One Kafka sentence

Frieda is asking the schoolboy Hans Brunswick some questions:


Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998).

In a preface to this translation, Mark Harman cites a passage from Kafka’s diaries:

Omission of the period. In general the spoken sentence starts off in a large capital letter with the speaker, bends out in its course as far as it can towards the listeners and with the period returns to the speaker. But if the period is omitted, then the sentence is no longer constrained and blows its entire breath at the listener.

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[In a store. A security guard was headed in our direction.]

“I was afraid they thought you looked suspicious.”

“I thought I looked fetching.”

“Suspiciously fetching.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Failsonry ?

Oprah is black, a woman, unabashed, loved, genuinely self-made as opposed to the product of intergenerational failsonry & legitimately rich. In other words, abt as close to the anti-Trump as you get. Everything that threatens him. His response will be quavering, angry and ugly.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 8, 2018

Failsonry ? This word appears to exist only in Josh Marshall’s tweet and subsequent retweets. Any idea what he meant to type? Or, if he meant failsonry, what he means by it?

*

January 11: Some smart OCA readers figured it out, or at least I think so. “Intergenerational failsonry” seems to be meant to suggest the International Order of Freemasonry. Thanks, Fresca and Chris, for seeing a masonry and Masonry connection. And thanks to everyone who suggested a meaning. The full story is in the comments.

A Google search for trump and freemasonry suggests to me that Josh Marshall might have done better to skip the pun.

[Josh Marshall is the editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo.]

LA to Vegas (representing)

Tonight on Fox, 9:00 Eastern: LA to Vegas. The New York Times picks LA to Vegas as one of ten shows “we’ll be talking about in January” and describes it as a “snappy sitcom that’s part workplace comedy, part Love Boat-like compendium of travel anecdotes.” Last week’s first episode snapped, crackled, and popped. Fast and funny. Our son-in-law Seth is one of the show’s writers. Go Seth!

The Stool of Repentance

Another letter to the Junior Eagle Game Club. Little Gladys Banning must have been the toast of her block:


[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 17, 1915.]

The Stool of Repentance should be familiar to any teacher who’s read through a packet of student evaluations.

See also the game of Tin-Tin.

[Thanks to the Brooklyn Public Library, whose Brooklyn Newsstand made this post possible.]

Tin-Tin

“You know how to play Tin-Tin?” So asks a character in Shirley Jackson’s novel The Road Through the Wall (1948), which has a long passage devoted to this game. The novel’s narrator says that Tin-Tin is “probably as old as children.” I managed to turn up exactly one description of Tin Tin (no hyphen) in a letter to the Junior Eagle Game Club, a feature of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle:


[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 17, 1915.]

In Jackson’s novel the game is a bit different: the tin seller is “It”; the buyer is “Victim”; there’s no husband/wife element; and the name is “some familiar word or name or nonsense syllable.” Missing from this 1915 description, I think, is what gives the game, at least in Jackson’s novel, a point: the answer to every question must be the player’s assigned name. As for the game’s name, there seems to be no relation to Hergé’s Tintin, at least none that I can suss out.

As you might guess, every letter to “Aunt Jean” is signed by a “niece” or “nephew.” You want your name in the paper, kid, you play along with Aunt Jean, see?

[Thanks to the Brooklyn Public Library, whose Brooklyn Newsstand made this post possible.]

Tim Rollins (1955–2018)

A New York Times obituary describes Tim Rollins as “an artist and educator whose mural-like paintings inspired by literary classics brought 1980s art stardom to him and his collaborators — a shifting collective of at-risk South Bronx teenagers.” Together they were known as Tim Rollins + K.O.S., meaning Kids of Survival. The Times describes the way they worked:

It was a demanding process, which Mr. Rollins oversaw from beginning to end. The authors he selected were challenging and included Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Lewis Carroll and Malcolm X. Digesting their writings could take weeks, and arriving at a suitable motif, a process they called jammin’, could take months.

Among the group’s other source materials: Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Duke Ellington’s The River: A Ballet Suite. Here are two samplings of the work of Tim Rollins + K.O.S.: one, two.

“A few days of living with K.”

In the schoolroom/gymnasium that doubles or triples as living quarters for K., who works as the school’s janitor, and Frieda:


Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

If the book fits

[Photograph by Rachel.]

Items in a series

Honesty. Integrity. Quality. Trust. Premium Onions.

[As seen on a bag of, yes, onions. I suppose that if onions are your everything, this series makes sense.]