College Degree: Good News, Bad News

Is college worth the effort?Here's one approach
SLATE: TUESDAY, NOV 25, 2014 03:45 AM PST

Robert Reich: College gets you nowhere

[The former secretary of labor examines why a degree no longer guarantees a well-playing job]

This is the time of year when high school seniors apply to college, and when I get lots of mail about whether college is worth the cost.

The answer is unequivocally yes, but with one big qualification. I’ll come to the qualification in a moment but first the financial case for why it’s worth going to college.

Put simply, people with college degrees continue to earn far more than people without them. And that college “premium” keeps rising.

Last year, Americans with four-year college degrees earned on average 98 percent more per hour than people without college degrees.

In the early 1980s, graduates earned 64 percent more.

So even though college costs are rising, the financial return to a college degree compared to not having one is rising even faster.

But here’s the qualification, and it’s a big one.

Reich's complete column can be found HERE.

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie "Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.

John F. Kennedy: His Assassination, November 22, 1963

In a brief discussion with students in one of my classes last week, I learned that many could not place the date of John Kennedy's assassination. On the anniversary of his assassination here's a film that can serve as a review, or an introduction to it:

This biography of John F. Kennedy is taken from the official White House government website.  You can also find links to biographies of all 44 presidents at this page.  The History Channel has report on the day of the assassination. CBS presents photographs of the day.

On November 22, 1963, when he was hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullets as his motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President; he was the youngest to die.

Of Irish descent, [Kennedy] was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917. Graduating from Harvard in 1940, he entered the Navy. In 1943, when his PT boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, Kennedy, despite grave injuries, led the survivors through perilous waters to safety.

Back from the war, he became a Democratic Congressman from the Boston area, advancing in 1953 to the Senate. He married Jacqueline Bouvier on September 12, 1953. In 1955, while recuperating from a back operation, he wrote Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history.

In 1956 Kennedy almost gained the Democratic nomination for Vice President, and four years later was a first-ballot nominee for President. Millions watched his television debates with the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Winning by a narrow margin in the popular vote, Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic President.

His Inaugural Address offered the memorable injunction: "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country." As President, he set out to redeem his campaign pledge to get America moving again. His economic programs launched the country on its longest sustained expansion since World War II; before his death, he laid plans for a massive assault on persisting pockets of privation and poverty.

Responding to ever more urgent demands, he took vigorous action in the cause of equal rights, calling for new civil rights legislation. His vision of America extended to the quality of the national culture and the central role of the arts in a vital society.

He wished America to resume its old mission as the first nation dedicated to the revolution of human rights. With the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps, he brought American idealism to the aid of developing nations. But the hard reality of the Communist challenge remained.

Shortly after his inauguration, Kennedy permitted a band of Cuban exiles, already armed and trained, to invade their homeland. The attempt to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro was a failure. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union renewed its campaign against West Berlin. Kennedy replied by reinforcing the Berlin garrison and increasing the Nation's military strength, including new efforts in outer space. Confronted by this reaction, Moscow, after the erection of the Berlin Wall, relaxed its pressure in central Europe.

Instead, the Russians now sought to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. When this was discovered by air reconnaissance in October 1962, Kennedy imposed a quarantine on all offensive weapons bound for Cuba. While the world trembled on the brink of nuclear war, the Russians backed down and agreed to take the missiles away. The American response to the Cuban crisis evidently persuaded Moscow of the futility of nuclear blackmail.

Kennedy now contended that both sides had a vital interest in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and slowing the arms race--a contention which led to the test ban treaty of 1963. The months after the Cuban crisis showed significant progress toward his goal of "a world of law and free choice, banishing the world of war and coercion." His administration thus saw the beginning of new hope for both the equal rights of Americans and the peace of the world.

The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2006 by the White House Historical Association.

This collage remembers the four major
political assassinations in the United States during the 1960s. 

1A: Homeless articles

National Coalition for the Homeless

"Hidden City: New York has more homeless than it has in decades. What should the next mayor do?"The New Yorker, October 28, 2013. By Ian Frazier. 

Child homelessness in U.S. hit all-time high in recent years, new report says. By David Crary and Lisa Leff, The Washingtonw12 November 17, 2013

PCC THEATRE IN LONDON 

Spring Break: March 7-15, 2015

Join Professors Manny Perea and Brian Adler for an exciting week of theatre and sightseeing in London.
You’ll enjoy: 

Four plays

Round-trip flight on Virgin Atlantic

Round-trip airport transportation in London

7 nights at the 4-star Holiday Inn Bloomsbury

Daily Continental Breakfast

Day trip to the historic town of Bath

A tour of the National Theatre in London

Seven-day transportation pass for London tube/bus

And free time to explore London and its environs at your own pace 

Imagine... the British Museum, the British Library, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Covent Garden, Harrods, pubs, and fabulous food and shopping!

