Entries tagged with kafka

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Interpretation and Kafka

Tonight I discovered, thanks to Languagehat, Franz Kafka's wee fiction "Odradek." I also discovered the amazingly over-labored interpretations that exist -- many times more words than the story itself.

The story is a tiny vignette, a meditation on an ungainly object called "Odradek," which looks like an elaborated but delapidated spool, and is apparently capable of speech but has no discernible purpose or desires of its own. Apparently "Odradek" bothers Kafka scholars a lot: they are sure it must mean something very deep, and they are willing to go to any ends to discover and defend its meaning. I don't think so. The word odradek itself is a word made up for the story, with a West Slavic feel but no real meaning. I think the story is the same kind of thing. It is a writing exercise: the reason it was ever published was that Kafka came to like it andf it helped to fill out a collection.

One a related front, I'm studying Czech again. I'm using Byki espress as a study tool, but I have no patience for the proprietary word lists which are too basic and don't advance me at all. There are quite a few relevant user-made lists, though at least half of the users who make lists seem to have missed the point, because they've made lists that are a hundred or more words long. This is not a useful study set. The lists I like the best right now are connecting phrases, and there are five or so of them, each with seven to twelve or so phrases. Things like "and besides that," or "oh, I almost forgot," or "now it occurs to me that."

I'm having to use the thing very loosely because I can't figure out how it decides that I have learned a phrase. Eventually I may use the phrasebook inside my dictionary to make some phraselists of my own. It's a wee bit strange, that phrasebook, as it seems to be aimed at Czech IT guys who are preparing to go to the US or the UK.

On another front -- a head thing front, I guess -- it is within the normal range of human behavior to spend almost an entire day in bed after every day socializing, right?

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Thanks to Del (my research, let me show you it)

I was complaining that online fashion historians were horribly vague about class and in fact seemed to be only talking about the aristocracy most of the time, and personhead

del_c suggested searching instead for images of people in the particular jobs I am interested in, in years that are equivalent to my story time. Thanks to this strategy, I now know what those collars really look like when worn (as opposed to a Leyendecker Arrow Collar advertisement). And also, I know that Albert Einstein went to Prague and attended intellectual gatherings with . . . Franz Kafka. That is very cool. Also, I found out about Einstein's assistant, Emil Nohel, the son of a Jewish farmer, previously a high school physics teacher, who lived to see his whole family killed by the Nazis, and himself as well.

I am experimenting with adding specific Central/Eastern European city names to the searches, but "Krakow" and "Prague" turn up a lot of Delacroix and Beveridge, which is not the end of the world but is really puzzling. Delacroix is not even remotely in the time period. But I guess it got the tag because elsewhere in the blog in question there was an article about Jaroslav Hašek (whose portrait might have been helpful except that it was only a head shot and showed nothing at all).

(irrelevant aside inspired by an illustration on a Kafka website: the german name Franz is the same as Frank and also František. My Frank doesn't like to be called František, as it sounds like a diminutive to him, and this caused a bit of friction in his Czech language class. I like the sound of the name myself, but I have no need to call him that. We never called him Frankie when he was little: we called him Franklin).

Another oddity I turned up was a mug shot for Menachim Begin when he was a mere terrorist and not a world-renowned statesman and architect of the policy of unrelenting war against Palestinians. People don't remember that that whole generation of Israeli leaders got their start blowing up tourist hotels. Aside: Einstein held out for a bicultural state, integrating Arabs and Jews, but most of his friends wouldn't even consider it.

And also I found what looks like a real gem: the Ptak Science Books blog, which has articles about almost everything, it looks like. I'm in danger of reading it all day.

Anyway, I think Yanek has to have a stiff collar and a ribbon tie. Some of these folks are wearing a modern tie and a pointy folded-down collar, but I think that those are too modern for a conservative environment such as the one Yanek lives in.

Bingo. I found the photo sleuth!

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The state of the kafkaesque nightmare

So this year Frank has to start taking the long-acronym licensing exam for US physicians, in order to be licensed in the US and countries which recognize a US license as well as being licensed in the Eurozone and countries which recognize the Eurozone license. We went through a lot of twists and turns in the spring to find out what he needed to do and what he needed to get other people to do. I spent half a month's wages on his application. He did what he had to do. He got the form to the office at Charles University with plenty of time. There he had to sign the form in person in the presence of the Czech administrator who then had to stamp it with a particular stamp which the University had designated to the test agency as their one and only official stamp for this purpose and then mail it to the test agency in time for them to process it and give Frank a US test location and test date.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Charles University told the test agency that they would use the dean's stamp to authenticate the forms when they came in. But they used the vice-dean's stamp. My first reaction was that the test agency was the villain here for not recognizing the vice-dean's stamp, but then I thought about it -- the University said the only stamp they would use would be the dean's stamp, and then the University did something else. In any case, no test for Frank this summer.

