Kafka on the Nudist Beach
Night came, settling with the heat, and cast some things in stark relief and others into shadow. The world was saturated with regret and consolation, people and things that went before.
Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett, • Breasts and Eggs
After dinner, Andy and I stopped by a bookstore that was next to St. Mark’s Comedy Club. Unorganized, lots of underground poetry, ended up getting “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and a preface to Plato. I asked the guy if they had any Ed Sanders (his Tales of Beatnick Glory shaped my sense of history of this neighborhood). They had that same book, signed,
... See moreKafka’s “The Burrow,” a tale of creaturely existence reduced to the obsessive and anxious pursuit of self-preservation, is one of the bleakest portrayals in literature of life as a solitude cut off from any mutuality. It is a dark prospectus of human life in the absence of community or civil society, at a furthest remove from the collective forms o
... See moreJonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
You’re a starcher, he said, skinny but strong. You can fight them off, the Kafkas. Hit them in the kishkas. And remember to read the nature poets—a pastoral a day keeps the doctor away. Don’t be so proud of your anxiety.