kafka

Even if it is just Bohemian Farmers Wives Vol III

I didn't pull you over, and I can see why nobody "gets" Kafka's humor now 'cause everyone who reads him is a humorless sniffer!

joeks, de bruv

OK. But I think that there's a legitimate interest in Kafka's erotica collection (porn stash) as a literary influence. Particularly when looking at, say, 'In the penal colony', for example.

For example, you can't look at Bruno Schulz without acknowledging he was a total foot-freak.

am i right in thinking that kafka meant us to assume that

uh SPOILER i guess

gregor samsa didn't literally transform into a "monstrous vermin," and that stress plus living with a truly shitty family had just driven him insane?

Dude you can interpret it all you want, but the fact is that Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.

I saw a staged production of this, it was v well done with Samsa's bed mounted vertically high on the rear wall, and the actor playing him was athletic circus dude who climbed and swung all around the walls. But he never actually turned into an insect (except for one bit where they showed an insect form in silhouette) so yah I was basically disappointed.

g00b otm

Yeah, Samsa definitely actually transformed into an insect.

I seen it with my own two eyes!

evidence for:

— everyone in the story accepts that the giant bug is gregor (instead of, like, "hey, there's this bug in the room, where'd gregor go?")
— several people in the story (cleaning woman, three boarders) are amused by gregor rather than terrified
— the family IS terrified, but it could be argued that they act the way any family might if one of its members started chirping like a bug and crawling around
— gregor becomes increasingly ill throughout story and loses his appetite -- because he's eating rotting food!
— kafka said he didn't want any picture of an actual bug used to illustrate the story

evidence against:

— people can't climb walls and ceilings
— "hello, you old dung beetle!"

has anyone ever done a film of this story?

surely there must be a Polish animation from the 80s or something.

Having spent a lot of time reading Kafka, I think you're looking for a neat, simple explanation of the kind that doesn't generally exist in Kafka. Yes, the fact that he transforms into an insect probably has some metaphorical significance for the condition of a stressed out, alienated traveling sales dude living with his shitty family, but Kafka stories are never that literal (it was really a dream, he went insane, etc.). You have to take Kafka stories at face value and as existing on their own plane of reality.

Nabokov gave a marvellous, marvellous lecture on The Metamorphosis, in which he discusses this (there is a great passage where he tries to entomologically determine exactly which kind of insect Samsa becomes). It was published in Lectures on Literature, but the text is also here.

am i right in thinking that kafka meant us to assume that

uh SPOILER i guess

gregor samsa didn't literally transform into a "monstrous vermin," and that stress plus living with a truly shitty family had just driven him insane?

in a german class i took a while ago where we read the metamorphosis this was one of the interpretations we discussed. one of the things i like best about the story, and kafka's work in general, is that there are dozens of ways of interpreting it — i would go so far as to say that the best way to enjoy the story is to interpret it in as many different ways as possible. i don't know if i would say that kafka means for us to assume anything that specific, because he seems to have avoided making points that direct and clear-cut, but i do think it's entirely possible that he deliberately left it open as one of several possibilities.

It was no dream.

best line of the story imo^^^

I mean, isn't that what gives the story such power? To wake up turned into a giant beetle or cockroach or whatever is so extreme, so awful, so at odds with what you think of as a likely thing to happen to us first thing in the morning, that it has to be a dream, or a hallucination, or an indication that you've lost your mind. But: It was no dream. No matter what you expected, what your ideas are of the possible, how you conceive of the world, what is happening to you is happening because it's happening.

And if that doesn't have resonance with your life, you probably haven't lived long enough yet. Or you've lived a charmed life. I don't know.

Swiss bank to lift lid on hidden Kafka works

has anyone ever done a film of this story?

This story being "Metamorphosis". I saw a Swedish or Norwegian (I think) film of it, when I was but a boy, on BBC2. Need to google this.

Swedish, 1976

there's a russian film from 2002

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328279/

and, of course, the TV film of Berkoff's play with Tim Roth as Samsa.

