Blumfeld, Part II - or - Kafka's Balls.

As I suspected and feared,  the bouncing balls in "Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor" were never explained. 

When last I left the story, Blumfeld had trapped the balls in his wardrobe, and was trying to give them to the charwoman's son.  This had to be a convoluted transaction, because Blumfeld was afraid the balls would follow him if he got anywhere near them.  He needed to give the key to his wardrobe to the boy, then the boy would have to get the key to his room from the the charwoman (the boy's mother) then go get the balls, then give both keys back to his mother.  The boy was dense and could not understand what he needed to do or why, but there were two little girls there who grasped the instructions clearly, so Blumfeld reluctantly gave them the key to his wardrobe.  They raced downstairs to the charwoman to get the key to his room, and Blumfeld left for work.  And that is the last the two bouncing balls are mentioned.

Blumfeld holds a supervisory position in a linen factory.  He's in charge of accounts etc for women who do piece work.   He has two assistants (both incompetent in his eyes), and a servant who cleans up around the place.  He had to beg his boss (who doesn't understand the complexities of the work) for assistants, and finally he got some, but now he feels his boss took an extra long time in order to find the dullest, most incompetent people possible.  He had hoped to train them and they they'd take initiative on their own, but that hasn't happened.  Blumfeld is convinced that if he dies or leaves the company, everything will fall apart because no one but him knows the complexities involved. 

I suspect that what has really happened is that the industry has changed, new technologies of sorts have been introduced and the world has passed Blumfeld by & he doesn't realize it.  But you have to infer that, everything in the story is from Blumfeld's point of view.

Now, back to the balls.  If a character in a story I was writing came home one day and found balls bouncing in his room,  bouncing in sync and following him around, with energy levels more or less reflecting his own, with no means of locomotion, I would probably feel compelled to explain how that could be.  But, I'm not Kafka.  Kafka feels no need for an explanation.

I've not read the Cliff Notes on this, so I don't really have a clue.

It is interesting that there are lots of  "pairs" in the story.  The balls, the assistants, the charwoman and her son (both dullards in Blumfeld's eyes), the two little girls (smart but untrustworthy, per Blumfeld).  I don't believe in literary co-incidences, but then what do I know.  Even the fact that Kafka chose the share the information that Blumfeld is a bachelor in the title instead of drawing it out is the story may have significance.  But I can't draw any lines to explain anything.  I can't connect the dots.  I don't even know where the dots are.  I don't know what it all means.   I understood the words, I followed the story, but I'm missing something.

I just know that Blumfeld is a very typical main character for a Kafka story.   And anytime I get through a Kafka story, it's a victory.

Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor

I've been reading a fair amount of books lately.  I read "Battle Ready" by Tom Clancy which details the career of Marine General Tony Zinni.  It jogged my memory a bit about being in the Army, and drove home the fact that I really did not have the personality for it. If I were in combat and an enemy who was trying to kill me suddenly withdrew, I personally would not be inclined to chase him down.  My personal reaction would be something on the order of relief at having survived a fire fight, and I'd be happy to let him go.  When someone has the motivation & means to kill you, it's down right dangerous to go chasing after them.  It's just as easy to get yourself killed by troops who are retreating as it is by troops who are charging.  However, that is not really the right attitude to take.  When an enemy is on the ropes you finish him off, otherwise he'll keep coming back, and one day he'll get you.  General Zinni seemed to love every challenge the military threw at him, in fact he sought it out.

I also read "Flashback" by Gary Braver which seem to me to be a pretty standard run of the mill made for TV movie book about corporate greed in the pharmaceutical industry.  It was better than anything I could write, but it was pretty predictable.

And I read "Aftershocks" by Richard S. Wheeler, about the immediate aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  That was a historical novel of sorts, and it followed the lives of 5 or 6 people, who for the most part, did not interact with each other so you had several stories going.  I never knew that much about the 1906 earthquake, so this filled in a few holes.   It was pretty good. There's so much I don't know.  Lots of times when I read things it makes me want to learn more. 

These books came from a thrift store, and I find myself temporarily without unread books about. 

So, with a heavy heart, having nothing else to read,  I picked up my copy of the complete stories of Franz Kafka, and chose a story more or less at random.   "Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor" is 23 pages long, and as always, before I start a Kafka story I make my peace with the world.  I ask myself if I want to suffer through 23 pages of something that will surely be odd, and maybe never make any sense.  I don't really want to, but the curiosity is overwhelming.  I know at some point I'm probably going to get lost, but each story loses me in a different way.