ALL THIS FOR $3,380!

Accommodations based on double occupancy. Single supplement: $850

Price excludes PCC course fees. Deposit due: December 5, 2014

INFORMATION MEETINGS

Thursday, November 13: 12 noon in C304 and 6 p.m. in C163

Please spread the word. Tell your family and friends! Any and all can come on this trip.

To learn more, please contact Professor Perea (626-585-7496; email: mxperea@pasadena.edu) or Professor Adler (626-585-7643; email: bradler@pasadena.edu)

Four films for Veterans Day from PBS Frontline

English 1A

Post English 1A class comments here.

Dunk!

How a 5'5" Basketball Player Trained Himself to Dunk

Brandon Todd is one of the shortest men in the world capable of dunking a basketball.

SAM PRICE-WALDMAN

THE ATLANTIC OCT 1 2013, 3:22 PM 
ET  Read the article here.

1A: CONOVER (1958--) & COYOTES

Coyotes was published in 1987

ABOUT TED CONOVER
CONOVER'S website: www.tedconover.com

CONOVER talk (March 2010 Presentation) with links to text and video clips @ Zocalo Public Square
[Note: if Zocalo link does not take you there, try search at Zocalo home page.]

Interview with Ted Conover from Mayborn School of Journalism 

This interview was conducted in 2011. Conover published Coyotes in 1987.

CONOVER continues to write.  Here are two other recent articles of his:

Conover wrote "A Snitch’s Dilemma," about Alex White for The New York Times Magazine, June 29, 2012.  If there was ever a "secrets, lies and spies" story, this is it. Here's the first paragraph:

"Kathryn Johnston was doing pretty well until the night the police showed up. Ever since her sister died, Johnston, 92, had lived alone in a rough part of Atlanta called the Bluff. A niece checked in often. One of the gifts she left was a pistol, so that her aunt might protect herself."

If you like, read the rest of Conover's story about Alex "the Snitch" White, a member of the Black Mafia Family, and "Behind the Cover Story: Ted Conover on the Murky World of the Snitch" for Conover's point-of-view about his article.

Conover also has a report on a slaughterhouse in Harper's, May 2013. 

From Harper's May 2013 issue

The Way of All Flesh

Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse

By Ted Conover

Here's the first two paragraphs:

The cattle arrive in perforated silver trailers called cattle pots that let in wind and weather and vent out their hot breath and flatus. It’s hard to see inside a cattle pot. The drivers are in a hurry to unload and leave, and are always speeding by. (When I ask Lefty how meat gets bruised, he says, “You ever see how those guys drive?”) The trucks have come from feedlots, some nearby, some in western Nebraska, a few in Iowa. The plant slaughters about 5,100 cattle each day, and a standard double-decker cattle pot holds only about forty, so there’s a constant stream of trucks pulling in to disgorge, even before the line starts up a little after six a.m.

First the cattle are weighed. Then they are guided into narrow outdoor pens angled diagonally toward the entrance to the kill floor. A veterinarian arrives before our shift and begins to inspect them; she looks for open wounds, problems walking, signs of disease. When their time comes, the cattle will be urged by workers toward the curving ramp that leads up into the building. The ramp has a roof and no sharp turns. It was designed by the livestock expert Temple Grandin, and the curves and penumbral light are believed to soothe the animals in their final moments. But the soothing goes only so far.

The story continues at Harper's, but it only offers limited access to its magazine online, including the above Conover article. You may be able to find the full-text through EbscoHost, a database available through the PCC Shatford Library.

John Moore/Getty Images

A flag marks the spot where the remains of a person believed
 to have been an immigrant were found in Falfurrias, Texas, in May 2013.
Published in The New York Times, September 22, 2013

NEWS from the BORDER
"Bodies on the Border" by Marc Silver, The New York Times, August 17, 2013:
This summer, as discussions have advanced around a comprehensive immigration reform bill, I traveled to Arizona to film some people who have a unique perspective on border security. I followed Dr. Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist with the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, who has worked to identify the remains of some 2,200 people found dead in the Arizona desert since 1990 — undocumented migrants who attempted to cross illicitly from Central America and Mexico into the United States. And I followed Robin Reineke, a University of Arizona doctoral student in anthropology who founded the Missing Migrant Project, a nongovernmental organization that helps families look for their missing relatives.

To read this article and watch a selection from Silver's film click here. or click on this link
http://nyti.ms/16xBGuN. This issued is covered further in "Bodies Pile Up in Texas as Immigrants Adopt New Routes Over Border", The New York Times, September 22, 2013.