In the Swedish film you do get to see a great big beetle though, dunno abt the Russian one

Best Final Fantasy baddie ever!

Read 'The Castle' recently, I'm still wondering how much kabbalism it allegorises..

My instinct was that Kafka would probably not have known much about the Kabbalah. It's not the sort of thing secular, middle-class Jews would have looked into much. It only became fashionable in recent years for anyone but the most devout religious scholars to study it.

Google searching suggests that I was right, although there are scholars who think his work is open to that interpretation:
http://www.kafka-franz.com/Franz-Kafka-Kabbalah.htm

I wonder if j0hn is on hand to comment over this.

Saw an inetrview with John Banville on Newsnight. His line was that even if 2-3 aphorisms come out of this the excavation of the remains will be worth the bother.

Manuscripts et al found

Reading his biography, it was surprising how literal and autobiographical his fiction could be (e.g., Metamorphosis).

Almost finished "Amerika". What a great, strange, funny book.

http://www.theonion.com/video/pragues-franz-kafka-international-named-worlds-mos,14321/

LOL x 1,000,000

The tone of the The Trial is, after all, one in which a false or obscure accusation against K. is relayed in the most neutral terms, without resonating affect. It seems that the grief avowed in the letters is precisely what is put out of play in the writing; and yet the writing conveys precisely a set of events that are bound together neither through probable cause nor logical induction. So the writing effectively opens up the disjunction between clarity – we might even say a certain lucidity and purity of prose – and the horror that is normalised precisely as a consequence of that lucidity. No one can fault the grammar and syntax of Kafka’s writing, and no one has ever found emotional excess in his tone; but precisely because of this apparently objective and rigorous mode of writing, a certain horror opens up in the midst of the quotidian, perhaps also an unspeakable grief. Syntax and theme are effectively at war, which means that we might think twice about praising Kafka only for his lucidity. After all, the lucid works as style only insofar as it betrays its own claim to self-sufficiency. Something obscure, if not unspeakable, opens up within the perfect syntax.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka

neat lil gloss on k there

rest of the essay more contingent but also v good

every once in a while you find someone puts something down you have been feeling in your bones, thank you based butler

Yeah I really liked that -- need to read his letters.

Does anyone know of a good comp of Jewish tales?

anyone read the hofmann translations of the stories?

No but want to!

You guys. What. The. Fuck.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/is-franz-kafka-overrated/309373/

In the unending critical Easter-egg hunt for the secret meaning in Franz Kafka’s fiction, Friedländer has retrieved the gay egg.

in a way it's almost refreshing to see someone actually criticize kafka, or try to, but i can't take anything by self-regarding homophobic nitwit joseph epstein seriously.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y5yDClWa5D4/T2dCLhiS5tI/AAAAAAAAF5c/LDbEpheR53M/s1600/Blog%2BArt%2B-%2BManhattan2.jpg

"They're all such schmucks. Really mired in thirties radicalism."

if woody allen dictated dk's pronunciation of "nabokov" two lines later it's the best argument ever for the auteur theory but it was probably keaton.

Rant/Using ILX as a blog/soapbox follows (just a heads up).

Today would've been Kafka's 130th birthday. Google Doodle is paying homage to him.

And I think back at what a bizarre last year and a half it has been: from moving to a different country, to aging parents on constant verge of death, to failed or unstable career moves.

Today was the due date to pay my IRS tax return, as well. As a Canadian living in the US, it bothers me that I had to move here. But I guess things never go as planned. And now I, too, feel like a monstrous vermin, crawling around the sewers of Los Angeles. When once health and exercise were an important part of my routine, now I struggle to have a decent quality of life and avoid breathing in crazy particulates when running on a hot, empty suburban street, where people initially looked at me strangely and locked their doors as I approached them. I guess they weren't used to having someone run around their safe and pretty neighbourhood. Ghost town.

All of it puts into question your self-worth, I suppose. And to add insult to injury, the American government is prepping for a cute role as police state. Canada, as spineless as their government officials are, follow along, and will now share all data with them. I wonder how long it'll take Canada Student Loan to figure out I'm not really in the country and force me to pay an exorbitant amount of money each month. I guess renewing my passport might tip them off.