So Blumfeld, who lives alone, is trudging up the stairs to his apartment, thinking of all the reasons he doesn't want to own a dog. Most of these reasons have to do with cleanliness - shedding hair and such.  When he gets to his apartment, he hears a noise, opens the door to find two balls bouncing in sync.  One reaches it's height as the other hits the floor.  I remember thinking - here it is, the point in the story (a couple of pages in) of Kafkian oddness.  I had no idea that this story involved random bouncing balls.   Balls bouncing for no apparent reason, and with no means of causation.  Perpetual motion bouncing balls.  The balls followed him around, keeping a certain distance away, and seem to have some sort of feelings.  I left the story half way in, I expect to finish it up this evening.   Blumfeld had managed by trickery to trap the balls in his wardrobe, and was trying to give them to the Charwoman's son, who seemed very dense and didn't quite understand.   Now I wonder how the story will end, and what other twists will be coming in it, and if the bouncing balls will be explained.  I seriously doubt it. 

Think kind thoughts.

Ford County: Stories

Ford County: Stories, is a book of short stories by John Grisham, and I finished reading it a couple of days ago. 

Some of these stories are 50 or 60 pages long, and to me that's not a short story.  That's a long story.  I'm not sure what the cut off for a short story should be, but after 10 pages, you're pushing it as far as I'm concerned. 

Anyway, these were interesting, & compared to Kafka, very easy stories to read.  Refreshingly easy to read. They were completely linear, and contained no airborne dogs, nobody who turned into a bug, no one who spent their life building a wall.  One of the stories took place over a period of 3 hours or so, others over a period of weeks or months, but they all were linear.  They started out at one point in time, and ended at another point in time, with the end of the stories always later in time than the beginning, and no time was lost anywhere along the way.   Some of the characters were decent people, some maybe not so much, but none of them ever seemed confused about what time it was or how long it was taking for things to occur.  None of them seemed to be out of touch with their surroundings.

The stories had plots that were pretty straight forward.

I wonder how Kafka would have written these stories.  But I'll never know, because a) he didn't, and b) if he had, I probably would not have finished them.

Now I need another book to read.

I decided to write a poem about Franz Kafka, my nemesis

I call it Kafka Oh Kafka and it's pretty stupid.  Here goes.

Kafka Oh Kafka

Kafka, oh Kafka
was it your design,
to throw in my face
the limits of my mind.

The Great Wall of China
and Metamorphosis,
and those stupid parables
where everything's amiss.

Everything in your world
is just a tad askew,
from airborne dogs to lost time
I tell you I am through!

Ah, but that's an idle threat.
Like a rat drawn to sewage
I'll chew on you again.
But Kafka, dear Kafka,
you'll never be my friend.

I did it again

I don't know why I do this to myself, but once again I read a short story by Franz Kafka.

This one was called "A Country Doctor", or maybe The Country Doctor, I can't remember and I don't feel like trudging upstairs to look.

Here's what I think happened in the story.

A doctor has somehow gotten word that there someone is ill.  It's night, it is snowing, and it is about 10 miles away.  He needs to get there, but his horse has just died, so he sends his servant girl to go around the village and ask people if he can borrow a horse.  None of them will lend him one.  He opens the door to his own stables and finds someone there who he has never seen before - a brutish sort of person who immediately attacks the servant girl, but who has two fine horses.  The doctor gets this person's attention, the servant girl runs into the house and barricades herself in her room (we presume), and the brutish man (who is there without any explanation) hooks the horse up to the doctor's carriage.  The doctor is worried about his servant, and wants the man to come with him, but the man refuses, and begins breaking down the door to the doctor's house. 

Now this is where it gets weird.

The doctor suddenly finds himself at his patients house.  He's confused, because it is as if no time has passed.  So he looks at the patient, who is a young boy, listens to his breathing, and decides nothing is seriously wrong with him.  But the family is expecting there to be something wrong, and the doctor has some thoughts about how people have switched their supernatural expectations from religion to doctors.  So he looks again, closer, and this time he finds a horrible worm infested wound on the boy's hip. The horses have gotten loose from the rig, managed to open the windows and stick their head inside the room & watch.  No one seems to care.  The people in the room take the doctor's clothes off & he lays down next to the sick boy. 

Next thing I remember the doctor is on his way home, worried about his servant girl, and the horses, unlike the trip out, are barely moving.  Moving at a snail's pace. 

This is all I remember, and I don't have a clue what it means or if it has any deeper meaning than what I read.  I'm not sure I like reading Kafka, but it'd be really neat to be able to write something like that.