"At the Border, on the Night Watch" by Marc Lacey, The New York Times, October 12, 2011
DOUGLAS, Ariz. — The lanky young man with two bales of marijuana slung over his back who was apprehended by Border Patrol agents in a rugged area about a mile from the border here one recent night represented both the significant strides the country has made in controlling its southern border and the challenges that remain.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

The Heartache of an Immigrant Family

The New York Times

By SONIA NAZARIO

Published: October 14, 2013

LOS ANGELES — WHEN we talk about immigration to America, we tell a hopeful story about courage and sacrifice. But that story obscures the fact that, especially for the poor, immigration is often a traumatizing event, one that tears families apart.

Consider the experience of one family, originally from Honduras. In 1989, Lourdes Pineda was the single mother of a 5-year-old boy and a 7-year-old girl. She sold tortillas, plantains and used clothes door to door, but barely earned enough to feed her children, and feared not being able to send them to school past the sixth grade. So she made the painful decision to leave them behind in Honduras, and found work in the United States as a nanny, taking care of other people’s children.

To read the rest of this article, go to The Heartache of an Immigrant Family

LANGUAGE USAGE
from The New York Times, April 4, 2013
No More 'Illegal Immigrants'
by Lawrence Downes

The Associated Press has changed its stylebook entry on the term “illegal immigrant.”  It now reads, in part:

“Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant.”

The new usage should quickly become apparent to readers of the thousands of newspapers and news web sites that follow, or try to follow, the AP’s rules.

Read the rest of this New York Times article here.
Also, the "L.A. Times updates guidelines for covering immigration".

10 miles east of Douglas, Ariz. by Aldo Zúñiga, May 2012 (The New York Times)

More New York Times readers photographs of the border can be found here.

*****

PLEASE NOTE FILM:  Janeen Gonzalez of 1A recommended a documentary, American Harvest, that touches on the same themes Ted Conover presents in Coyotes.  To learn more about American Harvest, you can go to its website or watch an 18 minute video  from it.  (Thanks, Janeen!)

PLEASE NOTE FILM #2: Yadira Easley, 1A student and a great fan of documentaries, told me about this one, Life and Death on the Border, that is a perfect film complement to Coyotes.   (Thanks, Yadira!)

PLEASE NOTE MORE FILMS about the immigrant experience. These were recommended by English 1A students Jose Quiroz, Cindy Huerta,  Christine Ching,  and Mathieu Mathet. (Am I forgetting anyone?) The films: Under the Same Moon, Crossing Over, Sin Nombre, and Cavite.) A big thank you to Jose, Cindy, Christine and Mathieu!

WETBACK: THE UNDOCUMENTED DOCUMENTARY (2 preview clips)

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS for COYOTES

You may print these out, if you like

1. Discuss the section “A Note on Translation”. Why would Conover use the terms “illegal alien” and “undocumented” when he says that he tries “to avoid both labels.” Why would the term “illegal aliens” appear in the subtitle? What term do you prefer to use—“illegal aliens,” “undocumented worker,” etc., to describe the subjects of the book. Explain.

2. See page xviii and the first full paragraph and the following sentence: “What La Migra does not know—what it perhaps cannot afford to know—is the more human side of the men and women it arrests, the drama of their lives.” What is Conover’s point here? In which ways does Conover's book best address the "human side." Why?

3. After Conover says “What La Migra . . . “ (as quoted #2, above), he makes a distinction between a story and a policy book. Though he claims he is only writing the former, explain the difference between the terms. Based on what you’ve read so far, do you agree with Conover that his book is mainly a story? Or not? Why? What impact do you think his book could have on American immigration policy?

4. Conover could have opened his book in many different ways. He could have told his reader about how he prepared for this writing assignment, or his trip to Mexico from the United States, or where he grew up, among other approaches. Why do you think he selected Alonso to open Coyotes? How would you describe the relationship between Alonso and Conover?

5. Point out at least three different examples of Conover’s and the workers’ reaction to police officers (and other uniformed personnel.) Explain how these different reactions may or may not be the central conflict that Conover faces as a reporter. Note his experience with Alonso crossing the border, with Carlos and the others at the airports, and additional examples that you identify.

6. By the end of “The Gringo and the Mexicano” chapter—and subsequent chapters—do you trust Conover as a reporter? You must point to specific examples to support your position.

7. By befriending the Mexican workers as a reporter and telling their story, has Conover intruded on their lives strictly for his own benefit? Discuss your position with specific examples from the book.

8. Why does Conover describe the workers on page 42 as “professionals”? Do you agree with his assessment? Why or Why not?

9. Point out examples where Conover is naïve. Does this quality help or harm him as he works as a reporter? Explain.

10. In the “Welcome to L.A.” chapter Conover describes the relationships between different racial groups. Point out at least three stereotypes—and the notion of “team”—that he faces and describes in the chapter. Does he succeed in upending these stereotypes through his reporting? Explain.

11. Conover published this book in 1987. Does the “Welcome to L.A.” chapter present a different society, especially with regard to race and the “team,”  than what you know about race issues today in Los Angeles County? Discuss.

