Dead Man Laughing (from New Yorker)
My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. (more…)
F. Kafka, Everyman (from NY Review)
The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay
by Louis Begley
Atlas and Co., 221 pp., $22.00
1.
How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:
The Book of Revelations (from guardian.co.uk)
Henry & George
In 1873, the young Henry James reviewed George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It was an odd review, neither rave nor pan. Eliot represented the past and James hoped to be the future.
Letter from Liberia (from guardian.co.uk)
PART ONE
Monday
There are no direct flights from England to Liberia. Either you go to Brussels or you book with Astraeus, a specialist airline named after a Roman goddess of justice. They run a service to Freetown, in neighbouring Sierra Leone. The clientele is mostly Africans dressed as if for church. Formal hats, zirconiums and Louis Vuitton holdalls are popular. A toddler waddles down the aisle in a three-piece suit and bow tie. Only non-Africans are dressed for ‘Africa’, in khakis, sandals, wrinkled T-shirts. Their bags are ostentatiously simple: frayed rucksacks, battered cases. The luggage of a nomad people.
The Zen of Eminem (from Vibe)
As Chris Rock had it, something sure has changed in America when the best golfer is black and the best rapper, white. Rock’s choice of words is remarkable: not richest, not most famous, but best. Because there can be no doubt about it anymore, and it’s getting sort of churlish to deny it.
