writing

What time is it? That’s right, it’s the Boy from Bohemia Time!

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While I wasn’t exactly thrilled with Kafka translator Michael Hoffman translating Ungeziefer as cockroach…

To say the least…

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…

Redeemable

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There's nothing Fixed that can't be Broken

Praise Jove, for without them, the Broken
And all the Hope and Possibilities for which they allow
There is nothing Redeemed
There is nothing made New Again

Beam of Sun meet Fall of Rain

Aye, mourn not the absence of the Sol
Relish instead the cool quenching of the Aqua
And the Unbounded Inactivity for which it now allows
For it is that, the Idleness, the Nothingness of Inactivity
And the Silence, the Stillness found within it
That beckons forth the Dreams
And the Inspiration

The Dreams and Inspiration of the Marrow
The Dreams and Inspiration for the Morrow

Hungry Artists, Kafkian or Otherwise, Fasting for Influence, Spiritual or Otherwise

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A Hungry Buddha, courtesy of Wikipedia

Why does one fast?

The obvious answers to me are most likely for spiritual or health reasons, and, should the need arise, for political and judicial reasons as well.

But who knows really — it’s such a strange thing to do if you think about it.

Back in the Nineties, which some Dennis Hopper character in some forgotten movie referred to as the Sixties standing on your head, I was a fasting vegan. That’s right, I was vegan not just before it was cool, but even before just about anyone had even heard of the word, and certainly before most of today’s nouveau hipster dreadlocked vegans were even born. I won’t attempt to analyze their motivations for become a vegan, but mine began in my desperate pursuit to quit smoking.

Long story short, one day out at sea — yes, I was a vegan sailor boy of all things — I stumbled upon an Anthony Robbins book in the ship’s library and from it I discovered things that took me on a long strange dietary journey beginning with food combining (not mixing proteins and carbohydrates), to your basic vegetarianism, to the Diamond’s Fit for Life with their whole body hygiene lifestyle maintenance system, which included veganism and eating according to the body’s cycles, to Deepak Chopra’s Perfect Health, to Arnold Ehret’s Mucusless Diet, to Mark Mathew Braunstein’s Radical Vegetarianism, which, if I remember correctly, is the book that led me finally to fasting.

Ah, the Nineties… what a decade.

The good news is I haven’t smoked since…

However, while I remained a vegan for most of the decade, the fasting* didn’t really stick with me.

It is a tough gig, this fasting. One learns very quickly how weak the flesh is and how strong mentally one must be to overcome this weakness.

Just ask perhaps one of our most renowned fasters throughout history – Jesus.

God only knows how he was able to not only fast for forty days, but to do so while also fighting off the devil’s relentless temptations.

Talk about mental toughness.

I recall reading, in which book I can’t recall, probably Radical Vegetarianism, that when fasting, the liver creates its own glucose and other enzymes to compensate for the lack of nutrients. One of these enzymes supposedly has the same effect on the brain as does LSD.

Could explain why there are so many trippy fasting ascetics throughout the ages…

Like Bodhidharma sitting in a cave in silence, abstaining from just about everything, which I imagine would also include food, and staring at a wall for nine years, I guess in an effort to convince/influence his growing flock of Chinese followers to follow him down his particular path to enlightenment.

Yeah, I don’t know but whatever the reason was for him to stare at that wall for so long, he was textbook trippy fasting ascetic if you ask me.

I don’t know about you, but to me if in your effort/desire to achieve enlightenment you find yourself sitting in a cave and staring at a wall for nine years, then, well, it seems to me that your efforts/desire to shed yourself of desire has transcended beyond desire into a weird neurotic fetish, spiritually speaking of course.

Anyway… I was looking through my old journals from the Nineties and I came upon some notes I took from an essay by the late Shin’ichi Hisamatsu titled “The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness“** and I found a passage from the essay that must have struck me then as I copied it verbatim, and which I will share with you now as it seems to apply to our current trippy discussion:

“The Mind in its dimensions is broad and great, like empty-space. It has no sides or limits; it is neither square nor round, neither large nor small.  It is neither blue, yellow, red, nor white; it has neither upper nor lower; it is neither long nor short. It knows neither anger nor pleasure, neither right nor wrong, neither good nor evil.  It is without beginning and without end.  But good friends, do not, hearing me speak of emptiness, become attached to emptiness.”

Seems to me our good friend Bodhidharma kind of got attached to emptiness more than just a little bit, no?

A Hungry Bodhidharma, courtesy of Wikipedia

Now, I don’t know if that wide-eyed monk (I’ve read somewhere that he cut his eyelids off so he could meditate without the interruption of blinking or sleep) became so attached to emptiness as embodied by the wall in that cave because he was tripping like a hippie at Woodstock due to the LSD-like enzymes polluting his head from an overabundance of fasting, or if he just had a bad case of misanthropy or what, but his kind of ascetism kind of reminds me of that of the protagonist in Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.”

Now this ascetic dude literally turned fasting into an art form.

That is, if you can call sitting on straw in a cage all day where the only thing you do is not eat art.

It’s one way to become a star, I guess.