12. Discuss at least three things that surprised you about Coyotes and the story Conover has told.

13. Define the notion of work in your own words. Illustrate your definition with several examples from Coyotes.

We don't have time review in-class "Making the Border Less Enticing to Cross," which appeared in the Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2012.  But read it if you have a chance.  On the same page, see links to other articles regarding immigration.


Questions posted by English 1A, Fall 2012:


Anna Dawahara, Michelle Burton, Rick Thurnell, Christine Ching:

1.) Compare the ways women are treated in Ahuacatlan and the ways Conover treats women. (p. 158, 165)

2.) What are the Mexican's expectations for America? (p. 138-139)


William Cheng, Rebeka Carrasco, Jose Quirzo:

1. On page 86, Carlos says to Conover "Welcome to LA! Welcome to the Hispanic team!" After hearing this statement which side do you believe Ted is on? Neutral or Biased side.

2. Throughout the book both the coyotes and the Mexican police are predators and prey on the weak. What are some of the things they did and how? Did it change your perspective of the undocumented workers? What other struggles not mentioned in the book do you believe the workers may have had to gone through just to get these low paying jobs in the US?


Jodi Shou, Alex Garcia, Cindy Huerta,Valerie Arellano:

1. How does Conover seem to earn the trust of groups, such as the orchard pickers, so easily? What makes it so easy for him to integrate into another person's lifestyle? Offer at least five examples from the book.  (Pg. 36, etc.)

2. In the "The Gringo and the Mexican" chapter, Conover is denied a construction job while Alonso, his undocumented friend, is offered it. How does Conover take it and what does his reaction show? Does this seem like an accurate response for the opposition to immigration policies? (Pg. 28-29)

Jon, Jactel, Tarik and 1 more student:

1. Conover is repeatedly met with suspicion, and mistrust again and again from Mexicans and coyotes (16, 56). However, he consistently seems to win them over. What is it about Conover that makes him seem trustworthy? What does it say about the Mexican workers that they are willing to trust Conover?

2. Why was Conover never directly accused of being a smuggler or a coyote, but his Mexican companions are met with constant suspicion? Taruk, Jaquetelle, Jon, and we had one more, but we did not write our names down. on English 1A: CONOVER & COYOTES

from McCabe:

1. Humorous moments appear in Conover's Coyotes.  Identify five humorous moments in the book, and explain how humor helps Conover's desire to show the "human side of the men and women [the INS] arrests, the drama of their lives" (xviii).

Conover with some of the men who crossed
at Sonoita, AZ, north of Nogales, Mexico

1B: Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Google's Doodle, July 3, 2013,

 in tribute to Kafka on his birthday and his Metamorphosis.

 More about the Kafka Google Doodle in the Los Angeles Times.

1B Students: take a look at--why not read it, too--the
 biographical material about Kafka &
 "'The Essence of 'Kafkaesque'" article that appear below.

"Franz Kafka was born [July 3, 1883] in Prague, where he lived most of his life. [He died June 3, 1924.] During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including 'The Metamorphosis,' 'The Judgment,' and 'The Stoker.' He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels." (Source: Random House Inc. Academic Resources).

"During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. 'Dearest Max,' it began. 'My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.' Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. The Trial came out in 1925, followed by The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature." (Source: The New York Times, 9/22/2010) To see the remainder of this article click on this.

For a good overview of Kafka's life, see Bio.  The Times Topics of The New York Times for Kafka is here.

To learn more about Kafka, go to the website The Kafka Project. It has extensive information about Kafka's biography and manuscripts.

Kafka on Books and Reading

"Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle," Kafka wrote.

Later, he would add: "[W]e ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief."

The above letters can be found at Brain Pickings. Kafka made these observations about books and reading in letters to his childhood friend and art historian Oskar Pollak. These letters were dated November 1903 and January 1904 when Kafka was 20 years-old.

Take a look at Kafka's drawing at Open Culture.

The Essence of 'Kafkaesque'

By Ivana Edwards
December 29, 1991
excerpts from The New York Times
for the full article click here.

SO just what does this adjective "Kafkaesque" mean? And why does Frederick R. Karl, author of an exhaustive critical biography of Franz Kafka, [Franz Kafka: Representative Man], believe that the word is as misused as it is used?

Kafka is the only 20th-century literary figure whose name "has entered the language in a way no other writer's has," Mr. Karl says. But "what I'm against is someone going to catch a bus and finding that all the buses have stopped running and saying that's Kafkaesque. That's not."

"What's Kafkaesque," he said in an interview in his Manhattan apartment, "is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.

"You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don't stand a chance. That's Kafkaesque."

The word has become the "representative adjective of our times," Mr. Karl says in his recently published book, Franz Kafka: Representative Man (Ticknor and Fields) and subtitled "Prague, Germans, Jews and the Crisis of Modernism." Mr. Karl devotes the entire epilogue to this elusive subject.

