A little fable by Kafka, and Eric Hoffer on what really matters

Kafka's "A little fable" at The Modern Word


The work of Franz Kafka seems a good source for graphic novelization, and Vincent Stall's 2004 illustration of Kafka's "A little fable" is currently featured at The Modern Word. By way of introduction The Modern Word's editorial director Allen B. Ruch writes:

“A Little Fable” (“Kleine Fabel,” in the original German) is a paragraph-long short story masterpiece by Kafka. I ran across a wonderful mini-comic adaptation of it by the American comic book artist Vincent Stall around 2004. I contacted Vincent, who graciously allowed us to re-publish the comic online here at The Modern Word. I was planning to post it when Vincent’s graphic novel, Brass Tack, was to be published, but when Brass Tack got delayed this somehow fell through the cracks, as well.

"I have written a number of good sentences"

Good writers write, and great writers think of nothing else but writing. That's the writer's craft, the equivalent of the pianist's "practice, practice, practice." Learning how to string words together in entertaining and thoughtful order is a matter of diligence and, if a writer is lucky, some amount of talent. The internet has given a springboard to much of this talent, much of it woefully unpaid, but good writers usually achieve some recognition beyond the computer keyboard, and the great writers -- well, the truly great will always care more about expression than recognition. Still, as Dorothy Parker once remarked, the two most beautiful words in the English language are "check enclosed."

Patrick Karp writes often, and writes well, in his blog Anecdotal Evidence about the intersections of life and art, the demands of daily living and the needs of the artist. Here is an excerpt from a recent post in which Karp describes one writer's utterly simple yardstick of measure.

In every realm of human endeavor I’m increasingly attracted to the informal, amateur, self-driven, wayward, unregulated and independent, particularly in writing.

In 1977, six years before his death at age eighty, Eric Hoffer writes in his notebook: “Disraeli felt that `nothing could compensate his obscure youth, not even a glorious old age.’ Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences--nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.”

I most admire Hoffer’s freedom and the way he revels in it and uses it so productively.

Also on Anecdotal Evidence, Karp posts about a charming story told by Jacques Barzun of youngsters hop-scotching their way across a playground-graphic computer keyboard, giggling and tapping out a four-letter word. "Did they spell it right?" the teacher asks.

UbuWeb featuring Gysin sound poetry (and other delights)

Gysin with William S Burroughs and the Dreammachine, 1966

Brion Gysin -- artist, writer, multimedian -- once commented on his many projects that the art world thought of him as a writer, and the writers thought of him as an artist. "I should have been one or the other," he said in one interview, when he had taken on another mantle -- "the world's oldest living rock star," onstage in his eighties. The inventor of both the poetic cut-up technique and the Dreammachine (which was, briefly, considered for production by Phillips Electrontics back in the heady days of the 1960s) seems be getting some well-deserved attention at The New Museum and accompanying features at Kenneth Goldsmith's UbuWeb media resource.

Brion Gysin - An Audio Retrospective (1958-81) Currently being honored by a exhibition at The New Museum in New York, UbuWeb is pleased to present the full-spectrum of Brion Gysin's sound poetry and audio works [MP3]. Included here are his seminal permutation poems from the early 60s such as I've Come To Free The Words and I Am That I Am as well as lectures on various subjects such as Thoughts On Modern Art. The historic Poem of Poems (1958), recorded in 1958 at the Beat Hotel in Paris and considered one of Gysin's important experiments in cut-up and recording technique, is available for download, as is his more ambient works such as The Pool K III (late 50s, early 60s) and Bruits du Beaubourg (1977). Finally, a posthumous 1993 recording -- Self-Portrait Jumping -- of Gysin's songs, poems and stories, are set to music by Ramuntcho Matta and performed by Brion Gysin and Ramuntcho Matta with Don Cherry, Elli Medieros, Steve Lacy, Lizzy Mercier Descloux. You can read interviews with Gysin here and here, as well as read William S. Burroughs' The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin. View a demonstration of Gysin Permutation Software here.

Cataloguing Ubu

In its pages, the site UbuWeb "posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos."

Margaret Smith's valiant efforts to archive the sprawling UbuWeb are a continuing project. Smith undertakes the job as site archivist for her Masters in Library Science at Syracuse University; more can be read about her ongoing work, with an excerpt from the project overview below.

"UbuWeb is a collaboratively curated website which includes thousands of historic and contemporary avant-garde texts, sound recordings, moving images and related curatorial and analytic commentary. Founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, it has grown to be a vast educational resource, providing online access to an obscure yet vital aspect of the cultural record that would be, in many cases, otherwise lost.
The initial goals of this project were to propose improvements to UbuWeb’s navigation and content access, and to introduce a plan for archiving and preservation."

Sept 2-14: The quickest eleven days in British history

How time flies

On this date, the British (who drag their feet for nearly two centuries) now make one sweeping correction of the calendar by royal decree. As Tom Christiansen dryly notes in the daybook of his blog about the date September 2, 1752: "Today is the last day of the Julian calendar in Great Britain and the British colonies. The Gregorian calendar will go into effect tomorrow, which will be September 14 (eleven days will disappear). Most other countries made the adjustment 170 years ago, in 1582." The following day September 3, "Feeling that eleven days have been taken from their lives, people riot in England." Judging from his sour puss above, King George III was not amused.

The OED announces it will go online-only

The sad news is that the Oxford English Dictionary is about to become an on-line only resource (two million hits per month from subscribers) after its one-hundred year existence in print as the ultimate go-to volume for word hoarders, poets, novelists, and the merely dyslexic. It will be a shame to lose the occasional page-browsing amid the arcane and forgotten phrases. From Language hat via Schott's Vocab comes this great OED phrase I haven't heard before. Having lived in the South for 40 years I'm surprised this hasn't ever come up in any conversation. Yet. But I'm waiting to use it!
pig's whisper, n. colloq.
Brit. /pɩgz wɩspə/, U.S. /pɩgz (h)wɩspər/ Forms: 17- pig's whisper, 18 pigs-whisper. [< the genitive of PIG n. + WHISPER n.] 1. A very short space of time, an instant.
1780 J. O'KEEFFE Tony Lumpkin in Town I. 4 I'll be with them in a pig's whisper. 1837 DICKENS Pickwick Papers xxxi. 333 You'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig's whisper.

[...] 1918 P. B. KYNE Valley of Giants xxv. 218 'Thanks so much for the invitation', Ogilvy murmured gratefully. 'I'll be down in a pig's whisper'. 1991 R. COOVER Pinocchio in Venice xxi. 229 'Back in a crack, direttore!' 'In a pig's whisper, direttore!'

2. A whisper; a confidential tone of voice.
1846 Swell's Night Guide 110/1 Pig's Whisper.., a word 'twixt you and me. 1866 M. BANIM Peter of Castle 5 The eulogist may.. in what they call a pig's whisper (that is, in a confidential tone).. [relate] a few anecdotes of his prowess. 1922 J. JOYCE Ulysses II. 484 Virag (Prompts into his ear in a pig's whisper). 2001 Hindu (Nexis) 21 Jan., I heard Ata informing Mummy, in a pig's whisper, that plagiarism, too, was actionable.

September 1: Word of Mouth meets in Athens, and Decatur (GA) Book Festival, Sept 3-5

Athens GA: Word of Mouth monthly reading

Athens (GA) spoken-word group, Word of Mouth, meets tonight upstairs at The Globe (corner of Lumpkin and Clayton Streets). It's a good reason to get out on what is traditionally a slow night for bars, even in a college town. Think of your alternatives: tonight you could be playing bingo or carrying a covered dish. Take the opportunity to come out and hear some local word-slingers. Tonight's featured poet is Andrew Mandelbaum and there's bound to be lots more mouthing off. Did I mention The Globe is a bar? No? Well, there is that, too, if you need any convincing. As NRBQ would sing, "C'mon if your comin'."

Here's a poem by Aralee Strange posted on the Word of Mouth site, "All boils."

The long-awaited gobble up
swift & successful
needs to know less of what
anything else and be cool
take over the world
quarry for icon
decode peace cry foul and
get fat
The worst of it
naked truth (an uphill battle)
shuffles thwart all over the world

Edgy mourns the loss
name-dropping human imperfections
goddamn sick of the way we do zeitgeist

Digital era oozes with satisfied
wanted to spend answers to bad habits
straight dope is cool
boring guests will be zapped

Original succumbed cha-cha-cha
local focus hits the skids
priority handling duo flog erratum at it again
priority handling oh-so richly deserved
priority handling those who want hands-on
probably cheaply

It can happen to you
just one year in the life of a terrible fix
what and how is about get busy
take on bumpy road hard to do basic
no biting
whatever you shoot
you need

This weekend: Jonathan Franzen at the AJC Decatur Book Festival

Timing, you know, is the soul of art. Or the wit of time is in its brevity. Whatever you can say about coincidence, Jonathan Franzen's recent appearance on the cover of Time -- the magazine's first cover to feature a living author since just before the death of print was announced -- just seems like excellent press for Franzen's appearance this weekend at the AJC Decatur (GA) Book Festival.

It probably helps that his new fiction, Freedom, is getting some ecstatic press. It certainly will be a boost to the Festival, just five years old this year and accustomed to names like humorist and Decatur native Roy Blount. To be fair, the DBF has been increasing in stature yearly, thanks to a dedicated staff that works tirelessly year-round to make the festival a destination for book-lovers of all kinds.

This year's festival will showcase three-hundred authors, more than enough to keep readers hopping between venues. Franzen is scheduled to appear Friday at 8 pm for the big show, and it guarantees an encouraging first-night draw for DBF organizers who can hope the weekend weather won't be dampened by Hurricane Earl or any of his siblings in the Atlantic. For more info on the Franzen appearance and other festival activities visit the Decatur Book Festival site.

