:

Its hallmark [was] a profound skepticism about the power of government—any government or, for that matter, economic system—to reform human life. In Austro-Modernist fiction and poetry, irony—an irony less linked to satire (which posits the possibility for reform) than to a sense of the absurd—is thus the dominant mode. The writer’s situation is perceived not as a mandate for change…but as an urgent opportunity for probing analysis of fundamental desires and principles.

This preference for diagnosis over prescription, for retrospection over renovation, is so far from what we usually think of as modernism that it may not seem to deserve the name. But in her case studies, Perloff argues convincingly that post–World War I Austro-Hungarian literature—a literature named after a country that had ceased to exist—did share fundamental elements with the wider modernist project. The preference for fragments over wholes, the resistance to “closure,” the dissolving power of analysis—these qualities, which we find in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Pound’s Cantos, Perloff also locates in works ranging from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to Kraus’s epic satirical play The Last Days of Mankind. The difference is that, while Eliot and Pound put their faith in various reactionary doctrines to repair the damage of the twentieth century, the Austro-Modernists remained poised in skepticism. To use a word that Perloff avoids, there is something liberal—in the sense of anti-utopian, anti-ideological—about these writers.

This skepticism about ideology appears to be an echt-Austrian quality, which developed over the course of the long reign of Emperor Franz Josef, from 1848 to 1916. During this period, the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe and of Prussian military power robbed the Austro-Hungarian Empire of its raison d’être. The empire satisfied neither the militant pan-Germans, who looked to Prussia for leadership, nor the other ethnicities living under Habsburg rule, who yearned for independence. All that was holding the empire together, it came to seem, was the personal authority of Franz Josef, who was revered as the symbol of a continuity everyone knew was on its last legs.

For writers looking back on this long Indian summer of empire, from the vantage point of post-1918 anarchy, it was the very mildness of this ruling principle—its tolerance, even its slovenliness—that inspired nostalgia. This was especially true for Jewish writers who found themselves in successor states where anti-Semitism flourished, and who remembered the monarchy as a bulwark that had once held anti-Jewish hatred at bay.

One of the greatest elegies for the empire came from Robert Musil, who was born in 1880 and raised in Bohemia. In his unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, which is set in Vienna in 1913, Musil evoked the atmosphere of resigned mediocrity that sustained the empire he called “Kakania.” The name is a double pun. It evokes the phrase kaiserlich und königlich, “imperial and royal,” which was affixed to the empire’s institutions, since Franz Josef—in a typically Austrian compromise—reigned as both emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. But it also puns on the word “kaka,” which in German as in English is a childish name for excrement.

The eighth chapter of the first book of The Man Without Qualities is Musil’s ode to Vienna’s mixed-up, ridiculous, but curiously resilient regime. Musil writes:

By its constitution it was liberal, but its system of government was clerical. The system of government was clerical, but the general attitude to life was liberal. Before the law all citizens were equal, but not everyone, of course, was a citizen. There was a parliament, which made such vigorous use of its liberty that it was usually kept shut; but there was also an emergency powers act by means of which it was possible to manage without Parliament, and every time when everyone was just beginning to rejoice in absolutism, the Crown decreed that there must now again be a return to parliamentary government.

To Musil, all this confusion left Franz Josef’s subjects “negatively free,” and he concludes that “Kakania was perhaps a home for genius after all; and that, probably, was the ruin of it.” Certainly his own novel is a portrait of genius—in the shape of Ulrich, the titular man without qualities—that can find no expression, no worthy aim, no intellectual or spiritual discipline. What Ulrich finds instead is a job with the Parallel Campaign, an initiative to celebrate the seventieth year of Franz Josef’s reign, in 1918.

Of course the reader knows, as the characters do not, that the emperor will die before that anniversary, and so will the empire. The whole campaign is an exercise in hubris and blindness, accentuated by the fact that no one involved can actually define what they intend to accomplish. All they can do is rhapsodize: “Their goal must stir the heart of the world. It must not be merely practical, it must be sheer poetry…. It must be a mirror for the world to gaze into and blush.”

The Austrian idea is empty, but at least it is not menacing. The same can’t be said of another character, Hans Sepp, whom Perloff sees as a representative of the fascism that would triumph after the war. Sepp, Musil writes, was part of a “Christian-German circle” that opposed “‘the Jewish mind,’ by which they meant capitalism and socialism, science, reason, parental authority and parental arrogance, calculation, psychology, and skepticism.” Musil, writing his novel in the 1920s—the first two parts were published in 1930 and 1933—could already see that this kind of all-too-definite ideology had triumphed over Kakanian “negative freedom.” Musil himself, like the Mintz family, had to flee Austria after the Anschluss—among other things, he was vulnerable because he had a Jewish wife—and he died in penury and obscurity in Switzerland in 1942.

