Sunday, May 26, 2019

The Kafka Of Uruguay’ (And Why It Makes Sense That Uruguay Produced One)

       “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to.”

— Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
Genius Japanese Invention Allows You To Instantly Speak 43 LanguagesMUAMA Instant Translator
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Meet The Man Who Invented The Languages For ‘Game Of Thrones’



It took David J. Peterson about six weeks to create Dothraki and a summer in a subsequent year to create Valyrian — and, as with Elvish and Klingon before them, those languages have taken on a life beyond the work they were created for. Indeed, there are now more British people who understand Valyrian than do Scots Gaelic. – The Times (UK)

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Lively political thriller The Realm a speedy snapshot of corruption
EVEN for just its final 10 minutes, Spanish film The Realm would qualify as a vastly superior political ...









It was Kafka that led me from the south to the north, W. knows that. It was Kafka that led me into the university. Before Kafka, there was my warehouse life. My life as a finder of UTLs, unable-to-locates, searching up and down the warehouse aisles.
I stumbled when I tried to convey it to W., which is a good sign, he says. I spoke of the castle hill, veiled in mist and darkness, and of the buzzling and whistling on the telephone line. I spoke of the illusory emptiness into which K. looked up as he crossed the wooden bridge, and of his abjection and passivity as he sought to settle his business with the authorities. What was I getting at?, W. wonders. What was I trying to say?
The world around me was unreal, I told W. that. The warehouse was unreal. The suburbs in which I had grown up, and on which the warehouse had been built, were likewise unreal. Despair reveals the truth of the world: isn’t that what was revealed to me by Kafka’s book? Despair reveals the nullity of things.
I had a vision, I told W., he remembers. I saw the workers around me like rats in a rat-run. I saw the pristine buildings around me like rat-pens, like rat-mazes. Absurdity was doing experiments on us: that’s what I saw, wasn’t it? Madness had us caged in the suburbs like laboratory rats ...
My soul was a UTL: isn't that what I saw? Life was an unable-to-locate, although no one seemed to know it but me.
The Castle made my life quiver like a compass needle. Things pointed in one direction: north! Out of the warehouse! Out of the south! North: to where dereliction, like The Castle, revealed things in their truth!  North: to where the destruction at the created order had worn through! 


‘The Kafka Of Uruguay’ (And Why It Makes Sense That Uruguay Produced One)



“In Latin America, it’s said that Chile produces poets, Argentina produces short story writers, Mexico produces novelists, and Uruguay produces ‘los raros‘ — the strange ones.” And, writes his translator, Annie McDermott, “[Mario] Levrero was a raro of the highest order.” –Literary Hub
  



Germany Is Returning Stolen Papers Of Kafka Executor Max Brod To Israel



“[The handover] will end a decade-long struggle to retrieve the missing Brod papers which, according to Israel’s National Library, were stolen 10 years ago in Tel Aviv. The documents, letters and memoirs re-emerged in 2013, when two Israelis approached the German Literary Archives in Marbach, and private collectors, with a huge collection of unpublished documents belonging to Brod.” –Yahoo! (AFP)

 The recent PEN World Voices Festival concluded with Arundhati Roy giving the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, and at The Guardian you can now read an abridged version of it, Literature provides shelter. That's why we need it.  

       Democracy Now ! also has an interview -- video and transcript --, Arundhati Roy on the Power of Fiction: Literature is “The Simplest Way of Saying a Complicated Thing”. 
How comforting this sex-positive vision is. How sophisticated and liberal we are.
Except. A paper in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal summed up the findings of three huge national surveys into sexual attitudes, called Natsal, the latest of which was in 2012. Natsal is British in focus, but some of its findings are reflected globally: worldwide, we are having less sex less frequently and are more upset about it. In Britain, most of the decline in sexual frequency is in people aged over 25 and in long-term relationships. In the US, the over-50s reported the largest decline in how often they had sex, though Finnish middle-aged men reported they were getting sex more frequently. In Japan, the most sexual inactivity was in young single people. Millennials are having less sex than their parents; young people, we are told, are in a “sex drought”.








‘Bound To Win’: Jill Lepore On The Evolution Of The Presidential-Candidate Memoir


“Before the nineteen-sixties, the books Presidential candidates wrote weren’t usually memoirs; they were collections of speeches.” Now? “Sometimes Presidential candidates write books about their vision for the country; sometimes they write books about themselves. And then, sometimes, their vision for America is a vision of themselves.” – The New Yorker 
The web is awash in tips from successfulwomen writers — here’s what they’re reading, their Sunday routine. Does it help us understand them". Sunday Routine  

In the last decades of the 19th century, séances abounded, and austere sects speculated about geology. Darwin’s world was awash with spiritualized science 

  The problem with eternity: it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. Can this realization be liberating 
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