"Poets on the Peaks," John Suiter (2003)

(BellemeadeBooks is on vacation during August. Here is a review originally posted September, 2008)


As the anniversaries of the Beat movement roll on (Kerouac's On the Road turned 50 in 2007) and its participants recede into American history -- if not its folklore -- there is something comforting in the fact that poet and lifelong Zen student Gary Snyder is still here, still with us, still quietly reminding the reader that Beat ideas of individual freedom and personal experience continue to have resonance in our daily lives as well as in art.

Although he has been linked with the Beats since the mid-50s, Gary Snyder is less the shaman or the showman than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and his writing shuns the wild word-is-a-virus pyrotechnics of William Burroughs. He shared the Beats' post-war restlessness: he studied in Japan, and learned Japanese and Chinese and traveled to India; his interest in Buddhism was coincidentally shared with Ginsberg and Kerouac when they came to San Francisco in the mid-50s, meeting up with poets Kenneth Rexroth and Philip Whalen. That became Beat poetry's East-meets-West moment, New York-to-San Francisco's transcontinental linkage. He was present at the Six Gallery when Ginsberg read "Howl" in October 1955, the first Beat cannon shot across the bow of 50s conformity.


Yet Snyder's individual impact on twentieth-century poetry and ecology -- the actual sinew, flesh and bone of man's place on the planet -- has been considerable, and has continued so for more than 50 years. Reviewing The Gary Snyder Reader in 2000, William Pitt Root puts Snyder's contribution pretty nicely: "Except for Gary Snyder, post mid-twentieth century American poetry might never have gotten further out-of-doors than the nearest garbage dump, golf course, or catfish farm." And Snyder's essays on nature (Earth House Hold, The Practice of the Wild) prove that these ideas are not the stuff of airy, lost-Edenic poetry. To the careful reader, his essays reveal exactly what America is losing more rapidly with every passing season.

Writer and photographer John Suiter trekked to the mountain lookouts where Snyder and others spent several summers in the mid-50s and captured images of the western mountains that inspired them. Poets On the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (2002) is a literary and photographic recreation of the Beats' original sojourn in the wilderness. Snyder began his long poem, Myths and Texts; Kerouac found inspiration for The Dharma Bums (Snyder was the model for the book's main character, Japhy Ryder) and Desolation Angels; Whalen's Sourdough Mountain Lookout was published in 1957. Suiter pulls together the books, notebooks, letters and diaries of poets and writers creating a wilderness ethic in mid-century America, away from the cities and highways that were beginning to mark the country, and into one of the last great wilds on the continent.



When The Dharma Bums was published the year after On the Road, Suiter writes, Jack was tremendously excited and wrote to Snyder that 1958 would be "the Year of the Dharma." Snyder, in his fashion, was planning another trip to the wild, but wanting to include Jack in his plans. Returning from sea aboard the oil tanker Sappa Creek, Snyder wrote:

"Maybe this is the Year of the Dharma. Now Arabian Sea and heading in for last load and trip home. Tiger, if you like, join me in the mountains this summer. I mean to wander the Sierras and Cascades both. Also, bhikku cabin around SF area -- we'll look into it."

To Whalen, Kerouac wrote that Gary's arrival would spark big changes:

"With Dharma Bums I will crash open the whole scene to sudden buddhism boom and look what will happen closely soon ... everybody going the way of the dharma ... then with the arrival of Gary, smash! Watch, you'll see. It will be a funny year of enlightenment in America."

It was telling of them both that Kerouac's comments envisioned a grand change in American values, while Snyder was planning a return to isolation and the high mountains. For Snyder, there was the real work to be done of living, creating and conserving. Kerouac's wild enthusiasm was not bound to last; within ten years he was disillusioned and drunk, full of despair -- even if his roman candle of a book inspired a generation, he was not part of the social revolution it created, and he despised the unintended counterculture that came up around On the Road.

What a contrast to the ecological awareness Snyder's work has encouraged. His poetry and essays have been enjoying a rediscovery, with a lengthy appreciation in the October 20 issue of the New Yorker ("Zen Master") being the most recent. Snyder's long career as a poet, his translations of the Cold Mountain poems by Han Shan and others from the Japanese, and his ecological essays have made him, in a way, the remaining Beat presence. It's ironic that his quiet and unassuming poetry (and his life away from the literary spotlight) would continue to give meaning to Kerouac's "rucksack revolution" and its subsequent 60s fireworks.

Now 78, after a lifetime of writing and contemplating what he once called "the real work", Snyder is still at it -- though his tools have changed from those he used at his Sourdough Mountain lookout in 1953. Here's an excerpt from "Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer":

... Because its keys click like hail on a rock & it winks when it goes out,
& puts word-heaps in hoards for me,
dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds,
identical seedpods strong on a vine,
or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out
and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at "delete"
so it teaches of impermanence and pain ...

Suiter's book is a valuable (and very beautiful) addition to Beat literature, putting into pictures as well as words what made this brief period of 1952-1956 so important to the scene that followed. He is currently at work on the first full biography of Snyder, to be published in 2010.