Kafka

Prompted by a recent conversation about Kafka with a friend (the gist: his work is fun to think about but often tedious to read), this weekend I reread Walter Benjamin’s essay “Franz Kafka: On The Tenth Anniversary of His Death.” Like most Benjamin’s work, the essay, while rhetorically incoherent, brims with insight. The opening paragraph is especially wonderful:

It is related that Potemkin suffered from states of depression which recurred more or less regularly. At such times no one was allowed to go near him, and access to his room was strictly forbidden. This malady was never mentioned at court, and in particular it was known that any allusion to it incurred the disfavor of Empress Catherine. One of the Chancellor’s depressions lasted for an extraordinary length of time and brought about serious difficulties; in the offices documents piled up that required Potemkin’s signature, and the Empress pressed for their completion. The high officials were at their wits’ end. One day an unimportant little clerk named Shuvalkin happened to enter the anteroom of the Chancellor’s palace and found the councilors of state assembled there, moaning and groaning as usual. “What is the matter, Your Excellencies?” asked the obliging Shuvalkin. The explained things to him and regretted that they could not use his services. “If that’s all it is,” said Shuvalkin, “I beg you to let me have those papers.” Having nothing to lose, the councilors of state let themselves be persuaded to do so, and with the sheaf of documents under his arm, Shuvalkin set out, through galleries and corridors, for Potemkin’s bedroom. Without stopping or bothering to knock, he turned the door-handle; the room was not locked. In semidarkness Potemkin was sitting on his bed in a threadbare nightshirt, biting his nails. Shuvalkin stepped up to the writing desk, dipped a pen in ink, and without saying a word pressed it into Potemkin’s hand while putting one of the documents on his knees. Potemkin gave the intruder a vacant stare; then, as though in his sleep, he started to sign—first one paper, then a second, finally all of them. When the last signature had been affixed, Shuvalkin took the papers under his arm and left the room without further ado, just as he had entered it. Waving the papers triumphantly, he stepped into the anteroom. The councilors of state rushed toward him and tore the documents out of his hands. Breathlessly they bent over them. No one spoke a word; the whole group seemed paralyzed. Again Shuvalkin came closer and solicitously asked why the gentlemen seemed so upset. At that point he noticed the signatures. One documents after another was signed Shuvalkin. . . Shuvalkin. . . Shuvalkin. . .

Thoughts On Writing

I’ve been reading Updike’s collected criticism, Hugging The Shore. It’s exactly what you’d expect from Updike—elegance, suavity, compassion. Here’s a selection from a review of Hemingway’s letters which I found surprisingly insightful.   (The Hemingway, I mean: Updike never surprises you with insight.)

…upon receiving the volume of his collected short stoires in 1938, he wrote Maxewll Perkins, “When I got the book and saw all those stoires I knew I was all right as a sort of lasting business if I kicked off tomorrow.”

For this rough, rude, appetitive, and even murderous man had bent his thoughts more intently toward literary immortality and perfection of prose than any American fiction writer since Henry James. His writing competed with his life—at first, with the need to make a dollar and the wish to have a good time; later, with celebrity, ill health, and the wish to have a good time.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and ahammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shiny and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Thus he introduced the book of stories that certified him, he flet, as “a sort of lasting business.” In all the conditions of convalescence and hangover, in hotel rooms and at his homes in Paris and Key West, Cuba and Sun Valley, he wrote, rising early and lovingly noting the number of words acheivered each morning—a habit left over from his days of counting words for foreign dispatch....   

 

The Writing Life

After a week of brutal slogging, I resolve a tricky problem with the plot of my TV spec. The solution is a complicated five-page scene in which I manage (I think) to both be funny and clear up a number of story inconsistencies. For an hour afterwards I allow myself to reflect, contentedly, upon my TV-writing powers.

This morning, I realize that my five, laboriously rendered pages can be replaced by a half-paragraph speech. I do nothing. The pages I already have are fine, I tell myself. Not just fine: outstanding! Such brilliance, surely, should be preserved?

Today I steel myself and make the cuts. The script is already too long and the pages in question introduce a plot-line that distracts from the main story. It's true, the jokes were good. But if I came up with good jokes once, I can probably come up with them again. At least, that's the hope.

All this work for something I don't even like. Bleah.

Caffeine

As anyone who has been made to listen to the stories of my on-again, off-again love affair with caffeine will know, I regard the drug with a wary combination of fear and admiration.

Right now I am back "on."

Caffeine is to the human mind as the moon's gravity is to the tide. We drink caffeine in the hope that by increasing the force of the moon's gravitation, we will increase the power and the frequency with which we are blessed with waves (human thoughts). However, if the power and force of the moon's gravity grows too strong, then the waves break up--are torn apart, dissolve before they ever reach land. This is what it feels like to have too much caffeine. You have a million thoughts, each of last two seconds. You can't follow through on anything. The mind becomes a vortex, consuming without producing.

At the moment, luckily, I seem to have some waves coming to shore. On which I place surfers (words?) in the hope that their peripatetic and awkward stabs at beauty may, occasionally, succeed.