Christ Nailed

now finished: Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
now reading: My Life by Bill Clinton
up next: The Wife by Alafair Burke

I've just finished reading Wise Blood, and I am here to say -- what a weird little book. Of course, for Flannery O'Connor that's a pretty tame comment. We emerge from so much of her writing with comments more along the lines of "Damn, that was dark!" or maybe "That was so fucked up!" so, you know, "weird" is no big, really. Then again, please don't get me wrong - there is twisted shit a-plenty in this novel, and I don't believe I'm spoilering you as a Flannery O'Connor reader by saying please don't expect a happy ending. But somehow this one, despite its showcase of the usual gothic depravity that is humanity, didn't leave me reeling as some of her others have.

And that, I think, is because I was so amused and delighted by her central character's invented not-religion, the Church Without Christ. Early-ish in the novel, Haze, who in Wise Blood is what passes for our protagonist, declares, "I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything" (p. 72 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631) and I perked right up. It reminds me of one of my favorite Pretty Woman lines I'm forever quoting at people: "I can do anything I want; I'm not lost."

A bit later, this man -- who, like everyone else in the novel, is pretty much a lost wreck -- begins "preaching" his Church Without Christ. Basically in response to someone on the street one day who mentions the Church of Christ, Haze invents his Church Without Christ and says, "I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption...I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redepmption because there was no Fall and no Judgement because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar." (p. 101 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

Good stuff, right? I mean - this book is hilarious. Even though it's also Flannery-dark-and-twisted. Now, O'Connor herself was Catholic, right? To the end? I've finished this book but am still unsure of exactly what she is trying to say about religion herein. Or about people. Or wisdom or blood. The plot, such as it is, mostly involves a few characters running into and from one another in a weird little small town as they try to figure out something, anything about their weird little days, and there's all kinds of grotesque imagery, animals-in-cages symbolism, notions of freedom, automobiles, whorehouses...a real nice range of human fuckery. But it's peppered throughout with Haze's "sermons" and it's therefore kind of fun.

There is also a great (terrible) argument with an even-more-pathetic-and-stupid-than-Haze (if that's possible) (and it is) character, named Onnie Jay, who tells Haze, "It don't make any difference how many Christs you add to the name if you don't add none to the meaning, friend." See what she does there? This clown actually thinks Haze is trying to preach Christ because, I'm telling you, he's reeeeallllly dumb, but O'Connor manages that jab at religious hypocrisy nicely. Onnie Jay goes on to say, "You ought to listen to me because I'm not just an amateur. I'm an artist-type. If you want to get anywheres in religion, you got to keep it sweet. You got good idears but what you need is an artist-type to work with you." (p. 157 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

Ha ha ha ha ha. That last sentence there in those exact words might be the very advice I'd give to, well, the whole world, if I were a consultant to the world. (And really, am I not, though, a consultant to the world? Just a decidedly unpaid one.)

Now in this book Flannery has touched me with not just the darkness, the worst zoo ever, an exploited gorilla, the religion, and this little artist-type bit, but she outdoes herself with one more passage that became my favorite with how nicely it sums up my religious worldview, like, really and truly.

I'll get to that in a second, but let me remind you that this is not to say I 100% agree with Haze. His nihilist Church Without Christ (it still makes me smile every time I type it) is actually antithetical to me in some ways, such as when he delivers this sermon: "I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's no truth...No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach!"  I dig his blasting of religion and all there is to unpack in O'Connor's literature, but I definitely DON'T believe in "no truth." There absolutely are absolute truths. I just think they're not being taught by religions, on the whole.

However, he moves from this directly into some of what I DO think, starting with his very next sentence:

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. 

"Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backward into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was a Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

"Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you?" he cried. "Show me where because I don't see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you that would be the place for you to be, but which of you can find it?"   (pp. 165-166 of ISBN 978-0-374-530631)

That, my friends, is some excellent preaching. In the past, when I have tried my ablest to get people to explain to me how Christianity works, perhaps I should have just hurled that question at them, demanding to be shown where in your time and body Jesus has redeemed you. Show me, people. Show me damn where.

