

What kind of funny is Kafka? - samclemens
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n23/rivka-galchen/what-kind-of-funny-is-he

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Osmium
David Foster Wallace also has a good essay on this in _Consider the Lobster_.
I think this is the same one:

[http://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-0...](http://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf)

~~~
RobertKerans
That Foster Wallace essay is great: when he was good, he was really very good,
and that's one of his better pieces.

Milan Kundera's Testaments Betrayed is pretty excellent as well; the last
chapter (and title) cover Brod not burning Kafka's papers, and then
manufacturing tortured genius Kafka instead of sticking with the fairly
ridiculous reality (the one that actually matches how his characters behave,
as this posted essay describes)

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drcomputer
There are layers to being a tortured genius. A person who is observer,
participant, and transcriber of a ridiculous reality is one who glimpses
through the lens of his own device.

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TallGuyShort
Did anyone else make it all the way to the word 'Franz' thinking this was
going to talk about the distributed commit log service?

~~~
samclemens
"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered
that in his bed he had been changed into a high-throughput distributed
messaging system."

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kansface
I'd really like to read this story, although I'd envision the ending closer to
Animal Farm than The Metamorphosis. After all, I don't think a distributed,
persistent messaging service is quite as shameful/unclean and useless as a
cockroach/vermin thing.

~~~
marbu
Any kind of complicated system can contain quite nasty bugs and being
distributed one doesn't really help in this regard.

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oldspiceman
The kind of funny where you deplore your best friend to burn all your writings
after you die but then he publishes them anyway. "Dearest Max, my last
request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts,
letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread"
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka#Max_Brod](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka#Max_Brod)

~~~
pimlottc
You mean Kafka implored Brod, and /then/ he deplored him, posthumously...

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jessaustin
That seems impossible?

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gioele
> Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to
> friends.

Does anybody know the source of this statement? I have read it for years and I
always wondered where it comes from. Some interview with a friend of him? A
friend's diary? Chronicles of the time?

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jeffsco
I find Rivka Galchen's essays enthralling. One intriguing thing she wrote a
while back is that the game Minecraft has a Joycean quality. I don't know what
she means by this, but I'm pretty sure she's correct.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/books/review/who-are-
james...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/books/review/who-are-james-joyces-
modern-heirs.html)

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pdkl95
Funny? Sure, when it is "the ONION"-style satire!

[http://www.theonion.com/video/pragues-franz-kafka-
internatio...](http://www.theonion.com/video/pragues-franz-kafka-
international-named-worlds-mos,14321/)

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dschiptsov
He mastered his style of "special effects" made out of words - grotesque
metamorphoses of familiar day-to-day situations.

Like it is with modern 3D special effects, out minds "get aroused" watching
them, and we, persons, like them due to some hormonal feedback loops.

Why not keep it that simple?)