'Tells Us What We Are'

"Kafkaesque," the author says, "defines us. It's the one word that tells us what we are, what we can expect, how the world works. And to find out what that means, you read Kafka. You read The Metamorphosis, which is about a man who wakes up as a big bug, and then you know."

As Mr. Karl showed a visitor around his book-lined study, it was evident that he is a passionist of the meticulously ordered and maintained book shelf, the straight spine -- nothing is crammed or stuck horizontally in the available space.

He recalled when he first unearthed Kafka's most famous short story ("The Metamorphosis") and how "absolutely stupefied" he was.

"I found it in the stacks of the Columbia University Library as an undergraduate, never having heard of it before," he said. "It was dark, and I sat down to read it under almost perfect conditions -- dark, deserted, spooky."

The German edition of Kafka's Metamorphosis
  (sometimes called The Transformation)
 It was written in 1912 and first published in 1915.

Today, Kafka is in the mainstream of student reading, and of the reading public, which is largely made up of former students, Mr. Karl said. He believes that "The Metamorphosis," "A Hunger Artist," "In the Penal Colony" and "The Judgment" are among the most widely read Kafka stories. He also says that "The Trial," Kafka's best-known long fiction, with its "trappings based on misinformation," has achieved the mythic symbolism of a world gone berserk.

"The Trial" is about Joseph K., who, although in hot pursuit of the truth, is executed for an unnamed crime. Time and space are rearranged so they "can work either for or against the protagonist; the horror of that world is that he never knows what is happening, or when," Mr. Karl writes. "Thus the Kafkaesqueness of the Kafkan world: that insistence to uncover what is always uncoverable, or to recover what cannot be recovered."

Kafka wrote Der Prozess (The Trial) in 1914.
 It was first published in German in 1925.
 The first American edition, seen above,was
 published in 1937; as of May 2014 a near fine
 (i.e., excellent) copy was selling for $4,300.
 The original German edition, seen below,
 was being offered for a price of $21,000.

When asked if Kafka could have become Kafka in any other city but Prague, Mr. Karl hesitated. "Every major writer is a product of a particular juncture, a meeting of the place, the time, the history, so that the answer is no," he said. "Prague wasn't only Prague, it was also a moment in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Prague was for Kafka a great love/hate relationship. He hated the place, yet he could never get away from it."

Mr. Karl recalled his own visit to Prague in 1989, before the fall of the Communist regime, to research his book and lecture on contemporary American literature at Charles University.

"When I got there," he said, "I could speak to people I knew, and they would say, 'Yes, it's a beautiful city, but it's killing us. We're dying here.' And I'd say, 'Prague is so magnificent,' and they'd say, 'That's all we have.' And Kafka felt that. He called it 'an old crone with claws.' "

Mr. Karl's book is dedicated to "the six million Europeans murdered by Europeans," a curious reference to the Holocaust, which came after Kafka died in 1924.

"Remember, I said 'Europeans,' not 'Jews,' " Mr. Karl explained. "I make it very clear that Kafka was not a prophet, but that what he saw coming was a historical development of the most disastrous kind. He was the historian, the genius, of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

"All those bizarre, surreal works can be seen against that background. The First World War that resulted was the real war. That was the war that determined the course of the 20th century. I see it as a kind of trajectory. All of that was being shaped in the world that Kafka was still a witness to."

Didn't Kafka become a kind of blotting pad for a lot of different theories?

"He absorbed into himself everything that was happening," Mr. Karl said. "Not directly, for he makes very few comments on politics, for example. The entire European world was changed, and indirectly the American world.

"Kafka seems to me to have understood this better than anybody else alive, and in that sense he becomes the person who absorbed the whole historical lesson before most people realized it was a historical lesson. A great writer does this.

"What he also saw was something else -- that history was going to roll over everybody, that everybody was going to become a victim of history. That's Kafkaesque. You struggle against history and history destroys you."

for the full article click here.

*******

What It Really Means to Be 'Kafkaesque'

Joe Fassler explains in "What it Really Means to be 'Kafkaesque'" how "[w]riters, when they affect us deeply, become adjectives. Some authors’ visions are so recognizable they can serve as a kind of shorthand: the 'Proustian' reminiscence, the 'Dickensian' slum, the 'Orwellian' surveillance program. This is useful, maybe, but not especially precise. Great literature tends to be complex and up for debate, and maybe that’s why these words—eponymous adjectives, they’re technically called lend themselves so easily to abuse."

(from The Atlantic, January 15, 2014.) 

Kafka Editions from Schocken (seen above)

New book covers virtually penned by Franz himself. Contributed by Stephen Coles on Feb 9th, 2011. From Fonts in Use: An Independent Archive of Typography. To learn more about these editions go to this site.  Here are some alternative covers of The Metamorphosis.

