Found 14 posts tagged ‘kafka’ |
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Kafka's The Metamorphosis didn't come out until 1915, but here's Gregor Samsa in the University of Mississippi's 1897 yearbook.
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Jonathan notes: "I can't help feeling that 'retroactively Kafkaesque' applies both to the appearance of the writer depicted in the illustration, and to his human-insect colleague. I see from Wikipedia that the date of the illustration, 1908, happens to be when Kafka's first stories were published; but it doesn't seem like he was well-known yet, and 'The Metamorphosis' was yet to come."
From Lustige Blätter, 1908.
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Restoring the Lost Sense –
June 22, 2017 |
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| [Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost
sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of
Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then
flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images
we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.] |
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Here's a precursor to Kafka attaining immortality -- it's a Kafka in English Illustrated, 1890.
"Why did Kafka not ask to have his physical body—like his body of work—burned? Perhaps he realized that the annihilation of his corpse would not save him from immortality" (J. Zilcosky, Kafka's Travels, 2003).
See our book of imaginary Kafka parables, Franzlations.
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I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought –
March 24, 2016 |
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This is really something: the Hamilton Public Library has categorized as non-fiction our book of imaginary Kafka parables, Franzlations. As library patron Selway noted, " What higher commendation for a book of parables could there be?" This qualifies as a Retroactive Lifetime Goal (phrase used courtesy of literary humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt). Here's a page from Franzlations, which symbolically shows that chickens' eggs are oblong in accordance with the earth's elliptical orbit around the sun. Chickens are famously linked to the sun, as the rooster announces each dawn.
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I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought –
December 18, 2015 |
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"There are more stories than could be read in a single lifetime. And even if you, dear reader, began reading, by the time you read even a fraction of them, the meanings of the previous stories would have changed. . . . Now all we need to create is more time, more memory, and a few more infinite readers like you."
"Everyone carries a TRAIN about inside of him. Sitting across the table from someone, when all is quiet, sometimes you can hear the whistle blow."
"We were SNAKES. Around us the jungle sighed. A woman offered us fruit. We ate and knew that we were not naked, nor human. She and her companion left. We remained."
"If you were walking across a barren plain and had an honest intention of walking on, then it would be a desperate matter, but you are flying, gliding and diving, SOARING and swooping, high above the plain, which, seen from above, is a tiny blot on a vast and various landscape."
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Go Out in a Blaze of Glory –
March 17, 2013 |
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Thanks, poet rob mclennan, for saying that our Franzlations "read like an illustrated translation or even continuation of Kafka’s work. ... The three authors work absurd movement, incredible wisdom and clarity, reading nearly as an extended essay-as-response on the work of Franz Kafka." |
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"'THIS is the BEETLE, with her thread and needle' suggests a kind of domesticated Gregor Samsa, but it well precedes Kafka." Thanks to Encyclopedia Virgina for this precursor by Richard Wynn Keene (a.k.a. Dykwynkyn) for a Cock Robin pantomime character, c. 1860. |
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I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought –
April 12, 2011 |
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"I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth out of everything I think." — Franz Kafka, from his diary, 1918 (quoted in Metaphor and Memory by Cynthia Ozick) Speaking of Kafka, have we told you that New Star Books is publishing a book we illustrated entitled Kafka Franzlations: A Guide to the Imaginary Parables? |
Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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