Everything you always wanted to know about...

...Franz Kafka, beginning with the the evening of 13 August 1912, when Kafka met Felice Bauer. A few days later, he composed, in a single, one might say fatal, night, his miniature masterpiece, "The Judgement," that perfect microcosm of what would come to be recognised as the "Kafkaesque" universe at large, analyzed rather nicely as follows:

the father figure who is both overpowering and dirty, the hollow rationality of the narrator, the juridical structures imposed on life, the dream logic of the plot, and last but not least, the flow of the story perpetually at odds with the hopes and expectations of the hero.

Nevertheless, Kafka wrote to Bauer in 1913: "Are you finding any meaning in 'The Judgment,' I mean some straightforward, coherent meaning that can be followed? I am not finding any and I am also unable to explain anything in it."

The summary and citation are from a newly translated and apparently excellent biography of Kafka by Reiner Stach, reviewed by Michael Dirda.

Meanwhile, in the months before he would see Bauer again, Kafka writes to her that "he lives for literature alone," in Dirda's summary, "that he is unsociable, fearful, sickly, unhealthily thin, self-pitying, obsessive, neurotic, without interest in children and probably incapable of sexual intercourse. He has nothing to offer her, except his devotion -- and he's not even sure about that, since it might interfere with his writing."

"Sex with you," as the character Pam says in Woody Allen's Everything you wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask), to cite the one usage of the adjective that does not make me cringe a little, "is really a Kafkaesque experience." Sex with Kafka, as readers of his biographies invariably discover, was much weirder perhaps. But who's asking?

Insult & Banality

It seems that the latest film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice was given a different ending for its American audience, described by Alessandra Stanley as follows: "a swoony moonlit scene of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in dishabille, kissing and cooing in a post-coital clinch."

This final scene in the boudoir, responds a former head of the Jane Austen Society of North America eloquently, "insults the audience with its banality."

Taboos, not Tattoos

Tattoos are a sign of civilization's end, says Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) who, while not quite advocating a legal proscription, still makes the aesthetic, psychological, and cultural case against them as follows:

First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.

Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.

And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.

In sum, tattoos are tasteless, indulgent, and aggressive (if not quite criminal). Corresponding to these three familiar arguments are the three classic types that embody them: the philistine, the narcissist, and the lout, respectively, all of whom would appear to be in acendancy in the Western world today. Uncoincidentally, these are also Dalrymple's usual suspects for civilization's decline. How convenient that they're tattooed for identification.

The problem, as Dalrymple soon discovers when queried on the subject by a Dutch interlocutor, is that while his arguments may (or may not—I, like the Dutch, make no judgements of morality or value here) be aesthetically, intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and morally dispositive, the legal case is the only one that really matters, and only barely at that. For in the absence of any social or moral authority such as may have been provided by Church and Custom, all human activity is increasingly judged solely from the viewpoint of the Law, a state of affairs that outrages Dalrymple when his interviewer draws it to his attention:

But the correspondent’s premise that the legality of an act was the sole criterion by which one could or should judge it chilled me. It is a sinister premise. It makes the legislature the complete arbiter of manners and morals, and thus accords to the state quasi-totalitarian powers without the state’s ever having claimed them. The state alone decides what we have or lack permission to do: we have to make no moral decisions for ourselves, for what we have legal permission to do is also, by definition, morally acceptable.

If one cannot legislate morality, then morality, in the absence of any other authority, must go the way of other quaint beliefs, such as those in God and progress, and end up as mere superstition, which is where many assume it began life in the first place. To reconfer upon Superstition the full powers and authority of the Law, without actually making it written law, is the difficult task that lies before those who would try to reverse this trajectory of long moral decline.

What Dalrymple laments in fact is the absence of taboo, another word of Polynesian origin that has entered the Western lexicon by the hand of James Cook. If modern Western youth have appropriated for themselves the tribal body-adornment of primitive societies, they have ignored or discounted its religio-ritual context. In other words, they've freely adopted the profane while rejecting everything sacred.

What is lacking today is a universal source of awe and fear, whether this source be a monotheistic God or, what may amount to the same according to Georges Bataille, exposed female genitalia or other magical, pre-rationalist forces.

Until then, the droves of philistines, narcissists and louts will continue to uphold our new, or neo-primitivist, tradition of indulgence without limit, tattoos without taboos.

The Eternal Colonel

Anyone who has spent some time in Asia can attest to the strange popularity in those lands, so far removed from the Kentucky pastures, of the restaurant chain known today as KFC. It is not, however, to the universal appeal of deep-fried battered chicken that I attribute the franchise's success, but to the universal appeal of its icon, Colonel Sanders himself, whose smiling, near life-size replica in plastic seems uncannily more at home in Asia than at home.

Of course we all resemble each other as we age—the hair turns white, eyes sag, ambitions fade, regardless of our race—culminating naturally in the greatest equalizer of all, death. But the Colonel's decidedly Asiatic cast cannot be chalked up to age alone. As some have remarked, he looks like a podgier (and yes, jollier) version of Ho Chi Minh—what Ho Chi Minh might have turned into had he been given a lifetime’s supply of counterrevolutionary fried chicken à la Kentuckienne.

