ickis: on kafka and other sleep deprived nonsense from Julene Horowitz on Vimeo.
Further clarification while equally as sleep deprived as I was in the video in regards to my Kafka-appreciation issues…
Kafka is one of those authors that, despite numerous attempts, I just don’t “get”. I’ve read his books, books about his books, and books about him–so you’d think something would stick, or spark my interest and generate some deep interest in his work within me. But it just hasn’t happened, and I don’t think it’s going to.
It’s funny that I’m writing this, because I feel like admitting to “not getting it” implies one of two things: laziness (a completely possible explanation) or worse, stupidity. It’s not that I turn to books entirely for the purpose of mental thumb-twiddling, or that I don’t have the mental capacity to understand higher concepts… I just don’t want books to stress me out. I have work, bills, a personal life and a moderately successful blog (not this one, obviously) that keep me covered in that department. That’s what reading Kafka does: stress me out.
The interest I had in Kafka’s work sprouted from a source I probably shouldn’t openly admit to: smart people (women, even!) in photos, showing off their sizable book collection in the background while framing their faces with one of his books. This blatant display of sexy-but-smarty-tarty snootiness made me curious. Over the years the number of girls broadcasting their Kafka love increased, but curiosity alone is not enough to overcome my deep, semantic dislike for his writing.
It’s not that the concepts are over my head, I think. (I mean, I wouldn’t know if I was too stupid to comprehend the material… or would I?) I understand that for Kafka there was no difference between life and art, which meant his art was just life. And life, it seems, contained many run-on sentences. It does in my head, too. But once put down in words there has to be something to break up the bubbles and lines; something short and sweet like an apostrophe or dash that allows the reader to know when they can take a breath, especially when relating your thoughts to others out loud.
Maybe it’s just the fact he was intensely anti-Freud during a time when people eagerly lapped up that psychoanalysis bullshit. I can even understand the great deal of himself that he poured into every story–the deep sadness over his lack of offspring, his desire to feel freedom in the less cognitive thought processes of other creatures.
All this trash-talking aside, one quote of his haunts me, if only for its simplicity (finally!) and how strongly I’ve found myself relating to it:
“The only strange thing about me is my nature.”
… After reading that line to myself time and again over the past few days, it’s the single most accurate explanation of self I can think of. I still think the man was onto something, lack of punctuation aside.