Posts From Author: franz kafka

A Year in Tehran

The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran by Hooman Majd NY: Anchor Books, 2014; 272pp “I advise you not to hang around the Americans very much.” This friendly advice, given to the author and journalist Hooman Majd by a doorman at a hotel in Tehran, while he is travelling with a CNN crew, in some ways typifies his experience at the hands of Iranian officialdom. In The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran, Majd chronicles the year he recently spent with his (American) wife and baby son living in his motherland. It was the year of what Majd calls Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “big sulk;” the Occupy movement; the main events of the Arab Spring. At a fraught political juncture, there is perhaps inevitably a strong Kafkaesque flavor to much of Majd and his friends’ interactions with the police and the government. But while this excellent, concise work of social commentary doesn’t shy away from politics, its fascination and pleasure lie just as much in its gentle revelation of everyday life in Iran. Nostalgia, an insoluble emotion at the best of times, ghosts both what has been and what […]
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1922 and All That: Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius

Let’s try to imagine the reactions of an unprepared, average reader of 1922, content with his beer and skittles and his Kipling. Suddenly, enter a skinny, shabby Irishman and a natty, quietly sinister American between them hell-bent on exploding everything that realistic fiction and Georgian poetry held dear. Enter also Pound, Proust, Freud, Hemingway, Kafka, Matisse, Picasso, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Le Corbusier, Chaplin, Buñuel… The cast list of Kevin Jackson’s marvellous journal of a watershed year, Constellation of Genius: 1922 – Modernism Year One, certainly justifies its title. It was a year bookended by the publications of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but to isolate the two would be to cut them senselessly adrift and Jackson wisely immerses us instead in context. He moves day by day, noting the major and minor biographical details of his subjects and the principal political events of 1922, from Mussolini’s rise to power to the Irish Civil War. Letters and diaries are ransacked for their contemporary insights. And there are some great one-liners, too (January 20, Iowa: “Christian K. Nelson took out a patent on the Eskimo Pie”). Here are ten things I learned: André Breton helped Proust with the corrections […]
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Plays with Matches: A Brief Meditation on Fire & Literature

This coming Monday, the House of SpeakEasy’s inaugural special guests — Andy Borowitz, Uma Thurman, Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, Simon Winchester and Dar Williams — will be stepping onto the stage at City Winery to ruminate on the theme “Plays with Matches”. I don’t know what they’re going to say. But it’s a fantastically potent theme — fiery metaphors abound in world literature, and fire has played a major role in the history of literature. So, in advance of gala night, I thought I’d share some of my own thoughts and a few excerpts from my reading notes. To start with, fire is of course the metaphor of choice for all kinds of passion, noble or ig-: “Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.” Venus attempting to sway the passions of Adonis in William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Humbert Humbert in the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Even when said passions turn out […]
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