A Day in the Death

November 7, 2015February 1, 2003 by H.D. Ludd

Tune: A Day in the Life (Beatles)

I read the news today OOOOOOOOOOOOY VEY!
About a lucky Prez who stole the Parade
And tho the news was rather sad
Well I just had to laugh
Looking at the comic photograph.

He blew Saddam’s brain out in a fallout shelter
But he didn’t notice that the world hadn’t changed
A crowd of allies stood and stared
They’d seen that war before
Nobody was really sure that it would cure
The poor world’s deathly sore.

I watched TV again tonight Oh Boy
The US Army had just won the war [spoken]: What again?
A crowd of women turned away
But I just had to look
Having just read Chomsky’s lovely book
And Oh…We’d love to tur-er-er-er-ern All Wars off.

Undressed and went to bed
Dragged a black sheet over my head
Found the bottle and slugged a shot
Spied Atomic Clock and saw that it was late
Popped some pills and then prayed a lot
And then Gore Vidal spoke and he went into a SCREEEAM!

I dread the news again this morn Oh Goys
4000 new terrorists in Arabia and Detroit
And tho their bombs were kinda small
I knew that they were gonna throw them all
And soon we’ll know how many germs it takes
To fill the great Johns Hopkins H-O-S-P-T-A-LL
Oh we’ve Agot to tur-er-er-er-ern all wars off
Yeah we’d better turn all them Godamned wars
Right off Right now
Right now Right Now [as from “Everybody Get Together”]

[spoken loud]: FUCKING CRAZY WARS
[shouted]: FUCK THEM CRAZY WARS

[spoken]: DON’T COOPERATE
DO NOT COOPERATE

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“Laurie Stone’s Streaming Now is a book of journal-like entries, scraps of critical pieces, bits of memoir, and it is a delight. She calls these fragments postcards, which is charming and accurate up to a point, but the writing is better than any postcard you ever got unless you got one from Laurie Stone and she wrote it really small so all the wit and all the passing contemplations could fit. She writes about life during COVID, at home with ‘the man I live with’; about old friends and glancing love affairs; about books and films and television shows, with a deeply appealing combination of spitfire skepticism and a constant openness to pleasure and joy. One is reminded in multiple ways during the reading that Stone came of age and was politically, intellectually and emotionally shaped by the struggles and commitments of second wave feminism, and we’re further reminded that for feminists like Stone the movement was not only about rights, and not at all about protections for women, but about freedom for women, a much more dangerous thing, for women and for society at large. Freedom is a long lost idea. It had a specific erotic push and was battled back as eroticism always is. Autocracies are always puritanical. Everything about Stone’s writing is oriented toward freedom and much of her linguistic and literary sensibility specifically evokes erotic and intellectual freedom–the very sound of the sentences, their surprises, the quick adoption of new positions in relation to the thing looked at and engaged with. So, one recognizes that a simple seeming book of pensées is really the exploration of a distinct and valuable cultural point of view. We are lucky to have it.” –Vince Passaro, author of the novels Crazy Sorrow, and Violence, Nudity, Adult Content

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Expeditions to Kafka
Selected Essays
Stanley Corngold (Author)

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka’s work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche’s conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others.Even as Corngold explores Kafka’s work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka’s ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Read an extract here.

Published	Aug 10 2023
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	336
ISBN	9798765100448
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Reviews

With superb erudition and his inimitable flair, Stanley Corngold’s Expeditions offer a magisterial guide through the intricate and ambiguous terrain of Kafka’s texts. Insights abound, providing a comprehensive and consistently profound investigation that strikes the perfect balance between drawing interpretive conclusions and maintaining hermeneutic openness-a culminating accomplishment by Kafka’s most inspired and most inspiring reader.

John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

You are not being introduced to Kafka – you fall into his stories as you fall into a trap, the bait emerging in the interstices between his words and your mind. That said, Corngold’s Expeditions are by far the best introduction to Kafka I have seen. He invites you to join him on his ventures into Continent Kafka, and he inspires you to stray off from his expeditions on your own terms, and risk.

Benno Wagner, Professor in German Studies, Siegen University, Germany

Stanley Corngold has been reading, reflecting, and commenting on Kafka and his writings for more than half a century. He has become our most penetrating and luminous guide to Kafka’s labyrinthine world. These essays, the distillate of a lifetime, manage both to reveal and to preserve the mystery of Kafka’s genius.

Robert Norton, Professor of German, University of Notre Dame, USA