Since 1816 a group of poets, journalists, musicians, painters and academics had been meeting almost every evening, at first in an inn 'Zum Blumenstöckl', and later in the 'Pfuntneresche Bierhaus'. The group took its name 'Ludlams-Höhle' ("Ludlam's Cave') from a fairy-tale by the Dane, Adam Oehlenschläger, being performed at the time at the Theater an der Wien....The members produced periodicals in the inn which were read out on certain days of the week and which bore titles like 'Fliegende Blätter für Magen und Herz' ('Fly-sheets for stomach and heart'), 'Der Wachter' ('The Observer') and 'Die Arschwische'('The Arse-Wiper').
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Friday, February 29, 2008
Die Arschwische
To previously collected examples of bumf, add this, from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert's Songs: A Biographical Study, tr. Kenneth S. Whitton (New York: Limelight Editions, 1984), p. 231: