clap-clap-clap-clap
You’re job’s a joke, you’re broke
Democracy’s DOA
Stuck in your bunk, you’re sunk Can’t turn up the right waaaay
“He is Franz Kafka. Franz Kafka.”
Relevant Home Movies
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka in case anyone was wondering.
thank you, it seemed eerily familiar
I just finished rereading this. The ending is so depressing.
Your jobs a joke, you’re broke, and now you are a bug!
Maybe you are a feature.
Feels like you’re stuck in an exoskeletoooon.
He is Franz Kafka. Franz Kafka!
TIL there is a cover song and director’s cut of this sweet Rock Opera.
It’s SO sad what happened to him. Imagine having a colostomy because you couldn’t stop doing drugs. Or drowning.
I’d argue it didn’t happen to him, but he did it to himself. A sad way to go, for sure, but he was well aware of him doing it.
While technically true, it feels kinda blamey and thought-terminating. I prefer to view addiction as a medical condition because it puts the focus on treatment and prevention rather than who did wrong.
I do agree with that, but you can’t say there wasn’t awareness on his side.
While I follow some of your argument I cannot entirely absolve the self in matters of addiction. It is a medical condition, but I wouldn’t call alcoholics who drive under the influence and kill a person not responsible for their actions., therefore drowning in a drug induced stupor has a function of responsibility in it.
I do see where you’re coming from!
At some point, I radically rejected the concept of blame for extreme cases — all the way from drunk driving to murder. I think it’s necessary to prevent these people who are acting irrationally from hurting others, but it just feels like a waste of my emotional energy to assign blame to someone who’s behaving in a way I can’t comprehend.
For context, someone in my family was killed when I was a kid. I still feel anger at the perpetrator, but I can’t even pretend to understand what would go through their head to make them act the way they did. My conclusion was just that they’re basically an alien to me — a broken person who can’t be trusted and has to be locked up. But did they commit a sin?
After writing this, I realize it’s the same sentiment as “Larry Ellison is a lawnmower.”
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think “oh, the lawnmower hates me” – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
I can see how that makes coping easier. And follow your agreement for a bit.
The grasmower argument doesn’t gel with me, though. I can’t release human agency that easily. I mean one doesn’t have to anthropomorphize a human being, as they are -well- a human being.
But on the ethical side of this much debate is possible. It hangs on the free will/ determination side of debate, not really one end all answer.
I feel like I should read at least one book by Kafka. Any recommendations?
none if you like happiness
Metamorphosis is the go-to Kafka book. I personally find The Trial the most “kafkian” of his novels, and I love it, but Amerika has a special place in my heart as what defines his literature is trying to find a way out, like a little seedling.
I did an entire semester on him, and maybe I’m just a philistine but for my money there was very little difference between Before the Law (a short story of ~650 words) and any of his longer works. So if you’ve read that and The Metamorphosis you know basically all you need to know about his writing.
There are other interesting stories for sure (I’d recommend In the Penal Colony and The Trial as Bones also mentioned), but the themes are very much the same throughout-- which I suppose is why the work Kafkaesque exists.
Cool! I felt like I just read a weird version of Samurai Jack. I’ll have to check out more of his work.
Apparently The Trial is his masterpiece.
That one on the image. Metamorphosis is a fun short book that you show you what Kafka is about.
On the other hand, The Trial is a long, heavy book that will make you feel like you have gone crazy. Personally, I can’t stand this one. (Though, it’s because it’s very good on what it intends to do.)
The most boring story ever. A guy wakes up, notices he is a beetle for whatever reason, and is afraid his family might notice. That’s it. Why anyone would waste paper on printing this shit is incomprehendable.
Because some people can feel the guy who got turned into a Beetle. And it’s sufficiently sad and disorienting to be interesting to read.
You just don’t seem to ever feel Gregor.
To me Goethe is far less interesting, even with Dürrenmatt I question if he might be more boring.
I’m not sure I can say what the difference is between people that like and dislike Kafka, but I have a friend who also thinks Kafka to be boring and another who like me quite likes Kafka, when compared to other classics, and in some ways that are hard to pin down we just seem to think differently. So much so that the guy who doesn’t care for Kafka at times seems like a bumbling fool and at others like a sage of wisdom, he definitely isn’t either of those outright, but our knowledge, our neural pathways might just be different in such a way that even though we are friends and close in age, social and economic strata(and so on), we percive and think fundamentally different.
I saw a really neat video a while ago that talked about this book, and he interpreted the story to be about disability. You go from being the breadwinner supporting your entire family to suddenly you can’t work nor enjoy your hobbies, people don’t want to look at you and you feel yourself to be a burden upon everyone. Your loved ones take care of you through a sense of guilt and because to not would be neglectful but the level of care might never actually be as much as it should be. The author of the video (I wish I could remember the name of the channel because he had a wonderful voice, writing style and art style) also proceeded to point out that everyone will either die young or themselves experience disability, so it’s also a story about what you will become some day. One day you too will turn into a beatle, struggling to get out of bed, unable to work and relying on others to cook and clean and care for you
Edit: aha I found it! Metamorphosis: The Horror of Disability by Tale Foundry (they’re also on Nebula if you subscribe)
It always amazes me how much people hallucinate into a bland and witless story like that.
And it amazes me how utterly unwilling to think some people seem to be.
If there was anything to think in his unhinged writings. Sorry that this guy was a nutcase, but it shows in the stories he wrote, and they were simply not worth the time I had to waste on them.
Classical Literature tends to be about interpretation more than anything. If you read classical literature and don’t try to interpret the message it’s trying to tell, you’re going to feel that way
I don’t agree here. Classical literature is often less refined as current literature, simply because there is progress over the centuries. And because classical literature is “classical” and therefor important, many people who consider themselves knowledgeable read things into those texts that were never there to make them sound more relevant. Which is fundamentally wrong.
In the end, one has to accept that humanity progresses, and that things from a hundred years ago really are more primitive than things today. A hundred years ago, people did calculations on a slide rule, now they have computers. And while a slide rule was technically top of the pops back then, nobody would call them bleeding edge today. In a similar way, one has to accept that a story that old simply is a story that old, and simply does not appease the modern mind, because it lacks the technique and finesses that has been developed in storytelling over the last hundred years.
Yes, there have been authors that have been far ahead their peers, like Shakespeare in English or Goethe in German. But they are old literature now, and one still has to read them with the correct timeframe and matching expectations in mind to value their genius. Kafka, on the other hand, never was anything special, at least in none of the works I was forced to read, even if generousely put in the time matching frame and a ton of benefit of doubt. I simply don’t understand why anyone puts this nutcase on a pedestal.
The guy who’s partly responsible for feeding his family can’t do that very thing anymore and notices that he basically lost all value to them (they start treating him like shit until he dies). If you want you can say its a book about failing to fulfill gender expectations and about why a patriarchy also is bad for men. About people loving him for what he’s doing, not for who he is, and that love eroding as soon as he can’t do that anymore.
Of course you can hallucinate about everything into that story, but that still does not change the fact that it is boring like hell.
Is it just meowmorphosis but with a cockroach?
It reads way better in German, and by that I mean that the boringness of it feels more like a bleak anti-joke observational humour comedy bit.
I’ve read it in German, and it was that bad.