I mention this by way of introduction to another curious fact concerning the Colonel which appears in this recent article about the much feared madrasas of Pakistan’s Nort-West Frontier Province. A Taliban-like regime has been imposed there by radical Islamist political parties, “banning the public performance of music and depictions of human form. The one exception to this, bizarrely, is the image of Colonel Sanders outside the new Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Peshawar. This was apparently because the Colonel was judged to be sporting a properly Islamic beard, and so was spared the iconoclasm imposed elsewhere.”

The enormity of such a decision becomes apparent when one stops to consider the kinds of icons that the Taliban could not spare; for example, the giant Bamiyan Buddhas that were carved out of a cliffside well over a thousand years ago, the only monuments of their kind, ordered destroyed by Mullah Mohammed Omar. Already defaced beyond recognition and amputated, the Buddhas resisted their destruction as anti-aircraft weapons exploded upon them, succumbing in the end only to massive quantities of dynamite.

Colonel Sanders, you might say, survived this fanatic destruction of false idols by just the hair on his chin. Perhaps when all the monuments of civilization lie in waste and ruins, today's KFC statuary in durable plastic will still stand smiling, no doubt in Asia.

Evolution of a Nobel Laureate

In Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee told the story of a disgraced professor whose daughter is impregnated in the course of a gang-rape by three black assailants in South Africa. In Elizabeth Costello, he told the story of an Australian writer who delivers searing lectures on animal rights in which the production of meat is likened to industrial genocide. Now, in Slow Man, Coetzee tells the story of a lonely, crippled photographer who meets a woman named ... Elizabeth Costello.

"A cartoon version of this," writes John Lanchester in the NY Review of Books, "would be to say that Coetzee has moved from a concern about human beings to a concern about animal beings to a concern about fictional beings."

Thai-rade

The G-6 nations, from a Thai point of view:

This is how we count the days. June: the Germans come to the Island - football cleats, big T-shirts, thick tongues - speaking like spitting. July: the Italians, the French, the British, the Americans. The Italians like pad thai, its affinity with spaghetti. They like light fabrics, sunglasses, leather sandals. The French like plump girls, rambutans, disco music, baring their breasts. The British are here to work on their pasty complexions, their penchant for hashish. Americans are the fattest, the stingiest of the bunch. They may pretend to like pad thai or grilled prawns or the occasional curry, but twice a week they need their culinary comforts, their hamburgers and their pizzas. They're also the worst drunks. Never get too close to a drunk American. August brings the Japanese. Stay close to them. Never underestimate the power of the yen. Everything's cheap with imperial monies in hand and they're too polite to bargain. By the end of August, when the monsoon starts to blow, they're all consorting, slapping each other's backs, slipping each other drugs, sleeping with each other, sipping their liquor under the pink lights of the Island's bars. By September they've all deserted, leaving the Island to the Aussies and the Chinese, who are so omnipresent one need not mention them at all. Ma says, "Pussy and elephants. That's all these people want."

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing

License and Senility

The recent translation of Gabriel García Márquez's frankly titled Memoria de mis putas tristes has occasioned a few reviews, mildly disapproving for the most part, with one very admiring, by John Updike, and one very damning, by Adam Kirsch. From the shrill and sure tone of his writings one surmises that Kirsch is not many summers out of private school (a "Harvard '97" turns up next to his name, soon enough, when googled), and it is not insignificant, for reasons that in the next paragraph become clear, that Memoria should be most favorably judged by its maturest reviewer (Harvard '54) and utterly misjudged by its greenest. Both reviews are worth reading for that reason, even if neither gets it right.

The book's plot (and, indeed, problem) is summed up in its opening line. As Updike notes, García Márquez is "a master of the arresting first sentence":

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

[El año de mis noventa años quise regalarme una noche de amor loco con una adolescente virgen.]

Arresting indeed, in every sense of the word (including, potentially, the cardiological and constabulary). If Kirsch never seems to recover from the shock of this typically Marquezian opening, both frank and fanciful at once like much of the author's magic realism (the 'magic,' as Kirsch puts it, "annuls the 'realism'..."), Updike appears weirdly unflapped, merely noting the proximity between the author's age and that of the narrator and adding that many of the details seem "lifted" from García Márquez's own life. He no doubt found unnecessary even to mention what Kirsch felt compelled to spell out, namely that "[t]he purchase of a child prostitute, if it were reported in a newspaper rather than imagined in a novel, is just the kind of exploitation most likely to enrage the very people who read Mr. Garcia Marquez," an exploitation that Kirsch feels equally compelled to denounce as "monstrous" and "pathetic."

The translation, however, by the much admired Edith Grossman, gives pause only for its clumsiness. There are a couple of words too many here ("wanted to give myself the gift of a night of..."), while a crucial equivocation in the expression "amor loco" goes entirely unregistered (Grossman's "wild love" captures the indelicacy of the proposition but admits none of its madness).

