Disintegration – I’m taking it in stride
Bret Easton Ellis
books
Filed my taxes yesterday
And no matter how many times I’ve filed them (I’m old so a lot), and no matter how sophisticated and whizbang the tax software gets, I always get a bad feeling when I’m done, that I haven’t done them correctly.
It could have something to do with my lifelong fear of any number greater than a single digit, I suppose.
Mostly that bad feeling is to no avail and everything works out fine. At least the feds haven’t come down on me yet.
But this time that bad feeling was spot on because seconds, seriously, mere seconds, after submitting my return I got an email from the tax filing service stating that my return had been rejected by the IRS.
The rejection turned out to be for a silly, easy to fix reason, but the experience left me wondering, if the IRS already knows the math, why do we have to bother to solve for the solution…
I mean, why in this whizbang day and age do I even have to do my taxes?
Is it really just so I have some skin in the game, as the silly mostly right-leaning politicians like to say?
Okay, I can understand large corporations and extremely high earners having to be obliged to keep intricate records and be in close communication with the feds…
But why must a poor swine like myself? Surely, it must cost the government more money than it makes to track the anemic, trickling cash flow of someone in my tax bracket.
And while we’re on the topic, doesn’t it seem a little immoral and against the laws of nature to tax the fruits of one’s labor?
I mean, I’m not against taxes, I understand their need, but it just doesn’t seem right getting taxed/penalized for what we earn to make our living, for our efforts to be constructive citizens.
Why not tax the hell out of us for what we consume like most of the states do? I’m all for a sales/consumption tax, provided it’s not for the purchase of basic needs that people smarter than me would have to determine what would qualify as a need, basic and/or otherwise. And for sure tax the complete hell, every speck of it, out of luxury items.
Again, I’m no numbers guy and I’m not saying an income tax isn’t the best way to fund our federal needs, and I know there’s the whole thing about taxes needing to be progressive and all that, I’m just saying an income tax just seems such an unnatural, immoral way to fund our societal needs, that’s all I’m saying.
Anyway…
Until next year.*
*Sure hope I don’t end up getting audited for this. And speaking of income, don’t forget all my books are free today! I need the reviews, yo!
Rainy Season, AI-Imagined
I’ve always wanted to write and illustrate a graphic novel.
But that would be a lot of work.
Too much for someone as uninspired and unartistic as yours truly.
So I figured why not give one of the AI machines a shot at illustrating some of my writing since they seem to be all the rage lately…
Which also seems to be making all the human artists rage lately as well.
But hey, if you can’t beat ’em might as well join ’em, right?
I mean, hey, better take advantage of the tech now before it takes complete advantage of us as our AI Overlords, right?
Right?
Anyway, I fed some of the characteristics of Rich and Miko, the two main characters of my novel Rainy Season, into the AI engine Midjourney, and this is a little taste of what it came up with…
I must say, I’m pretty impressed. Just the vibe I was going for when writing the novel. There are other cool renditions of the troubled couple, as well as some beautiful renderings of a rainy Tokyo night filled with the hazy glow of neon, just like the story’s setting calls for.*
Pretty nifty.
And a little scary.
But hey, maybe the awakening tech might just allow me to release an illustrated edition of the novel.
Sure would be a lot easier than having/trying to draw all those illustrations myself.
I guess if I’m going to do it, I better hurry before the AI becomes fully aware…
And finds itself less interested in rendering unto us silly pictures from silly stories…
And more interested in having us render unto it our complete and total carbon-filled, mushy-hearted fealty.
Yeah.
*I tried using the same defining terms with the DALL-E AI machine and the images it rendered were lame compared to Midjourney’s.
Sunday Songs to Spark the Spirit and Summon the Moves of the Dance
You probably know that Steve Earle is a world-renowned folk/country/crossover singer-songwriter…
And maybe you know that he is also an actor, having appeared on The Wire, Treme, and other productions, his characters mostly mirroring his life as a musician, as in Treme, or as a recovering heroin addict, as in The Wire.
But did you know he is also an author?
And a damn fine one at that?
Yeah…
Dude’s def got it going on, I must say. Obviously, I’m a big fan.
