Word: kafka
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...fourth-year graduate student in English. Last Spring he defended twenty people before the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities and attended many other hearings as an observer. He is presently writing his doctoral thesis on the theme of justice and its absurd procedures in Shakespeare, Brecht, Camus and Kafka...
...welfare has stretched some cities to the edge of bankruptcy; some states are being forced to choose between the poor and the public schools or other essential services. Moreover, the U.S. is distributing aid through an administrative system that might have been designed in a demented collaboration between Franz Kafka and Rube Goldberg. Federal, state and local regulations regularly overlap, producing a punch-card maze from which escape seems impossible. The situation is, as the President said in his State of the Union address, "a monstrous, consuming outrage...
...blindly across a dead landscape manned by a gunner and some top-hatted diplomats, popes and kings. But his most memorable images were elegies of dispossession: of that dark tract between social role and inner imagination whose verbal maps were drawn by Kubin's Middle European contemporary, Franz Kafka. The Guilt, 1902, is quintessential Kubin: a starveling figure immersed to his knees in water, bent double under the weight of a fat, disaffected-looking seal-slimy, absurd and immovable. The beast is not even malevolent enough to make his victim look brave. It was with such images that alienation...
...Kafka's observation provides a fitting epilogue to a brilliant, complex and vagrant film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. Can a police chief -or any official with direct power -commit any atrocity that piques his fancy and get away with it? Italian Director Elio Petri (The Tenth Victim, A Quiet Place in the Country) raises a disturbing question that seems to defy satisfactory answer...
City Life, by Donald Barthelme. Wizardly fantasies, written with Kafka's purity of language and some of Beckett's grim humor...