I guess another way is for absolutely no reason other than you’ve somehow managed to convince a million others to follow you on the latest social media flavor of the day for no other reason than because a million others follow you…

Whatever.

Influence is influence I guess, no matter if it comes from your ability to cure cancer or your ability to manipulate the social media app into putting cute dog ears on a cute photo of you.

But by the time we come upon the Hunger Artist in the story, his influence is on the wane and we find, regardless what his reasons were for becoming a performing ascetic, be they for spiritual reasons or not — my guess is not but who knows, right? — this ascetic dude is desperate to keep performing.

Because by now, it’s all he knows.

I mean, if all you do is sit on straw in a cage (or sit in a cave in front of a wall) doing nothing but not eating day after day, year after year, sooner or later that shorthand skill you picked up as a side-hustle during college is going turn stale and leave you with no other options but to continue sitting on straw in a cage doing nothing but not eating.

And, where once he was performing maybe because he felt what he was doing was bringing a certain joy and enlightenment to the crowds he used to draw, now it’s he either performs or he…

Well, I don’t want to spoil the story for you if you haven’t yet had the pleasure to read it.

But, if you know anything about Kafka, then you can probably imagine what would happen to such a strange, desperate character of his at the end of such a strange, desperate tale.

At least he, the Hunger Artist, is not the poor strange soul at the end of In the Penal Colony.

But he suffers nonetheless, our poor ascetic known as the Hunger Artist, who, alas, I presume is just one more soul Kafka leverages to illustrate the sense of alienation he felt from a society wholly incomprehensible to him…

And he to it.

So, he — take your choice as to who the he may be here, the Hunger Artist, Gregor Samsa, Joseph K., K., Kafka himself, you? — found for himself a life where he could separate himself from others, and be protected from them sitting safely behind the steel bars of his cage, and where he could even find a sense of glory from them.

And all he had to do was refrain from what it was that is common to all, including himself, from whom he wished to separate himself from.

In other words, all he had to do was fast.

And it was something he did very well, right up to the end.

*While I never stuck with long-term fasting, I do adhere to intermittent fasting, trying to go at least 16 hours a day without food.

**This essay was published in 1946 and the language is a bit dated so don’t get all bent out of shape at me for it… please.

There’s vermin in my library!

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n884_w1150

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.

All I’m Conscious of…

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Is what I’m conscious of.

You dig?

Put with brutal succinctness, Damasio’s brief goes like this: Mental activity consists of a stream of “images” that map aspects of the world around us. But these images, by themselves, cannot be conscious. For that, they must be related to a perspective, an “owner,” a self — this, after all, is what subjectivity means. And here is where feeling comes in. As Damasio uses the term, “feelings” are “the hybrid, interactive processes of the interior, at once mental and physical.” They register how well or badly its various subsystems are doing at maintaining homeostasis, at keeping the organism alive and flourishing. So feelings point within, to the interior; images point without, to the world. And when feelings and images come together in the brain, the result is conscious thought. To adapt a simile of Damasio’s, feelings are like a musical score that, when added to the silent reel of images in the mind, produces cinematic consciousness.

Is It Possible to Explain How Consciousness Works? New York Times, November 2, 2021

ONE SONG ETERNAL

During that half-measured beat of our lives
for Heaven, we look upward to Sky
for Hell, downward to Earth

All whilst desperately,
dependently, desirously
existing within an infinitely
expanding Universe –
our One Song Eternal –
a Rhythmical Void void
of Direction
of Time

A Void where that which we seek
be it that Heaven or that Hell
can only be found within
that Composition of
our Mind

∞

From Short Verses & Other Curses

Was thinking about converting one of my books into a GIF and selling it as an NFT*…

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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.

Sun Worshippers

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Even with all that wood chopped and a nice cozy fire blazing…
Some still prefer the warmth that only the sun can provide…

One of these days I’ll get back to blogging for real again, especially since there’s so much nonsense to discuss these days. But I am at least getting close to knocking out another book. Going back to my wheelhouse this time with another literary fiction number similar in spirit, but not in story, to Inside the Skin. I’ll probably be sending out a request for beta readers to my newsletter soon so if you’re interested helping me out, get on that mailing list so you’ll be notified (and get a free copy of my short story collection to boot). Stay weird, ya weirdos.

The Graduate by Charles Webb – A Review

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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.

Check it out

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?

A Pebble is a Rock is a Mountain is Me

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I look at the little pebble at my feet and can’t help but think

But for the grace of god go I

And then laugh

Not out of humor

But of fear

Because he’s nowhere

But within the magic of my mind

The madness

For, but for the grace of chance goes that pebble at my feet

No more purposefully than the patient rock at the corner of my lot

Having had waited a million years for me to move it there

Or the mountain I’ll never climb

Or the moon, or the sun

Or the boundless galaxies in the sky

That are as real to me as the oxygen molecules I breathe

I just have to take your word for it

And yet you admonish me over and over

Essence before Existence!

An a priori on high

And I want to take your word for it

Like I do for the oxygen molecules I breathe

And many times I almost convinced myself I had

But then comes the horrible news

Relentlessly so

To remind me that

Nope

You got the order all wrong

That the only a priori meaning there is

First and foremost and forever more

Is only that of my mind’s making

Of its madness