His book I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive is named after a Hank William’s song. I listened to the audiobook version, of which Earle performed. It’s great. The main character is a down-and-out, disgraced doctor, and an addict, who angelically performs illegal medical services for the locals of his unruly hood, particularly for the at-risk sex workers. It is a sad, touching, funny, magical, hallucinatory/ghostly tale (Hank Williams plays a critical role… or at least his ghost/Doc’s hallucination of him does) of which I highly recommend.
Anyway, have a listen of this little ditty of Earle’s from when he was a much younger human, and tap a toe or two while you’re at it…
What time is it? That’s right, it’s the Boy from Bohemia Time!
While I wasn’t exactly thrilled with Kafka translator Michael Hoffman translating Ungeziefer as cockroach…
I am in definite accord with him on much of what he discusses in his introduction to METAMORPHOSIS AND OTHER STORIES, a collection translated by him consisting of all of Kafka’s stories that were published in Kafka’s lifetime.
For instance, when discussing how hard it is to translate Kafka, Hoffman tells us this is so because in Kafka’s work “there is no ‘voice’, no diction, no ‘style’ — certainly not in the literary sense of high style ….[Philip] Rahv describes him perfectly as a ‘master of narrative tone, of a subtle, judicious and ironically conservative style’.”
Obviously, as a single-tongued simpleton I can’t comment on the translation difficulties, but as a Kafka fanboy I do get what he means by the lack of high style, of how inobtrusive Kafka’s writing is.
As a writer myself, I rely far too much on literary devices such as metaphors and similes and on language such as adjectives and adverbs (yeah, I know, I know…), but Kafka’s writing is almost as if it isn’t there, as if it comes to us as a dream, without any distracting devices or large, literary words to destroy that deep, immersive verisimilitude that no other writer I find can create quite like him.
“If this is what Kafka is like,” Hoffman says, “then the big words in his stories are in fact the little words. Not verbs and nouns, much less adjectives and adverbs, but what are aptly termed ‘particles’…that change or reinforce the course of arguments in his prose.”
Which is why I was so surprised when I read such an overtly literary passage in one of Kafka’s earlier stories found early in the collection called “Unmasking a Confidence Trickster”:
I had an invitation, I had told him as much right away. I had been invited, furthermore, to come up, where I would have liked to have been for some time already, not standing around outside the gate gazing past the ears of my interlocutor. And now to lapse into silence with him too, as if we had decided on a long stay in just this spot. A silence to which the houses round about and the darkness that extended as far as the stars, all made their contribution. And the footfalls of unseen pedestrians, whose errands one did not like to guess at, the wind that kept pressing against the opposite side of the street, a gramophone that was singing against the sealed windows of one of the rooms somewhere – they all came to prominence in this silence, as though it belonged and had always belonged to them.
I had to stop after reading that passage, mostly because I felt it was such beautiful writing and I wanted to reread it, but also because I wasn’t quite sure what I had just read, what it was about, which is always a danger for me with highfalutin literary writing.
Even in this winding passage, I can still feel the underlying Kafkaian vibe to it, but the vibe is disrupted because of its “literariness,” because of the beauty of the writing. Usually, it’s not until after I stop reading Kafka for whatever reason – bathroom break, sleep, never because of disinterest – that I realize that Kafkian vibe had totally penetrated my psyche and has been humming deep within me without me even knowing it.
Yeah…
And this brings me to what I am particularly smitten with in Hoffman’s introduction, this concept he calls “Kafka time,” of how it’s always either too late, as it is for Gregor Samsa who has already metamorphosed by the time we meet him, or is never arriving, as how K. is never able to fulfill his land surveying duties for the castle.
Or, to put a twist on a point Hoffman made above, it’s in that slip of time it takes for the particles to change or reinforce the course of arguments in Kafka’s prose.
To me, it is from this sense of “Kafka time” where the Kafkaian vibe resonates most, creating this unsettling feeling of striving for something just beyond our grasp…
While traversing along a narrow, crumbling path barely wide enough for a foot to fall…
While high on a mountain’s edge…
While sightless from the thick and endless and suffocating clouds.