The next step is to do the form signing and stamping all over again when he gets back to Prague and to pay the test agency another hundred fifty to take the test somewhere in the Eurozone during the school year -- remember that Frank has to do his part of the form wrangling in the presence of the Charles University administration. Then he gets to buy train tickets to wherever the test is given -- I believe we noticed that the closest place was somewhere in Germany. So altogether, it's going to cost nearly another week's wages for me (his school loans do not cover this: for some reason they will only loan him approximately five thousand dollars less than he actually needs to go to school, live, and travel back and forth once a year. It has to do with him being at a foreign school. And talk about predatory lending practices! Sallie Mae keeps sending him these come-ons for variable-rate loans that he would have to start paying off immediately -- necessitating higher loans, naturally).

I am a literary trope, aren't I -- widow with a low-paid service job trying to get a kid through medical school. All I need is a ragged shawl and an excessively deferent attitude.

On the other hand, I have a working car again, I'm signed up for the early literacy class that will be taught in Spanish, I have canned tomatoes, made wild plum jam, dried plums, and the construction project is moving forward. More about that when we finalize the plans.

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One damn thing . . .

So last night was Live Music Night at folk dancing. It went well: the music was great, I got really sweaty, it felt good.'

However.

I was going to take a treat. People bring thigns to eat to Live Music Night. Usually sweets. Ellie brought "Mexican wedding cookies" (known to some of us as walnut balls, or possibly as Those (insert ethnicity) Christmas Cookies). I thought about makign sesame candy adn decided it's too messy for the occasion. Then I was going to make a pumpkin bread because I have cooked pumpkin. But I really really liked the dinosaur kale ("there's really something called dinosaur kale? Why?" Emma asked) and pea quiche thing I made the week before for my lunches. It's maybe more of a timbale or (Spanish) tortilla, or maybe like a breadless strata, I don't know: no crust, and the egg part is firm so you can eat it out of hand. So I figured I would make one out of what I had to hand. Which was cauliflower. So, cauliflower strata.

But . . . two and a half hours, and my always-slow oven had still not finished preheating and I thought I might smell gas. So I turned it off and determined to call PG&E in the morning after I got home from Dog Beach Saturday (except it was field not beach because the tide was so high there was no beach, which happens every so often, more likely around the full moon which it is about now). But as I was gathering my strength to start this task, I thought . . . I've had the stove for twenty years and it never worked right . . . I have four hundred dollars cash in my pocket from selling my telescopes to a nice guy from El Cerrito who wants to show his kids and his friend's cub scouts the wonders of the stars . . . I could get a new stove.

So, a new stove is coming Friday. It's the cheapest one at Sears that I could stand, and it was still over five hundred dollars after taxes. It's weird lookign, too. Who decided it was a good idea to put a black front and back on a stove with a white top and sides? What were they thinking? Do customers come in in droves demanding piebald cooking appliances? "Hey, we can't decide between white and black, so why don't we just split the difference?" Or what? There was no black one, it cost more for an all-white stove and I thought that since the nice fellow had insisted on black appliances, the black and white stove would look a little less weird anyway, so I'm getting a patchwork stove. Though it looks pretty damned weird.

I kind of thought that selling the telescopes was going to allow me to pay off my lawyer this month, but maybe-smelling gas kind of put that consideration first. And no, I can't do two things in one month.

one another front: Frank intends to go to the winter ball again this year. What's special about it: "We're going to the ball."

on yet another front: Neighborhood 99 is doing a literary lot design contest. Take any kind of house or community venue from any literary source and illustrate it with the Sims.

I was going to do Huckleberry Finn's raft and island, but I decided instead . . . Gregor Samsa's apartment from Metamorphosis. Without cockroach, but with narration.

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"You'll have to come back next week, Mr. K:" a little update

So apparently what happened to my Frank was this. His visa had been on hold because the foreign police misplaced a document. They finally got around to asking him to bring it in. He brought it in to the office and stood in line for 5 hours after which they arrested him because he was walking around without a valid visa. They kept him eight hours, they started deportation proceedings, but those are on hold for a week.

He went to the embassy, and they were no help. The consulate has not responded to his message. There is a person at the University who may be able to help but they're out till Monday. He's naturally having trouble sleeping, but he only missed two classes (unfortunately one was where he had to give a presentation on the gall bladder).

I wonder how often Charles University professors hear that excuse -- "Sorry I missed class, but the foreign police arrested me for no real reason?"

On another front, despite the fact that my preschool credential is nothing like I thought it was, I may have a job within a week or two in a different age group than the one I thought I was most likely to be able to work in. A lovely one where the people are wonderful.

I'll be fixing that credential, however, because it's dumb for a person with my experience, skills, and knowledge with infants to not have an infant credential (and how was I legally able to get all that experience, anyway? I've always shown everybody what I had!)