What kind of funny is Kafka? | Hacker News Reader

What kind of funny is Kafka?

lrb.co.uk

75 pointssamclemens22 comments

David Foster Wallace also has a good essay on this in Consider the Lobster. I think this is the same one:

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-0...

That Foster Wallace essay is great: when he was good, he was really very good, and that's one of his better pieces.

Milan Kundera's Testaments Betrayed is pretty excellent as well; the last chapter (and title) cover Brod not burning Kafka's papers, and then manufacturing tortured genius Kafka instead of sticking with the fairly ridiculous reality (the one that actually matches how his characters behave, as this posted essay describes)

There are layers to being a tortured genius. A person who is observer, participant, and transcriber of a ridiculous reality is one who glimpses through the lens of his own device.

Did anyone else make it all the way to the word 'Franz' thinking this was going to talk about the distributed commit log service?

You sir just saved me a lot of reading (not that its a bad article). I'm currently working on leveraging the distributed commit log service so my mind immediately assumed that's what the article was about.

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a high-throughput distributed messaging system."

I'd really like to read this story, although I'd envision the ending closer to Animal Farm than The Metamorphosis. After all, I don't think a distributed, persistent messaging service is quite as shameful/unclean and useless as a cockroach/vermin thing.

Any kind of complicated system can contain quite nasty bugs and being distributed one doesn't really help in this regard.

and with every one of the hundreds of split-second network partitions that occurred each day, he is forced to choose between consistency and availability; sadly at any given instant, he can never have both. Until one day he learns how; he open sources this project, much to the disappointment of his employer who as punishment chains him to a cliff

“I have no mouth, and I must data stream.”

In the horrifying finale, Daniel Dennett turns up to reveal that nothing has changed! He was really just a distributed, persistent messaging service all along. And then Samsa wakes up and it was all a silly dream.

Not at all. The fact that Franz Kafka is my favorite writer makes me think of Franz before Apache every time ;) But I must admit that I was very curious about a Franz Kafka siting on HN ;)

Is anyone else proud of the fact that when they hear the name of a famous author/artist/historical figure their first response is to think instead of a buzzwordy tech project?

I wouldn't interpret my comment as pride. We're on a traditionally software-oriented website, and I thought of software

The kind of funny where you deplore your best friend to burn all your writings after you die but then he publishes them anyway. "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka#Max_Brod

You mean Kafka implored Brod, and /then/ he deplored him, posthumously...

That seems impossible?

But the original papers are still caught up in a legal battle between the daughter of the secretary of his friend, and the State of Israel. Seems apropos.

> Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends.

Does anybody know the source of this statement? I have read it for years and I always wondered where it comes from. Some interview with a friend of him? A friend's diary? Chronicles of the time?

I find Rivka Galchen's essays enthralling. One intriguing thing she wrote a while back is that the game Minecraft has a Joycean quality. I don't know what she means by this, but I'm pretty sure she's correct.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/books/review/who-are-james...

Funny? Sure, when it is "the ONION"-style satire!

http://www.theonion.com/video/pragues-franz-kafka-internatio...

He mastered his style of "special effects" made out of words - grotesque metamorphoses of familiar day-to-day situations.

Like it is with modern 3D special effects, out minds "get aroused" watching them, and we, persons, like them due to some hormonal feedback loops.

Why not keep it that simple?)

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