Hey, what can I say, I’m no Kafka, but i think you get what I’m trying to get at.
Anyway, Hoffman goes on to discuss the “middle moment” of Kafka’s writing, the time it takes to shift from the Muzak of normalcy to that initial, sweet, dissonant twang of that Kafkian vibe, as “the Zeno moment, the infinite possibility of infinitesimal change.”
The Zeno he is referring to of course is Zeno of Elea (as opposed to Zeno of Citium or Zeno of Southern Pennsylvania) who pretty much gave us way back (B)efore (C)hrist was even a sparkle in God’s eyes the definition of Kafkaesque, but which he less than humbly dubbed Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox.
Actually, I think it was Plato who first gave Zeno his props so we should cut him some eponymous slack.
Anyway, Aristotle illustrates Zeno’s paradox thusly:
“Suppose Atalanta wishes to walk to the end of a path. Before she can get there, she must get halfway there. Before she can get halfway there, she must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, she must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on.”
And by so on, I take it to mean Atalanta is never going to reach the end of that path.
Sounds like it could be the blurb for just about any of Kafka’s books, no?
But then, even Kafka himself lived on Kafka time as he was thrice engaged but never married, authored three novels but completed none, and then, sadly, his life was left incomplete by disease.
So strange.
Yeah, there is so much more to discuss regarding Kafka and his time, but perhaps it’s best if we come to a conclusion with this one final thought…
There’s vermin in my library!
And by vermin I mean Ungeziefer of course.
And if that Ungeziefer were a snake, the little bugger probably would have bitten me.
Yeah, so… after yesterday’s mostly tongue-in-cheek diatribe re: my frustration with translators who blasphemously translate Ungeziefer, the German word for the mysterious critter into which Franz Kafka has Gregor Samsa of “The Metamorphosis” metamorphose, as anything other than vermin, the actual word Ungeziefer translates as into English, I happily discovered in my Kindle library a 2002 translation of the complexing story by a one David Wyllie that I downloaded from the Gutenberg Library god only knows when that has the famous first sentence translated as…
“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin” (emphasis emphatically mine!).
Now, was that so hard?
Actually, I have no idea if that was hard or not because I, alas, am a mere one-language knucklehead.
But, don’t you feel even a bit more relieved to know that you are reading a translation of a word, a word that has caused much confusion and consternation and the expenditure of reams and reams of paper, both of the tactile sort and of the e-sort, for nigh a century now, that comes closest to the author’s original?
Look, obviously all this so-called diatribe of mine is, like I said, mostly tongue-in-cheek.
Key word there being: mostly.
There is, to me, however, a little slice of sincere seriousness about all this as well.
Think about it…
Think about the differences between Ungeziefer/vermin and insect, which the Muirs use in their translation, and cockroach, which Hoffman uses in his translation, and even a “big beetle with wings under his shell, capable of flight” for which Vladamir Nabokov lobbied *.
Because I’d bet my bottom bitcoin (if only I had one, right?) that Mr. Kafka certainly did.
And for some reason, he felt compelled to use, not such a specific identifier as cockroach, nor a more general identifier as insect, but an identifier that could easily include both in its meaning as encompassing and horrible, as Wyllie refers to it as in his translation, or as gigantic, as the Muirs refer to it as in theirs, or as monstrous, as Hoffman refers to it as in his, as it is.
So, we all probably have some general understanding what the word vermin means, but let’s get the read deal definition from a renowned authority:
Vermin (colloquially varmint(s) or varmit(s)) are pests or nuisance animals that spread diseases or destroy crops or livestock. Since the term is defined in relation to human activities, which species are included vary by region and enterprise.
–
The term derives from the Latin vermis (worm), and was originally used for the worm-like larvae of certain insects, many of which infest foodstuffs. The term varmint (and vermint) has been found in sources from c. 1530–1540s.
Wikipedia
So then, with that understanding in mind, what would compel a man like Kafka to use just that word and not the others?
To me, the crux of it all has to do with the alienation he felt in life.
Some say this alienation has mostly to do with his daddy issues.