A Short Animated Film on Kafka

What can I say about this short animated film, "Franz Kafka de Piort Dumala"? No more than what you may have to say about it. I invite you to watch it and enjoy.  

Gabriel Garcia Márquez & Franz Kafka

The great Colombian writer García Márquez was highly influenced by Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Here's a passage from the Garcia Marquez website Macondo: "One day, however, [García Márquez's] life changed -- all from reading just a simple book. As if all the lines of fate suddenly converged in his hands, he was given a copy of Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The book had a profound affect on García Márquez; making him aware that literature did not have to follow a straight narrative and unfold along a traditional plot. The effect was liberating: '[García Márquez said] I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.' He also remarked that Kafka's 'voice' had the same echoes as his grandmother's -- 'that's how my grandmother used to tell stories, the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice.'"

Arthur Miller & Franz Kafka

"Gregor Samsa: Drone Operator" by David Burr Gerrard

Los Angeles Review of Books, March 17, 2014

Susan Bernofsky has chosen “The Death of a Salesman” as the title of the afterword to her excellent new translation of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” In fact, Gregor Samsa does have a certain kinship with Willy Loman: they share Gregor’s pre-transformation job as traveling salesman and his post-transformation decision to commit suicide, which, in Bernofsky’s words, is “the final service [Gregor] performs for the benefit of his family.” Bernofsky notes that Gregor “is a salesman, but what he has sold is himself: his own agency and dignity, making him a sellout through and through.” This is all true and supports the standard and probably correct interpretation that Gregor is an insect before his transformation, a non-person with no important preferences of his own. This is why I was startled to notice something I had never paid attention to: that Gregor once had a job he actually seems to have liked. Even more surprising is what this job was: a soldier." To read the rest of this review click on this.  An adaptation of Bernofsky's afterward to her translation of The Metamorphosis follows below, after the cover of her book.

Go to Amazon's "Look Inside" for Susan Bernofsky's
translation of The Metamorphosis in 2014.  Click on Amazon's "Look Inside" 
 for her book,  and then you can make a comparison of the first few pages of
 her translation to Willa and Edwin Muir's translation of it  from 1948. Their translation appears in Literature, 3rd edition. An adaptation of Bernofsky's afterward to her translation follows.

ON TRANSLATING KAFKA’S “THE METAMORPHOSIS”

POSTED BY SUSAN BERNOFSKY
THE NEW YORKER, JAN. 15, 2014

This essay is adapted from the afterword to the author’s new translation of “The Metamorphosis,” by Franz Kafka.

Kafka’s celebrated novella The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) was written a century ago, in late 1912, during a period in which he was having difficulty making progress on his first novel. On November 17, 1912, Kafka wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer that he was working on a story that “came to me in my misery lying in bed” and now was haunting him. He hoped to get it written down quickly—he hadn’t yet realized how long it would be—as he felt it would turn out best if he could write it in just one or two long sittings. But there were many interruptions, and he complained to Felice several times that the delays were damaging the story. Three weeks later, on December 7, it was finished, though it would be another three years before the story saw print.

As we know from Max Brod’s diary, Kafka read the first section of his “bug piece” (Wanzensache) aloud to friends on November 24, 1912, and again on December 15. People started talking about it, and Kafka received a query from publisher Kurt Wolff in March 1913 on the recommendation of Kafka’s friend Franz Werfel. Franz Blei, the literary editor of the new avant-garde journal Die weissen Blätter, expressed interest, and Robert Musil wrote as well, soliciting the novella for the more established Die neue Rundschau. But months passed before Kafka had a clean manuscript ready for submission, and then World War I intervened, causing further delays (Musil was called up to serve, and because of the war Blei decided to stop printing literary texts). In the spring of 1915, René Schickele took over as editor-in-chief of Die weissen Blätter, and with Max Brod’s help, Kafka placed the story there. It came out in October 1915, and then appeared in December 1915 (though dated 1916) as a slender volume published by Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig.

The story’s protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is the quintessential Kafka anti-hero. He has worked himself to the point of utter exhaustion to pay off his parents’ debts, and his grotesque metamorphosis is the physical manifestation of his abasement. What exactly is he transformed into? In Kafka’s correspondence with his publisher, he was adamant that the “insect” (Insekt) not be depicted on the jacket of the book. And although he and his friends used the word “bug” (Wanze) when referring casually to the story, the language that appears in the novella itself is carefully chosen to avoid specificity.

