Sleepless in Sydney after watching Balloon and talking about the escape to freedom with Gitka ... as no one suffered as much as my sister as she was sacked from teaching for going to church and was forced to do manual labour on the Czechoslovak railways ... strange as she was never and even now Gitka is not bitter about the kafkaesque experiences
"One doesn’t want to share in that old-man vibe and die of a heart attack after a student protester shows us her breasts." Justin E.H. Smith on avoiding Adorno's fate Adorno's Fiasco
Ten bush medicines have been curing people for generations
Technological progress in rock climbing
Propwatch: the only types of prop in the world in ‘The Antipodes’
Dave says there are seven types of stories in the world (starting with ‘rags to riches’). Josh says there are ten types of stories in the world (starting with ‘a threshold crossing’). One of the Dannies says there are 36 types of stories in the world (starting with ‘supplication’). But what is quite clear, by the end of The Antipodes by Annie Baker at the National Theatre, is that there are just seven types of props in the world. – David Jays
This 19th-Century French Poet Was The Ancestor Of Today’s Goth Kids
Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) wore black, dyed his hair green, broke with his family, refused to get a regular job, did absinthe and opium, had too much illicit sex, and, of course, died young. Better, “his first collections of poems,Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), was prosecuted for offending public morals, challenging its audiences with its startling treatments of sex, Satanism, vampirism and decay. No wonder his words would one day be set to music by The Cure.” – The Conversation
How To Write About Those Outside Your Own Experience?
“Given all the excellent writing about the challenges of rendering otherness, someone who asks this question in 2019 probably has not done the reading. But the question is a Trojan horse, posing as reasonable artistic discourse when, in fact, many writers are not really asking for advice — they are asking if it is okay to find a way to continue as they have. They don’t want an answer; they want permission.” – New York Magazine
Who Gave You The Right To Tell That Story? Ten Authors On Writing Fiction About Identities Other Than Their Own
“The conversation is often depicted in the media as a binary: On one side are those who argue that only writers from marginalized backgrounds should tell stories about people who share their cultural histories — a course correction for an industry that is overwhelmingly white — while on the other are those who say this wish amounts to censorship. For those following closely, it can feel as though the debate has gotten stuck in a rut.” Here, a group of writers including Jennifer Weiner, N. K. Jemisin, Victor LaValle, Laila Lalami, Monique Truong, and Sarah Schulman discuss why they write outside their identities. – New York Magazine
Don’t even wait
This is the Kafka Blog, a blog about the life and works of my favorite author Franz Kafka. Here I’m going to discuss his famous works, The Trial, Metamorphosis and The Castle.In other Kafka news, I see Robert Crumb has a book of his impressive Kafka drawings out in May. Also Anxious Pleasures by Lance Olsen from Shoemaker & Hoard this month "takes Franz Kafka’s profoundly haunting and sad comic novella, The Metamorphosis, and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surrounded Gregor Samsa during his plight".
Finding a space
How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?I don't have an answer, I just wonder how many more people happened to read Doris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech because of the internet? Of course, reading online is different from reading a book, even Felicity Finds Love; the hope if offers, for example, of a possible unity as abstract as its binding is real. But reading Lessing's speech and then The Literary Saloon's reporton the NBCC's survey results, I wondered about the impact blogging has - not on reading - but on writing. So many more people are writing for a large audience. What an extraordinary change! What impact might this have?
Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?"Yes, many more are finding a space: however the word is disguised, a whole day may indeed pass inwriting ... etc.
It is always said that Kafka's readers laugh because his prose is so humorous. No, they laughed not at the joke, but at the truth. If something is striking, then one laughs. Humour is, after Goethe, an indication of a declining art. Kafka's art is so pure that it is true. At this, one must laugh.
Twitter is an unreliable arena for literary debate because terms cannot be defined – What is an emotional novel? What is a real emotion? – and one can only misunderstand by assuming answers. Better to move away. Displacement is therefore precisely Twitter's value for literary debate. Lee's rightful distaste for button-pushing novels displaced me to remember a passage in Saul Bellow'sMore Die of Heartbreak in which the narrator recalls the existential troubles of his uncle Benn Crader, a botanist, an expert in arctic lichens:
Benn once told me that when he landed by helicopter on the slope of Mount Erebus to collect samples, he had felt that he was very near the end of the earth, the boundary of boundaries. "Of course, there's no such thing," he said, "but there's such a feeling."
The effect appears to be a combination of chance and design, which should offer anyone an excuse to start writing. No need for a story. Milan Kundera says "dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms every thing, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution". For a clearing, resolution is hacked away and a path opened. This has happened for me in many places, and these examples come from my early days of reading fiction (the dates are when I first read them). First from Kundera himself and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1986):
I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections [on the opposition of lightness and weight] did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the court-yard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do. (Translated by Michael Henry Heim)
Second, in the preface to the first volume of Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London (1995):
By consigning to paper today the first lines of this prose (manifold in imagination) I am perfectly aware of administering a mortal, definitive blow to what I conceived on turning thirty as an alternative to self-chosen extinction, and which served for over two decades as the project of my existence. (Translated by Dominic di Bernardi)
Certainly there is a quality of valediction here but at the beginning, which surely changes matters. In Kundera's paragraph the narrative is set forth on uncertainty, intellect and imagination. And third in Gabriel Josipovici's novel Distances (published in In the Fertile Land, 1988).
A woman.
The sea.
She begins to walk.
She walks.
She walks.
The staccato rhythm here was like nothing I'd read before and, as each sentence and section built in length, it became like breathing itself. Reading, breathing, walking, clearing. This might be how writing fulfils itself.
The sea.
She begins to walk.
She walks.
She walks.
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (10)
The track on this Duke Ellington LP that hit me hardest was “Sepia Panorama,” which featured Jimmy Blanton. I had only just started teaching myself how to play string badd, and Blanton was the first person ever to become a major jazz soloist on that notoriously unwieldy instrument. – Terry Teachout
Axe-books of the year
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us, says Kafka in the famous letter.
I wondered what this might mean as the 'books of the year' lists began to appear last month. Imagine if each contributor constrained themselves to choose only axe-books. Each entry would likely remain blank and the value of what did appear would be extreme compared to the predictable logrolling we see each year. Or maybe they would be exactly the same, as the idea of such a book is so vague that it could include everything from everyday escapist relief to a silent version of Freud's talking cure.
For this reason, it is the second most abused quotation of modern literature, after Beckett's Fail better. While Beckett is encouraging deeper failure rather than one that is closer to success, its playful ambiguity has enabled it to become a motivational mantra for a million creative writing memes, allowing Beckett one more catastrophe as he fails to turn budding writers away from the sewer of success. Kafka's line may not be misunderstood but is preceded by flourishes that rather complicate its promise:
I wondered what this might mean as the 'books of the year' lists began to appear last month. Imagine if each contributor constrained themselves to choose only axe-books. Each entry would likely remain blank and the value of what did appear would be extreme compared to the predictable logrolling we see each year. Or maybe they would be exactly the same, as the idea of such a book is so vague that it could include everything from everyday escapist relief to a silent version of Freud's talking cure.
For this reason, it is the second most abused quotation of modern literature, after Beckett's Fail better. While Beckett is encouraging deeper failure rather than one that is closer to success, its playful ambiguity has enabled it to become a motivational mantra for a million creative writing memes, allowing Beckett one more catastrophe as he fails to turn budding writers away from the sewer of success. Kafka's line may not be misunderstood but is preceded by flourishes that rather complicate its promise:
We ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. We need the books that affect us like a disaster. We need books that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.