And just for some icing on this cake of Wise Blood, there's a (fucked up, obviously) character who swears, and boy does he swear excellently. He has introduced me to two new excellent swears, in fact: "Jesus on the cross!" and "Christ nailed."  I shall endeavor to incorporate them into my vocabulary at the earliest opportunity.

July 28th: Grace Stone Coates A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading, somewhat grudgingly: 
Good Wives, better know as  "Part II of Little Women"(apparently), by Louisa May Alcott
now listening: To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

Four days left to go, still home-stretchin', and I found a Trojan! Well, kind of. An attempted Trojan.

Today's Story: "Wild Plums"
Author: Grace Stone Coates
My Rating:  C+

Grace Stone Coates went to USC! (That, for you uninitiated, is my alma mater, the University of Southern California.) Apparently she didn't get her degree from there, nor from any of the other three colleges she attended, but she did get a teaching certificate (because you could do that in 1900) and taught for a while and then wrote poems and stories and worked for a literary magazine and eventually went a little nuts. She had battled mental illness, but reached a point decades later where she would forget to eat or sometimes wander into the street and stuff. I should mention that I have barely verified any of this--it's just the Wikipedia highlights of Grace Stone Coates, of whom I don't believe I've ever heard a mention before today, but I did bother to click a couple of source links and see most of these facts in a university/library online digital archive that includes her papers, so I think we're good.

Oh, her story?  Right. "Wild Plums." Um, yeah--I guess I found the author's random details a little more compelling. The story was a bit of a bore. Also, it was one of those, "Wait, what's happening here?" I have no idea what is wrong with the Slumps, the family the parents refuse to join in plum-picking. Are they disliked because they are poor? Loud? Non-conformist? Irish? Black? Atheist? It's never really made clear. I had the feeling I was supposed to know, though.

What can I say, 1929? You confuse me. Also, the beginning paragraphs about tasting wild plums and knowing a thing or two about them seem fraught with some risqué innuendo that never quite makes sense, either, but seems to be really about actual plums, despite talking about nether regions and such.

Our narrator seems to be a young girl, maybe a Scout Finch kind of girl, and the big thing that happens to her is that SPOILER ALERT!! she secretly tastes a plum. I think we are deep in the realm of symbolism as this girl has a life awakening about a World Outside of Her Family She's Always Known, but the actual narration and sequence of events/dialogue/thought processes are rather clunky. So between the awkward pacing/feel and the why-on-Earth-don't-we-like-these-people?! confusion, I just don't have a lot of praise for this particular story. Maybe I'll try another one some time, Grace!

July 15th: Anton Chekhov A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now reading: Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford

I must say that my first experience with Chekhov didn't go so well. But I was fifteen years old at the time. What did I know? I've since fallen in love with all things Russian literature. Isn't it high time I revisit ol' Chekhov?

Today's Story: "The Looking Glass"
Author: Anton Chekhov
My Rating: A

This is a short but sweet (or well, you know, bittersweet...emotional...a little worrisome...depressing...take your pick) story about a girl ("young and pretty") who is gazing into her looking-glass while dreaming about getting married. Let's talk about the term "looking glass" for a second. This is one of those things that is absolutely positively one hundred percent not used in USA English (I have no idea about Canada, I realize...Canadians?) but that we are easily able to understand is a mirror. Once we learn it, that is. When we are eight or nine years old and have finished reading Alice in Wonderland and pick up the sequel Through the Looking Glass, we might not know that a looking glass is a mirror and we might at first be unsure of what exactly is happening to Alice and what sort of glass she is falling through, thinking maybe it's a window or something, until we are finally bonked over the head with a sort of "Duh!"  Because, simply put, it's a mirror. So this just gets me feathers all ruffled thinking about how stupid it is to "Americanize" (and or "USA-ize, pending what we hear from Canadians) English-English books. FOR EXAMPLE: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone. Ugh. I like the idea of learning about one another's English usage, with footnotes if necessary, not translating English-English to USA-English, when I read. Who's with me? I know that it can lead to confusion sometimes when you don't have footnotes, but that's OK. It's a learning experience! Anyway, whoever translated the Chekhov obviously used the term "looking glass" and not mirror. And so here we are.