The epithet ungeheueres Ungeziefer in the opening sentence poses one of the greatest challenges to the translator. Both the adjective ungeheuer (meaning “monstrous” or “huge”) and the noun Ungeziefer are negations— virtual nonentities—prefixed by un.Ungeziefer comes from the Middle High German ungezibere, a negation of the Old High German zebar (related to the Old English ti’ber), meaning “sacrifice” or “sacrificial animal.” An ungezibere, then, is an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice, and Ungezieferdescribes the class of nasty creepy-crawly things. The word in German suggests primarily six-legged critters, though it otherwise resembles the English word “vermin” (which refers primarily to rodents). Ungeziefer is also used informally as the equivalent of “bug,” though the connotation is “dirty, nasty bug”—you wouldn’t apply the word to cute, helpful creatures like ladybugs. In my translation, Gregor is transformed into “some sort of monstrous insect” with “some sort of” added to blur the borders of the somewhat too specific “insect”; I think Kafka wanted us to see Gregor’s new body and condition with the same hazy focus with which Gregor himself discovers them.

That same blurred focus applies to other aspects of the story. Although Vladimir Nabokov—with his penchant for exactitude—has mapped out the Samsa flat in some detail, I am far from certain that Kafka himself—with his penchant for the blurred perceptions of bewilderment—was much concerned with the apartment’s precise geography. How many rooms does this apartment have? Many, too many; just as Gregor, lying on his back in the story’s opening sentences, discovers he has “these many little legs” waving in the air above him. Both are physical correlatives of a life that has gotten out of hand. Kafka is not even particularly attentive to the continuity of his cast of characters. Early on in the story we see the maid give notice and flee, only to find her still working in the household several pages later and in fact doing all the cooking, since now it is the cook who quit. Except for the charwoman who plays a starring role in the penultimate scenes, the household help is just part of the furniture of the story, like the cabinet that gets shifted to another room.

Even the main characters tend to appear categorically, named only by their functions: “father,” “mother,” “sister.” Only one of them gets a name, Grete (rhymes with beta), but even she is usually referred to only as “sister” throughout, until the decisive moment near the end when she becomes instead a “daughter.” By defining all these characters through their relationship to Gregor, Kafka slyly allows Gregor’s point of view to dominate the story even when he is not actually present in the scene being described.

One leitmotif I was unable to preserve in translation is the theme of ruhig/unruhig. Ruhigdenotes “calm,” “peaceful,” “quiet,” “tranquil,” “at ease,” and unruhig its opposite. Starting with the unruhigen Träumen (“troubled dreams”) in the first sentence, the narrative oscillates between untroubled and troubled, tranquil and harried, peaceful and unsettled. Since no one word in English fits well enough in all the contexts Kafka presents, I decided to translate the word in many different ways; but note when you are reading all these synonyms that you are watching a motif unfold.

The post-metamorphosis activity that gives Gregor the greatest sense of freedom appears in my translation as “crawling”: he enjoys crawling around the walls and ceiling of his room. Ironically, the German verb kriechen (which also translates as “to creep”) has the additional meaning of “to cower.” To kriechen before someone is to act sycophantically toward him. In this sense, too, Gregor’s new physical state appears as a representation of his long-standing spiritual abjectness.

Finally Gregor has only himself to blame for the wretchedness of his situation, since he has willingly accepted wretchedness as it was thrust upon him. Like other of Kafka’s doomed protagonists, he errs by failing to act, instead allowing himself to be acted upon. Gregor Samsa, giant bug, is a cartoon of the subaltern, a human being turned inside out. He has traded in his spine for an exoskeleton, but even this armorlike shell (“carapace” and “armor” are the same word in German, Panzer) is no defense once his suddenly powerful father starts pelting him with apples—an ironically biblical choice of weapon.

Gregor is a salesman, but what he’s sold is himself: his own agency and dignity, making him a sellout through and through. For this reason I occasionally use the word “drummer” (commercial traveler) to describe his profession, referring back to another of his ilk, “a hardworking drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them.” That’s Willy Loman as described by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman (1949). The Metamorphosis is Kafka’s own Death of a Salesman, with all the sad, grubby tragedy, all the squalor. Like Willy Loman, Gregor is a suicide, though of a different sort: he dies a hunger artist, perishing of starvation because nothing tastes good to him anymore. And like Willy’s, Gregor’s death is the final service he performs for the benefit of his family.

At the same time Kafka’s tragicomic tale—unlike Miller’s—is very often hilariously funny. I imagine Kafka laughing uproariously when reading the story to his friends. Gregor’s naiveté (one might also call it gullibility) combined with his earnestness and his tendency to sound somewhat overwrought in his assertions is perfectly risible. To bring out this side of the story, I’ve emphasized the slight tone of hysteria in Gregor’s voice wherever it seemed justified.

The story is brutally comic in parts, and never more so than at the moment when it is revealed that—despite the fact that Gregor has been living more or less as an indentured servant to pay off his parents’ ancient debts—the family has plenty of money; not enough to allow them to stop working altogether, but a proper little nest egg. And although they are described as poor, they are never too hard up to retain the services of at least one domestic servant.