It's a good thing I don't do drugs, because all this has upped my paranoia. I hardly use my fancy iPhone and don't post or talk about personal things on Facebook, Instagram, Skype and other suspicious software. I guess you can say posting this rant on ILX is my breaking point. I don't know. I might want to become a US citizen one day and from mine and others' experience when crossing the border, it seems like they'll point to anything that can make you a criminal or unwanted in the Land of the Free™. I guess their making a big deal of the smallest things is their defence mechanism. Meanwhile, the Harper Government has a plan of its own to destroy our country. I guess I should start defriending my anarchist and socialist friends. Or I don't betray who I really am and get on that RetroShare app. But encryption adds another level of suspicious activity, as one headline reads, "NSA: If Your Data Is Encrypted, You Might Be Evil, So We'll Keep It Until We're Sure". Then there's "US Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement", "Never Trust Facebook", "The Criminal NSA", "The Fallacy of Human Freedom", "DHS Watchdog: 'Intuition and Hunch' Are Enough to Search Your Gadgets at Border", the Utah Data Center. Maybe I should cancel my Verizon service as soon as my contract is up. Maybe surrounding myself with good people will help me deal with all this.

I'm sure LA has wonderful people, but I sure wish I would stop meeting crazy artists, charlatans, opportunists, money-hungry businessmen, and start meeting, you know, normal people. Not that Vancouver doesn't have their share of crazies, but the ratio for crazy-to-normal seems higher here. Concrete jungle, for sure. But so many people want to move down here. Colour me confused, I guess.

I guess in the end I should stick to using the few good opportunities I've been given to my advantage and plan my Great Exodus as soon as possible. That's possibly the silver lining in all of this -- barely.

I always replay an incident from university in my head. It was my last final before graduating -- my Eastern European literature class. I lived just a few blocks from campus, in a 2-bedroom basement suite. I woke up an hour early because I tend to stress out easily and get paranoid about the smallest things, as you can tell from this rambling. My exam is at 8:30 and I am ready to leave by 8:00. As I go to open the door, I notice the door is locked. I unlock the knob but realise the top lock can only be opened with a key. The key had always remained in the keyhole for this very reason, I realised. But there was no key. In other words, the lock from the inside required a key to unlock the door. With no key, there was no way to open the door. I look to the only window large enough for me to exit, but there were bars protecting it. I remember thinking I wished I had some handyman tools at that point, but luckily I had my trusty mobile phone. Except no one picked up. I sat there for 45 minutes and someone finally came. I was late to my exam but while I waited I wrote a note to my prof explaining exactly what surreal conditions prevented me from being on time. When I got to class, I handed him the note and he handed me my exam questions. I had to choose one. I wrote an explanation of the term Kafkaesque.

And it seems like it's always like this. One is always waiting for another to open that locked door to let her in. As much as one is ready to go, it is very much a prisoner in a cell situation. It is not you who decides when to take the next step, it is the step, the external factors, the situation out of your grasp that comes looking for you.

I know I'm not the only one in this situation or with these feelings and that many others understand from experience. And many others are in far worse situations. But if the beginning of understanding is the wish to die, I don't know if I want to understand.

I apologise for the above. You can go back to your regularly scheduled programme.

I wonder how long it'll take Canada Student Loan to figure out I'm not really in the country and force me to pay an exorbitant amount of money each month.

or, y'know, you could just pay back your obligations.

If I had the money, I would. If you live outside, there is one single monthly amount, regardless of your income. So I would probably pay more than someone who owes $100k.

They only lower your monthly payment (drastically) if you live in the country.

To your point, though, I would much rather move back and pay whatever I need to, because it would probably be pretty darn low and doable, and it would save me this headache. But I have no one left in Canada. I'm currently saving up to move back, though. It's a slow process, because we pay thousands of dollars for my grandparents' due to their illnesses and such.

happy birthday franz kafka!

also, sorry to hear about all of that crimson hexagon.