Floating Dogs

I finally finished that Kafka short story, "Investigations of a Dog".  38 pages of hard, tortuous reading.  A 38 page fictional examination of the psyche of a somewhat bohemian, slightly alienated, extremely curious, sociable against his will,  and a very 19th century dog.

Like most Kafka stories, there was something bizarre in it, something that flies in the face of reality.  And like the typical reality based (usually) human that I am I try to rationalize it.  This came when, without any apparent provocation, the canine protagonist began describing floating and soaring dogs.  I closed the book and closed my eyes and thought, here we go again.  This took me back to a Kafka story where one minute he was at a party, then some how he's on a footpath running up a small hill with a friend on his shoulders.  In both cases I don't know how it happened.  

My great urge is to go back a few pages and see if I missed anything.  This rarely works.  So this time I didn't.  I just cleared my mind and accepted it.  Floating dogs.  Dogs soaring thru the air.  Dogs who's arguments, philosophies and science were worthless, maybe because you couldn't understand anything they said, or maybe because they never touched the ground.   Just let it go - in this story there are dogs in the air.

Several pages later though, I had a revelation.  Someone else may have had this revelation earlier, I don't know.  But at some point in the story it became apparent that our protagonist did not differentiate between the species - everything was some type of dog.  The soaring dogs were birds.   I can't describe the relief I felt when I realized the author wasn't describing Bischon Frises floating amongst the trees.   He was in the mind of a dog, describing how a dog saw birds.  Big sigh of relief - I finally understood something.

Anyway, the protagonist was trying to get at the nature of what it was to be a dog, in a scientific manner.  He decided a dog's nature was all wrapped up in food, so that's where he conducted a lot of his experiments. After all, according to dog science, if one "had food between his jaws, all his problems were solved, for the time being". He wanted to see if his "incantations and singing" had any effect on if he received food or not.  He was very confused about exactly how food appeared, and wanted to nail that down.   He failed.  He could not escape his dog-ness, and it tainted every observation and every experiment he did. 

It'll be awhile before I read another Kafka story.  But I'm sure I will sometime in the future.  I'm drawn to them, even though I know they never do me any favors.

Oh man, not Kafka again

I ran out of stuff that I wanted to read, so I picked up my copy of Kafka short stories.  I opened it up almost, but not quite, at random to a story called "Investigations of a Dog".  I stared at the title for a long time, with some trepidation.   I checked to see how long it was, just to see what I was in for.  38 pages of small print.   38 pages of challenging reading.  I was tired, I was looking at this while in bed, and I wondered if I really wanted to do this to myself.  Did I want to put myself through this? 

I figured why not.

So I started reading.  By the second page I found myself going back and re-reading portions of the first page, just to double check my understanding, to make sure I hadn't missed something.  It is not light reading.

I don't know what it is with my run-ins with Kafka through the years.  I'm not sure why I've kept that book.  Part of the reason is I take it as a personal challenge, I think.  I will not admit that I cannot get thru, and understand, any piece of literature that is written in English, no matter how difficult.  I don't have this problem with people like Faulkner.  Heck, I don't even have it with Hermann Hesse, I've read both Siddhartha & Steppenwolf and maybe a few other things he's written.   Just Kafka.  Why is that?

Of course I'm reading translations.    I'm not sure if Kafka wrote in German or Czech (I should find that out), but what ever it was, it was the 19th century version of the language.   To do it justice, the translation should reflect that, and it sort of does.  There are long sentences, lots of clauses, lots of passive voice writing, not lending itself to any kind of college Freshman Composition class.   So it's hard to read from that perspective. 

Also, its difficult to read because it's just so weird. You have to discover what is going on, and I find myself going back and re-reading because I either have trouble believing what I'm reading, or I lost the flow of the story somehow.  This story, for example, is being told from the point of view of an apparently alienated, decidedly bohemian dog.  And as the reader, I know nothing more than what the dog knows, nothing more than what the dog sees or experiences with his other senses.   I know what the dog thinks, I know his opinions, and it is not easy to follow.  The dog describes things in a way most humans wouldn't.  Kafka is a very, very good writer.  But at the moment, I have no idea where the story is going.

Everything Kafka has ever written is like that, at least to me.  I've had this book for years.  I guess I'll keep it and force my way thru a story every now and then.

He wrote a story about a man who woke up and found that he was a huge insect - his most famous, probably.  He wrote another about a man sitting at the gates of heaven for years, afraid to ask permission from St. Peter to enter (I think).  That one was a parable, and I'm still shaking my head.  He wrote one about building the Great Wall of China, and after reading that I remember thinking, yep, that's pretty much what it was like being in the Army.

I'll read some more tonight.  But I suspect I'll spend a week at least on those 38 pages.