True or False: Chekhov writes a lot about women. I'm totally cool with that, Anton, but I really need to read more of your stuff. It was Three Sisters that did me in, at age fifteen, at theater camp. Had to perform an abridged version of it. Was miserable. Can't even remember the name of the acting coach who directed us in that scene, but I remember actually hiding out in the bathroom one day trying to figure out a way to not return to his classroom and not have to rehearse the scene. With hindsight, I think that whether or not he was a great acting coach of teenagers (especially sheltered and immature ones), I was clearly the pathetic one. I do believe it was Lori and Penny and I playing the three sisters--and I'm not even sure which one I was. I'm thinking maybe Irina. Really, the plot is lost to my memory, everything is lost to my memory except the utter misery I felt the entire several weeks of rehearsing. What's funny about that is that I had to burst into tears in the scene, acting-wise, and you'd think I should have been easily able to do that, what with being miserable and all. Why was I so miserable? I don't know! It was just miserable! Which is just so weird seeing as I have grown very fond of angst, drama, and Russian lit over the years. Did I just not know myself yet? (This is a distinct possibility.) How did the performance go? Well, all three of us were nominated for acting awards, and the director of the entire workshop did initiate a standing ovation for us. (But really, not for me. Probably mostly for Penny; she was actually a good actress.) I think it's just because he adored Chekhov, and Three Sisters was famously his favorite play, which, you know, no pressure! That's probably why our director was so hard on us and why I was so miserable. I swore off Chekhov after that summer.

And now here I am, in a cold and gray and windy Michigan summer (yes, this is what passes for July around here; might as well be in exile in Siberia or something) reading a little more Chekhov. "The Looking-Glass" has a plot that is entirely imagined but that is vividly rendered. It makes sense when you read it. It leaves you with lots of profound questions like "What does it mean to join my life with that of another?"  and "What do we owe our neighbors?" (not to mention our horses) and "Is life at all worth living, since it will inevitably be filled with sad and terrible events?"  That Chekhov, fun guy. Let's all have a beer, no?! Seriously. !@#&*Russians. Love them.

And so, I hereby heartily recommend this great story and I hereby also pledge to reread Chekhov's Three Sisters and try to figure out just exactly what was wrong with my unable-to-appreciate-it-fifteen-year-old-self (perhaps Taylor Swift can weigh in?), and I also apologize to the universe for allowing my personal adolescent misery to prevent me from fully appreciating the beautifully rendered misery of others.

July 9th: James Joyce A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors

now finished re-reading: "The Metamorphosis"/"Die Verwandlung" by Franz Kafka
now reading: Sophie's Choice by William Styron

Kafka, Styron, and Joyce...someone might call these guys "writer's writers," if that weren't such a weird way to talk about creative people. (Not that it stops the critics. "She's a real songwriter's songwriter," you sometimes hear. We understand what it means, but it still seems like a phrase to use when you can think of no other words to describe the artist -- truly no other words, so you just use "artist" again.)

Today's Story: "Clay"
Author: James Joyce
My Rating: B

Reading this story, "Clay," puts me in mind of the eternal question I ask myself as a writer (well, one of them): do I want any and all readers to understand my work? Do I care if they don't get it? Does it matter if I refer to things that are clear and obvious now, or known to many people, but that in the future will be confusing, or baffle some folk?

In short, do I want to be one of those annoying pieces in the Norton Anthology where the footnotes take up more of the pages than the actual text? No, I do not. But will I be?  ???  Over time, the things which we find so familiar will be altered beyond recognition. And even now, I know some people have a hard time keeping up with my allusions, although I don't say that in a literary snobby way, just an "I-talk-a-lot-and-throw-in-a-lot-of-random-Clue-and-Designing-Women-references" way.

