alan bennett's 'kafka at las vegas' (and other 'mixed blessings')

 ok down to 2C tomorrow night so it is getting colder. that's probably the end of the tomatoes.

horsemouth is working his way through alan bennett's thoughts on franz kafka as you can see there are rather a lot.  he's doing this by working through the references to franz kafka listed in the index of bennett's writing home. 

of course bennett's big problem is a tendency to see kafka as a comedy of manners - this is very english, but this means he cannot see kafka as anything else. at least kafka made it across the english channel, he did this (bennett speculates) because there is something in him that draws a response and gains the  recognition of a british audience. 

there is of course not just the article kafka at las vegas, or the play  kafka's dick, there is also a film of the insurance man (1986). (here horsemouth has found it on the IMDB). bennett devotes an entire chapter to the filming of this (in bradford and liverpool as opposed to prague).  

the filming of a work is inherently more comic than the writing of it because  life itself intervenes and the shadow of it falls. bennett has concerns about the traitor sign hung round the neck of a man himself hanging from a lampost (a mere detail in the shot). he asks for the shot to be retaken without the placard but just as they come to do it the hanged man starts to have a heart attack and is taken away to hospital. bennett never gets his reshoot. 

kafka at las vegas  bennett describes as a paralipomena of all his researches that went towards writing kafka's dick and the insurance man but that could not go in to them, all the jokes and dialogue that could not be used. and kafka at las vegas is already comic - what is kafka supposed to do in las vegas? (answer; be a stand up comedian).

we have met a paralipomena before, at the end of  theodor adorno's aesthetic theory, in that case assembled by gretel adorno (theodor's widow) and rolf tiedermann out of the off-cuts and leavings.   

there's a lot of love for kafka on this scene - see adorno's notes on kafka (a text described as having a 'lustrous obscurity' in the german by stanley corngold). this is possibly because they are mostly germans and kafka writes in german (unlike schulz say who writes in polish), because german is also one of the state languages of the austro-hungarian empire. .it is unlikely that alan bennett will find much to like in lustrous obscurity - such a thing is not a virtue that a text can possess, it is literally incomprehensible, perhaps best rendered as a mixed blessing. 

today more reading. a walk. saturday zoom beers with howard (maybe).