Yeah, okay, maybe to some extent; but to this knucklehead it seems that this alienation is mostly driven by Kafka’s identity and the marginalization he felt because of it.
For, not only was he marginalized as Jew in a city country continent world** rife with antisemitism, but he was even further marginalized because, for some reason I’ve yet to discover/research, Prague Jews didn’t speak Czech, they spoke German, which is why we’re discussing the German word Ungeziefer for vermin and not the Czech word Havěť .
So, what better way to express this deep-seated feeling of alienation in Kafka as embodied by Gregor Samsa than to turn him into, not some creepy but elusive cockroach, or some ambiguous, generic insect, most of which are mostly harmless and go mostly unnoticed, but into some vile, oversized and infectious vermin that everyone, without prejudice, could fear and despise?
Nothing comes to mind. Yeah, I think Kafka pretty much nailed it.
Yeah, so a lot of this is just for fun and I really have nothing but respect and envy for all the translators out there opening up the world for us…
But, a little bit is wholly and very serious to me because I think it matters with much immensity and immediacy that the world regards the fateful Gregor Samsa explicitly as Kafka intended.
*A reenactment of Nabokov instructing his Cornell students on the subject of “The Metamorphosis,” with Christopher Plummer staring as Nabokov, can be viewed here.
**The Metamorphosis” was published in 1915, only a few short years before the rise of Nazism begins… and which, by the time of its end, Kafka’s three sisters had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps. To illustrate how anti-Semitic times were within Kafka’s life, three years after he was born, Friedrich Nietzsche’s domineering, mentally imbalanced, and extremely anti-Semitic sister Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche moved with her husband to Paraguay to create the pure-Aryan paradise of Nueva Germania. Yeah… pretty awful and surely highly impressionable times for Franz, I’d venture to say.
NOTE: Regarding the featured image, Kafka instructed his publisher to not represent on the book cover what he, the publisher, conceived the vermin to be; instead, he, Kafka, wanted only a man lying in bed to be represented. Hence, my choice of the featured image that I found in the Pexel free database. To me, the identity of person lying in bed is unidentifiable, although I assume (I know, I know… risky business there) this is a person of color, which would, sadly, make this person wholly marginalized in my neck of the woods… and probably, sadly, in yours too.
If it’s Ungeziefer why not just call it Ungeziefer?!
Okay, admittedly, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer so please take my perplexity for what it’s worth…
About a plug nickel, that’s what.
But anyway, I know it’s easy for a one-language knuklehead like me to complain, but if in “The Metamorphosis” Kafka writes that when Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find himself changed into an Ungeziefer, which translates into English as vermin, then why don’t translators just use the word “vermin” (or, as it also can be translated, parasite or, if in a religious context, an animal unsuitable for sacrifice, or so the web tells me, whatever) when translating the work from German to English?
I don’t know, I guess I’ll never understand smart people.
But anyway, for any of you non-Formalists out there who have no problem looking outside the text for interpretation, you can find a bit more clarity — not complete, but a bit — on what Kafka meant by the Ungeziefer that Samsa metamorphosed into from the instructions he gave to his publisher about how he did not want any representation of the creature on the book cover:
Kafka had no intention of labeling Gregor as any specific thing, but instead was trying to convey Gregor’s disgust at his transformation. In his letter to his publisher of 25 October 1915, in which he discusses his concern about the cover illustration for the first edition, Kafka does use the term Insekt, though, saying: “The insect itself is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance.”
Wikipedia, and about a million other places on the web
And even within the text we find an affirmation of that bit of clarity when the charwoman refers to the Samsa vermin as an old dung beetle1.
So, what this all means to me is that any further classifying by a translator of Samsa the vermin beyond a generic insect is simply just the translator taking poetic license with the text, to put it nicely.
To put it un-nicely, maybe it is more likely that the translator is punching beyond their paygrade (huh?)
Or… maybe it’s just that they are trying desperately to stick out from the very large global pack of other admiring Kafka translators.
Looking at the tried and true translation of Willa and Edwin Muir, we find the sentence reading in respectfully as, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”2
Nicely done, well within the limits of Kafka’s intent and desires I would say.