A better translation, therefore, more faithful and fluent at the same time, might have run: "The year of my nintieth birthday I wanted to award myself a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin."

Finally, still with regard to the translation, it is remarkable that no review has mentioned the trouble with its title, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. "Sad whores" evidently struck Grossman as either too harsh, since it includes the subjective sense of "sad" (corresponding to the Spanish tristes putas, as opposed to the objective putas tristes of the title) or too unpoetic—or both. García Márquez, at any rate, did not write putas melancólicas. Between sad and melancholy could not a more deserving word be found? Even Memories of My Unhappy Whores would have made for a happier, if not entirely felicitous, solution.

Many have attested to the quality of Grossman's translation, but given the not insignificant problems with both its title and its first sentence, which are surely two of the most, if not the two most, important lines of the work to be translated, one remains skeptical.

Pedalling the Moonlight Sonata

Some years ago there appeared on my television screen a former centerfold model in an interview for an entertainment "news" segment. To demonstrate to the audience that she wasn't just another overstuffed bodice, I recall, she carefully lowered her intensely trained bottom onto a piano bench and proceeded to finger out the first few notes of a familiar piece, Beethoven's Opus 27 no. 2 in C-sharp minor, popularly known as the "Moonlight" Sonata.

This was particularly painful for me to witness because the Adagio of Opus 27 no. 2 happens to be one of the few works I can play on the piano, an instrument at which I am otherwise inept.

The segment convinced me of three things: one, anyone can play the Moonlight Sonata; two, few can play it well; and three, never to play it before an audience unless you're one of the few mentioned in number two (unless of course you're merely trying to demonstrate number one, and even then...)

The reason it's so difficult to play well, or expressively, is precisely because it's so easy to play technically, if one can allow such a distinction. In other words, the simpler the piece, the more latitude there will be in interpretation and feeling. In the case of the Moonlight Sonata this latitude in interpretation is most evident in the greatly various tempos and rhythms with which performers have chosen to play the work, from the glacially slow to the rather quick and bouncy.

The entire piece could be said to be nothing but feel and atmosphere, with no hummable melody, the right hand occupied almost entirely with its arpeggiated triplets, played now with a pulsating rhythm that lends the piece a forward momentum, now more evenly and repetitively, without apparent progress.

Yet another pressing difficulty in interpretation is its pedal work. The issue arises again in a review of a new biography of Beethoven by Edmond Morris in today's NY Times Book Review. According to Morris:

Beethoven directed that the first movement of his "Moonlight" Sonata should be played with "both pedals of the piano . . . held down nonstop." That isn't true. In fact, Morris goes on to quote the Italian phrase with which Beethoven inscribed his instructions for the pedals (Italian having been, back then, the lingua franca of European music), and, quite plainly, it mentions only one of the pedals, and even then is ambiguous about how often that pedal should be used.

What the reviewer fails to mention, however, is that the construction of pianos changed radically during Beethoven's lifetime and that modern instruments have a longer sustain time which makes the continuous application of the damper (or 'sustain') pedal not only unnecessary but undesirable. In the case of the Moonlight Sonata, however, the decay rate of unpedalled notes stands further retardation; otherwise one risks losing the sympathetic vibrations and ensuing harmonic play that occur with undampered strings.

One modern solution to this problem is the technique of "half-pedalling", whereby the pedal is only partially depressed. But on many pianos, such as the Steinway baby grand I used to dishonour with my playing, the pedal action is shallow enough to discourage such an apparently simple pedœuvre.

Further complicating the picture is the added direction by Beethoven that the whole piece be played "as delicately as possible," indeed pianissimo. How one is to achieve that on a modern piano with the dampers continuously disengaged is far from evident. Hence the experiment with double-pedalling, which produces a somewhat mysterious sound, both hushed and resonant.

It is a lot simpler at any rate for the hopeless amateur to keep both pedals pressed the entire time than to have to mind one's feet as well as one's fingers. I suspect the centerfold pianist felt the same, but then again, few in the audience would have been watching her feet. Or her fingers for that matter.

Of Mice and Men

Robert Sapolsky's new book, Monkeyluv, contains this curious fact, cited in a review in today's NY Times Book Review, namely that there is "a parasite that infects the brains of rats without any effect on their behavior except that they lose their instinctual aversion to the smell of cats and, instead, are drawn to it. Needless to say, such absurdly obliging prey is quickly gobbled up: bad for the rat but great for the parasite, since it can only reproduce inside a cat host. The next generation hitches a ride out on the cat's feces, which are ingested by rats to start the cycle over again."

A quick google search (keywords: parasite rat brain cat feces) netted several articles on the topic, one of which began with the following statement : "Toxoplasma gondii is a heteroxenic coccidian parasite of felids with an unusually wide range of intermediate and paratenic hosts, including humans." Confused but intrigued, I read on: "...infected rats have higher activity levels, lower neophobia, reduced learning capacity and lowered level of avoidance of cat odour." In other words, they become hyperactive and thrill-seeking while demonstrating a fatal combination of stupidity and arrogance.

Naturally one wonders whether other paratenic hosts exhibit the same symptoms...