One last translation problem in the story is the title itself. Unlike the English “metamorphosis,” the German word Verwandlung does not suggest a natural change of state associated with the animal kingdom such as the change from caterpillar to butterfly. Instead it is a word from fairy tales used to describe the transformation, say, of a girl’s seven brothers into swans. But the word “metamorphosis” refers to this, too; its first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is “The action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance; esp. transformation by supernatural means.” This is the sense in which it’s used, for instance, in translations of Ovid. As a title for this rich, complex story, it strikes me as the most luminous, suggestive choice.

(c) 2014 by Susan Bernofsky. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Illustration by Hannah K. Lee

Inspired by Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

A "meal," above, inspired by Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Here's a passage from the novella: "There were old, half-rotten vegetables; bones from the evening meal, covered in white sauce that had gone hard; a few raisins and almonds; some cheese that Gregor had declared inedible two days before; a dry roll and some bread spread with butter and salt . . . ." [photograph by Dinah Fried from her Fictitious Dishes; more at http://fictitiousdishes.com/ Thanks to Eva Urška for the tip.] 

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

by graphic artist Peter Kuper

WATCH with CAUTION!
 Animated and film versions of
 The Metamorphosis are too numerous,
 and they will live forever online. None,
 that I've seen, are a substitute for Kafka's novella.
 Against my better judgment, here are three adaptations:

The Metamorphosis, above,
 by Spanish filmmaker Carlos Atanes, 1993. 

 Animated version, above, of

 The Metamorphosis by Charlie Amos

The official trailer for Metamorphosis, 

a 2011 film based on Kafka's novella.

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Now this film, above, is of a little more interest and helpful to what we are doing. Christopher Plummer stars as the late Vladimir Nabokov, the celebrated Russian-American novelist and teacher, who is admired for his novels Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962), among many others. Later in his life Nabokov was a professor at Cornell, and Plummer plays him giving a lecture on Kafka and The Metamorphosis.

To see a stop motion animation of the Samsa family home go here. The animation is based on Vladimir Nabokov's sketch that accompanied his lecture on Kafka's Metamorphosis. If the link does not work, copy  this link, http://vimeo.com/56019499 , into your browser.

The first page, above, is from Kafka's The Metamorphosis with Nabokov's annotations and his sketch of the creature that he said, "has six legs, that [Gregor] is an insect." (This page, marked by Nabokov, appears in his Lectures on Literature.) Nabokov adds, "Commentators say cockroach, which of course does not make sense. A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.) Further, he has strong mandibles. He uses these organs to turn the key in a lock while standing erect on his hind legs, on his third pair of legs (a strong little pair), and this gives us the length of his body, which is about three feet long. In the course of the story he gets gradually accustomed to using his new appendages—his feet, his feelers. This brown, convex, dog-sized beetle is very broad."

Other Writings on Kafka

"I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting"; or, Looking at Kafka
To the Students of English 275, University of Pennsylvania, Fall 1972

by Philip Roth

“I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist.“We do admire it,” said the overseer, affably.“But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist.“Well then we don’t admire it,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?”“Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist.“What a fellow you are,” said the overseer, “and why can’t you help it?”“Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer’s ear, so that no syllable might be lost, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked.If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast.

-Franz Kafka,  from “A Hunger Artist”

1.

I am looking, as I write of Kafka, at the photograph taken of him at the age of forty (my age)—it is 1924, as sweet and hopeful a year as he may ever have known as a man, and the year of his death. His face is sharp and skeletal, a burrower’s face:pronounced cheekbones made even more conspicuous by the absence of sideburns; the ears shaped and angled on his head like angel wings; an intense, creaturely gaze of startled composure—enormous fears, enormous control; a black towel of Levantine hair pulled close around the skull the only sensuous feature; there is a familiar Jewish flare in the bridge of the nose, the nose itself is long and weighted slightly at the tip—the nose of half the Jewish boys who were my friends in high school.Skulls chiseled like this one were shoveled by the thousands from the ovens; had he lived, his would have been among them, along with the skulls of his three younger sisters.


Of course, it is no more horrifying to think of Franz Kafka in Auschwitz than to think of anyone in Auschwitz—it is just horrifying in its own way. But he died too soon for the holocaust.Had he lived, perhaps he would have escaped with his good friend Max Brod, who found refuge in Palestine, a citizen of Israel until his death there in 1968. But Kafka escaping? It seems unlikely for one so fascinated by entrapment and careers that culminate in anguished death.

Read the rest of Roth's essay here.

Is Franz Kafka Overrated? by Joseph Epstein in the The Atlantic, July/August 2013 (posted June 19, 2013). A response to Epstein's essay is "Why Kafka Matters"  by David Ulin, published in the Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2013. For the Kafka kid in you, or the kid in Kafka, see If Gorey and Sendak Had Illustrated Kafka for Kids.