Better Than Friday - 108
Good evening everyone, hope you're having a fine Friday evening.
It's getting colder in the mornings here, a refreshing change from 115 degrees this summer.
Coming soon is a patron-only review of Yukio Mishima's 'Death in Midsummer: And Other Stories'.
After that...
1. Next Up - The Trial by Kafka
First time reading this, I'm very late to the game.
Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.
- Goodreads
The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices—these are typical behaviors in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes.
- From the article
I was just listening to lectures about Hawthorne's 'The Scarlett Letter'.
Maybe will do a review concerning these themes.
Haunting me these days.
This was shown as an example of a kind of 'found-footage' music video in a film class I was taking, and it's stuck with me throughout all these years.
Phenomenal 60's French Pop that was used in the film Death Proof, which I just saw for the first time. Pretty solid.
I realized it was the same artist, Fabienne DelSol, who does the phenomenal "I'm Gonna Haunt You".
A great documentary on New York No-Wave bands and their influence.
Opened so many doors for me as a 15-year-old kid.
Perhaps one of the greatest No Wave bands of all time, maybe the No Wave band, is absent, and that would be MARS - Amazing.
Like The Velvet Underground but terrifying.
Comments (8)
Clifford, most of the time when I reread a book it’s because I like it so much. I’ve read Don Quixote, The Brothers Karamazov, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom Absalom and a few others multiple times. But one that didn’t grab me at first but really came alive the second time was Heart of Darkness. Also I didn’t enjoy The Odyssey in junior high school but love to read it now. I recently finished One Hundred Years of Solitude and I honestly don’t understand why it is so loved. It didn’t do much for me and I expected to really be moved by it. But it left me cold and empty. Maybe you can enlighten me on that one?
Maybe - it's certainly been praised, though I haven't read it. I've tried a few by Marquez and wasn't that into him, haha I'll give it a shot at some point though. And I really need to do The Odyssey again...Thank you for the reminder.
if you are on facebook in any fashion you could join the No Wave page: robin crutchfield, marc cunningham, weasel walter, gary panter and even thurston moore, lotsa other peoples chime in there on occasion. good people, smart group, quality posts. kinda like this place but under zuckervision
LOVE Devo!!!
I read (by audio) The Trial a few years ago. It didn’t click with me. Part of that may have been due to using an audiobook. I’ll be interested in what you decide about it. I’ve certainly read other books that I didn’t like that on reread I ended up loving.
Thanks Jeff, that’s always a really good point to try and remember. So far it’s good, disturbing in its kind-of-real-but-something’s-deeply-off vibe, we’ll see how it finishes. I’d be interested to know which books you ended up loving upon reread, were there any that really surprised you?
Synchronicity! A German friend posted the Atlantic article about The New Puritans early this morning (surprisingly, because his English is very limited). There certainly is a new Puritanism afoot—in academia, media, and the business world. Glad to no longer be dependent on any of them, because I wouldn't survive! In the Atlantic article, there was a link to a great article on the same subject by John McWhorter, "Academics Are Really, Really Worried about Their Freedom," that was well worth reading too.
Kafka is my favorite author. His critiques of absurd bureaucratic systems and the feeling of endless frustration he conjures has stuck with me since first picking it up senior year of high school. Just re-read the trial so quite timely youre also giving it a shot