Then again, even a one-footnote story puts forth this eternal question, because were it not for the footnote in this particular case, and despite the story's title, I wouldn't have known that Maria had stuck her hand into the clay, nor known that choosing the clay is ominous. Is this an Irish thing? A 1915 thing? I have no idea. Never heard of it. Never heard of the Hallowe'en game they're playing, in fact. So maybe I'm just unimpressed because I'm confused, but James gets a deduction and the grade is a B. Not fair? (Who ever said I was a fair grader? It's my freakin' blog, after all.) Well, I hardly think that anyone coming to the defense of James Joyce's writing is going to try, "You're just ignorant; he doesn't make any obscure allusions" for the thrust of their argument.

Oh, James Joyce. Good writer, that boy. Are his short stories deceptively simple? Are his deft turns of phrase like Forster's, with more than meets the elegance-beholding eye? Is he as wise as Tolstoy about the human condition? (OK, no on that one, sorry.) Is he the Dante of his generation? The Da Vinci? The Bono?

In AP English my senior year of high school, we were all set to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We knew this was coming, because as I previously mentioned in my Kafka entry, my sister and several of my classmates' older siblings were two years ahead of us and the English department pretty much kept the biggies of the curriculum the same, at least not altering them in just a couple of years. Now, it wasn't to be our first time around the James Joyce block cul-de-sac, as we had studied "Araby" the year before, but anyway, the novel loomed. And then our teacher, who had taken over AP English that year from our sisters' teacher who departed in the wake of a messy life/divorce incident, discovered that we had not yet read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She was incredulous. At first she thought one student was saying he alone hadn't read it, like, he had blown it off sophomore year or whatever. No, we explained, to this teacher who had in previous years taught the "average" and remedial English classes and wasn't familiar with us, the accelerated/Advanced Placement crowd who'd gone through our four years of high school together, we didn't read that in sophomore year American Lit. None of us read it. We read The Scarlet Letter  and Moby Dick that year and assorted other things, but no Huckleberry Finn. She immediately scrapped Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and hauled out her set of Huckleberry Finn  classroom copies, which we AP seniors surely eyed with disdain, as they were normally handled by, you know, sophomores. And not even advanced  sophomores. Do I now look back on her decision approvingly? Do I agree with her that any self-respecting English student must study Huckleberry Finn in American Lit?  Yeah, sure. But we hated the very idea of being senior AP English students reading the same book as the average sophomores. What a delicious whirlwind of meta-pretentious thought, no? Joyce should be proud.

Before you can become an artist, you must rid yourself of all the baggage of your "influences." But what games did you play on All Hallows' Eve, James Joyce, that now haunt Maria and me? What twists of fate await us, blindfolded, when we try to reach for our destiny? And when the hell will I ever get around to reading Ulysses?

A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors July 7th: Virginia Woolf

now finished: F Is for Fugitive by Sue Grafton
now reading: Best Short Stories/Die schönsten Erzählungen by Franz Kafka
and Men Against the Sea by Charles Bernard Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
up next:  a few mystery thrillers and more William Styron

So, today I may be kind of cheating, or at least approaching my July blog project a little differently, because today's story isn't really a short story -- or is it? One is never too sure of these things.

Today's Story: "The Mark on the Wall"
Author: Virginia Woolf
My Rating: A-

It may also be cheating, or simply impossible, to try to explain all of my experience with/feelings about/analysis of Virginia Woolf in one blog entry, so we shan't expect that to happen. But first things first: is "The Mark on the Wall" a short story, and if not, what then should we call a sketch like this by our gal Virginia, or by any other consciousness-streaming author?

I think "The Mark on the Wall" succeeds because it wraps humor, longing, and awareness into one big package of thoughts that carry the reader along on the stream of consciousness. There is no plot and there are hardly any characters, but it's more than just a rumination on life, because the voice is very much a narrator who is doing something, even if that something is mostly thinking. This story makes me think that Virginia Woolf would have been a great blogger. Would she have liked to blog? She might have brought some fretting to the process -- one can imagine, for example, her responding to trolls and getting caught up in some nonsense comment war -- but just in general it seems like something she would have been great at if she had done it. She always found these moments worth musing about, and although she's widely considered to have been temperamentally unfit for all of the poised schmoozing of happy little social butterflies, she still knew people, related stories, and wanted to connect. Bingo! That's pretty much 80% of bloggers, no?

