Austin Kleon – Page 597

LAUGHING WITH KAFKA

Sunday, January 15, 2006

“For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny…Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication -theorists sometimes call “exformation,” which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called “compression” — for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.”

– David Foster Wallace, “Laughing With Kafka,” HARPER’S July 1998

PREVIOUSLY, ON 24

Saturday, January 14, 2006

My fiction teacher in undergrad bugged me for almost three years about 24. He would pound on the table during lunch and say, “If you’re not watching 24 you’re missing the best show on television!” And then, after reading twenty or so plotless workshop stories written about drinking and vampires, he passed out photocopied reviews of the show and said, “You want to learn about plot? Watch 24!”

We’ll, I’m hooked now. Two weeks ago, Meg and I watched the whole set of season one in a week (that’s something like four episodes a night). Knowing there would be no time to watch all the rest of the seasons before the fifth season started, and knowing that my blood pressure couldn’t survive another marathon, we devised an ingenious strategy to get up to speed:

First, skip season 2. (Don told us there was too much annoying crap about Kim in there, anyways.) Just read the episode guides. Then, get ahold of season 3 and season 4. Watch the first couple of episodes of season 3, then skip the rest by watching the “Previously on 24” clips before the rest of the episodes. (Watching all the “Previously on 24” clips in a row is ALMOST as stressful as watching the actual shows, because you’ve got all these plot twists crammed into 2 or 3 minute segments…) Then watch the finale. Rinse and repeat for Season Four. Throw the season five prequel in there, and you’re good to go.

The four-hour premiere of season five starts at 8 o’clock Sunday, and continues on Monday at the same time.

REMEMBER! THE ONLY WINNER OF A RAT RACE…IS A RAT!

Friday, January 13, 2006

B00000J5QC.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg I’ve eaten two Christmas dinners with Murray Saul, and I can tell you, he’s a helluva guy.

Murray’s going on 78 now, but back in the 70s, when WMMS-FM was the #1 station in Cleveland, Murray used to do this thing called “The Get Down.” Legend has it that Friday night at 6 o’clock, everybody in their right mind would tune their radios to WMMS and listen to him announce the weekend with a rant about everything from slavedrivers to chocolate sundaes, topping it all off by screaming, “It’s Friiiiday!”

I saw Murray at the library recently, and he showed me his new column with the FREE TIMES, “Ask Murray.” It’s like “Dear Abby,” but with Murray. You can e-mail him a question, here, and if it’s the best one of the week, you get a free copy of his CD, THE GET DOWNS: VOL. 1.

Here’s a transcript of one of his “Get Down” monologues:

Oh, the slavedriver brought out the meat grinder and the stomper this week, and after they pushed us through, grinding the shit out of us, they threw us on the grill, salt and peppered our wounds, and laughed as they squeezed the onion in our eyes. They make us go to work in the dark, and we end up going home in the dark. We’re lucky if we have five minutes to peek at the sun. We can’t even look out the windows…it’s just like the third grade. The only time they smile is when we’re locked inside, but remember, the only winner of the rat race…IS A RAT.

Listen to it on MP3 at your own risk. Rock on, Murray…see you at dinner.

BILL HICKS ON COMEDY

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

If comedy is an escape from anything, it is an escape from illusions. The comic, by using the Voice of Reason, reminds us of our True Reality, and in that moment of recognition, we laugh, and the “reality of the daily grind” is shown for what it really is—unreal…a joke. True comedy turns circles into spirals. What before seemed a tiresome, frightening, or frustrating wall, the comic deftly and fearlessly steps through, proving the absurdity of it all. The audience is relieved to know they’re not alone in thinking, “This bullshit we see and hear all day makes no sense. Surely I’m not the only one who thinks so. And surely there must be an answer…” Good comedy helps people know they’re not alone. Great comedy provides an answer.”

—Bill Hicks, “The Wicked Christians,” in LOVE ALL THE PEOPLE: LETTERS, LYRICS, ROUTINES

DAVID LYNCH ON MEDITATION

Sunday, January 8, 2006

From an article in Arthur Magazine:

Transcendental Meditation is the way of the householder in that it allows you to stay in the world. Some people like the recluse way and want to go into the cave, and there are mantras that will take you right out of the activity and put you into that cave. But Transcendental Meditation is a way of integrating these two worlds….In the West people think, yeah like I’m really gonna give up my dental practice and go to the cave, but you don’t have to quit dentistry. Meditate before you go to work and you’ll start liking the people that come in and you’ll start getting ideas about dentistry. Maybe you’ll invent something and get into the finer points of a cavity and honing that bad boy.

Lynch talks more about TM and The David Lynch Foundation, his attempt to bring Transcendental Meditation and Conciousness-Based Education to the children of the world, in this Newsweek interview.

Dale Cooper would approve.