Weekend Content
LRB, Double Thought by Michael Wood, which weighs whether or not Kafka's office work was a wellspring of his fiction:
Where did Kafka learn to think like this? A case could be made that he found his training not in his intricate psyche or in his horrified commitment to writing – ‘the service of the Devil’, he called it – but in his day job at the Prague Institute for Workmen’s Accident Insurance. Born in 1883, he trained as a lawyer, worked briefly for an Italian insurance company in Prague, the Assicurazioni Generali, and then in 1908 took a position with the institute, where he remained until he resigned on grounds of ill-health in 1922. He died in 1924. We may not believe, as we are told in the preface to The Office Writings, a selection from his legal and clerical work, that ‘much of Kafka’s greatness . . . is owed to his office job,’ but we can certainly agree that anything we learn about his job will strengthen ‘our sense of the conditions under which Kafka accomplished his nocturnal writing’ – the writing he did, that is, when he got home from the office. The editors of this volume are understandably eager to make literal, referential connections between Kafka’s office work and his fiction, and their texts of choice are ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘The Great Wall of China’, Amerika and The Castle. But their real point, and the real interest of this book, is rather different, and hinges on the idea of the Kafkaesque.
This new 3-book set of The Arabian Nights from Penguin is utterly beautiful. (As far as I can tell, only available in the UK). See an interesting conversation with the designer here.
Stein and Joyce arguing over which one of them is greater:
I wanted to read more about the controversy occasioned by the Autobiography, so I went and got Janet Hobhouse’s short biography of Stein down from the shelf. The grievances were as follows: The Jolases were pissed because Stein had pronounced transition dead (it hadn’t published any Stein lately); Braque was pissed because Stein had denied his role at Picasso’s side in the creation of cubism, and Matisse was pissed because Stein had compared his wife to a horse. Tzara was pissed because he was Tzara.
The pamphlet sounded to me like a kind of anti-matter version ofOur Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress,the latter symposium intended to promote a modernist work and the former, its evil twin, intended to torpedo one. Joyce himself had been behind the 1929 publication of Exagmination, and most of the contributions – by Eugene Jolas, Samuel Beckett, and others – had already appeared in the pages of transition. This got me wondering: could the real motivation behind the 1935 transition pamphlet have been an attack by the Joyce faction on the Stein circle?
And David Hockney and Robert Irwin, arguing via intermediary (The Believer, The Paralyzed Cyclops):
Indeed, for some twenty-five years now, whenever I have written about one or the other of these two giants of contemporary art (arguably the two most significant artists to come out of the late-twentieth-century California art milieu), the other one has called effectively to tell me, “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” The two have never met or conversed in person (straddling that Southern California scene like Schoenberg and Stravinsky before them, each seemingly oblivious to the other’s existence though in fact deeply seized by the work); instead they have been carrying on this quite vivid argument for over two decades, through me, as it were.
The 7 greatest stories in Esquire history,a s chosen by Esquire. (You can face-off Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer.)
A Philip K. Dick documentary.
I apologize if i'm being overly thick. This Malcolm C. Lyons translation of The Arabian Night... How does it compare to other translations?
Posted by: badger | November 21, 2008 at 08:41 AM