And "The Mark on the Wall" is not just  a flow of thoughts about what the mark on the wall might be, but also a wink-wink reflection on those thoughts:

I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle.I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes. . . Shakespeare. . . . Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an armchair, and looked into the fire, so--"  (The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Third Edition, 1974, p. 2310)

The layers of writer brain and creation in each paragraph of this story (sketch) are remarkable. With commentary on the past, the future, a ton of the present, and the process of the mind figuring things out, it's like a meta-creation, detailing the process of observing something on Earth and reproducing it as art. But it's also a person sitting looking at the mark on the wall above the fireplace -- and too lazy to get up and see what it actually is.

No spoilers here! You'll have to read the story yourself to find out.

Obviously, I do like Virginia Woolf. A lot of people aren't at all prepared for her when they first read her, so they just have no idea what's going on (which is, simply put, a lot) and for those people I guess I recommend starting with Night and Day -- although you'll have to go back and read it again later anyway once you totally get her more. I read Jacob's Room early on in my Woolf-life, and it became one of my top ten novels. I have also read a bunch of other stuff: To the Lighthouse  and Mrs. Dalloway, obviously, and Orlando, and The Voyage Out, Kew Gardens, A Room of One's Own, The Waves (which by the way is phenomenal) plus some of The Common Reader and Three Guineas...and maybe one or two others. I thought I had read Monday or Tuesday but if I did, I didn't remember much about "The Mark on the Wall," which appeared in it -- but as I said (and many others have said), whatever Woolf you read when you were twenty years old, you really need to re-read now anyway.

A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors July 2nd: Franz Kafka, "The Judgment"

now reading: Best Short Stories/Die schönsten Erzählungen, A Dual-Language Book
by Franz Kafka (ed. and trans. by Stanley Appelbaum)
+ like 6 other books at the same time, but it's not as bad as it sounds

Yesterday as July commenced I explained that I have (yet) a(nother) little reading project wherein I shall read and reflect on one short story and/or its author per day throughout July. We kicked it off with Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings" and my jabber about both my experience reading her novels and how I totally hated/didn't get The Handmaid's Tale upon first reading it. Today, we continue with another author I've read before, the mighty Franz Kafka. Since I have the abovementioned book of his stories checked out from the library right now and it's due back in a week or two, he shall be my story of the day author a few times this month. (By the way, I think the word "erzählungen" is more like "narrative" or "story" than "short story" as we know that term in English; am I right, my fluent German peeps?)

Today's Story: "The Judgment"/"Das Urteil"
Author: Franz Kafka
My rating:  A -

First of all, let's start by saying that the word "judgment" drives me crazy because I never know how to spell it. Everyone has that one word that they can never feel they are spelling correctly (well, everyone except you people who suck at spelling, who presumably have lots of words like that) and mine has always been "judgment" although the thing is that it can also be spelled "judgement" and therein lies the problem. For years I would write one and then the other, but no matter what I wrote, it felt wrong. Only to find out both are right. Argh. However, since this book/translator goes with no 'E' we shall do the same in this blog entry.

Although "The Judgment" is weird, it is immensely likable. What do I mean by "weird"? Well, this is Kafka, after all. But it's not absurd-weird or non-linear-weird or magical-realism-weird, it's more like emotional "What just happened?" weird. I don't want to give spoilers, but I will say that when the father gets angry and "judges" I found myself very confused. What is he mad about? Was he pretending not to know the friend, or was he really going crazy? And then there's all the stuff leading up to that: I really had no idea what to make of it, either, namely the relationship between Georg and his friend. Is this supposed to be a closet homosexual thing, and that's why he doesn't want to announce the engagement?  I mean, color me severely confused. And yet! The confusion in no way makes you want to not read the story or throw the book across the room or anything like that. You just keep reading and reading and get right on to the end and you think, "Whoa!" and only then do you ask, "Wait, why did that all just happen? What does it mean?"  (Like life?)

