Poet — What To Us (cf. What, to us, is the 4th of July, asked Frederick Douglass) has his book soon — and friend, Lewis Freedman, who read at the inaugural Celansalon last November, has long had the idea to cull a book from sentences containing Kafka (or Er…)
At the beginning of her quietly wise review of Louis Begley’s The Tremendous World I Have Inside MyHead: Franz Kafka–A Biographical Essay, Zadie Smith uses this to good effect.
How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps: Continue reading ‘M. Brod’s Everymen’
Stumbling upon the paper doll Suhrkamp made for Robert Walser’s 125th birthday, one imagines there’s a cut-out Kafka in store for us. Fischer Verlag, for their part, is running a contest (through tomorrow) and the German government has trotted out a stamp and a €10 silver coin (an irony, Philip Roth reminded us, that would not have escaped Kafka.)
As the world turns (to watch him turn) 125, we might pause to wonder: how did — or did — Franz celebrate his birthday? Surely the begetter of the best known birthday in world literature — K.’s thirtieth — must have found some significance in his own. Continue reading ‘Kafka is 1…2…5′
Published on
July 2, 2008 in
Kafka.
From his Weimar notebook (1912):
Wednesday, July 3. Goethehaus. Photographs were to be taken in the garden. She was nowhere in sight so I was sent to fetch her. She is always all atremble with movement, but stirs only if you speak to her. They snapped the photographs. The two of us on the bench.º
Continue reading ‘Kafka’s 29th birthday’