Off the Wall

January 31, 2021January 31, 2021 by Bob Levin

“Is that a fucking thumbtack?” Fritz said to the Skeleton-and-Roses poster behind me. Some of us regulars from the café were zooming. “It ought to be behind glass. In a vault.”

To illustrators, thumbtacks matter.

Someone had handed it to Adele on Haight Street and I had it up. Push-pin actually.

When I Googled, prices ran from $50,000 to $29.95 at Target.

“Send me a photo,” a fellow at Heritage Auctions said.

I added a poster from a Tower Theater show in 1956. Little Richard, who played a conga drum with his head, had sixth billing. The only photo was of a disc jockey holding a .78. I had torn it off a phone poll and it had been on walls in dorms, apartments, and law offices. I figured it the only one in existence. Who else would have bothered?

“The good news,” Heritage said, “is it’s definitely a first printing. The bad is its condition.

Heritage had sold a mint first printing for six-figures. It had sold one like ours for a fiftieth of that. It had sold one for low five figures, but it came with a pedigree from a silent partner in The Family Dog. The collection of the author of “The Pirates and the Mouse” paid no premium. “Your Tower Theater may bring more.”

Adele and I thought it over. The money did not mean much. The posters? The money would remain when we passed or they would.

“We could buy something nice,” Adele said.

“There’s nothing I want,” I said. “If I did, I’d buy it now.”

I thought some more. It felt like we had stepped into a story. One way, we would be left with the posters, wondering, What if… The other, we would be left with no posters and regret. But regret what? It was not like I sat in contemplation of them posters. It was the memories. Little Richard. Screamin’ Jay. Riding back on the D-bus with Max Garden and forgotten guys from the neighborhood, singing “Strange Love” loud as we can. I would have those whether I kept the cardboard or not.

Spin the Wheel of Fortune! See how this part of the game ends.

I e-mailed Max’s widow for an arcade photo of him – shades, slouched – for my bulletin board of the gone.

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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