from Kafka: A World of Truth Giorgio

 "Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me."

- Sigmund Freud

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."

- Martin Luther King

“Nabokov describes writing as a kind of game between — not the characters and the page, but the readers and the author. I love that idea and think of it as a very participatory, playful thing, not as talking down to the reader.”

Imposter Syndrome

The truth about fiction 

from Kafka: A World of Truth

Giorgio Fontana

Kafka again. Why? A hundred years after his death, he has not lost one iota of his fascination, and that in itself is a problem. Few writers have enjoyed the fate of becoming an adjective; fewer still have names and adjectives that spill over from the literary field to immediately create, in whatever context, a “specific emotional atmosphere”: Kafka, it is said, describes the condition of contemporary man; he foresaw the inevitable rise of totalitarian regimes; he reveals the true nature of increasingly bureaucratised and dehumanised societies. 

According to the description in Wikipedia, his work “typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.”

 ‘Groundbreaking’: scientists develop patch that can repair damaged hearts

Choosing Seeds From 14,000 Varieties? It Just Got Easier.

The New York Times – gift article – “The Exchange, on Seed Savers’ website, pairs the people who save heirlooms with those who want them, all for the price of postage. With a diversity of crops and an impressive depth of choices within each, this year’s Exchange adds up to more than 14,000 unique plant varieties on offer — each of them open-pollinated, which unlike hybrids will produce offspring identical to the parent plant.Heirloom bean packets are among 20,000-plus types of seeds preserved inside the seed bank at Seed Savers Exchange. 

With the advent of hybrids and genetically modified crops, and a changing climate, as much as 75 percent of the world’s edible plant varieties have been lost. This is no ordinary seed catalog, and actually it’s not a catalog at all, but a seed swap of treasures begun 50 years ago, conducted back then by mail under the name True Seed Exchange and in recent years taking place online. That effort became the nucleus of Seed Savers Exchange, the well-known nonprofit seed conservation organization based in Decorah, Iowa, which was founded to preserve the culturally diverse and endangered genetic history of our garden and food crops. 

Today Seed Savers safeguards more than 20,000 heirloom varieties in the country’s largest nongovernmental seed bank, plus collections that include more than 300 historic apples, 500-plus potatoes, and some 200 garlic varieties. The organization publishes a popular seed catalog, too, featuring 600 varieties for 2025; the proceeds support its preservation work. 

But what’s catching my attention in Seed Savers’ anniversary year is a different navigational link atop its homepage, just to the left of the ones about the catalog — the link that simply says, “The Exchange.” It’s the way back to Seed Savers’ point of origin, and to make digging through the trove easier, it just got embodied in a newly redesigned website…” [h/t Barclay Walsh]