Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1925

Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, put Dali "on trial" lol -- these dudes had no humor at all

there was obviously a lot of rancour and dickishness but there's at least one level where calling out Dali was funny and Dali kept his shaman face a lot straighter, for money

Mark Polizzotti's Breton bio shows Dali, at his insouciant best, having his way with these fools.

The most worthwhile among them all got excommunicated.

i can't objectively call a score so fair enough, the outcome was as it was. i care about Breton's work, especially the absence of work, way more than i care about Dali, who seems quainter and way more assimilable to me

Breton's poetry is about the only "spontaneous" kind I can take.

a lot of the game play surrealist stuff isn't very interesting or good?

Nadja is amazing, i agree. i feel like Breton argued the best for not just making more stuff to shove into the art markets

and again Kafka was right if he didn't want to add to the heap of commodities in a world that was accelerating the pile of cultural commodities exponentially

i'm rambling in knots now, the Bretonian move is to shut the fuck up

On the other hand, but ignoring that, I'm suddenly struck by the thought that The Trial is a nightmare about taxonomy and its reification as filing. And taxonomy is the liberating motor of the enlightenment, and the power of its liberation derived from squishing the reality of things into the labyrinth of records, and your name is the file tag the state apparatus uses to exert its squish

Gatsby seemed like more of an idealist, a different type of American product, than Kane, Hearst or Trump, though they all four have a lot of drive...he may be an example of "The con man has to love his own bullshit," though we see the kind of overachievment this leads to (I'm sure somebody read this and thought, "Well yeah, but if he had done this that way and that this way, coulda alled work out, hmmm.")
Stein, ICB, Ford, and Drieser can be amazingly good, but I haven't read these particular books. Dos Passos's appropriately large USA kept me racing along , but I envy Scott Seward for reading it in high school; that would have been perfect.

"all worked" or woiked out, even.

ts reification as filing Yeah, he worked in an insurance office, didn't he? His father's?

oh yeah, this sounds about right: Kafka obtained the degree of Doctor of Law on June 18, 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.

Work

At the end of 1907 Kafka started working in a huge Italian insurance company, where he stayed for nearly a year. His correspondence during that period witnesses that he was unhappy with his working time schedule - from 8 p.m (20:00) until 6 a.m (06:00) - as it made it extremely difficult for him to concentrate on his writing. On July 15, 1908, he resigned, and few weeks later found more suitable employment with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. He worked there until July 1922 when he retired for reasons of ill health.

He often referred to his job as insurance officer as a "bread job", a job done only to pay the bills. However, he did not show any signs of indifference towards his job, as the several promotions that he received during his career prove that he was a hardworking employee. In parallel, Kafka was also committed to his literary work.
8 p.m. to 6 a.m.!
https://www.kafka-online.info/franz-kafka-biography.htm

Strange to say, there's only one thread on ilx solely dedicated to kafka

But there are two for Max Brod, vis a vis Kafka:
Thread of Max Brod Hate
where would we be without Max Brod?

None of them are on I Love Books.

I agree that Kafka is making a map of the territory, albeit at half a step removed. Even something as ostensibly allegorical as the Penal Colony has a realist weight to it. I'm sure he'd have pissed himself laughing at the notion of being a prophet or whatever but he's like Ballard in that regard: his worlds are always on the edge of becoming our own. Or vice versa.

speaking of kafka, anyone read that newly translated story in the new yorker this year? it must have sucked because it seems no one’s discussed it

There were four stories and you could read all of them in ten minutes, which may explain the lack of discussion - not to criticise them for brevity, my favourite thing I read this year of Kafka's is this aphorism:

The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens. This is certainly true, but it proves nothing against the heavens, because heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.

The longest of the New Yorker stories starts with a simple proposition which rapidly descends into typical absurdity, it reads almost like a shaggy dog story with a groan-worthy punchline.

Blanchot has some good bits about this, but I digress.

― pomenitul

Blanchot has some good bits about a lot of things. I should really go back and reread some of his shit, it's so good.

The New Yorker pieces are excerpts from The Lost Writings, which I posted about on What Are You Reading?:
"It is not a barren wall, it's living sweetness pressed into a wall, bunches of grapes pressed together."---"I don't believe it."---"Taste it."---"I'm too incredulous to lift a hand."---"I'll put a grape to your mouth, then."---"I won't be able to taste it from incredulity."---"Then drop!---"Didn't I tell you that the barrenness of this wall is enough to lay a man out?"
That's from Kafka's The Lost Writings, recently published by New Directions, translated by Michael Hofmann, and selected by Reiner Stach, who also wrote the afterword.
More uses of humor than expected, to a range of effects, incl. at least one that turns out like a sketch from Yiddish theater, if not a Mel Brooks movie. Also one that involves a power figure's much younger wife, uh-oh: more about sex and gender than expected as well---been a long time since I've read him, though. (Those last two are almost as long as it gets in here, like a couple pages each.)
Don't worry, it's also Kafkaesque:
A delicate matter, this tiptoeing across a crumbling board set down as a bridge, nothing underfoot, having to scrape together with your feet the ground you are treading on, walking on nothing but your reflection down in the water below, holding the world together with your feet, your hands cramping at the air to survive this ordeal.
Those are among my favorites so far, but some don't seem to work as well, though even here, he sets the bar fairly high.

Some of the ones I didn't get at first I do now (I think): the mind has to adjust to the shifts, the climbing of trees and word-walls and bridges and so on.

also the elite cadre, with Kafka at the top and Orwell quite possibly second, of writers who've stamped themselves into the imaginaire of people who've never read them

― Uptown Top Scamping (Noodle Vague), Monday, December 14, 2020 7:43 PM (one minute ago)

Kafka is evading this tendancy these days, I think. "Read some effin Orwell", is how it mostly is.

Also don't think Brod's interpretation has stuck -- all of this speaks to the greatness of the work.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Want to vote for "Frau Sixta by Ernst Zahn", but I'm thinking of a Sixta by another mister.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Was semi expecting a Silent Majority for Fitzgerald here but I guess it's no surprise Kafka would triumph on ILX

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1926

Would've voted Woolf had I known it would be a landslide. Only 3 votes is criminal imo.

Shout-out to whoever voted for the Dreiser, can't honestly say I think it deserves to win this field but it packs a punch and I'm glad it wasn't shut out

ranked voting would be handy in polls with multiple worthy books, but I think Kafka still would've won.

I really want more Stein and Dreiser, also need to try Gide, but right now what an unfuckwithable 1925 lifeboat quartet:
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs Dalloway by Virgina Woolf
The Professor's House by Willa Cather

The only Dreiser I've read is the Library of America volume comprised of Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and Twelve Men: exxxcellent.

also the elite cadre, with Kafka at the top and Orwell quite possibly second, of writers who've stamped themselves into the imaginaire of people who've never read them

― Uptown Top Scamping (Noodle Vague), Monday, December 14, 2020 7:43 PM (one minute ago)

Kafka is evading this tendancy these days, I think. "Read some effin Orwell", is how it mostly is.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 15 December 2020 18:51 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just seen the following joke in The Simpsons. Lisa is outraged about something.

Lisa: This is Kafkaesque! Kafkaesque!
Judge: I've got my eye on you too
Lisa: Now it's Orwellian!

Lol fair enough though if it's a season 10+ joke then I'm not sure it counts

It was more recent than that. Of course it means nothing, but the timing made me smile