The Night Before

November 8, 2016November 7, 2016 by Joel DeMott

Yesterday

Hey, Hillary’s sounding much better (in Cleveland this afternoon).

She had a voice not tense with present and past shriek, even a capacity for affection and true belief through it –

She felt better, so she was better.

I’m goin with that. For 2 days.

Today

The reason Trump’s campaigning hot and wild in Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other states he will lose is to rack up the white-boy votes (look at the areas in those states: guaranteed to aggrandize a pop number, not the select electoral college. Same reason he returns to states he may ((but I doubt)) carry: Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina).

He wants to seize all possibility of innocent unabashed expression from the happy planet, pursue his bannony golden-creepoid advertizement for post-Nov-Eight hell on earth.

But I don’t think we’ll come on down. I don’t.

I think the black and girly planet goes 350 electoral college, and Hill wins 49% and the Republicans lose the Senate. And fuckin Richard Burr in North Carolina, defeated as a politician and a human, drives his auto into the sea, swims then floats his way to Morocco, where he’s taken for a dead boar, roasted fresh and gently on a spit, then fed to friendly fishes…

I fell out this morning with hole in my stomach. News of shit tightness where should be dancing-line loosey goosey space.

But I still hope for a great day, a rain of No to the “fun” or Ideology (fuck Paul Ryan, fuck Mitch, fuck that chawing clawing ratface Giuliani) of stomping folk.

Rain it rain it rain it, on this sunny coming day.

go obama

Yrs in communnion.

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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