Franz Kafka

Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Ray Bradbury
3. JRR Tolkien
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Douglas Adams
6. Mark Twain

The rest in alphabetical order by last name:

• Robert Benchley
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Albert Camus
• Raymond Chandler
• Umberto Eco
• William Gibson
• Spalding Gray
• Franz Kafka
• Jack Kerouac
• Milan Kundera
• George Orwell
• Dorothy Parker
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Muriel Spark
• Bram Stoker
• Jules Verne
• Edith Wharton
• HG Wells

Honorable Mentions

• Jane Austen
• Jorge Luis Borges
• George Carlin
• Philip K Dick
• James Ellroy
• Ernest Hemingway
• Ursula K Le Guin
• James Joyce
• Stephen King
• Herman Melville
• Flannery O’Connor
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Neal Stephenson
• John Steinbeck
• Hunter S Thompson
• Virginia Woolf
• Oscar Wilde
• PG Wodehouse
• Emile Zola

In the NY Review of Books, Zadie Smith reviews The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay by Louis Begley.

How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:

It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.

A naked man among a multitude who are dressed.

A mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham.

Franz was a saint.

Or then again, using details of his life, as found in Louis Begley’s refreshingly factual The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay: over six feet tall, handsome, elegantly dressed; an unexceptional student, a strong swimmer, an aerobics enthusiast, a vegetarian; a frequent visitor to movie houses, cabarets, all-night cafes, literary soirees and brothels; the published author of seven books during his brief lifetime; engaged three times (twice to the same woman); valued by his employers, promoted at work.

More on Zadie Smith at Wikipedia.

Via moleskinerie, the diaries of Franz Kafka presented in blog format, in English or Deutsch:

Diaries in the public domain seem natural candidates for the weblog format. While the Kafka Project has already made the critical edition of Kafka’s diaries available online, this site aims to supplement that work by providing a public-domain translation in English and a space for discussion (in the event of a talkative readership).

On a related topic, I find it hilarious that the Pepys’ Diary is being blocked by the Internet filter at work. Perhaps they don’t like discussion of tennis-ball-sized stones blocking the urinary tract. By the way, if it isn’t done already, I’d like to propose March 26th be recognized as Pepys Stone Day and celebrated in some appropriate manner.

Robert Benchley

“A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.”

Samuel Butler

“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.”

Charles Doran

“A man’s soul can be judged by the way he treats his dog.”

George Bird Evans

“I think we are drawn to dogs because they are the uninhibited creatures we might be if we weren’t certain we knew better.”

Edward Hoagland

“In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn’t merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.”

John Holmes

“A dog is not almost-human, and I know of no greater insult to the canine race than to describe it as such.”

Lonzo Idolswine

“My dog is usually pleased with what I do, because she is not infected with the concept of what I ‘should’ be doing.”

Franz Kafka

“All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers is contained in the dog.”

Rudyard Kipling

“When the Man waked up he said,
‘What is Wild Dog doing here?’
And the Woman said,
‘His name is not Wild Dog any more,
but the First Friend,
because he will be our friend
for always and always and always.’”

Milan Kundera

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.”

John Steinbeck

“I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”

(Miscellanea: A collection of miscellaneous matters; matters of various kinds (Webster’s 1913). Noteworthy tidbits gleaned from all over, sans commentary.)

Thoughtfully, he sipped the hot, bitter liquid.
There’s a “Lyttle Lytton” contest! —Since 1983, the “official” Bulwer-Lytton contest has been awarding prizes for the best first sentences of the worst (thankfully nonexistent) novels imaginable… (Long story; short pier)

morbid friday
I like this idea. Get buried wherever you want. In the Culture the traditional way of being buried is for your body to be fired into your home star. I like that idea. The component atoms of your body being spread out to again form part of some other entity in the universe… (Dream Time)

A paradox
From the new issue of gobybicycle magazine, called "from hither and nither." — "In Sweden, a decision was made to change the driving from the left side of the road to the right side in order to match the rest of continental Europe. After this decision was adopted and implemented, car crashes dropped by 17 percent, which seems counter intuitive…." (Velorution)

Sour crop
…The average man, when confronted by a chap demanding that he Pretend to be a chicken, might be forgiven for laughing like an asthmatic mule, and backing nervously away. For, along with trying to swat imaginary flies, making such requests is one of the eight sure-fire ways of being marked down as a looney. And on the whole people aren’t too keen to engage with loonies…. (Dunstan’s blog)

Quicktime’s secret built-in keyboard … revealed!
If one opens a standard MIDI file in QuickTime Player, chooses "Get Movie Properties" from the Movie menu, and selects "Music Track" and "Instruments" from the popup menus… (macosxhints)

Caution!
Ron Silliman, a stalwart champion of what he calls "post-avant" writing, nevertheless has problems with what he calls in an equally colorful way "retro-avant-gardism," particularly the sort of poetry "that tends to employ new technology in order to generate post-rational texts, ranging from tossing dice to the latest in flash technology. I often feel that such writing is too in love with techné & not with the text, sort of an avant-gardism at all costs strategy… ." (The Reading Experience)

Strat-o-matic Memories
In a post about the rise of Sabermetrics, Martin Devon reminisces about the glories of Strat-o-matic Baseball…. (Off Wing Opinion)

Rewriting Kafka
I’m entirely sympathetic to the plight of small presses and to the difficulty the authors and books they publish have in getting any review notices at all. Sometimes they publish good books that couldn’t get a mainstream publisher, and although such books have difficulty getting recognized, they are at least in print. Sometimes, however, they publish books that were deservedly rejected by the larger publishers, and their lack of recognition is justified…. (The Reading Experience)