Cracking a nut is really not an art form, and so no one will dare to call an audience together and entertain it by cracking nuts. If he does it nevertheless, and does so successfully, then it must be a matter of something more than merely cracking nuts. Or it is cracking nuts, but we must have ignored some aspect of this art form because we mastered it too well and it took this new nutcracker to reveal its true nature to us, and it can even help his demonstration if he is a little less proficient at nutcracking than the rest of us.

– Franz Kafka, from “Josefine, the Singer, or The Mouse People”, in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, translated by Michael Hofmann

I have such a crush.

INTERVIEWER

A large number of Americans today hold the notion that god and the devil are at work in their daily lives.

MAILER

I think they are. Not in a controlling sense – I don’t believe that the devil seizes you and you’re gone forever. But can you say that you’ve never had a fuck where you didn’t feel evil for a little while? Continue reading »

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

–A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic pose?

–Excerpted from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Continue reading »