What´s that got to do with the literature?

Victor Serge: Unforgiving Years

So I just finished Metamorphosis....and....well.....it just made me incredibly sad.

^ How Kafka can make us care about some dude turned into an insect is partly why he was a genius.

By the way, read it again and look for comedy. You'll find plenty.

Next, read The Castle.

I'm in the middle of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. Exquisitely written, lots of lovely politics and she seems to have more registers of writing than is seriously reasonable for a single individual.

I may have also mentioned this before, but Helene Cixous' Neuter was probably the best thing I read last year (and last year was a particularly heavy year for reading for me). Baffling, but beautifully so.

^^^ YES!!!

kafka was by all accounts a very funny man and once you get past the shock of being thrown the futility of our little lives on the face (we're all insects, kinda), his books are hilarious.

1st time i read the castle i wanted to hang myself from the boredom.

btw, i highly recommend orson welles's film version of the trial-- it's very fucking good! great screenplay, great great great cinematography, i shot a brain cumload when i watched it.

I have a lot of free time today(class cancelled due to bad weather) and I guess I can go re-read it.

I know, maybe it was a bad translation, because while there were melancholy overtones, overall that short story was quite hilarious if you took it in a literal sense, I mean imagine that outlandish event actually happened to your family, exactly the way Kafka narrated it at that! More psychedelic then mushrooms!!

That is also why I like Dahl, because he has that kind of absurdity to his most glaring reality, basically the Leslie Neilsen approach which makes something so damned inappropriately serious that you can't help but laugh and say is this for real?

in the literal sense...well...I can see it kind of funny since yer kind of describing it (bold script) like a prime time sitcom...but still. What's funny about potentially ruining yer family's life? Granted they were better off in the end....but Grete, his sister, for instance....wouldn't you have rather seen her become a talented musician, ESPECIALLY! after this

"And yet the sister was playing so beautifully. Her face was inclined to one side, her eyes followed the notes of the music with a searching and sorrowful look."

I mean....that sense of helplessness I sensed there....hit me hard. I dunno. when on the literal sense...the only comedy I can see is the fact that a human being was transformed into a giant bug.

whats funny is the way the people went about it in a rather mundane, routine and farcical manner when if the story went exactly as it was written, it would be unimaginably even demonically horrifying. Of course what is happening is so surreal it is absurd, and that is why it can remain funny, but it is indeed a chilling blend of fear and laughter, but what in life isn't? People still kept their sense of humor in the Concentration Camps, surely we can laugh with Kafka at the Metamorphasis, and then afterward delve into the deeper, more serious meanings, motifs and symbolism used to tell a deeper story that may be a bit less funny.

I'm just going to point out a couple of things, as I've drunk too much and, y'know, it's the internet and stuff.

First: I think that suchfriends... sees Kafka as funny suggests he's close to European humour. This is quite the compliment from me, as Americans are clearly the repulsive dogshit on the street of international culture.

Second: I have a habit of thinking anyone thinking Burroughs is a good writer is a prick. Don't get me wrong, I like Burroughs, but if that's the end of your literary knowledge you need to man the fuck up and read anything pre-20th century and non-American.

Note Bene: If suchfriends... has said anything pleasant about Burroughs he's excused because that motherfucker is a better read motherfucker than all of y'all illiterate motherfuckers.

I couldn't finish the Castle; book drove me nuts. Kafka's short stories/novellas are fantastic though. From what I understand, and I'm no German speaker, is that the first two or three sentences of the Metamorphosis translate something akin to "Gregor Samsa woke up like an insect" based on a specific grammar form in German. Can anyone confirm this?

Also, In the Penal Colony is amazing and a quick read.

I think nobody hasn´t yet mentoined Anthony Burgess book Clockwork Orange. I think it is very good accompanion to Vonnegut´s Player piano, Huxley´s Brand new world, Orwell´s 1984 and also Kafka´s works. I liked also a lot the film from Kubrick.

About Burroughs...Well he´s not my favourite, but somehow I have liked his paranoid world. And if I remembered correct, Junkie was quite good, easyreading book. I have also liked a lot the story behind Tom Waits Black Rider, although I have never read the original play.

Faulkner, Cormac, Hemingway, Joyce, Roth, Pynchon, Capote, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Ayn Rand, Toni Morrison, Burroughs, Bukowski, William Gibson, Claude McKay, Jonathan Franzen.

For more easy reading (i.e., stuff that makes plane flights go by faster) I like Pahluniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, shit like that.

Marquis de Sade rules too. I Never dug Kafka much. Too. Salomon Rushdie is amazing, especially if your stoned on something.

you provide a clear picture.


must spread rep.

currently reading Executioners Song (about Gary Gilmore) by Norman Mailer, about 50% interesting, those Mormons is some weird people, for damnsure. It's especially interesting to read after having recently watched the Cremaster containing the Mormon/Gilmore stuff. Keep flashing to the bees and the riders. The Cremaster is HIGHLY recommended, if you haven't seen this one......

A couple months ago I read two big motherfuckers back to back: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and William Gaddis's The Recognitions. Both I highly recommend. Set aside some time and let them bowl you over.