Lektion 92

In the spring of 1973, in the forests of Arkansas, specifically in the woods between Cooter Neck and Rock Island (you won't find them on any map I know), I was living in two abandoned school buses on a knoll in the woods overlooking two cypress-enshrouded ponds. Not much for me to do there, after my twelve hours a week working at Chet Darling's Mobil in Fordyce, but read and write. One of the books I had with me was the 1960 Dell paperback Great German Short Stories edited by Stephen Spender with works by Stifter, Büchner, Keller, Heym, Aichinger, Hildesheimer, Böll, Nossack, and, between Kafka and Benn, someone named Robert Walser... (Tom Whalen Reads Walser in an Abandoned School Bus)