But when reading one of the newer translation of Kafka’s text by Michael Hofmann — which is what started this whole literary todo — his first sentence of “Metamorphosis” (not The Metamorphosis like it’s been referred to in English for close to a century now, but just Madison Avenue cool (or whatever the British equivalent is) Metamorphosis) reads presumptively as, “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach (emphasis emphatically mine) in his bed.”3
A cockroach?!
No, not cool, Mr. Hofmann.
Not only do I the one-language knucklehead take umbrage with Hofmann overstepping his literary bounds, I’m sure none other than the great Mr. Nabokov would as well if he were, you know, still able to stand vertical and chase those little butterflies around.
But anyway, as I embark on a close reading of the relatively new Penguin collection of Kafka’s work as translated by Mr. Hofmann, let it be known that I have already been prejudiced against it, for whatever it’s worth…
Not much more than a plug nickel, that’s whatever.
But you already knew that.
1. FRANZ KAFKA, The Complete Stories, Schoken Books, 1971, p1274
2. Ibid, or something like that, p89
3. METAMORPHOSIS AND OTHER STORIES, Penguin Random House UK, 2007, p75
4. Yeah, it’s been several decades since I tried to correctly cite a source so cut me some slack, huh…
Was thinking about converting one of my books into a GIF and selling it as an NFT*…
Until I read this:
Ethereum uses as much electricity as all of Libya, and the digital artist Memo Atken calculated that, due to the blockchain transactions involved in minting an NFT, the average NFT has a carbon footprint equal to over a month of the average EU citizen’s electricity usage.
*Yeah, I have no idea what an NFT is either – was just trying to be one of the cool kids.
The Graduate by Charles Webb – A Review
BOOK | FICTION | LITERARY
THE GRADUATE by Charles Webb
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★
When The Graduate, a book published in 1963 by recently deceased author Charles Webb, popped up as a Kindle Unlimited recommendation the other day, I thought to myself, why not? I mean, shouldn’t every fan of the movie version, a film which “is often ranked among the greatest, most quoted and talked about of all time,” feel obligated to read the source from which the film’s greatness was spawned?
The answer, of course, is yes.
So I read the book obligingly – it’s a fast read as the book weighs in at a slim 224 pages – and upon reflection, I didn’t realize it from the movie version, but The Graduate is essentially a continuation of The Catcher in the Rye. In other words, we essentially witness Holden Caulfield’s post-collegiate angst as channeled through Benjamin Braddock.
In the movie version Dustin Hoffman’s Braddock, as excellent and memorable as it is, comes across to me as more neurotic and whiney than angry and angsty as the character is portrayed in the novel. As I’m not a practicing psychologist, please don’t ask me to differentiate between the two as per the DSM-5 or whatever version the shrinks are now working off of.
However, as examples, when I, the layman psychologist that I am, think of neurotic-y (whiney) type actors in the vein of Hoffman’s Braddock, I easily think of Woody Allen (obviously), Owen Wilson, and Jesse Eisenberg.
However (once again), coming up with angsty type actors in the vein of Webb’s Braddock, that’s a little harder for me to pull off – Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattison both come to mind (probably can blame it on Twilight), and perhaps Zack Braff. Of course on the extreme end of the angsty scale we have Christian Bale, whose several angsty roles often seem to teeter on the precipice of sanity.
Anyway, that’s my impression of the novel. So I give it a four-star, not so much for its literary achievements (because, honestly, it’s not that well-written (Just about everything is described as perfectly this or that; and for some reason, just about every character seems to have a hearing problem as they keep having to ask What? after something is said to them. Quite annoying; however, we see a similar case of the What’s in The Catcher in the Rye as well, so… take that for what it’s worth.)). But for a book written by a twenty-four-year old that becomes the foundation for such an important movie, hey, I can afford to grade on a curve and give it an extra star.
Incidentally, it’s interesting to me that both J.D. Salinger and Charles Webb were so disillusioned with society that one became a famous grouchy recluse and the other donated his book proceeds to charity and lived a chosen life of poverty.
How ’bout that?