VLVL2 (15): The Robert Musil Story

[cfalbert]

Musil was also a physicist of some note. I believe he is credited with 
"inventing" the color wheel.

The only thing I clearly recall from my struggle with MWOQ is Musil 
proposing that athletic prowess was a form of "spontaneous genius"....

Cannot think of an OBVIOUS link to Pee-Wee, however... it may be limited to 
juxtaposing, again, the serious (to the point of ponderous) with the 
ridiculous....I would add that Ruebens (Pee-Wee) was a top ranking scholar 
in high school, a fact unlikely to be known by TRP....

love,
cfa



At 10:30 AM 5/26/04, you wrote:
>370.32:  "About the time the show ended, Prairie came by, Zoyd and Flash 
>went off looking for beer, and she and Justin settled down, semi-brother 
>and sister, in front of the Eight O'Clock Movie, Pee-wee Herman in _The 
>Robert Musil Story_.  It was mostly Pee-wee talking in a foreign accent, 
>or sitting around in front of some pieces of paper with some weird-looking 
>marker pen, and the kids' attention kept wandering to each other."
>
>
>"Austrian novelist, best known for his monumental unfinished novel DER 
>MANN OHNE EIGENSCHAFTEN (The Man Without Qualities) in three volumes. The 
>first book was published in 1930, part of the second book in 1933, and 
>remaining texts posthumously in 1943. Musil also wrote plays, essays, and 
>short stories. His works, which often deal with the protagonist's 
>self-sustaining intellectual and emotional life, have been compared to 
>those of Marcel Proust. " [...]
>
>http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rmusil.htm
>
>http://www.xs4all.nl/~jikje/New/index.html
>
>
>and:
>
>http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000607/
>
>
>I am unfamiliar with the Musil work, although I know it's been compared to 
>Mann's _The Magic Mountain_.  Would Otto (or anyone else) care to 
>enlighten us on _The Man Without Qualities_, as well as its relation to 
>the Pee-wee gag?