Josef K. in motion

Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken, 1998).

So cinematic. It’s so easy to imagine such a scene as the stuff of silent film.

When I was in high school, Borges and Kafka were my passports to real literature. How I found my way to their work, I’ll never know. What I didn’t understand back then: Kafka is funny. I’m glad to have figured that out.

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

Dot Flagston has just wished that it were possible to celebrate “the holidays” earlier. Because right now the world is a carousel of color, sort of:


[Hi and Lois, October 9, 2017.]

Today’s Hi and Lois makes me think of the first sentence of a poem I made from remarks of my then-very-young daughter Rachel: “The colors are / broken.” They are, indeed. And I’m certainly not going to take the time to fix them. Tinkering with what’s in the balloon makes things dumber and funnier:


[Hi and Lois, altered, October 9, 2017.]

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Good cop, bad cop

This metaphor for a Tillerson–Trump North Korea strategy is, let’s say, faulty. And not merely because there is no evidence of a coordinated strategy. The metaphor is faulty because it doesn’t fit the circumstances. Good cop–bad cop works, when it works, because the options available to a person being held for interrogation are few. Those options, typically, do not include the use of nuclear weapons.

Domestic comedy

[Talking about roads not taken.]

“That program? It would have been like galley slaves, but with grading instead of oars.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[I finally got it right, or wrong: I thought I’d said “freshman papers” and “oars,” or “grading” and “rowing.” But no, it was “grading” and “oars,” not parallel, I know.]

Recently updated

 

The figure on the left is from Rudolf Modley’s Handbook of Pictorial Symbols (New York: Dover, 1976). I removed the hat, lampshade, and typewriter and added a laptop to make the image on the right. For a faux-industrial coffeehouse look, you could always put the lampshade back in.

[I draw a line at the hat. No hats indoors.]

“Bob & Timmy & Lassie”

Fresca, l’astronave, has made a photo-collage to go with my story “The Poet”: it’s “Bob & Timmy & Lassie.”

[All of this silliness reminds me of something the owner of a corner grocery in Brookline, Massachusetts, said to Elaine and me one night in the mid-1980s: “It’s good to get away from reality once in a while.” Confirming what we already knew.]

“A radiance behind it”

Once a year, Robin travels by train to Stratford, Ontario, to see a Shakespeare play:


Alice Munro, “Tricks,” in Runaway (New York: Vintage, 2005).

Also from this book
One Munro sentence : “That is what happens” : “Henry Ford?” : “A private queer feeling”

Astonishment

The New York Times, from a story about Rex Tillerson:

Although he insisted he had never considered resigning, several people close to Mr. Tillerson said he has had to be talked out of drafting a letter of resignation on more than one occasion by his closest allies, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff. And they said he has regularly expressed astonishment at how little Mr. Trump understands the basics of foreign policy.

I’m astonished that he’s astonished.

Nancy rain

[Nancy, September 26, 1950.]

I’ve been waiting for the chance to identify with Nancy. We had less than a quarter-inch of rain in September. Today, it’s raining, for real.

Rain or no rain, you can read Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy six days a week at GoComics.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Stoner movie

The Hollywood Reporter reports that John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner is being adapted as a movie, directed by Joe Wright and starring Casey Affleck. A press release from the companies behind the movie describes the novel as the story of

the hardscrabble life of William Stoner, a dirt-poor farmer turned academic, who emerges as an unlikely existential hero while making his way through the first half of the 20th century.

Key elements in that description — “hardscrabble,” “dirt-poor,” “unlikely existential hero” — are lifted from the back cover of the New York Review Books paperback edition. But the press release still manages to get something wrong: Stoner is not “a dirt-poor farmer turned academic”: he’s the son of a farming family.

I’m sure I’ll see this movie, though I’m prepared to be disappointed.

Other Stoner posts
John Williams on Stoner and teaching : On “the true nature of the University” : Stoner and adjunct life : Stoner FTW

[And what’s with the producer’s claim that the novel is “not well-known”? It is. In 2013 NPR reported that the novel was a bestseller through much of Europe.]