Word: kafka
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...Paglia is determined to hit a few frontiers too. Kafka once said "a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us." Paglia wants to write that book -- "not the Band-Aid, not the comforter, not the down quilt...
...main character, Bill Lee (Peter Weller), is an exterminator who sees roaches everywhere -- not least because his wife Joan (Judy Davis) has been stealing the bug powder he needs for his job; she cuts the stuff with baby laxative and injects it into her breast. "It's a Kafka high," she says. "You feel like a bug." In his daymares, Bill is visited by beetles -- big ugly things, chatting away through purulent orifices -- that send him on a spy mission into the Tangier of his delirium. Typewriters turn into bugs, and so do the humans Bill meets, who are verminous...
...this respect, at least, Turner showed a canny awareness of the literary temperament, which is more obsessed with money than is the Wharton School of Business. Half a million dollars might have cheered up Kafka. But would it have made him write a good book? This is where Turner's idea ran into trouble, eventually culminating in a debacle last week: a prizewinner that was immediately repudiated by some of the big names who had voted...
...must be doing something wrong. The problem must be pretty severe, too; otherwise, a prestigious university wouldn't go to such great lengths to solve it, right? As the police told the confused protagonist of Franz Kafka's The Trial, "[T]he high authorities we serve, before they would order such an arrest as this, must be quite well informed about the reasons...
...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...