Mini Work Makes Maxi Pads Look Lame
Mini Work Space, Maxi Good Times
Kleine Liste:
Benjamin, W., & Kafka, F. (1968). On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 164.
Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition – Yasemin Yildiz – Google Books. (n.d.). Retrieved April 11, 2019, from https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=RPx5XSWVXTIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=the+uncanny+mother+tongue&ots=rrm7aUZyan&sig=KmfSQikcEFj22HGEFhdhnyCvvUs#v=onepage&q=the%20uncanny%20mother%20tongue&f=false
Erpenbeck, J. (2017). Go, went, gone. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Kafka, F., & Crick, J. (2009). The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. OUP Oxford.
Kafka, F. (2009). The Metamorphosis, a Hunger Artist, in the Penal Colony, and Other Stories. Richer Resources Publications.
Puchner, M., The Written World: Storytelling from Mesopotamia to the Moon. The American Academy in Berlin, April 9, 2019.
Sentences:
Benjamin in reflecting on Kafka in his essay entitled, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” reflects that Kafka’s parables unfold like blossoms; furthermore, when writing on his first “Meditation”says that Kafka’s female characters rise from the “swampy soil” of his experiences.
In Beyond the Mother Tongue, Yildiz describes the possibility or impossibility of commodifying language in the act of assimilation, deppropriation, and appropriation through a historical analysis of Kafka’s works on Yiddish and German.
Go went gone is Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel about a newly retired and widowed professor who finds himself dispossessed from his habits, self-identity, and normalizing repression; happening on a group of refugees he finds that they are experiencing similar shifts.
Martin Puchner spoke about The Written Word at The American Academy in Berlin and somehow I have five pages of notes but I learnt mostly never to take a Benadryl before a lecture in a stuffy, albeit beautiful, space.
Pick six:
- Monolingual Paradigm: Catch 22, on the one hand may unite a society, while realistically, encourages an “Us Them” mentality thus normalizing discrimination.
- Appropriation: In this case appropriating a language of another’s culture as though a commodity in order to assimilate.
- Assimilation: Blending into dominant culture to be accepted and to avoid discrimination.
- Deppropriation: Shedding one’s language in order to assimilate, assuming that language can be shed as one sheds a pullover.
- Language Dispossession: “Politically engineered and historically specific, a universal condition of the impossibility of language as a possession that posits the impossibility of assimilation and ownership as the common ground of the subjects speaking the language.”
- Freud’s uncanny: Uncanny is what isn’t meant to be uncovered but divulges itself.
What struck me:
When I read Benjamin describe Kafka’s parables as unfolding blossoms versus unfolding paper boats, he aroused a feeling I only get from beauty. Later he quotes Kafka’s first “Meditation,” writing, “With my sister I was passing the gate of a great house on our way home. I don’t remember whether she knocked on the gate out of mischief or in a fit of absent-mindedness, or merely shook her fist and did not knock at all.” I immediately, having Kafka’s “Before the Law” in mind, thought of The Clash song, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.” Mischief is a fun way to see the unseen. Absent mindedly knocking as she walks is familiar. I absent mindedly brush my fingers across hedges when I walk on sidewalks. It’s somehow comforting and I feel it connects me to-something. Finally, shaking fists in the air is like a powerful cry no one hears. In these three, she is no closer to entering the gates on her own terms.