Word: davenports
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Later, Kafka compares the Italians flocking to the 1909 air show to tartar tribes invading an English garden party. What is most interesting about the story is that it was taken in part from original accounts by Kafka and Brod. One wonders whether it was Kafka, Brod, or Davenport who wrote this sentence...
...Robot" (pronounced ru-bow) Davenport tells the story of the discovery of the Lascaux cave in southern France, the site of some of the earliest prehistoric paintings. According to this version a dog named Robot chasing a rabbit actually discovered the cave. Henri Breuil, a French Jesuit anthropologist provides Davenport with a voice to describe the caves as brains for the earth. Breuil talks about his discoveries in China, Africa, the Altamira caves in Spain where Picasso studied the ancient bull drawings for the bull he painted in "Geurnica." Everything becomes interconnected in Davenport's stories; history isn't simply...
...longest story, "The Dawn in Erewhon," the hero, a Dutch philosopher, Adriaan van Hovendaal, who apparently actually exists, says, "Man has a history rather than a nature." And this story is Davenport's most comprehensive attempt to present that idea. But here the author fails, partially because he gets too pedantic, in both his language and his ideas, and partially because he shifts from the present action to an excerpted translation of van Hovendaal's works on Samuel Butler's utopic Erewhon and his own concepts of Utopia which are rightly described as "some of the strangest in modern thought...
...most perplexing of Davenport's collection. It is a lot like The Turn of the Screw because you're never sure if you can trust the narrator who could be one of three different people, Davenport may be fooling everybody with this...
DESPITE THEIR underlying theme of "remembering," these stories don't come together into a unified reading experience; they don't make up a book. And that may be the most frustrating part about the whole endeavor. Davenport's sense of history is limited--sometimes so specialized as to be useless. Who, after all, would know what a young man described as a "redstone kouros from Sounion...translated into the slenderer grace of a modern gramivore" is unless he knew that the kouros was an idealized version of the male in ancient Greek sculpture practiced in Sounion and that a gramivore...