I have it in me to be sublime talk show host, and interviewer. A really good intellectual, funny, campy, don't give a fuck, cuts to the chase, doesn't mince words, cuts through the bullshit in a George Carlin way Joyce Behar type talk show host.
I hadn't of thought of Franz Kafka in years, (Kafka esquese is now an entry word in the dictionary. So anyway, somehow I thought of Barbara Kruger used a quote twice in the new coffee table book about her, that quote is seen twice, one of the time an artwork on the side of a bus. so the quote "The point of life is that it stops," is in that genre of being a selection of words that cuts through the bullshit, is precise, exact,True with a capital T. The phrase made an impact, an impression on me as being showing the ability to sum of with a few words a profuned multi-layered Truth. How you say?
So this is why I began to think of Kafka, googled him, bought The Trial two days ago
Just getting into a pop-culture, slightly deeper than surface knowledge/ web search education about Kafka. ( It is proving hard to read his book The Trial. Not quite as ploddingly through as Pride and Prejudice but I have this mental laziness with all classic literature)
Tues. night I first googled him I read a story of some missing correspondence letters written by Kafka and left after his death at age 40, into in the hands of his last lover. I got the impression the location of the letters was uncertain.
About ten minutes after reading that website, I went back to the search page and noticed a NYT story released 5 hours ago that very afternoon. Guess what the topic of that story was?
The missing correspondence was in safety deposit boxes about to be released to the public after legal battles. Now what are the chances of that? But my life is filled with things like that when I get into one of my "historical" characters, cult figure tangents.
OK, simple, strange, odd things amuse and fascinate me.....
Story below.
Unseen Franz Kafka Writings Inch a Bit Closer to the Light
By PATRICIA COHEN; Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: July 22, 2010
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A list of manuscripts, letters and journals written by Franz Kafka, below, that languished in safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich for decades will soon be released, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. The documents have been the subject of a legal battle between the National Library in Israel and Eva Hoffe, who inherited the documents. Ms. Hoffe’s mother, Esther, was the secretary to Max Brod, a close friend of Kafka who served as executor of his estate after he died in 1924. Although Kafka requested that all his personal papers be burned, Brod, who immigrated to Israel in 1939, never complied. The District Family Court judge in Tel Aviv who heard the case ordered attorneys to prepare a detailed list of the contents of four boxes that had been stored in a Zurich bank and opened on Monday. Haaretz reported that a handwritten short story by Kafka, never before seen, is among the papers. Several more safe-deposit boxes with Kafka’s documents are also expected to be opened by the Tel Aviv court. The library contends that the Kafka papers are “cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people,” David Bloomberg, chairman of the National Library, said.
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