Therefore, confused about what the actions of the story mean on the surface, I happily turn to the symbolic realm, which is where Kafka's real writing genius lies, no? The friend is the true inner Kafka...bachelorhood is Kafka's writing/art/career/life's purpose from which engagement will snatch him away...the father is perhaps a god-like ultimate Judge, perhaps the judge within Kafka himself...the bridge is all that connects two people...

And speaking of that bridge, a cursory "what the heck just happened?" internet search upon finishing reading "The Judgment" leads me to many different literary critics (plus, even Wikipedia goes there) who point out that the German word "Verkehr" can mean both "traffic" and "intercourse, of the sexual variety" and that word's appearance in the end of the story is thus fraught with all kinds of meaning. Which is interesting, but I still see the bridge as having a lot of layers, not just one sexually symbolic point, especially because Georg stares at it in the beginning of the story after finishing his letter.

I do love the German language. German was the first foreign language that I studied, and I'm really sad that I could take only two years of it in high school (there wasn't enough student interest for a third year class my junior year, sadly, as SO many high-schoolers dutifully took the two years that look good on a college application and then bailed) and I'm even sadder that as I then studied French, and began dabbling in other languages, I let my mad German skills slip away. I need to rekindle them. Anyway, in this particular story I loved the word  korrespondenzverhältnis, which describes the relationship between Georg and his friend who is off living in St. Petersburg, so they only communicate by letter these days. Correspondence-relationship doesn't have nearly the same ring in English (not to mention it's not a word), but in my life I have totally had a korrespondenzverhältnis or two. He knows his friend -- they grew up together or whatever -- but now they are living in two different countries so they have a korrespondenzverhältnis. Maybe this just speaks strongly to my expat soul or my adolescent dozens-of-pen-pals soul, but I've had several other korrespondenzverhältnis, too, in which my relationship with a friend or family member became truly richer and deeper through letters, after or in between seeing them in person. I miss writing letters, damn it!!!

Franz Kafka. Just as with yesterday's Margaret Atwood whose famous The Handmaid's Tale was the first thing I read by her, the first Kafka I ever read was his mega-famous "The Metamorphosis," back in the AP English day. I've since also read The Trial, but I *think* that's it for the Kafka and me. (I know -- pathetic. I don't know why people think I could ever qualify as a literary snob, having read so little Kafka, not to mention less than half of Atwood's oeuvre. What the heck, people?) I liked "The Metamorphosis,"  although I kind of recall not love-loving it (it sure beat the hell out of Faulkner, though, I'll give it that!) because I wanted the weirdness to be more wacky and fun instead of darkly brooding and stuff. You have to understand that my sister was two years ahead of me in school and therefore in English literature classes, so she was forever dropping hints about things I would get around to a couple years later (in some cases the hints became major spoilers, i.e, SPOILER ALERT Anna Karenina and her train, while other times the hints just allowed me to be a particularly precocious high school freshman, randomly dropping Beowulf into conversation with other juniors who I knew were in my sister's English class when she wasn't around).  So she had talked up this story about "a guy who turns into a cockroach" and one does not easily forget that, now does one? After two years of interpretation, I suppose in my head it had become incredibly grotesque and cartoonish and spectacular, but really it's kind of sad and drudgery-laden. (I repeat: like life?)

Anyway, "The Metamorphosis" ("Die Verwandlung") is in this library book I have checked out now, so I'll reread it this week and see how it and I have aged since high school. The Trial was also weird, but not absurd-weird or magic-weird or wacky-weird, just more "What's happening here?" with an eerie calm hanging over it all. (Again: government, society, life.) Kafka is one of those authors who is constantly on my to-read-more-of list that I stupidly never get around to reading more of. I'm glad to remedy that at least a tiny bit this month!