Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...opposite), except a generalized homage to revolutionary thought. Art's elimination of semblances to the physical world corresponded vaguely with Einstein's way of seeing time and space, but it really sprung from an atmosphere of change, in which Einstein was yoked with Freud, Marx, Picasso, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Joyce, Kafka, Duchamp, Kandinsky and anyone else with original and disruptive ideas and an aggressive sense of the new. By that tenuous connection did the discoverer of relativity become a major figure of a world consisting of individuals interpreting the world individually. He was similarly associated with the pluralism of modern music...
Relativism brought the underground man into his own--in Europe, with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Aichinger, Sartre, Mann and Pirandello; in America with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ellison, Capote and Salinger. The antihero, too, searched for unified meaning, but the narrative that held him was all about divisions, schisms and self-inspection. He sought to be by himself, like a god. In Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Richard Wright's The Outsider, protagonists become serial killers out of the desire to be alone...
...Retreating, the Turks left their coffee sacks behind, and the Austrians took to mocha with the same passion they later devoted to waltzing along the Danube. In Austria's legendary coffeehouses, a great culture grew--from Mozart (who, alas, did not write the Coffee Cantata; that was Bach) to Kafka and Freud. The Habsburg empire was, however, doomed, battered by the French in the 18th century and trounced by the chicory-gulping Prussians in the 19th century...
...been a torture, a purgatory out of Kafka, not Orwell, where the absence of directions becomes the scourge, and the authority becomes something you start craving, asking for. Was that the plan all along? Was all the rigid neglect of this Army Reception Battalion, all the days and weeks lost in chow lines and idle formation just a way of whetting our appetite for action...
First, some background. We were devolving here, "Lord of the Flies"-style, a platoon of 59 punks, most just out of high school but some with wives and lives and jobs, who had come to the Army for a fatherly whipping and instead had gotten Kafka's castle - a supposedly all-knowing, all-seeing complete shambles of a bureaucracy that couldn't even be bothered to take us for an occasional...