Thank You Aldus Manutius

I finished reading Kafka's The Trial two days ago. I thought that this was the most important paragraph in the entire book...

"Are you mad at me?" K. asked the priest. "Perhaps you don't know the sort of court you serve." He received no reply. "Of course that’s just my own personal experience" said K. Then the priest screamed down at K. "Cant' you see two steps in front of you?"

I believe that "Perhaps you do not know the court you serve" would have fallen from his mouth with greater gravity than "don't." I'm not Kafka.

If Kafka had a friend who swore to destroy all of his work after he died (which his friend did not do consequently giving birth to The Trial) couldn't he have had a friend that he could trust to tell everyone that Kafka had requested all of his work to be destroyed but secretly told his friend to not destroy it and publish it under the auspices of saved work?

I think that it is important for me to share with you my new compulsion to call everything Kafkaesque. I mean everything. I feel that it is my right. It rained again today in Ithaca. There's always small talk in the morning while you tailor your coffee at the local fairly traded coffe shop, but where you would usually say, "howabout this rain" I blurt, "this rain sure is Kafkaesque." I think it works best in small talk. Perhaps to be yelled out of the window at a bad driver, or a good one. It doesn't much matter.

I bought a copy of My Life by former President Bill Clinton. I don't have any particular inclination to Bill Clinton but I felt it would be worth reading. I was disappointed to read the first sentence. Doesn't bill Clinton know enough to not start a book called "My Life" with a sentence about the day he was born? I almost returned it. Maybe it's a protocol thing.

I planned on segwaying the name of the main character in The Trial whose name is "K." with the other book that I bought that came highly, highly recommended by Adam Robinson.
I was disappointed with the cover. I probably would not have picked it up were it not for Adam's recommendation.

Coincidentally, one of the main reasons I bought The Brothers Karamazov was because of the cover (and because I had been reading Nabakov and it just felt right).

I thought that the similarity of the main character in the Kafka book being named K. and then my purchase of The Brothers K and then the mention of the The Brothers Karamazov would tie this post into a neat, well scripted little post. But now that I've read it, it seems more Kafkaesque than anything else.

Neruda & Galeano Write...

(Neruda)
"Anyone who does not read Corta'zar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder, noticeably paler, and probably, little by little, he would lose his hair."

(Galeano)
"While writing words that loved people, Julio Corta'zar was making his own journey, a journey backward through the tunnel of time. He was traveling from the end to the beginning from discouragement to enthusiasm, from indifference to passion, from solitariness to solidarity. At almost seventy, he was a child of all ages at once.

A bird who flew toward the egg, Corta'zar went forward by going back, year after year day after day, toward the embrace of lovers who make the love that makes them. And now he dies, now he enters the earth, like a man who, entering a woman, returns to the place he comes from."