F.K.

I've just finished reading the middle volume (the first vol. doesn't yet exist and the 3rd vol. isn't in my school's library) of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka (Kafka: The Decisive Years).  1st, I can't believe that any biography of Kafka could have the word decisive in its title!  But it still offers a fantastic discussion of Kafka's lunatic marriage proposal to Felice Bauer, which has to be the worst and most comical proposal of all time: he spends reams of paper explaining exactly why he is unsuitable for marriage at all and specifically to her.  So, of course, she accepts--which complicates Kafka's life immensely. (They never got married although they got engaged later on again--but again didn't get married.)  Another quotation from his relentless diary: "Often--and in my innermost self possibly all the time--I doubt that I am a human being."  But then the biographer annoys me with the following statement: "In his everyday interactions, Kafka resorted to ironic laments, gestures of comic desperation, which hid the true extent of his precarious inner state.  By social convention, anyone who whines is not suffering profoundly."  What the hell?  I whine, probably incessantly, and I think I suffer, even profoundly, he said whiningly.

My Theory of History

My theory of history is as follows: it's been mountain people versus valley people (that is, for example, the Balkans versus the Hungarians or the Turks), and you can never fully defeat mountain people because they have nothing to lose and they're essentially barbarians. But there's also been ongoing battles among the valley peoples, and so what has generally occurred is that large valley nations tend to fight against other large valley nations (e.g., France versus Germany or China versus Japan) by battling over (and thus occupying) smaller valley countries, e.g., Belgium, that happen to be in between them.  In fact, the most depressing cinema tends to be produced by victim valley countries (Belgium, Poland, South Korea).  When we visited Milan, another small valley country, the guide I hired to show us around the city told us that there was no art in Milan.  Why?   Because larger neighbors had been fighting over it against each other for the past 400 years, and every time a new "valley" country occupied it, it removed whatever art was there to its own museums: the Louvre, Madrid, Vienna, etc.  The only thing left was The Last Supper, which couldn't be removed because it was a wall in a building (although I'm sure if they could have found  a way . . . a la The Elgin Marbles).  Oh, and whenever a large valley people lose, then they look for someone to blame, which in Europe has tended to be the Jews, because, of course, their own incompetence or stupidity couldn't be the reason.  This pretty much explains everything there is to explain, I think.