'kafkaesque'

is one of my least favorite adjectives. I think it's almost always used wrong, and even when the situation might somehow be actually Kafkaesque (your train is stopped on the tracks for 17 hours with no explanation, and all your fellow passengers inexplicably start howling all at once) the adjective is woefully chintzy and inadequate.


That being said.

I've spent the past few days, 2-4 hours a day, verifying the titles and series numbers of identically bound volumes of Israeli statistics from the 1970s...and 80s... and 90s. A dull maroon. Full of population densities, tourist hotel statistics, and car accidents.

Somewhere Josef K.'s tormentors are present. If they had faces, it's possible they might be smiling.

To quote Alfred Austin, who is a poet I just discovered by Googling Sisyphus:

"`Why was I chosen for this hateful task,
Fantastically futile, which the Gods
Lay on their victim, for their own disport?
Rather a thousand times upon the wheel
Would I, Ixion-like, be racked, or lift
The tantalising gourd-cup to my lips."

The poem is called 'Sisyphus'... OK, fevered love for the nineteenth century aside, I'm VERY GLAD some stylistic mores have changed. Saw Robert Hass give a magnificent reading yesterday, his face all carved up with skin cancer and a giant bandage over his nose like a half-invisible man; perhaps half-invisible is what the face of a colloquial poet is supposed to be. I fell in love with his poem about Grushenka, of The Brothers Karamazov, "I am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name is Dmitri." You can hear him read it here: http://selectedpoems.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/robert-hass-i-am-your-waiter-tonight-and-my-name-is-dimitri/

Also, since we mentioned the nineteenth century, I will quote some excellent and snappy lines from Hass's poem on the subject, "The Nineteenth Century as a Song":

"
Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.
He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,
over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century

while Marx in the library gloom
studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit
and that gentle man Bakunin,
home after fingerfucking the countess,
applies his numb hands
to the making of bombs."


I love me a poet that can address finger fucking with frankness.

I feel kind of shitty that I seem to be able to address nothing but literature in this blog as of yet; we'll see how things go. I am still battling Vlad Nabokov into letting me write something of a polemic against him.



Also---I've received a few complaints about the name of this blog. Notable critiques include that it is "half fart joke, half too precious," &c. I am now announcing a name this blog contest. Something that puts the "fun" in "profundity," or a soft lob at my own narcissism, or whatever it is. I am open to suggestion. (A life goal of mine is to always remain open to suggestion.)

-Talia