Word: kafka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Taoist adage tells of a sage who dreamed he was a butterfly and then awoke to find himself wondering who was doing the dreaming. Might he not be the butterfly imagining it was a philosopher? Zhang has reproduced that pretty reverie, combining it with Kafka's Metamorphosis and shading it with The Fly. The question is now threefold: Is the narrator a person dreaming he is a cockroach or a cockroach dreaming it is a contemporary citizen of the People's Republic, or is there no difference between them...
That is sure to occasion anguished edification for those who study the language of Goethe, Kafka and Freud, but it may provide a few pleasant surprises as well. As my own recent and none-too-elegant plunge into the language at the Goethe-Institut in Berlin demonstrated, learning German is hardly the ordeal of a lifetime, but neither is there an escalator up the magic mountain of fluency...
...should also have honored Karel Kachyna's The Ear, made in 1970 and just now released. This stark, dark comedy, depicting one long night in the life of a bickering Czech couple who find their house bugged, plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as written by Franz Kafka...
Cookbook-author Barbara Kafka (Microwave Gourmet) has quieted many culinary Luddites with dishes like her almost effortless microwave risotto. A sampled batch was creamy, a bit chewy and nearly identical to risotto made from the traditional Italian recipe that requires 35 minutes of nonstop, laborious stirring. "Microwaves don't cook everything well," Kafka cautions. "Manufacturers originally claimed that they were a magic pill that could do anything. They can -- badly...
Most likely to leave you talking to yourself. Making a quick phone call to ask a simple question? Forget it. Since the advent of voice mail (a.k.a. automated answering systems), there are no simple questions -- just a maze of electronic choices that could have been designed by Kafka. Got a medical emergency? Please push 1. Want something kinky? Press 4. Need to talk to a human? Just stay on the line...