A similarly grim end was in store for Joseph Roth, whose The Radetzky March is the other major novelistic elegy to the vanished empire. This book too, in Perloff’s words, “tracks the dissolution of a particular complex of values—values in many ways absurd and regressive, but benign in comparison to the political climate of post–World War I Europe.” The story concerns three generations of the Trottas, a family elevated to the nobility when the grandfather, an ordinary peasant turned soldier, saves the life of Franz Josef at the Battle of Solferino. The grandson, Carl Joseph von Trotta, is an officer in the imperial army on the eve of World War I, where he too experiences the breakdown of traditional martial and aristocratic values. Perloff emphasizes that this is above all a breakdown of language: “Words—the official words and state dogma—can no longer control actions.”

Language was inevitably a central issue for writers in a polity that was riven along linguistic lines, and it is one of the recurring themes of Edge of Irony. Karl Kraus, the arch-satirist of imperial and post-imperial Vienna, edited a one-man journal, Die Fackel, whose major purpose was to expose and denounce journalistic clichés. Perloff’s chapter on Kraus focuses on The Last Days of Mankind, his immense antiwar drama, which he worked on throughout World War I and completed in 1922.

The work is unperformably long: as Kraus himself wrote, “the performance of this play, which according to terrestrial measurement of time would encompass about ten evenings, is intended for theater on Mars.” Rather than a script, Perloff thinks of it as “hypertextual,” an assemblage of “newspaper dispatches, editorials, public proclamations, minutes of political meetings, or manifestos, letters, picture postcards, and interviews—indeed, whatever constituted the written record of the World War I years.” In this way, Kraus anticipates today’s conceptual poets, such as Kenneth Goldsmith—a writer much admired by Perloff—whose work consists largely of transcriptions. (Goldsmith once led a project called Printing Out the Internet, which attempted to do just that; it’s easy to imagine Kraus admiring this impossible dream.)

Kraus famously referred to Vienna as a “proving ground for the destruction of the world,” and in The Last Days of Mankind he showed that the first stage in this process was the destruction of language. In one scene, Kraus mocks the wartime vogue for banning German words of foreign origin by having a character deliver a speech on behalf of “the provisional Central Commission of the Executive Committee of the League for the General Boycott of Foreign Words”—a speech that, Perloff observes, is “a tissue of foreign phrases,” including the word “boycott” itself.

In another scene, he has two characters discuss the proliferation of wartime rumors, in a dialogue where the word “rumor” appears thirty times, reducing language to nonsense: “The rumor going around in Vienna is that there are rumors going around in Austria,” and so on. Kraus’s emphasis on language might seem excessive until one remembers the euphemisms coined by the Nazis to conceal their crimes—proof that the corruption of language is indeed indispensable to the corruption of human beings.

The issue of language unites post-imperial writers as different as Elias Canetti, known mainly for his study Crowds and Power and his memoirs, and the poet Paul Celan. Perloff observes that, in describing his own childhood, Canetti makes much of the continual changes of language to which he was subject. Born in a Sephardic Jewish community in Bulgaria, he grew up speaking Ladino at home and Bulgarian to his neighbors; meanwhile his parents spoke German to each other, and a move to England brought English into his repertoire as well. Not until he turned eight and the family moved to Vienna did German become his “mother tongue.” But can a mother tongue acquired so late really be called native speech? Perloff argues that Canetti’s own prose “is the language of the always already translated,” as if “he intuitively looked for words and syntactic constructions that would ‘go’ in the other language.” In this sense, cosmopolitanism is a kind of dispossession.

If Perloff finds Canetti’s language insufficiently knotty and idiosyncratic, the same certainly can’t be said for Celan, one of the most difficult poets of the twentieth century. With Celan, she writes, “irony is carried to its logical conclusion, which is to say, a refusal to define, to assert, to take a stand,” even when it comes to matters of simple denotation. Perloff focuses particularly on the love poems Celan wrote to the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, in which “the scene of encounter tends to be abstract.” “White and Light,” for instance, reads in part: “White,/what moves us./without weight/what we exchange/white and light:/let it drift.” There is eroticism in these lines, a sense of something intimately shared. But there is also a profound sense of disconnection, Perloff observes: “The love proffered here is intense but hardly a source of joy,” partly because the world of the poem is abstract and underpopulated, a place where “no one else exists but the lovers.” Language, in Celan’s verse, often seems to have broken away from the world altogether, becoming almost a self-referential medium.

This pessimism about the power of language to communicate and refer may be the most important marker of Austro-Modernism. Kraus’s aggressive burlesque of journalism and slang, Roth’s melancholic mockery of the codes of chivalry and military honor, Canetti’s sense of being permanently lost in translation—in various ways, all of Perloff’s subjects seem to be in mourning not just for an empire and a way of life, but for the transparency and meaningfulness of language itself. As Austrians and, in many cases, as Jews, these writers had a unique vantage point on the crisis of language that was to become so central to modernism in all its guises. The edge of irony, Perloff shows, was an uncomfortable place to live, but a fruitful place to write from.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/06/22/marjorie-perloff-ironists-vanished-empire/

@catcomaprada as if you do not have enough to read lol

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