Excavating Kafka

Excavating Kafka can get very tiresome at times. Never been a follower of the ‘K-myth’. I bought the book because I live in a country where the offer of books in English is so limited that I feel I have exhausted all their readable offer. This one has proved highly overpriced.
I expected unbiased information about Kafka. A biography that will spare me of the emo-writer portrait. What I received was an unexpectedly enthusiastic debunking of Kafka as a legendarily lonely, depressed urbanite. The idea of the emo writer never appealed to me before and will hardly dig roots from now on, as such.

The emotional charge of Excavating Kafka is irritating and superfluous. It feels like the author is fighting against his own deformed perception of Kafka and we pay (a too high price) to watch the show.

The whole study could be summarized in: Kafka was a normal person with a gift for literature.

Later edit. An article on Prague by the same author:  Repression’s Capital, Europe’s Canary

Depression is a flaw in chemistry, not in character

In paradise, social stigma is avoided. In paradise, deep sadness is caused by a chemical imbalance.

Born in Bukovina, deported in Transnistria in 1941, during the pogrom that displaced the entire Jewish community of the region, remaining behind, watching the mass emigration of Jews in Israel after the communist regime took power, self exiled  in USA as a result of constant disagreement and disappointment with the socio-political system, Norman Manea withdraws from the physical space and takes refuge in the Romanian language as existential territory.

Publishes Felix Culpa, an essay that casts doubts on Eliade international brand, an essay that brings him unwanted fame in a Romania that refuses to accept the possibility that Mircea Eliade has been, indeed, associated with the Legionnaire movement ideology. The Iron Guard.

The reaction against the hooligan is aggressive.

The hooligan’s reaction against the Romanian society is equally hostile.

I’m an Earthling myself

Kalvar‘s pieces are short drama acts in which the characters are oblivious that they were assigned a role to act, a story far from their daily reality to sustain. A different role for each different viewer.

The best parallel I can think about is one with Ionesco’s plays. Just like the play writer, Richard Kalvar goes towards abstraction and towards the ridiculous, creating a parallel space from which he gazes at us.

What’s always interested me in photography is the way you can play with reality. Photography is based on reality, it looks like reality, but it’s not reality. That’s true of anyone’s pictures. It’s a picture of something, but it’s not the thing itself. It’s different from the reality – it doesn’t move in space, it has no sound, but it reminds you of reality – so much so that you believe its reality. From 2point8.

Richard Kalvar joined Magnum in 1975 and he keeps returning to Rome working on the Sieff book that never happened. Earthlings comes as a retrospective of his work over the past 40 years.

You can watch the Magnum photo essay dedicated to Kalvar here.

Burroughs on Addiction, Miller on other type of drug: possessions

As a result of my good habit of browsing the Paris Review interviews archive, I came across The Art Of Fiction, Issue 35, Fall 1965. William S. Burroughs interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker.

Burroughs admits, with blunt honesty, that he didn’t start writing out of a strong desire towards it. “I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day.”

He talks a great deal about addiction, about people’s deformed interest towards this phenomenon and somehow dethrones the myth that drugs and art go together. “They are absolutely contraindicated for productive work”, Burroughs argues, because he says they “decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings”.

He rejects the idea that drug addiction is an illness. In his perception, the process that leads a person to succumb to drugs is similar to the one that leads a cop to exercise his authority.

Burroughs talks at large about drugs. Fame came to him after writing Junky, a novel based on his experience with addiction. Even more interesting are his theories on “wordless state” being more desirable, or his visionary image on the future merge of arts and science. Religion and cults – Scientology. Nova Express. Sex and utopia.

Read more

Serge Gainsbourg, Kafka, Jewish American Literature

For the German readers: Buch Wien started two days ago. For the French readers: Salon Du Livre De Montreal is still running till 24.

Call It English The Languages of Jewish American Literature, Hana Wirth-Nesher.

From Princeton Press. Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English.

Revenge of the Domestic :Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic, Donna Harsch

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Romanian Literature in Translation

Romanian The Cultural Observer (Observatorul Cultural) launched a translation project which ‘will host Romanian fiction, poetry, literary criticism and literary history, and news about Romanian writing abroad, all translated into English, French, German, Italian and Spanish starting in May 2008′.

The project inaugurates with Stefan Banulescu’s Men in Winter. As a whole, Iarna barbatilor/Men in Winter offers a specifically local variety of magic realism, discovered in Romania in the 1960s through the intermediation of the South Americans—a trend at once oriental, Balkan and southern: fabulatory in the extreme. The essence of this “magic” is dislocation.

I Love You (italics mine)

Prayers sold on eBay auctions; a musical set after the Yellow Pages; anti-depressant, aromatic high-tech textiles; Max Endorphin’s levitations; trouble in Disneyland; the revenge gone wrong of a rich family against the nanny that is on the verge of publishing embarrassing facts about her employers and more, are all found in the last book of Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy.

A collection of humorous 18 short-stories, Mere Anarchy, the first of its kind published by Woody Allen in the last 25 years was received with mixed reviews.

The book raises language difficulties even when it does use plain English. The twist of phrase and the use of terms that require a dictionary are accompanied by a great number of Yiddishisms, Frenchisms and German language insertions. Some others languages as well.

The absurd and the humor it engages don’t always cook for an easy digestion, but personally I am quite fond of the genre. Read more

The Rat Killer – Alexander Terekhov

Svetloyar is an untractive town with no history, build under Stalin’s regime.

More, it appears of being infested with rats. When the town sees in the near future the chance of being included in the “Golden Ring” famous tourist route, it will stop at nothing to grab it. The circumstances induced are at times ridiculous and sad, but also highly humorous.

Svetloyar will undergo absurd preparations for the event, going as far as inventing an archeological site, displacing the population and using actors instead, as well as hiring, for an enormous sum of money, two rat killers from Moscow to clear a specific building where rats are falling from the ceiling.

The novel can be difficult to follow when it changes time, space an rhythm all of a sudden. On the other hand, some pieces of dialogue are savory enough to recharge your attention.

The political aspect, the very obvious parallel between the human society and the rat’s society are at the center of The Rat Killer, but what really draws attention is the comic of situation generated by a micro-society put under stress.

What others are saying: New Russian Writing.

The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan

Here the author develops a psychoanalytic theory of the movie, which took the movie as a starting point. Avoids telling about historical context of film production as well as it`s reception.

When McGowan says about the audience he doesn’t mean the empirical spectator, but the one which is expected by movie text himself. Of course none of the movies ignores its historical context as well as context of those who watch it, but neither the context nor the spectator don`t exist out of the movie text.

Every movie, developed esthetically, brings with itself its own context, builds up it`s own spectators, turns to them in specific way. It`s worth to get to know how, by McGowan, Kubrik`s, Spike Lee`s, Michael Mann`s or Fellini`s movies turn to us.

Summarised by Fusinha

Franz Kafka – The Zürau Aphorisms

In 1917 Franz Kafka went to Zürau in Czech Republic because of health problems. It was a small village placed between mountains, meadows and groves. The life there had been concentrated on growing hop-plant and the inhabitants there were mostly animals rather than humans. On the spot Kafka realized that he was caught in small zoo lead under different and new rules.

Kafka took up residence under his sister`s roof near the market place by the church. He had been living there on his own and how he wanted for eight months. Can man find better place to write aphorisms? Doubtfully.

One of his pearls sounds like this: “Crows claim that already one of them is enough to conquer the sky. Couldn`t disagree more even though it doesn`t turn towards the sky because the sky means also impossibility of crows.”

Or one more: “In the battle between you and the world – second the world”.

Summarized by Fushinha

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